Willow Glen

Living in Willow Glen

Willow Glen was its own city until 1936, when San Jose annexed it in the consolidation of Santa Clara Valley's expanding municipalities. The annexation technically worked, but culturally it never quite took. Willow Glen residents still use phrases like "the village" without irony. The neighborhood maintains its own business association, its own neighborhood improvement associations, its own holiday traditions — most famously the Christmas Lane lights display on Eucalyptus Avenue, which draws visitors from across the Bay Area and has operated continuously for decades.

The neighborhood occupies a roughly triangular area in west-central San Jose, bounded by the Guadalupe River to the west, Meridian Avenue to the east, and Lincoln Avenue running east-west through its center. Lincoln Avenue is the commercial core: a genuine main street with locally-owned restaurants, boutiques, wine bars, salons, and neighborhood businesses that have resisted the chain-restaurant homogenization that eliminated main street culture from most Santa Clara County communities.