Comment by p_alexander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p_alexander | Hacker News Reader

San Jose, like any major US city, has its awesome points and its disgusting monstrosities (Santana Row, I'm talking to you). And come on, San Francisco has its share of fake and cliche (North Beach? Haight? The area around PacBell Park?).

Since the link focused on the negatives, I'll throw some positives out there (coming from a San Jose native who has lived in SF, LA, Chicago, and now Morgan Hill - mushroom capital of the world).

1. There are some cool little neighborhoods in the San Jose metropolitan area: Willow Glen, Rose Garden/Burbank, Campbell, Saratoga, Almaden Valley.

2. Good ethnic food, especially from Latin America, Vietnam, India, and China. Even some good fine dining opportunities (La Foret in New Almaden comes to mind).

3. A great Latino/Chicano cultural scene.

4. Decent transit that's been getting better (much, much better than LA, lagging a little behind SF and WAY behind Chicago/New York).

5. Retail tech stores all over (even SF lacks this).- Central Computer, any number of Fry's.

6. A developing downtown. If you'd been here ten years ago, this place was dead. If you'd been here 20 years ago...well, you wouldn't have been downtown. The fact that you can go there at night at all now is AMAZING considering what this place was like when I was a kid. It's fairly jumping now, with a decent selection of restaurants and good parking.

7. Cheaper than SF by a bunch.

San Jose is great, especially if you aren't into the trendy hipster scene and don't mind heading into "scary" (aka non-Anglo) parts of town like East San Jose, Little Saigon, etc.

Lot of Santana Row hating here. I liked the place. Some people just like nice things and convenience, and Santana Row has plenty of both. It doesn't necessarily make you "fake" or materialistic.

I personally enjoyed having a Brooks Brothers, a Diesel, a Cole Haan, and a Tommy Bahama store all next to each other. Mix in some decent (though overpriced) restaurants, and it's altogether a nice place. I did have to be sure to route my wife around the Donald J. Pliner shop though.

I guess maybe it's just due to the inordinate amount of time I spent in Las Vegas, but I find it fairly easy to coexist peacefully with the materialist mindset, and simply take advantage of the perks while opting out of the pseudo-religion. You can like nice stuff without that defining you.

Santana row is a cheap immitation of a city street. The immitation of italian architecture is really gawdy and cheesy and very aethestic displeasing. The people that go there are also have a certain attitude, that is far from simple and humble, but more of a show off type.

Santana row is a clear manifestation on what's wrong with modern american architecture.

Please travel to other countries, to see real town centers with real people (that are not trying to show off).

I've been to 7 other countries so far, and counting. I've seen architecture from Paris to Mexico.

Santana Row is not meant to be a town center. It's not the Champs Elysees. It's a high-end shopping area in San Jose. I mean, what do you want it to look like?

Your comment on the attitude of the people who shop there is just plain ignorant. How do you know what attitude they have? Did you stop and survey them all? It's incredibly small-minded to assume that of so many people.

Santana Row is bad relative to a real city, but it's great compared to a regular shopping mall (and compared to most of what surrounds it).

For example, the linked article, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96sep/kunstler/kunstler.ht... (which is a good read, btw), says: "In many localities apartments over stores were also forbidden under the zoning laws. Few modern shopping centers are more than one story in height, and I know of no suburban malls that incorporate housing."

Santana Row, however, does have housing above the stores.

Right. Comparing a shopping mall to a city is almost as bad as Gladwell comparing a Trailblazer to a Boxster.

And calling a place nicer than a shopping mall is like saying that my squalid, decomposing first apartment was nicer than a prison cell; true, and irrelevant.

Santana row is a cheap immitation of a city street. It is made in a way to make people feel like they are in a urban enviroment, mainly b/c there are no true urban enviroments in SJ.

Yes it is a mall, but it takes this form mainly b/c SJ lacks proper city streets, with thriving retail, where you can actually enjoy walking, meeting people, dining, working, and shopping.

You don't have to go out of the country to see where proper urban areas mixed with retail can be great enviroment. Go to Boston's Fenaul Hall, or Harvard sq. where there is a very healthy mix of PUBLIC space, retail and shopping, some offices, and condos or houses.

If people did city planing in a good way, these garish malls would be superflous.

Faneuil Hall felt just as fake to me, kind of like Fisherman's Wharf. The rest of Boston is nice though.

It only takes a few steps to be out of Faneuil Hall and into the rest of Boston. If you haven't seen the greenway since the big dig finished, that's one more nice place to walk directly out of Faneuil Hall into:

http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2008-05-14

I agree, in terms of convenience for higher-end shopping it's nice. I'm more concerned about the erosion of true public space (as in a public plaza, square, city streets, etc) and the conflation of such space with purely commercial zones. I know of at least one dense "new urban" development (University Villages in Marina, CA) that includes a plaza owned by the developer, which allows them to outright ban people, demonstrations, gatherings, or at the very least make it prohibitively restrictive when trying to plan or hold such events.

As a shopping mall, it's great. As a neighborhood, which it certainly aspires to, it sucks.

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