Berryessa, San Jose, CA

Berryessa is the big, settled bedroom district of northeast San Jose, and its name reaches back to the Berreyesa family, the prominent Californio landholders whose Mexican-era ranchos once covered much of this ground and who also lent their name to Napa County's Lake Berryessa. In the orchard era this was famous fruit country, part of the Santa Clara Valley's 'Valley of Heart's Delight,' with apricot and prune orchards along Hostetter and Piedmont Roads before the subdivisions filled in through the 1960s and 70s. Today it is a flat grid of established single-family homes organized around wide arterials, with the Berryessa and Penitencia creek corridors and district parks threading green through it and Piedmont Hills High serving the area. The neighborhood's southwest edge is where the change is happening: the historic San Jose Flea Market, the beloved La Pulga that opened in 1960 and grew into one of the country's largest open-air markets and a cornerstone of the region's Latino community, is being redeveloped into housing and new retail beside the Berryessa BART station. Vendors fought hard to preserve a piece of it, and the outcome still stings for many. The appeal is a solid, family-oriented, reasonably priced suburb with real transit now on its doorstep. The honest tradeoffs are that transitional, in-flux southwest fringe and the general car-dependence of the interior, where daily life runs on the arterials. But between the schools, the creek greenbelts and BART finally arriving nearby, Berryessa is one of the more practical and steadily improving suburban addresses on the north side of the city.