The Sorisseau Academy for State and Local History, located at San Jose State University, has some interesting commercial photos from the 1950's taken by Arnold Del Carlo, including many aerial photos of the area. Their searching tools aren't as easy to use as San Jose State's primary historical collection, but there's occasional good finds. Here's the Accent flavor enhancer plant (Stauffer Chemical) in San Jose that made MSG from sugar beets. They had their own switching locomotive for the plant; if someone needs a prototype for a small industrial switching layout, this might be a good choice.
The Accent plant was between Stauffer Blvd. and the SP spur on the west side of Monterey Highway south of downtown San Jose. The plant was torn down in the late 1980's, and now has modern warehouses. See this page of the
San Jose SPINS maps for more details. As an added bonus for an interesting layout, the other side of the tracks held the General Electric San Jose plant, with spurs both for the "motor plant" and "atomic plant". Just the thing for your glow-in-the-dark paint schemes...
I'm also a sucker for mid-century modern buildings, and this grocery store definitely catches my eye. I have no idea where the Story Book Market was.
[Both photos from Sorisseau Academy. I was really hoping to find one of the Moody Gulch oil field photos from "Santa Clara: Harvest of Plenty", but not much of their collection is online. Time to visit San Jose State.]
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When I was a kid we lived in Morgan Hill (1961) and would occasionally go up to SF for the day. On the way back we were sleepy but knew where were passing this plant
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