City Streets

Maintenance: City of San Jose, DOT
Surface Composition: Asphalt

Curb/gutter maintenance: Responsibility of owner of adjacent property
Composition: Concrete, natural color, broom finish
Curb address numerals: A permit is required from the City of San Jose for painting house addresses on a curb face. The permit will provide guidelines for paint type, numeral size/form, and foreground/background colors. Solicitors must possess this permit to provide the service. Those who leave a note and return another day to see if you accepted their offer to paint the curb have a history of not giving any identifying information. Businesses are required to identify themselves with contact and license information and therefore, a solicitor who will not provide this information is operating illegally.

Use:
- Yard waste is supposed to be set out no more than a day in advance of pickup and never on Saturdays. This is a fineable offense. However, there are times when there are so many palm fronds that have fallen in Palm Haven that residents pile them up on the street anyway. There may be some flexibility granted by the city for this situation but you will have to investigate that yourself.

Parking Rules for Palm Haven: Click HERE for info.

Click HERE to view the actual code for other related items.

History:
The streets of Palm Haven were originally "Macadamized".
Macadam is a type of road construction pioneered by John Loudon McAdam in the early 1800s. It consists of three layers of stones laid on a sloped subgrade, with side ditches for drainage. The first two layers consisted of angular aggregate (hand-broken, maximum size 3 inches) for a total depth of about 8 inches. The third layer was about 2 inches thick with a maximum aggregate size of 1 inch. The layers would be compacted with a heavy roller. This caused the angular stones to lock to their neighbors. This basic method of construction is sometimes known as water-bound macadam. Although this method required a great deal of manual labor, it resulted in a strong and free-draining pavement.

Roads which were constructed in this manner were described as Macadamized. Click here for more on Early American Roads.

With the advent of motor vehicles, dust became a serious problem on macadam roads. The vacuum created under fast moving vehicles sucked the dust out of the surface leading to a gradual raveling of the larger size materials, as well as an unpleasant dust cloud. This problem was later rectified by spraying tar on the surface thus creating tar-bound macadam, or tarmac.

In 1913, when Palm Haven opened, very few streets in San Jose were actually paved with concrete or asphaltic surfaces. Especially on the outskirts of the city, many roads were still just dirt roads. Palm Haven was on the southern edge of San Jose city limits and developer, Eaton, Vestal and Herschbach, included Macadamization as an improvement in Palm Haven. "Saratoga Rock" was the final top dressing used in the Macadamization. Concrete curbing was also installed at this time and most of the original curbing is intact today. This was the same system used for the Hanchett Residence Park developed after 1906 outside San Jose's western edge off The Alameda.

There were no street signs on poles at the time. The use of street signs was still "catching on" across the country and was yet far from being a standard. So streets were labeled by painting their names on the side faces of the curbs at intersections. Remnants of these old painted markers using a white background and black letters can still be found on some of Palm Haven's original curbs.

Later, Palm Haven had its streets paved in concrete. This was a premium road finish but lasted many years with little maintenance. Current research indicates that the streets of Palm Haven were paved in concrete in the late 1920s after the Municipal Lighting Maintenance District Act of 1927. This improvement may also be coincident with when the 4 streetlamps were installed in Palm Haven. Some years later, the City of San Jose continued maintenance of Palm Haven's streets with its standard asphalt surfacing and has done so to this day.

An interesting discovery in the documents of the Palm Haven Tract Association (PHTA) was a 1920 letter to its members (Palm Haven property owners) regarding the paving of Coe Avenue from Delmas to Bird. The City of San Jose had proposed paving Coe because Delmas was the primary access street to San Jose from the Willows and paving it would improve that traffic to Bird. The PHTA Secretary, Charles Woods, noted in his letter that the properties that directly abutted the improvement area would be assessed the cost for improvements. However, the city was having trouble getting enough votes from those property owners to proceed. They complained that the sole reason for improving Coe Avenue was for the benefit of residents of the Palm Haven tract who wanted a nicer approach to their neighborhood. Charles made no argument with this and proceeded to collect $25 from each Palm Haven property owner to pay to have Coe Avenue paved. He wrote the paving of Coe "would not only render a much more pleasant approach to the Tract, but would enhance the value of all property therein."

Ever wonder why palm seedlings and weeds always grow up in the crack between the curb wall and the curb gutter in Palm Haven? It is because of Palm Haven's early street installation as described above. The streets were macadamized with curbs. Later, when the streets were paved with concrete, the concrete was poured up to the curbs leaving a small crack between the two. It appears an attempt to keep water from just seeping underneath the road resulted in the small "lip" that rises next to the curbing. Today, an asphalt surface has been poured over the top of the street. On newer streets, the city or developer now installs a one-piece curb & gutter that results in better flow of storm runoff and no need to weed the gutters!

In the below photo from 1921, it is easy to see that weeds grew robustly at the edges of the Macadamized streets where there was little auto traffic. The boy at right is stepping on the curb. This and other early photographs confirm that both Bird and Coe Avenues were also Macadamized when Palm Haven opened.