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Local Landmarks & Heritage

  • Oak Hill Memorial Park (est. 1847)
  • AT&T Long Lines Tower Site
  • Communications Hill Grand Staircase
  • Vieira Park

Neighborhood History

Communications Hill takes its name from a 114-foot AT&T Long Lines microwave relay tower constructed on its summit in 1972, which transmitted telecommunications data across the Santa Clara Valley as part of the national long-distance network. The hill itself — part of the San Juan Bautista Hills — carries much older history: the Tamyen Ohlone people mined its chert deposits for tools and arrowheads before European contact, and on November 29, 1777, Juan Bautista de Anza designated the area as part of the southernmost boundary of San José's original pueblo land tract, California's first civilian settlement.

In the late nineteenth century, Portuguese immigrant José S. Azevedo established the American Dairy Company on roughly 96 acres of hillside land. That family enterprise persisted through multiple generations of the Azevedo and Bettencourt families until the Azevedo Quarry operated on the site from 1971 to 2006. Oak Hill Memorial Park, on the northern slope and in operation since 1847 as the oldest secular cemetery in California, has stood through each of these eras. The City of San José began preparing the hilltop for residential development in 1984 and formally adopted the Communications Hill Specific Plan in 1992; construction commenced in 2002.

MY-NHD's Communications Hill tee is for those who know that the best views of Silicon Valley belong to the neighborhood that was a dairy farm, a quarry, and a telecommunications relay before it became a home.

MY-NHD

Communications Hill - San Jose - Unisex Cotton Tee

Communications Hill - San Jose - Unisex Cotton Tee

Regular price $29.95 CAD
Regular price Sale price $29.95 CAD
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Communications Hill is named for the AT&T microwave relay tower built on its summit in 1972, though Ohlone people once quarried its chert for tools. Later a Portuguese family dairy and then a quarry until 2006, the hilltop saw homebuilding begin in 2002.

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