San Jose

Western Alliance of Independent States

San Jose is a city in California and part of the San Francisco Bay Area.

San Jose dominates the south end of San Francisco Bay. Once a small community immortalized by the Dionne Warwick/ Burt Bacharach hit Do You Know the Way to San Jose?, it is now a sprawling, center less city with a population nearly twice the size of neighboring San Francisco. Home of the famous Silicon Valley, Apple Computers, and Hewlett-Packard, civic pride has inspired San Jose to purchase an NHL hockey franchise and make repeated attempts to steal baseball's Giants away from San Francisco. A seemingly endless landscape of uninspiring bungalows and industrial parks, the city is screened from the sea breezes by the northern tip of the Santa Cruz Mountain range, resulting in a warmer and more humid climate than other parts of the bay. Perhaps due to its rapid growth, San Jose now suffers from some of the ghetto-based crime in the bay area. Gangs, drive-by shootings, carjackings, and racially motivated attacks seem all too commonplace.

Reached from San Francisco by an hourly CalTrain commuter route, San Jose's chief tourist attraction is the Great American Amusement Park. Less popular is the Rosicrucian Museum displaying ancient Assyrian and Babylonian artifacts, Egyptian mummies, jewelry, and a simulated tomb.

Population

• City () - Dated census
• Metro Area () - Dated census