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

SAP Center Puts the Letters Back Up as Phase One Wraps

The SAP Center letters are back on the south entrance, hung a little higher to clear a new digital display and the footprint of an expanded Sharks team store. That store is the headline of Phase One of the Teal Reimagination, a multi-year overhaul budgeted at about $425 million. Phase One itself cost just under $30 million and is scheduled to finish this fall.

Opening night is October 1 against the Florida Panthers. Fans walking in that week will find a new bar with eight points of sale at the top of the south-side escalators, a guest-experience kiosk shifted nearby, and Section 216 turned into a walk-through grab-and-go market with self-checkout. The team store above the south doors is slated for mid-November and will run about three times the size of the current shop. Jon Gustafson, the Sharks’ senior vice president, told the Silicon Valley Business Journal the retail upgrade is the biggest visible change of this first slice.

Phase Two starts in January 2027 with locker rooms and a premium lounge. After the 2026-27 season ends, the building is set to go dark for concerts through summer 2027 so the heavy structural work can happen without a mid-week show in the way. That phase is meant to be ready for the 2027-28 opener. Later chapters call for a reseated lower bowl that could add about 100 seats, more food-and-beverage points, restrooms, premium rooms, and new entries. About 90 percent of Sharks staff will move later this year to 450 W. Santa Clara Street so current arena offices can become home and visitor locker space.

Five or six phases remain on the table depending on costs. Perkins&Will designed the work. Renderings and updates live at https://www.tealreimagination.com. Tickets for October 1 are available at https://www.nhl.com/sharks.

Source: SVBJ

SummerHill Locks In 6.3 Acres for 616 North San Jose Apartments

Del Rey Investment Co. signed a contract to sell SummerHill Apartment Communities two empty parcels at Baypointe Parkway and Zanker Road: 3.7 acres at 240 Baypointe and 2.6 acres at 255 Baypointe. Closing deadlines in the county files run to late July 2028 for the larger lot and late July 2029 for the smaller one. The price stayed off the record.

If the city signs off, SummerHill would put 315 apartments in a six-story building at 240 and 301 apartments in an eight-story building across the street at 255, for 616 units on 6.3 acres. Filings list a club room, lounge, fitness center, and two-level roof decks on the six-story side; the eight-story side would add a bike room, pool deck, and roof deck. Both sit over podium parking. The sites had been flagged earlier on Affordable Housing Overlay maps. No construction calendar is attached yet. Final entitlements still have to clear San Jose planners.

The same developer is already at work a block away at 210 Baypointe, where 42 townhomes and a 292-unit rental building are replacing a one-story office. Baypointe VTA light rail is the commute argument. North San Jose has been the city’s designated tech-job cluster for years; putting mid-rise housing on leftover pads next to that cluster is the general-plan logic in plain language. Del Rey’s principals, John Arrillaga Jr. and Jason Peery, sit in the family line of Peery Arrillaga, the firm that assembled much of the valley’s suburban office stock.

Source: The Mercury News

Dollar Tree Joins the Next Wave at The Plant

Dollar Tree is combining three storefronts at The Plant, the 650,000-square-foot power center at Monterey Road and Curtner Avenue, into a new shop at 2151 Monterey. Suites 40, 60, and 80 add up to about 9,772 square feet on the leasing flyer. Suite 40 used to be Payless. No opening date has been posted. A Customer Service Associate listing already uses that Monterey Highway address, which is usually a sign the build-out is underway. Dollar Tree opened more than 100 stores in the first quarter of 2026 and still plans about 400 new locations this year even while closing 75 others.

The Plant has been filling holes since Arc Capital Partners and Milan Capital Management bought the center for $95 million in August 2024. Vacancy had been high under the previous owner. Target and Home Depot still sit as shadow anchors; Realty Income paid $73 million for the Home Depot pad in late 2024 without changing the store. Best Buy, Ross, Ulta, PetSmart, and a string of restaurants never left.

Vallarta Supermarkets is slated to take the old Toys R Us box, close to 60,000 square feet, with a November target. That would be Vallarta’s first Bay Area store and would put a full cocina next to the big-box row. Chikin Drip, the San Jose hot-chicken outfit, already opened a second kitchen at 81 Curtner inside the same property. Sixteen dining spots and ten national anchors are the pitch the landlords have been using.

The full directory and hours are available at https://www.plantsanjose.com.

Source: SVBJ