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Local Landmarks & Heritage

  • Noble House Community Center
  • Penitencia Creek Park & Trail
  • Berryessa/North San José BART Station
  • Alum Rock Park

Neighborhood History

Noble is a residential neighborhood in the Berryessa district of North San José, taking its name from Noble Avenue, the street that runs through its heart and defines its civic identity. The broader Berryessa district in which Noble sits was once covered by the fruit orchards of the Berryessa family's Californio landholdings — apricot and prune groves that made this part of the Santa Clara Valley famous for high-quality fruit through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like much of North San José, Noble's orchard landscape was converted to suburban residential development during the 1960s and 1970s as San José expanded aggressively under City Manager A.P. "Dutch" Hamann's annexation campaign.

The neighborhood is served by the Noble House Community Center, one of San José's neighborhood-level civic facilities that provides programs and services to the surrounding community. Penitencia Creek Park and the Penitencia Creek Trail, one of the most ecologically significant waterways in the Santa Clara Valley, are accessible from the neighborhood's edge — a landscape that the Ohlone people knew as Shistuk and that Spanish missionaries named for the penitential adobe that stood along its banks. The Berryessa/North San José BART station, opened in 2020, transformed regional transit access for Noble and the surrounding district.

MY-NHD's Noble tee is for those who know this quiet corner of North San José — the orchard history beneath the suburban streets.

MY-NHD

Noble - San Jose - Unisex Cotton Tee

Noble - San Jose - Unisex Cotton Tee

Regular price $29.95 CAD
Regular price Sale price $29.95 CAD
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Noble takes its name from Noble Avenue in the Berryessa district of North San José, where apricot and prune orchards gave way to homes in the 1960s and 1970s. The Noble House Community Center and the Penitencia Creek Trail serve the neighborhood.

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