Change of Venue Sought for San Jose Concert Hall

Civic disputes over the location of public facilities generally erupt between adjacent communities, either because they’re lusting after the tax receipts that accompany attractions such as stadiums and office centers, or because they’re hoping to deflect the hassles that come with public necessities such as garbage dumps and dog pounds.

It’s rare for one community to simultaneously yearn for a big project and despise it. But that’s the case with a proposed new concert hall for San Jose. The proposal has provoked a nasty fight between the city and Santa Clara County, including accusations of backroom deals and threats of litigation -- all because they disagree about which city neighborhood should receive the potential investment of more than $50 million: downtown, or the underused county fairgrounds in the south part of town.

“We’re very surprised at how antagonistic the city has been,” Kristina Cunningham, chief of staff for Santa Clara County Supervisor Blanca Alvarado, told me last week just after the city threatened legal action to block bond financing for a hall at the fairgrounds.

But it’s not really so surprising. City officials have long figured that a 5,000-seat music venue would be a capstone to the cultural resurgence of San Jose’s downtown core, which has become one of the more visitor-friendly precincts in Silicon Valley. A theater that size, they contend, would fit nicely in the gap left between a half-dozen community theaters downtown with a few hundred seats each and the 20,000-seat HP Pavilion, which hosts acts like Eric Clapton and the Ringling Bros. circus when it isn’t serving as the home of the National Hockey League’s Sharks.

“This belonged in the center, too,” says Harry Mavrogenes, interim director of the city’s redevelopment authority, regretfully.

City officials contend that by voting in May to build a 7,000-seat music hall at the fairgrounds, the board of supervisors trod on their master plan for downtown. To hear city boosters talk, the fairgrounds, about three miles from the city center, might as well be in another state: Customers there won’t easily be persuaded to parlay a concert ticket into a day or evening on the town, patronizing downtown restaurants or other amenities the way visitors to the Tech Museum of Innovation, the Museum of Art or HP Pavilion often do.

Behind the city’s concern are questions of civic pride that cut a little deeper in San Jose than elsewhere.

“We’re a small agricultural town that became the 11th-largest city in the U.S., but we’re still a small town growing into a big-city body,” says Scott Knies, executive director of the San Jose Downtown Assn. Particularly irksome is life in the shadow of San Francisco, that burg an hour’s drive north which, despite being smaller in population, gets all the fancy press.

To combat the perception that it’s a sort of Oakland South, San Jose has tried to win a name commensurate with its size. It’s often mentioned as a candidate for a National Basketball Assn. franchise, and a campaign to attract Major League Baseball is underway. But many civic leaders believe that the key to burnishing San Jose’s identity is to rebuild its downtown.

Like the cores of many American cities, San Jose’s suffered from suburban flight and commercial disinvestment. In the 1950s and 1960s the district lost all its department stores. Even City Hall moved out in 1957.

The city’s first ventures in urban renewal bypassed the center. To capitalize on the growth of the regional electronics industry, the city moved a clutch of trailer parks out of a marshy north San Jose district, fixed the drainage, and remade it as a magnet for office and industrial parks. A similar effort took place in south San Jose.

“We got to calling downtown ‘the hole in the doughnut,’ ” Mavrogenes says.

No one doubted that downtown needed flash. The redevelopment authority’s first major achievement was the construction of the luxury Fairmont Hotel in 1987. The new hotel “changed everyone’s mind-set about what this city is,” Mavrogenes says. “It showed that we’ve grown up and become a big city.”

The Fairmont was the first piece of a plan to turn downtown into San Jose’s “creative core.” Museums, restaurants, a new city library and the theaters would all produce a cultural critical mass. When planning began for HP Pavilion, the city deliberately skimped on adjacent parking so that event-goers would have to park downtown and stroll past restaurants and shops to get to a game.

But there wasn’t universal agreement that every new entertainment venue belonged downtown. The county had its own ideas for developing the fairgrounds. Supporters of that site also say that residents of outlying city neighborhoods think the investment pendulum has swing too far in downtown’s favor.

At this point the issue appears to be at a stalemate. The county says it still plans to float bonds to build the fairgrounds hall, notwithstanding the city’s threat to sue.

City redevelopment officials are wondering whether it might pay to build a smaller downtown music hall of about 3,500 seats even if the county’s plans proceed. They’re working to attract more housing downtown, including high-rise condos, which would turn downtown into a genuine 24-hour community complete with supermarkets, bookstores and a booming nightlife.

And they haven’t stopped thinking big.

“Bringing BART into the city is a major objective,” Mavrogenes says, referring to the rapid-transit system that serves San Francisco and the East Bay. “But that’s looking out 20 or 30 years.”

Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.