Jay Paul moves quickly with new downtown San Jose office towers

SAN JOSE — The developer behind two projects poised to usher in dramatic changes to downtown San Jose and the city’s skyline intends to begin construction on one big office complex this year and has sketched out plans to launch a huge mega campus at an adjacent site.

Construction is slated to begin this year on an office tower at 200 Park Ave. near the corner of South Almaden Boulevard, according to one of the brokers seeking tenants for the development that’s being planned by Jay Paul Co.

Separately, Jay Paul has sketched out which buildings at the nearby and massive CityView Plaza will be demolished and where three new office towers will sprout to replace them, according to public documents on file with San Jose city planners.

“200 Park is well underway and CityView will follow,” said Phil Mahoney, an executive vice chairman with Newmark Knight Frank, a commercial real estate firm. “We expect to start construction on 200 Park well before the end of this year.”

An office tower of roughly 800,000 square feet is planned for 200 Park Ave, city documents show. The CityView development would total 3.4 million square feet, according to municipal planners. Newmark Knight Frank is seeking office tenants for both the 200 Park Ave. tower and the CityView Plaza campus.

Demolition crews have worked to clear away 200 Park Ave. ahead of the actual start of construction of the new tower. The timing for the outset of demolition on the CityView location isn’t as certain.

“That is a little more fluid right now,” Mahoney said of the demolition that would be the prologue for the vast campus that Jay Paul envisions at CityView Plaza. CityView is bounded by Park Avenue, South Almaden Boulevard, West San Fernando Street and South Market Street.

A community meeting has been scheduled in San Jose for Aug. 19 at 6 p.m. at 145 W. San Carlos St. in the Bowers Institute Meeting Room to discuss the latest on the CityView Plaza complex. Jay Paul Co. hopes to obtain a demolition permit for CityView Plaza.

The meeting notice states that roughly 961,000 square feet of office, retail, and restaurant space now at CityView Plaza would be cleared away through the demolition, which would occur in two stages. Two existing office buildings, one with a Wells Fargo branch on the ground floor at Market and San Fernando, along with a second office building at the corner of West San Fernando and South Almaden, would survive the demolition under the current plans.

“We look very favorably towards these projects,” said Scott Knies, executive director of the San Jose Downtown Association. “Godspeed to Jay Paul in terms of getting more cranes in the air over downtown San Jose.”

In June, Adobe launched a new office tower to dramatically expand its downtown San Jose headquarters campus. If Jay Paul follows up with construction this year as planned for the 200 Park Ave. office building, the Adobe and Jay Paul efforts would mark dramatic milestones for the urban core of the Bay Area’s largest city.

For roughly a decade, not a single office tower had begun construction in downtown San Jose, after the Riverpark Tower 2 had sprouted on West San Carlos Street in 2010. Now it appears that the downtown could see the start of two new office towers within the same calendar year.

“It’s a wonderful sign for Jay Paul to start on an office building,” Knies said.

Plenty of speculation has emerged about whether Jay Paul will land a tech titan for one of its big office projects, whether at 200 Park Ave. or at CityView Plaza.

In Sunnyvale, the Jay Paul client list reads like a who’s who of the luminaries of Tech America: Google, Facebook, and Amazon are among the tenants for the stalwart development company in that city.

“We have talked to a number of groups and the preliminary interest is very strong,” Mahoney said.

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