San Jose's newest stage is a park the city already loved. Arena Green East, addressed at 340 Sharks Way beside the SAP Center, is the eastern lawn of Arena Green - the stretch of the Guadalupe River Park where the river meets Los Gatos Creek, ringed by the hockey arena, historic Diridon Station, the Hotel De Anza and Little Italy - now pressed into service as an open-air concert and events venue for downtown. The park format is straightforward festival staging: promoters build the stage, sound .....

A movie palace saved from demolition-by-neglect became one of the world's most intimate opera houses. The California Theatre at 345 South First Street in downtown San Jose opened in April 1927 as the Fox Theatre - Hollywood stars attended the premiere of An Affair of the Follies with it-girl Billie Dove - designed by Weeks and Day, the architects of Oakland's Fox and San Francisco's Mark Hopkins Hotel, and hailed on opening day as the finest theater in California. Vaudeville, 3D and Cinemascope .....

Italian restaurant by day, Latin dance club by night - Club Milano wears two identities at the same downtown San Jose address. The venue at 394 South 2nd Street, on the corner where the SoFA entertainment district begins its run of clubs and theatres, pairs a full-service restaurant and bar with a nightclub floor plan built for dancing: two large dance floors, a proper stage, a patio and the kind of unpretentious service the house has long advertised with the promise that everyone through the do.....

The street it sits on is named for Steve Wozniak, and the green space beside it has become Silicon Valley's open-air concert ground. Discovery Meadow at 180 Woz Way in downtown San Jose is the flexible grass field beside the Children's Discovery Museum, part of the Guadalupe River Park chain of parks that threads the river through the city centre. Managed through the City of San Jose's special-events program alongside Plaza de Cesar Chavez and Arena Green, the meadow serves as the city's princip.....

Home to minor-league baseball in the heart of Silicon Valley, Excite Ballpark is a historic stadium in San Jose, California, and one of the oldest ballparks still in regular professional use on the West Coast. Originally built in the 1940s as San Jose Municipal Stadium, the ground has been the long-time home of the San Jose Giants, and over the decades it has earned an affectionate reputation for its old-fashioned, intimate atmosphere. The ballpark holds roughly five thousand spectators, with a.....

In the rolling hills south of San Jose near the garlic-growing town of Gilroy, Gilroy Gardens is a family-oriented theme park built around an unusual horticultural premise, the combination of conventional amusement-park rides with vast living-tree sculptures, an idea unique among major American theme parks. Originally developed by a local nursery owner as Bonfante Gardens and opened in June 2001 at a cost of more than 100 million dollars, the park was later sold to the City of Gilroy in 2008 and.....

The bar behind the northeast goal is the largest outdoor bar in North America - a detail that says everything about how this stadium was designed. PayPal Park, at 1123 Coleman Avenue beside San Jose's Mineta International Airport, opened on 27 February 2015 as Avaya Stadium, the 100-million-dollar soccer-specific home of the San Jose Earthquakes. The design brief was intimacy: HOK gave the 18,000-seat bowl a canopy roof and some of the steepest-raked seating in Major League Soccer, with suites .....

A striking modernist landmark in downtown San Jose, the Center for the Performing Arts is one of the principal cultural venues of California's third-largest city. Opened in 1972 and designed in a sweeping curved style associated with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright's studio, the hall was built to give the growing city a flagship home for the performing arts, and it has hosted concerts, dance, theatre and touring productions for more than half a century. The auditorium seats around two thousand.....

Allen Ginsberg taped the Dylan show here; Stanford keeps the recording. The San Jose Civic at 145 West San Carlos Street opened on 14 July 1936 as the San Jose Municipal Auditorium, a Spanish Colonial Revival hall by Binder and Curtis built with Depression-era Public Works funds on land the Montgomery family gave the city in 1933. The lobby's painted wooden beams carry Native American designs, and the 500,000-dollar building was conceived as a civic everything-hall - opera to circus, basketball.....

Silicon Valley's biggest indoor room spent its first decade losing business to San Francisco. The San Jose McEnery Convention Center at 150 West San Carlos Street opened in 1989, a 147-million-dollar, Mitchell/Giurgola-designed complex approved by Mayor Tom McEnery in 1983 and renamed in his honour in 1991. The design put three column-free halls totalling 140,000 square feet above a half-sunken 1,200-car garage, with bow trusses carried on service-spine piers and ramps running trucks directly o.....