#2: Hamann: San Jose's
growth guru
He turned town into big city;
sprawl, smog also in legacy
BY PAUL ROGERS
Mercury News Staff Writer
He was a blond kid nicknamed for his Dutch Boy haircut.
When he grew up, he commanded attention a different way
-- by putting San Jose on the map.
He built a sleepy fruit-packing town into one of the
nation's largest cities, setting the stage for Silicon Valley.
He brought jobs, housing, roads, factories and political
power to the South Bay.
He also paved some of the world's most productive
farmland under a hodgepodge of strip malls, freeways and
suburbs. Critics say he turned San Jose into a poster child
for sprawl, draining life from its downtown and saddling
future generations with traffic jams and smog.
He was Anthony P. ``Dutch'' Hamann. With his
appointment as city manager on March 5, 1950, San Jose
-- for better and worse -- changed forever. More than any
other person this century, Hamann shaped San Jose's
emergence as a major American city.
During his tenure as San Jose's most powerful city official
from 1950 to 1969, Hamann was the key player in
developing San Jose Airport, its modern sewage plant,
libraries, firehouses, shopping malls, parks and the city's
expanded road system.
Backed by city councilmen and chamber of commerce
leaders, he pushed bond acts to pay for it all. He lured
industry titans such as IBM. From Congress to Wall Street, he tirelessly
sold San Jose like a
municipal Fuller Brush man working overtime.
``He wanted San Jose to be a big city,'' said Al Ruffo, who served as mayor
in 1946 and 1947.
``I kept saying: `Dutch, this is going to be another Los Angeles.' He said,
`Good!' It was just
growth, growth, growth. That was everybody's song. And Dutch sang it the
loudest.''
As a young man, Hamann played football with Ruffo at Santa Clara University.
A portly and
jovial attorney, Hamann had served in the Navy, sold Chevy parts in Oakland
and oil in Salinas.
Eventually, he found his calling: empire building.
When the San Jose City Council hired him, the Depression was still in the
minds
of many city leaders. They hoped to broaden the city's economy away from
farming alone.
Hamann delivered beyond their wildest dreams.
Annexation bonanza
During his reign, San Jose grew a stunning eightfold from 17 to 136 square
miles, gobbling up unincorporated territory in an annexation bonanza that
gave the
city the expansive, odd-shaped boundaries that remain to this day.
When Hamann took office in 1950, San Jose had a population of 95,000 --
half
the size of Modesto now. When he retired, there were 460,000 people, a
fivefold
increase. Today San Jose is the nation's 11th largest city, with 910,000
people --
more than San Francisco, Baltimore, Boston or Seattle.
``He had a great vision for what was going to happen to this valley,''
said Hamann's son, A.P.
``Butch'' Hamann, 52, a San Jose real estate broker. ``My dad really believed
that some day we
could be right up there with San Francisco or any city of the world --
whether it was in business
or the arts.''
Hamann, unapologetic until the day he died in 1977, championed
the credo of nearly every city leader in Eisenhower America:
Growth is progress. And progress is good.
That meant developers got nearly everything they wanted.
``I really miss when I was a child here, going through Santa Clara
Valley and seeing all the mustard in bloom in spring, and the miles
of orchards,'' said Lennie Roberts, 63, legislative advocate for
Committee for Green Foothills, in Palo Alto. ``It's hard to believe
it's all gone.''
Many observers say San Jose's sprawl from 1950 to 1970 was
inevitable. The climate was good. Defense firms were hiring. The
baby boom was in full swing.
Another way
But Roberts argues Europe already had proved that cities can focus
development into dense centers rather than allowing it to spread.
``It's understandable when you have a very undeveloped area, you
to want to have more things,'' said Roberts, a fourth-generation Californian.
``But often it is
killing the goose that laid the golden egg.''
As Hamann and most residents of San Jose saw it, he was bringing the American
Dream to as
many people as possible: a new home with a good job and wide open freeways.
It was the era before environmentalists. Developers rarely paid the costs
of schools, parks or
roads. Local leaders spent federal dollars on highways and showed no interest
in extending the
new BART rail line to the South Bay.
The San Jose Mercury and News both supported Hamann to the hilt, typified
by then-publisher
Joe Ridder's reported comment: ``Prune trees don't buy newspapers.''
While Hamann ruled City Hall, San Jose expanded its territory 1,377 times
by annexation --
compared with 42 annexations in the previous 100 years.
Hamann did not want Santa Clara County to develop like his native Orange
County, with many
competing medium-sized cities. He wanted San Jose to be dominant. As other
areas feared loss
of their identity, however, they rushed to incorporate.
In 1952 Campbell became a city; Milpitas followed in 1954, Cupertino in
1955, Saratoga in 1956
and Monte Sereno in 1957. Farmers who hoped to slow growth often were forced
to sell as their
property taxes skyrocketed.
For a while, the public loved it. Seven times Hamann was given a vote of
confidence in two-year
elections, as was then required.
``I believe it was a kind of pioneering mentality. It wasn't until paradise
started to turn sour --
with traffic and overcrowding of schools -- that the voters started to
rethink it,'' said Gary
Schoennauer, former San Jose planning director.
Hamann retired in 1969 just as a new era of city leaders, including Norm
Mineta and Janet Gray
Hayes, began limiting growth. Today San Jose has among the strictest growth
laws of any major
U.S. city.
In 1970, California Today magazine called San Jose's growth ``an uneconomical,
wasteful and
fiscally insolvent mess.''
Similar sentiments linger.
``You can criticize me all you want,'' Hamann said in 1976. ``But don't
forget the people of the
community thought what I was doing was good or could have dumped me.
``The urban sprawl here is no different from any other place. Urban sprawl
was created by the
demands of people.''
Hamann and his wife, Frances, died in 1977 in the collision of two passenger
jets in the Canary
Islands.
For the past 25 years, San Jose has tried to lure developers back to a
downtown that by the late
1970s had become a sad mix of empty lots, failed shops and winos.
Led by former Mayor Tom McEnery and redevelopment director Frank Taylor,
the city spent
$1.2 billion from 1977 to 1998 on downtown projects. Today, San Jose boasts
the new Tech
Museum of Innovation, the San Jose Arena and the Fairmont Hotel. Plans
are under way for a
new city hall and a symphony building. Entertainment downtown has thrived,
but retail sales,
crippled by Valley Fair and other malls, have languished.
Meanwhile, Hamann's genie can never be put back in the bottle.
``It was beautiful,'' said Ruffo, now 91. ``It was the Valley of Heart's
Delight with all these fruit
trees. We knew everything would grow. But it grew too fast. We couldn't
even keep up with it.
We had no idea what would occur with the traffic.
``But Dutch was pretty proud of what he accomplished. He put San Jose on
the map. A lot of
other people were proud of it, too.''
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