San Jose Mayor To Street Vendors Before #SuperBowl50: Get Out Of Our ‘Clean Zone’

The Super Bowl’s Golden Year — the big Five-Oh — kicks off a week of celebration in San Jose beginning February 1st. As first-time hosts of one of America’s largest sportsball extravaganzas, the city is as ready as it’s ever going to be: a recent report from local news affiliate KTVU outlined just a few of the many exciting things in store for the public: an enormous opening night celebration at the SAP Center, the football-fieldification of San Pedro Street, a beer pavilion at Cesar Chavez Park…downtown San Jose is poised to become a Garden Of Earthly Delights for the estimated 100,000 people from across the nation that will flood her streets, their collective excitement eclipsed only by that of the local businesses ready to fulfill their insatiable demands in the coming week.

But this garden has walls, and as per usual, those who could benefit the most from the occasion are about to be left on the outside of them once the merrymaking begins.

“The occupation that I have found myself in is that of a street musician,” Walt Hansen told the city’s residents last week, in an open letter to San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo on his blog. “I drop a hat at my feet, and live off what donations are placed there. I never ask for a dime, not one.” If you’ve ever set foot in Downtown San Jose, then you’ve seen Walt, even if you’ve never really looked at him: a tall, slender, older gentleman, with a weathered, careworn face partially obscured by a perpetual scruff of beard. He can usually be found leaning quietly under an alcove beside Camera 12, gently serenading passers by with his flute as it gleams softly under the dim fluorescent lights. It’s ethereal, captivating, a perfect soundtrack to the cityscape. And for the patrons of Super Bowl week, it will never even exist. Walt will never really exist.

“Recently I was handed…an ordinance that’s gone into effect for the upcoming Super Bowl week,” his post continues. “This ordinance states that I will not be able to legally play anywhere in downtown San Jose.” The day before Walt published his blog entry, Mayor Sam Liccardo, who’s office issued the letter, was in attendance at a conference hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama on ending veteran homelessness. I do not know whether Walt is homeless or not, yet it hardly matters; as a veteran, his words have teeth. “San Jose is telling me, ‘we don’t care that you served your country, we don’t care that you add to the flavor of downtown day in and day out,’” he writes. “San Jose is telling me, ‘go to hell.’”

‘Another Misstep Of People In Power’

Downtown San Jose’s fleet of ‘mobile vendors’ — the folks you see pushing around food carts and the like — are also to be excluded from downtown next week, remanded to the exterior of what city official Teri Killgore referred to as the ‘clean zone’ during a meeting at city hall back in November. Of course, the city was issuing permits to certain members of the unwashed masses to take part in the festivities, which could be found directly behind Arthur Dent’s bypass proposal at the City Clerk’s office.

“But the plans were on display . . .”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a torch.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.”
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’d rather not see a repeat of the glut of hot dog vendors that clogged the streets during Christmas In The Park during the Super Bowl(at one point, there were at least ten surrounding the ice rink next to Cesar Chavez Park, each one selling the exact same product). At the same time, I’d rather deal with an aggrieved sense of smell due to an overabundance of beef brine for a week than deny those same vendors access to what will easily be San Jose’s largest revenue-gathering opportunity for small businesses this year.

Father Jon Pedigo with Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish agrees. He’s been agitating for street vendors for quite some time now with great success, and didn’t hesitate to make his displeasure felt on the evening news. “[A] public rule that doesn’t study the impact of a community, it’s another misstep of people that are in power,” he told reporters when the decision was announced, over the heads of the street vending community. “When you take away [their] vending income, you’re basically taking away food from [their] children.”

Killgore and Company stress that the ‘clean zone’ ordinance is the only way to protect public safety and public health, due to what she referred to as “guerilla marketing.” I’m disappointed that San Jose’s media outlets didn’t demand that she elaborate on this notion, as it likely would have turned into some racist argle-bargle about the way street vendors call out to the public to get attention, which would likely made the ordinance DOA. Because last time I checked, street vendor callouts don’t involve tiger pits, tripwires, or poison darts, so I’m not exactly sure what the hell she’s worried about. But I have a hunch.

Making San Jose easier to swallow for Middle America’s diabetic masses should not involve sanitizing the streets of their local color, quite literally in this case. Because let’s not kid ourselves: the street vendors in downtown? Predominantly Latino folks. Must we continue shamefully hustling them out the back door when company arrives? I for one am tired of giving a shit what the rest of the country thinks about the Silicon Valley; leave the respectability politics to those who aren’t busy maintaining the information superhighway. Peter Allen, an art community leader running for San Jose City Council’s District Three, said much the same thing, albeit much more politely. “The city obviously needs to leverage the Super Bowl to boost revenue,” he told me in a recent email, “but I think we can do that and still allow for our organic culture to thrive in the same space.”

It’s that ‘organic culture’ that makes San Jose special, that has brought us to a place of prominence on the world stage, that brought the attention of the fucking Super Bowl Committee onto us in the first place. To carefully and deliberately erase that culture in order to impress outsiders and make a buck is incredibly egregious, and for Mayor Liccardo — who campaigned and was elected upon a platform of preserving and expanding the very ‘organic culture’ of which I’m referring to — it’s the height of hypocrisy.

“Mayor Liccardo,” Walt concludes near the end of his letter. “Are you going to tell a normally accepted member of downtown San Jose that he can stand outside and look in, but please don’t expect to be welcomed at your party?”

Well, Mr. Mayor…are you?