State judges back San Jose decision on downtown brutalist building

SAN JOSE — A panel of state judges has backed San Jose’s decision to allow the demolition of a brutalist-style building on a prime site that is expected to become part of a huge downtown tech campus.

The state Court of Appeal, in a 3-0 decision, affirmed a 2021 decision by a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge that determined the city acted properly in approving a tech campus on the site of CityView Plaza, a downtown San Jose office and restaurant complex that was developed over a period from 1968 up until 1985.

The Preservation Action Council of San Jose, an activist group, filed a lawsuit in 2020 to try to force city officials to redo an environmental impact report for the campus project — litigation that was part of a quest to preserve the brutalist building. County Judge Sunil Kulkarni ruled in favor of San Jose and against the preservationists, saying the city properly crafted the project’s environmental impact report.

San Jose’s approval of the tech campus, which was proposed by San Francisco-based development firm Jay Paul Co., meant the demolition of several buildings on the eight-acre site. The property is bounded by Park Avenue, Almaden Boulevard, West San Fernando Street and South Market Street.

One of the sites that faced the wrecking ball due to the county court’s decision was the former Bank of California property at 199 Park Avenue, a building with a brutalist design. Brutalism originated in England in the 1950s as part of an effort to swiftly construct utilitarian buildings after the German bombing campaigns during World War II.

In November 2021, within days of the county judge’s ruling that cleared the way for construction, Jay Paul Co. demolished the brutalist bank building.

Even though the focal point of the preservationist group’s lawsuit had been reduced to rubble, the activists still filed an appeal.

On April 18, associate justices Allison Danner, Patricia Bamattre-Manoukian and Charles Wilson affirmed the county court’s decision that supported the city’s approval process and thereby rejected the appeal by the Preservation Action Council of San Jose.

“We’re obviously disappointed and we’re reviewing the decision with our counsel before deciding if or how to proceed,” said Ben Leech, executive director of the Preservation Action Council.

City officials acknowledged that the tech campus project would demolish several CityView Plaza buildings with some level of historic and architectural significance, the state appellate panel noted.

“The proposed project would result in the loss of multiple historic structures” that are “representative of modernist commercial architecture of the 1970s,” the appellate panel noted in its ruling, citing observations by city officials.

The tech campus, as approved, would feature three 19-story office towers totaling a combined 3.5 million square feet along with 65,000 square feet of retail and restaurant spaces.

The preservation group demanded in its appeal that project developer Jay Paul Co. mitigate the loss of the buildings in CityView Plaza by establishing a fund to pay for the preservation of buildings elsewhere in downtown San Jose or even the city generally.

But the appeals court rejected those proposals by the preservation organization, also called PAC*SJ.

“PAC*SJ has offered no authority to support its argument that compensatory mitigation, broadly directed at historic preservation generally (such as by creating a historic preservation fund to identify and protect offsite historic resources), would serve as feasible mitigation,” the state appellate judges wrote in the ruling.

The preservation group also lost a different downtown San Jose case in both county court and the state appeals court whereby the organization sought to block the development of a lodging tower next to the historic Hotel De Anza. Leech said the group has dropped that case and decided not to appeal its losses in that matter to the California Supreme Court.