• Plaza de César Chávez (formerly Pueblo Plaza)
• San José Downtown Historic District (National Register)
• San José State University
• Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph

Downtown San José occupies the site of El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, the first civilian settlement in Alta California, founded on November 29, 1777 by Spanish colonists led by José Joaquín Moraga. The original pueblo stood near what is now the intersection of Taylor Street and Guadalupe Parkway; in 1797 it was relocated to its present site surrounding Pueblo Plaza, now known as Plaza de César Chávez. San José served as California's first state capital when the legislature convened here in 1850, and for more than a century downtown functioned as the commercial and cultural center of the Santa Clara Valley — the hub through which the valley's agricultural bounty moved to markets across the country and around the world.

The Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, contains buildings representing more than a century of California commercial architecture — Italianate, Romanesque Revival, Victorian, Edwardian, Neoclassical, Mission Revival, and Spanish Colonial Revival styles built by the leading families of the valley between the 1870s and 1940s. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake reshaped much of the district, and subsequent decades of growth and redevelopment added landmarks including the 1926 Bank of America Building — the city's first skyscraper. San José State University, the oldest public institution of higher education on the West Coast, anchors the southern edge of downtown.

MY-NHD's Downtown San José tee is for those who know that Silicon Valley's capital began as California's first town — and has been at the center of the state's story ever since.