Here in San Jose, we love our pets! How much do residents of San Jose love their pets? More than 15,000 people—and 3,900 dogs—turn out every September for Bark in the Park, which bills itself as the largest dog festival in the country.
San Jose lays claim lately to more and more “best” and “biggest” titles. From just 39,000 people a century ago, it stands today as the 10th biggest U.S. city with 1,030,119 people. It surpassed nearby San Francisco in population during the 1990 Census and is now the most populous city in the San Francisco Bay area of northern California.
It has been ranked as the healthiest city in the country and the best place for telecommuting. It has the highest percentage of millionaire households in the country and one of the highest municipal per-capita GDP figures in the world.
Technology has fueled the boom. The Capital of Silicon Valley is home to more than 6,600 technology companies that employ about 254,000 people. Companies such as Cisco Systems, Adobe, eBay and Paypal are based in the city. Apple is based in nearby Cupertino, and Google is in Mountain View.
San Jose—founded in 1777 as San Jose de Guadalupe—is California’s oldest civic settlement. It was part of Mexico until 1846 and became California’s first capital upon statehood in 1850. What is now San Jose State University was the state’s first public college.
Long before technology, San Jose had other claims to fame. Before California’s Gold Rush, the hills around San Jose were a rich source of mercury. In the 1850s, French immigrant Etienne Thee planted vineyards along the Guadalupe River; the region’s reputation for wine-making was cemented in 1914 when Paul Masson won the Grand Prix.
Stanford University engineers William Hewlett and David Packard founded an electronics company that bore their names in a Palo Alto garage in 1939 and sold one of their first products to Walt Disney. In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, at least according to legend, repeated the garage-invention feat with the first Apple computer. But Wozniak has said the garage of Jobs’ home in Los Altos was more of a hangout than a workspace.
San Jose’s climate is influenced by its location in the Santa Clara Valley, between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range. The area gets 17 inches of rain per year, and most of it comes during the winter. Summers are mild, with high temperatures in the lower 80s.