Westercon Weekend

[kevin_standlee]

Saturday afternoon was the Westercon 64 committee meeting at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose and the first time the committee walked the hotel. I reckon it looked a lot different the weekend before during FurCon

Comments

[kalimac]

North Fourth? Are you sure you don't mean North First? I suspect that was the main road out from San Jose to access the old Bayshore Highway (which still exists in bits and pieces) before what's now 880 was built. If you were going to Oakland, you took 13th St.

[kproche]

No, the HI Express is on N Fourth. The ex San Jose Hyatt that became a Holiday Inn no longer appears to have that affiliation. It's now the "San Jose Garden Hotel".

Guess they couldn't meet the HI standards either.

[kalimac]

It may be on Fourth, but the greater number of the old hotels, the comment I was responding to, are on First.

[kevin_standlee]

The reason I think the US-101 alignment might have been or Forth (not First) is because of the style of road; however, First has been so extensively remodeled due to the light rail construction that it's difficult to tell what it must have been like in the 1950s-60s. It still looks like to me as if Fourth was the connection to the a-building Bayshore Blvd (now the Bayshore Freeway). What is now CA-82/El Camino Real once carried the US-101 route number while Bayshore was US-101A, I think, and what used to be CA-17 and is now I-800 carried a US-101E designation at some time in the past, I think.

[totient]

North 4th was in fact part of BY-101 for at least a decade -- it's shown as such on the 1942, 1947, and 1951 USGS San Jose quadrangles, though by 1953 the designation has been removed (coincident with the construction of what's now the Nimitz Freeway and the designation, since removed, of Oakland Rd as CA-17).

Screen caps of the (windows only) UC Berkeley map collection here.

(Edited to fix cut and paste buffer error in link)

[kevin_standlee]

Thank you! I thought it looked like a former main highway. It was just the right combination of old hotel buildings, bars, and light industrial businesses combined with the width of the road. Also, there's a tavern along the way that still has a US highway shield as part of its sign, although it no longer has a 101 in the shield.