Quietly tucked in glossy NatGeo magazines and buried deep in midnight Wikipedia rabbit holes, history has always been my safe space, close enough to marvel at yet too distant to escape into.
That was until I made a wrong turn on a rainy January afternoon to Alviso in San Jose.
Once a thriving port that ferried the South Bay's harvests to San Francisco, Alviso now felt like an overlooked corner. Unpaved, pothole-filled roads led past abandoned warehouses, and the nearest grocery store was miles away. It felt like stepping into a different world, a place paradoxically close to where I had grown up, yet so wildly different.
Seriously... What even happened here?
Curious, I returned, notebook in hand, chasing answers that only multiplied: floods, lawsuits, and decades of neglect. One day, Francisco, a lifelong resident, pointed to a derelict factory building and joked, "This was our Google 100 years ago, but now it's our museum." His words struck me. For the first time, history was rusting right in front of me, and I had to save it. That impulse soon blossomed into a website and a research paper for National History Day. But I was just getting started.
