San Jose City Council Approves Jay Paul’s Cityview Plaza Development

In a unanimous vote last Tuesday, the San Jose city council approved the City View Plaza development in the downtown core. The current 1970s-style mixed-use campus on the block bordered by Park Ave, Almaden Blvd, and Market is set to transform into a modern, glass-lined, 3-tower, 3.8 million square foot office park.

The developer, Jay Paul, is already under construction with a different project located directly across the street at 200 Park Ave where a 1 million square foot office building is going up. Eventually the intention is to have this, and the City View project integrated. Overall, Jay Paul is expecting to invest $5 billion into San Jose’s downtown by the time all projects are completed. “We believe the Valley’s future lies in downtown San Jose,” Jay Paul’s Chief Operating Officer Janette D’Elia said Tuesday.

The decision to approve the project marks the end of a fight by preservationists to save the Family Court building at the corner of Park Ave and Almaden Blvd. It was previously argued that because of the building’s ties to master architect Cesar Pelli and its distinct brutalist design, the building should be designated as a city landmark. This claim did not find support with the city council and was ultimately not approved.

Lee Wolff, the previous developer of the plaza stated, “The building was actually sketched out at a dinner table in my house years and years ago with another architect named Sid Brisker. In my opinion, it’s not an example of any form of architecture, especially (brutalist) or whatever the term that they assigned to it after they found that Cesar wasn’t the sole architect.” Wolff now welcomes this re-development of the area and the new era it brings to the downtown core.

Now that the project has been given the green light, Jay Paul is set to start construction on the massive development later this year.