San Pedro Square Market
Vida Abundante Mural
This is my favorite mural right now as I type this. It is beautiful and mixes several qualities so well. It is several aspects of San Jose in one artwork along the side of the Hotel De Anza. What I see is an inherently beautiful painting that manages to blend Hope, the Abundance of our fertile land, the Virgin Marry representation of gift and nurturer, Art Deco, and a Boldness of people in lines and in color. It is currently the mural I look forward to driving by most. One I appreciate walking up to greatly.
Mural on side of Hwy 87
I stare at this one so long. I can feel the heat. Up close, the heat is tangible. That small sun of a sphere in the sepia sky; that was the genius of this. That brought so much more of the woman’s texture to bear on my feelings, there in that sun.
There is more to interpret and play with as you see the rest.
Japantown Murals
This service station is a perfect slice of Japantown in San Jose; history meets today, still running and valuable, with bits from all times in between, in a blend rare and wonderful to find.
Spiderweb – Trellis Edifice
Harker High School
This performing arts building has a beautiful metal scale skin; like a metal dragon turned into a building, the scales overlap and reflect the sun.
RAMAC Park
At the base of the lamp post, and in several other places at the park and in the surrounding area, you can see the tile homage to the original and historical buildings that once stood here adorned with a tile mural, here where the disk drive was developed and so much more was invented at the one time San Jose IBM campus.
RAMAC Park is named after the first disk drive system. RAMAC stands for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control. It’s first level of development and invention occurred at the first California IBM laboratory in a rented building near the De Anza Hotel in San Jose. When the the new 190 acre IBM campus was ready on Cottle Ave., the lab moved to this south San Jose location and went on to innovate in big ways.
If you look around the park area today there is very little, but some, of the original tile mural work still up and visible. Other areas have covered the mural work to protect it, hopefully for a good and public purpose in the future.
Blossom Hill intersection
Gladiola
The Alameda Murals
So many murals down one alleyway off of The Alameda. This was a happy find and I spent a lot of time enjoying these. At the end of the alley and parking lots, was a wonderful smell or flowers. There were roses and jasmine in the vicinity. To smell the roses I ended up next to this fence. I like this fence, I don’t know why I liked it so, but I think it was the aged wood and older San Jose home with the extra detail and color, and of course, the smell of roses all around it.
