Rose Garden, San Jose, CA

The Rose Garden is central San Jose at its most photogenic, and it is named for the real thing: the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden, a formal 5.5-acre park laid out on a former prune orchard, with the city buying the land in 1927 and dedicating the garden in 1937. Volunteers rescued it after budget cuts in the 2000s, and in 2010 it was named the country's 'America's Best Rose Garden,' a point of genuine neighborhood pride that locals time their spring visits around. The neighborhood's other set-piece is even stranger and just as beloved: Rosicrucian Park, a full Egyptian-Revival temple complex on Naglee Avenue whose Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, opened in 1966, holds the largest collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities in the western United States, plus a planetarium. It has been a field-trip fixture for generations of Bay Area schoolkids. Around these two landmarks sit some of the city's oldest and best-kept homes, Victorians from the 1860s and 70s alongside 1920s and 30s period houses, on the deeply canopied streets of tracts that trace back to an 1877 subdivision just west of The Alameda. Naglee Avenue itself honors Gen. Henry Naglee, the pioneering valley viticulturist. The Alameda's cafes and restaurants run along the northeast edge as a walkable node. This is one of San Jose's signature historic-home districts, and it prices like it. The honest tradeoffs are that premium and the traffic on The Alameda, plus the Highway 880 wall on the west side. But for buyers who want architecture, canopy and a marquee park in one neighborhood, the Rose Garden is about as good as central San Jose gets.