• Berryessa/North San José BART Station
• Berryessa Elementary School (1927)
• Penitencia Creek Park
• San José Flea Market

Berryessa takes its name from the Berryessa family, a prominent Californio lineage of Basque-Spanish origin that arrived in California as part of the De Anza expedition in the late eighteenth century. The family became major landholders in the northern Santa Clara Valley, and the district that bears their name was established across their former holdings in what is now northeastern San José.

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Berryessa was one of the most productive agricultural zones in the Santa Clara Valley, celebrated across California for its high-quality apricots and prunes. Orchards lined Hostetter Road, Capitol Avenue, Piedmont Road, and Lundy Avenue, and the J.F. Flickinger Fruit Packing Company — one of the largest packing operations in the valley — operated near present-day Hostetter Road. The 1927 Berryessa Elementary School building, a Spanish Colonial Revival structure designed by prominent Northern California architect W.H. Weeks, stands as a surviving landmark of that agricultural era. Postwar development transformed the orchards into suburban neighborhoods through the 1960s and 1970s, while Berryessa's civic life deepened through institutions like the Berryessa Citizens Advisory Council, formed in 1973.

The Berryessa/North San José BART station, which opened in 2020, marks the district's most recent chapter as a regional transit hub. MY-NHD's Berryessa tee connects the neighborhood's orchard roots with the community that grew from them.