• Alum Rock Park (est. 1872, California oldest municipal park)
• Penitencia Creek Trail
• Penitencia Creek Park
• Berryessa/North San José BART Station

Penitencia Creek takes its name from the Arroyo de las Penitencias, named in the mission era for a small adobe structure that stood along its banks and served as a place of confession and penitence for mission padres traveling between Mission Santa Clara and Mission San José. The Ohlone people knew the creek as Shistuk — a name connected to the jackrabbit in the Chocheño language — and depended on its waters and riparian habitat long before European contact. The creek was diverted southwestward by a farmer circa 1850 to irrigate his fields, permanently separating what became known as Upper Penitencia Creek from its downstream portion in Milpitas.

Upper Penitencia Creek, which flows through Alum Rock Park before joining Coyote Creek near Berryessa Road, is one of the last remaining steelhead trout streams in the Santa Clara Valley. Alum Rock Park, established in 1872 as California's oldest municipal park, has protected the canyon through which the creek runs for more than 150 years. The Penitencia Creek Trail, one of the Bay Area's urban trail networks, follows the creek from near Noble Avenue through Penitencia Creek Park to the Berryessa BART station. The residential neighborhood that bears the creek's name developed during the 1980s and 1990s as part of the broader suburban expansion of North San José.

MY-NHD's Penitencia Creek tee honors the mission-era waterway, the Ohlone landscape it sustained, and the community that grew along its banks.