It’s the tenth-largest city in America, but the scope is basically like Birmingham. It has workable transit with buses and light rail, and I can go straight home on the light rail without changing modes or agencies. It has cathedrals, Catholic and Protestant alike. It has a baseball team with a perfect minor league feel, and a professional soccer team with its own ultras and cozy stadium (itself now more transit-accessible than ever). You can fly direct to London from the airport. There’s a Fairmont hotel with a lobby bar suitable for cocktails. There’s a train station from which you can catch Amtrak to San Diego or Seattle or anywhere in between. There’s high-rise dense living if you want it and rambling old neighborhoods if you don’t. There’s a well-regarded local paper, there’s a state university that sends a lot of engineers to Apple, there’s a nearby Jesuit college, there’s a super high end mall if you really need that sort of thing (which you don’t) and a super-plebian mall if you need that sort of thing (which you might).
There’s a Japantown, a Little Italy, a Little Saigon, a vintage adobe, a history of people of all backgrounds. There’s an Irish bar with live sessions on Tuesday night that sound like Galway, and an English pub with no televisions and cask conditioned ale in a leather chair by a potbelly stove. There’s a huge arena and the concerts it advertises are as likely to be Tejano or K-Pop as hip-hop or country. The city bills itself as the Capital of Silicon Valley, and it still is, in a way, because all the companies that insist on locating in San Francisco tend to be the 21st century Silly Con Valley ones. It even once had its own Mob family separate from San Francisco and its own rudimentary music scene which included Skip Spence and the Doobie Brothers.
San Jose, in other words, is a place where you can turn your head and squint just a little bit, on a slow Tuesday morning with nothing to do all day, and see something that looks kind of like what you wish the whole real world looked like. Cosmopolitan without being alienating, sprawling yet navigable without a car, plenty to see and do without being overwhelming, contemporary without disappearing up its own ass. No one is out here comparing San Jose to “Florence during the Renaissance”. You can go around San Jose without being overrun by gingham shirts and Allbirds and hoodies and electric unicycles. If you want an unfiltered fresh IPA, fine, but you can also get a Modelo Especial or a Coors Light or just a plain ol’ Guinness.
The question has come up lately of whether I could be happy if I moved back to Nashville, and I think it’s a solid “no” but not for the reasons you think. The whole “it city” phenomenon around Music City is kind of ridiculous, but it means you can probably get street tacos (which you could in 1994 at La Hacienda) and craft beer (which, Jack Daniels Amber Lager was kind of? Also Gerst, that was good stuff) and live music (hello, it’s NASHVILLE, that was never a problem anywhere from the Bluebird to Exit/In to Robert’s to the Opry). The problem with Nashville isn’t the tourists and hipsters, because those were always with us. It’s the exact same problem you have in Austin – once you step one toe outside the cultural cool bubble, you’re back in a virulently red state surrounded by orange-clad UT fans, a Confederate state government and the worst humidity on the planet. And while Nashville is doing a good job obtaining the same kind of hall pass for being in Tennessee that Austin gets despite being Texas – and is no more undeserving than Austin is, certainly – it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still in The South, and not the kind that reads The Bitter South and listens to Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires.
So here I am, aspiring to go out for a quiet pint or maybe two in DTSJ. It’s accessible, it’s not unreasonable, it’s in California. It might not have the cool factor of an Austin or a Nashville or a Portland, and that’s probably good. As long as San Jose remains resolutely uncool, it’ll still be possible to get around and get along and enjoy California’s third largest city in an unsophisticated, unpretentious, unmistakably pleasant way. In fact, forget I ever said anything. Nothing to see here. Move along.