A hand-colored Phostint beauty captures the grand red-brick Second Empire façade of San José's old City Hall, its clock tower rising above a lush plaza thick with fan palms and cypress — a civic showpiece that would be demolished decades later, leaving this card as one of its most vivid surviving portraits. Published by the prolific Edward H. Mitchell of San Francisco, whose numbered California series documented the state's boom-era architecture with exceptional color fidelity, the card carries number 1644 and was never mailed, preserving its rich tones in pristine condition. The foreground statue, likely a Civil War memorial, peers through manicured flower beds in a scene that evokes the confident municipal pride of early 20th-century California.