Prime San Jose site lands restaurant, owner now seeks office tenant
SAN JOSE — An office and restaurant building has added a dining establishment in a boost for downtown San Jose – but the next big challenge is to find an office tenant for the high-profile site.
The restaurant and office spaces are located at 189 West Santa Clara Street, a site known as the Lyndon Building. An affiliate of veteran real estate firm Hunter Properties owns the downtown San Jose building.
David Mulvehill, a business executive who owns and operates multiple restaurants in the San Pedro Square area, one of the downtown’s hot spots, is responsible for the upcoming restaurant at the corner of Almaden Avenue and West Santa Clara Street.
“We hope to be open in the fall,” said Mulvehill, chief of operations with Nuvo Hospitality and the operator and principal owner of the dining and drinking establishment. “We’re pretty excited about this.”
The restaurant is being planned on the ground floor space of the building and will occupy roughly 5,500 square feet.
The next big challenge for Hunter Properties at this site is to find an office tenant for the second-floor offices. with an uneven market for office properties as the backdrop for these efforts.
The office space on the upper floor totals about 8,000 square feet.
The Lyndon Building was constructed in two stages more than a century ago, according to the Preservation Action Council of San Jose, an activist group.
Originally built in the Italianate style in 1884 through a design by famed South Bay architect Theodore Lenzen, the building was remodeled in 1902. Until 1902, the building was the home base for the Times-Mercury, a precursor to the present-day San Jose Mercury News.
In 1902, the newspaper relocated nearby and the building was renovated. The original facade yielded to a Beaux-Arts exterior. The building is named after the Lyndon family, whose patriarchs James Lyndon and John Lyndon, were prominent Los Gatos businessmen in the post-Civil War 19th Century and early 20th Century.
The building’s upper floor was once The Balconades Ballroom, a venue for big bands and country music in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, some Bay Area rock bands performed on the second floor.
The prospect of a new restaurant adds to the vibrant scene in this part of downtown San Jose, in the view of Tom McEnery, whose family owns much of the city block that includes San Pedro Square and the Farmer’s Union Building.
“Downtown San Jose has taken some hits, but it’s coming back strong, including this block,” McEnery said. The block is bounded by Almaden Avenue, West St. John Street, North San Pedro Street and West Santa Clara Street.
Mulvehill, while not completely decided on the restaurant’s name, is considering a moniker that evokes memories of the newspaper that once was located there and operated its printing press at the site.
“We are going to do breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Mulvehill said. “We will have California-style cuisine, a farm-to-table approach.”
An upper-floor office tenant could provide close-knit synergy with the restaurant downstairs.
“An office tenant and the restaurant would activate and beautify this corner,” Mulvehill said. “Office workers could go downstairs for a meal and a drink.”
The second floor could be ideal as a creative office space or for a smaller tech company such as an artificial intelligence startup.
The prospects of another vibrant corner in downtown San Jose on the San Pedro Square and Farmer’s Union Building block encourages McEnery, who has seen numerous economic cycles in the city’s urban core.
“This block always seems to figure it out after a downturn,” McEnery said.