Valley Health Center Opens on Bascom

Santa Clara County opened Valley Health Center San José-Campbell on Monday, September 28, at 1410 South Bascom Avenue, on the San Jose–Campbell line next to the VTA Bascom light-rail stop. The 10-story, 230,000-square-foot outpatient building holds more than 200 exam rooms. It is the largest clinic in the county system. Services include adult medicine, family medicine, pediatric primary and specialty care, adult and pediatric urgent care, OB-GYN and maternal-fetal medicine, dental, behavioral health, pharmacy, lab, and imaging. Two older San Jose clinics fold into this one roof.

The county bought the converted commercial site from HSRE-PMB San Jose in January for $340 million, financed with a 30-year revenue bond. Officials said owning instead of leasing will save about $112 million over three decades. Construction ran four years. A 600-space garage sits on the lot. More than 11,000 households are within walking distance; about 90,000 people live a 10-minute drive away. Apartments bookend the block. The Urban Village map already wanted density here and putting the biggest public clinic on that corner is the most practical version of that map.

Weekday clinic hours run 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Adult and pediatric urgent care stay open until 9:30 p.m. on weekdays and until 5 p.m. on weekends. County clinics already see 1.3 million visits a year. This building is the bet that wait times drop when primary care, dental, and after-hours urgent care share an elevator and a light-rail platform.

Hours and a service list live at https://www.scvh.org/sjc

Source: San Jose Spotlight

SJSU Puts $5.5 Million Into a Shared Home at Excite Ballpark

San Jose State Athletics closed more than $5.5 million in private gifts for baseball facilities at Excite Ballpark, the old Municipal Stadium the San Jose Giants have used since 1988. That sum sits inside a larger athletics haul of more than $19 million since July 1, a department record according to senior deputy athletic director Scott MacDonald. The cycle is still early. The baseball money pays for a dedicated Spartan clubhouse and coaches’ offices, a team weight room, laundry, and access to bullpens, batting cages, and the complex’s sports-medicine rooms. Work for the university side is slated to finish in 2027, with the new clubhouse aimed at April.

The Giants and Diamond Baseball Holdings already funded most of the park-wide upgrades under a 25-year lease that runs through 2050 and a capital package of about $20 million meant to meet Professional Development League standards. City Hall agreed to reimburse up to $5 million of the field and dugout work over seven years starting in fiscal 2027-28. SJSU’s check will turn the Single-A yard into a shared college-and-pro plant.

Brad Sanfilippo’s roster will practice and play home games on the same grass the Giants use in summer. The arrangement also opens the gates for youth camps and, if the conference calendar lines up, a Mountain West Baseball Championship.

Private donors, not a new bond measure, moved this one. MacDonald tied the total to years of relationship work. The field stays in San Jose and The Spartans get a locker that belongs to them.

More on the project: https://sjsuspartans.com/news/2026/09/23/more-than-dollar55-million-raised-to-transform-the-future-of-spartan-baseball

San Jose Wishlist - Halloween in the Park (Part XVIII)

As Halloween approaches, it is time to resurrect one of my favorite wishlist items for San Jose: "Halloween in the Park."

Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year. It's the one day where you get to interact with your neighbors and the wider community. The level of creativity in decorations and costumes is also the most eclectic and interesting out of all the holidays for me--whether that's for trick-or-treating, Halloween parties, or work events.

In October it's tradition for The San Jose Blog have a wish-list post for Halloween in the Park. The idea is to build on the momentum that Christmas in the Park brings to San Jose each year and create something of similar scale for the month of October. A lot of the infrastructure such as wiring, lighting, and booths might even be able to be shared between the events. The goal would be to make Downtown San Jose the epicenter of October Halloween experiences, much as it is today with Christmas in the Park.

Below you will find brainstorming ideas we have collected for this concept so far over the years. Please have a look and provide your feedback and suggestions in the comments or on X. Thanks!

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The largest draw to Downtown San Jose for many years now has been Christmas in the Park. It has continued to grow year after year and brings in visitors from all over the Bay Area. It's economic impact is substantial and helps keep many Downtown businesses and restaurants alive.

What would you think about a similar event for Halloween? Picture Downtown lit up in orange and purple with elaborate Halloween displays assembled by local artists. Perhaps infrastructure could even be shared with Christmas in the Park (e.g. retail booths). A strong event in October would help maintain traffic between the summer months and Christmas in the Park. Here are the ideas we have so far:

• Animated Halloween Displays
• Created by local artists
• Analogous to the Christmas displays that attract many families during Christmas in the Park (almost half a million visitors)
• Family friendly so that everyone can enjoy it (PG/PG13, perhaps around the same level as Great America's Halloween decorations)
• Halloween Lighting
• Orange, purple, and green LED lighting on trees
• May be possible to use programmable LED lighting that can go from Halloween colors to Christmas colors with the push of a button, allowing the lights to stay up for Christmas in the Park as well and reducing setup/take-down costs.
• Halloween Food
• Booths with candied apples, chocolates, candy, pumpkin seeds, etc.
• Food trucks
• Trick-or-treating station - a free piece of candy to anyone wearing a costume any day in October (could also be used to hand out promotional flyers for Downtown events/businesses/resources)
• Retail Booths selling Halloween items, for example:
• Artwork (paintings, glass pumpkins, etc.)
• Home decor/crafts like candles
• Light-up hats/necklaces/bracelets
• Costumes
• Zombie/Halloween make-up station 
• Halloween-themed Carnival Games
• Pirates of Emerson and Candlelighters (Fremont) do a good job of providing family-friendly games themed around Halloween
• A handful of children's rides could also be added to the Paseo and reused for Christmas in the Park
• Interactive Art
• Subzero-style, but with a Halloween spin.
• Halloween-themed video game kiosks and/or arcades
• Pumpkins
• Instead of the sponsored Christmas trees in Christmas in the Park, how about decorated Pumpkins (can even be Styrofoam so there is no mess/decay)?
• Pumpkin carving station for families. 
• Pumpkin carving contest.
• Costumed Entertainers
• Walking around the area, not necessarily scaring people but adding to the ambiance and providing photo opportunities for families
• Haunts / Mazes
• Would be ideal if these were nearby, perhaps in vacant retails spaces, surface parking lots, the San Jose Convention Center tent, or at SJSU.
• Could partners with one of the established San Jose haunt providers such as the Winchester Mystery House or The Bernal SCREAM.
• Potential Events
• Zombie Crawl / 5k Run
• Día De Los Muertos Events (already quite a few today)
• Halloween/Día De Los Muertos Bike Party
• Horror Movie Trivia Contest
• Weekly horror movie screening (perhaps in the Circle of Palms area?)
• Costume Ball
• Pet costume contests and pet-friendly events

Inspirations:

• Winchester Mystery House Unhinged
• Candle Lighters
• Pirates of Emerson
• The Great Jack O'Lantern Blaze (photos below)

Goddard School Stakes Two San Jose Corners for More Than 300 Childcare Slots

The Goddard School is lining up two San Jose campuses that would add at least 46 jobs and more than 300 licensed childcare seats, one on The Alameda near Diridon and one on Cottle Road in South San Jose. Both projects recycle empty retail boxes rather than punching new holes in residential blocks.

The 821 Alameda site will carry the name The Goddard School of Diridon. Plans call for converting a 12,690-square-foot former CVS into 12 classrooms for as many as 180 children, ages six weeks through 5, plus about 25 staff jobs. Two outdoor playgrounds and an activity lab would cover roughly 12,943 square feet of the old parking field. A Goddard representative told the Silicon Valley Business Journal the school is still in development and pointed to a 2027 opening. The stretch already holds Whole Foods, Chipotle, Anytime Fitness, and apartments at Avalon Cahill Park and 787 The Alameda, a short walk from Caltrain’s Diridon Station and SAP Center. For families who work Downtown San Jose or ride the train, the location is the point.

South San Jose would take a slice of the long-vacant Orchard Supply Hardware building at 5651 Cottle Road. City permits describe a 9,800-square-foot conversion with classrooms and playgrounds for 144 children and 21 employees. Dollinger Properties bought the 4.3-acre lot at auction in 2025. The larger project would also install a Sprouts Farmers Market of about 25,100 square feet and two unleased retail bays. A planning hearing was on the City Council calendar in mid-September. Hours listed in earlier filings ran Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Neighbors include Orchard Town and Country shops such as Baskin-Robbins and Castillo’s.

Goddard already runs Bay Area schools in San Francisco, San Ramon, and Brentwood. Combined, the two San Jose rooms would put 324 infants through preschoolers into licensed care and give the franchise its first foothold in the city proper. Childcare capacity is not a luxury item here. Putting it next to a grocery store and next to a transit station is the kind of reuse that makes empty big boxes useful again. Enrollment and job postings will follow construction. Goddard’s locator page is at www.goddardschool.com.

Source: SVBJ

Diwali Carnival Returns to the Plaza on October 24

The Association of Indo Americans will bring San Jose Diwali Carnival back to Plaza de César Chávez on Saturday, October 24. City permit hours run 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eventbrite lists the window as 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., with a 2 p.m. start in the description. The plaza sits at 1 Paseo de San Antonio in Downtown San Jose. AIA’s vendor calendar puts expected turnout above 7,500. Last October’s first downtown carnival drew a much larger crowd than the permit number suggested. Entry is listed as free.

Diwali, the Festival of Lights, lands in late October this year. The carnival format that worked in 2025 returns this year: food courts, jewelry and fashion booths, kids’ activities, henna, ritual space, and a stage. AIA’s food list from the last plaza night included chai, jalebi, chaat, dosa, and biryani. A separate AIA show, Dussehra Diwali Dhamaka, is set for October 17 at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton.

California recognized Diwali as a state holiday through Assemblymember Ash Kalra’s bill. The plaza already hosts Music in the Park, Christmas in the Park buildup, and half the city’s civic photo ops. Putting lamps and a sound system there for one Saturday is how a tech city shows it can hold a religious festival without moving it to the suburbs. RSVP and updates live on AIA’s site below.

Register at https://www.aiaevents.org/san-jose-diwali-carnival

Minth Pays $8.35 Million for a North San Jose Shop Floor

Minth California Inc. closed on 2040 Ringwood Avenue for $8.35 million, according to a deed recorded September 17. The seller was Ringwood Properties LLC. The one-story building is 23,800 square feet on 2.54 acres, built in 1986, and listed by JLL as R&D and manufacturing space with 800 amps at 277/480 volts, one dock-high door, one grade-level door, and solar installed in 2015. Ardent Systems, which does electronics manufacturing and storage-device test work, had used the site.

Minth Group, based in Taiwan, makes exterior trim, body structure parts, and battery enclosures for more than 70 automakers. Lucid is among its customers. The company already runs dozens of plants across three continents. A modest North San Jose box will not match a Windsor-scale factory, but it puts a parts supplier inside the same industrial belt as Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid’s regional footprints. General Motors recently bulked up at Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto. Auto work in Silicon Valley has been drifting from showrooms toward engineering and component space.

North San Jose holds more than 20 million square feet of industrial inventory, the largest pile in the valley, with a 7.6 percent vacancy rate and some of the region’s lower industrial rents, per Cushman & Wakefield. Class A product is tight, so buyers have been taking second-generation buildings that still have power and dock access. Ringwood sits near the Milpitas line in the 95131 zip. Minth did not comment on how it will use the floor.

Source: SVBJ

Sharks Finish Second in the NHL’s Offseason TikTok Race

Hard Rock Bet Canada scored every official NHL TikTok account from June 16 to September 14 and put the San Jose Sharks second in the league. Boston won the composite index at 78.0 after stacking 14 million views. San Jose landed at 65.6. The surprise was not the ranking so much as how the Teal got there.

The Sharks collected 4.3 million total views, fourth in the NHL behind Boston, Toronto, and Florida. What separated them was what happened after the play button. Their engagement rate hit 20.4 percent, the highest of any club in the study. Median views per video sat at 53,300. Chicago, Minnesota, and Carolina also posted strong interaction numbers. Montreal led the league in median views per post at 58,000. San Jose’s mix of reach and reply rate is what pushed a mid-pack view total into a top-two index score.

The index weighted five pieces: overall reach, content performance, fan engagement, shareability, and consistency, so a single lucky clip would not carry a team. Boston’s volume still won. San Jose’s comments, likes, and shares per viewer did more work per video. That tracks with a fanbase that spent the summer watching Macklin Celebrini, Will Smith, and the rest of a young core show up in short-form clips while Mike Grier added veterans and Ryan Warsofsky signed an extension.

The team’s own feed is @sanjosesharks. Tickets and the 2026-27 schedule are at https://www.nhl.com/sharks.

Little Italy Turns Ten on Sharks Way

Little Italy San Jose will mark ten years of its street festival on Sunday, October 4, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Little Italy Way and Sharks Way, a few blocks from SAP Center in Downtown San Jose. Organizers at the Little Italy San Jose Foundation expect 20,000 to 25,000 people. The district itself dates to 2016--the festival grew into one of Northern California’s larger Italian days, with food stalls, Cal-Italia wine, crafts, museum tours, a kids’ train, and a car row that now ranks among the bigger Italian-marque displays in the country. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, and Pagani usually show up.

Opening ceremonies start at 11:30 a.m. Grammy-winning accordionist Cory Pesaturo takes 12:15. New York Italian-American jazz singer Vanessa Racci follows at 1:15, then a duo set with Pesaturo at 1:45. Tenor Pasquale Esposito headlines at 3:15 for about 90 minutes. The Anthony Nino Lane Band closes from 5:30. New murals honoring Italian-American work in the valley are scheduled for dedication over the weekend. Proceeds feed the Cultural Center and Museum on the same block.

Today is the paid warm-up: a four-course dinner with wine and a concert by Racci and Pesaturo at the Museum Piazza and Italian Cellar Speakeasy, $75 a head. That is the only ticketed piece.

Festival page and dinner tickets: https://www.littleitalysj.com/little-italy-san-jose-festival

Aven Lands on Sharks Home Helmets Through 2028-29

The word Aven will sit on San Jose Sharks home helmets starting today against the Florida Panthers, the first night of a deal that runs through the 2028-29 season. The San Francisco fintech, which sells a credit card backed by home equity, also picked up branding at SAP Center, Sharks Ice at San Jose, team broadcasts and digital channels, and Sharks Foundation programs.

Sharks Sports & Entertainment president Jonathan Becher framed the pact to the Silicon Valley Business Journal as a working partnership rather than a logo rental. Aven spokesperson Rick Chen said the club’s audience lines up with the company’s target: Bay Area homeowners who might use a lower-rate card instead of a conventional one.

The timing is not accidental. After the second half of last season, Becher said broadcasts, social traffic, season-ticket memberships, and merch all moved up. Inbound partnership inquiries tripled versus a year earlier. Team deals now range from about $100,000 to more than $10 million a year. On the ice the club is selling a young core: Macklin Celebrini (NHL 27 cover athlete), Will Smith, Ivar Stenberg, and Michael Misa.

Source: SVBJ

A $500,000 Green Room Puts Levitt Closer to St. James Park

Aart de Geus, the former Synopsys CEO who still plays guitar in a blues band, put $500,000 toward a permanent Levitt Pavilion stage in St. James Park. The gift carries naming rights. He assigned them to the green room and put Chris Wilder’s name on the door. Wilder, former executive director of the Valley Health Foundation and a onetime San Jose Jazz board chair, survived a massive stroke in 2021. The two met when Wilder invited de Geus to a CEO jam at Jazz Summer Fest and later formed Legally Blue, Wilder on bass, de Geus on guitar.

Friends of Levitt Pavilion San Jose have staged free summer shows in the park for years while chasing a fixed venue. Construction is slated to start next summer, with Levitt Foundation money layered on top of local gifts. The finished pavilion is supposed to host 40 to 50 free concerts a year plus rentals for schools, nonprofits, and civic groups. The group’s own math puts $14.3 million a year into the Downtown San Jose economy and 50 regional acts on the payroll. Suzanne St. John Crane, the organization’s director of strategy, called de Geus a useful example of a tech principal writing a check instead of waiting for someone else.

De Geus has said Silicon Valley still under-funds the arts relative to the money and the number of engineers who moonlight as musicians. The last pop-up of the 2026 season packed the lawn for Peach Tree Rascals on September 6. The next step is steel in the park, not another season of rented risers.

Give and follow the build at https://www.levittsanjose.org.

Source: SiliconValley.com