Cupertino was not Steve Jobs’ first choice for a state-of-the-art Apple headquarters.

He had another vision three decades ago, when the computer genius was young and healthy, on the cover of Time magazine and on the verge of introducing the Macintosh. It was 1983 when Jobs took a helicopter ride with a real estate consultant, had cocktails at Carry Nations bar in Los Gatos with then-San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery, then announced he was ready to build a “statement” corporate campus.

The location: the southern end of San Jose — on the green pastures of Coyote Valley. He even lined up a world-renowned architect, in that case I.M. Pei.

How history would have changed, how the fortunes of San Jose would be different, had the project gone forward are immeasurable. But one thing is clear: The vision for the modernist Apple headquarters that Jobs unveiled in Cupertino last week is remarkably similar to the one he had dreamed about for San Jose. And three men involved in Apple’s Coyote Valley project — McEnery; real estate consultant Bob Feld; and former Apple vice president Al Eisenstat — are amazed that even after 28 years, Jobs never gave up.

“I am absolutely thrilled that after everything he has gone through, physically and everything else, that he still has this desire to take on something of this magnitude,” said Feld, now a vice president with Cornish & Carey in Sacramento. “To me, it’s as if time hasn’t shifted — 30 years, same vision, same scope, same dream.”

Drinks and dreams

It was late winter or early spring in 1983 when McEnery met Jobs at the London Oyster House on Main Street in Los Gatos before heading to a corner table at Carry Nations. “I usually stick in downtown San Jose,” said McEnery, who was a newly elected mayor when he met Jobs. “But in ’83, the best hotel was Holiday Inn and the best restaurant was the Sizzler.”

Jobs was selling something McEnery desperately wanted: a new Apple headquarters that would bring tax revenue to the city his family had called home since the late 1860s, and with it his dreams of world-class museums, sports arenas, the kind of police force worthy of a major American city.

“I want to help you make San Jose a great city,” McEnery remembers Jobs telling him.

At the time, San Jose was a place “full of hopes and dreams, most of which had been unfilled or dashed,” McEnery, 65, said in an interview last week. “It was a bombed-out center city and had little positive feelings about it. It could get kicked into another kind of city if it had some crucial things like this happening.”

At the corner table, Jobs was brash, focused, excitable, McEnery recalls. The two men talked about the project, a shimmery glass structure surrounded by oaks and grasses.

“What sticks in my mind is he clearly saw the potential in San Jose,” McEnery said. “We could have a great set of campuses, a la Stanford Industrial Park.”

Jobs, who had already hired I.M. Pei to renovate a New York City apartment for him, even suggested that “I could see myself” buying an old warehouse in downtown San Jose, renovating it and living in it. If only, thought the mayor whose name now adorns the downtown convention center.

Flights of fancy

Jobs first saw the Coyote Valley property on a helicopter ride with consultant Feld and Apple executive Eisenstat on a spring day. Feld remembers it well. As they circled the pastoral property, Jobs asked to land on the valley floor, not far from a rolling hillside near Bailey Avenue and across from the 1950s-era IBM campus.

They got out and walked through the tall grass. “He wanted to know how far up that hillside went,” Feld said. “He immediately saw that with the right kind of architecture, you could do some tram type of connection between the hillside property and the property on the valley floor.”

Whether it be a research center or a think tank, Feld said, “he saw incorporating the hillside, not taking the trees out, but somehow making that part of the facility.”

And leaving most of the property in a natural state.

Feld had worked with scores of executives before, and most wanted something fast, cheap and easy. Not Jobs.

“In my mind, he was very unequivocal about the vision he saw there. He did not come across as ‘Let me think about it,’ ” Feld said. “When we landed there, he was seeing things, he was seeing it right there that minute. There was no hesitancy.”

The next day, handwritten on a yellow sheet of lined paper, they drafted an all-cash deal and soon, the property belonged to Apple. But the project was fraught with politics over developing San Jose’s last wide-open space and other problems. At the same time, the economy was tanking — and in 1985, Jobs was forced out of the company he founded. The Coyote Valley deal foundered. Apple would later sell the property.

McEnery tried to resuscitate the project in the late 1980s with Jobs’ successor, John Sculley, suggesting Apple move to downtown San Jose instead. (Adobe later made that move.) But Apple “could not decide if they really wanted it,” he said.

The mayor left office six years before Jobs returned to Apple in 1997. Since 1983, even without the Apple campus, San Jose has built world-class museums, an arena and is considered one of the safest cities in the country. Still, McEnery says, if the Apple project had gone forward, “Just everything would have been different. It would have changed everything.”

Finally fulfillment

Little has changed in Coyote Valley, long imagined as the new frontier for development, first by Tandem Computers and Apple, then by networking giant Cisco Systems, whose plans to build a 20,000-employee campus there disintegrated with the tech bust in the early 2000s.

Apple has since grown to be one of the most innovative and respected companies on the planet, with a workforce of almost 50,000, and consumer products that have changed the world. Last week, Jobs announced his plans to demolish scores of old buildings on 150 acres across Interstate 280 from Apple’s existing headquarters and hire renowned architect Norman Foster to design a spaceshiplike building surrounded by natural landscaping.

On medical leave from his job, after battling pancreatic cancer and undergoing a liver transplant, he looked older than his 56 years when he addressed the Cupertino City Council. His cheeks were sallow, his hair thin, his trademark black sweater hanging lose on his gaunt frame. But Eisenstat, 80, who long since left Apple and is living in Atherton, was impressed.

Jobs had plenty of enthusiasm for the San Jose project, he recalls, “but I think he has even more today in developing a significant statement for a campus.”

And all three men who intersected with Jobs’ first push for Apple’s signature corporate home agreed on another point as well. When it comes to passion and vision, for Jobs, time hasn’t changed a thing.

Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409.