“Writing legal descriptions used to be much less of a science,” said Nanci Klein, the city’s real estate director. “To my knowledge, Google’s extensive historical research has not turned up anyone who could meet the criteria to manage the property.”
Nevertheless, Google began to track down the families of the original owner. In February, it sent letters to 115 possible descendants of the three men, including Peter Adams, a product manager at a data center technology company in Washington. Google believes that Adams could be a distant descendant of Archibald Peachy, through the cousin’s cousin of Peachy’s son-in-law’s niece.
In its letter to Adams, Google wrote that it was “in the process of clearing the property rights” of San Jose’s roads, and that it would pay Adams a “courtesy fee” if he filed a deed declaring his rights and interests in the property and kept the deal strictly confidential. The $5,000 offered was almost an insult, according to a legal expert WIRED spoke to; another defendant described it as “a meaningless amount” in a court filing. Commercial lots in San Jose have recently sold for $2 million an acre, or more, albeit for traditional lots that are not paved with roads and alleys together.
While the majority of those 115 descendants signed the quitclaim deed, Adams did not. Presumably neither 33 other potential heirs of the original men. So Google sued them, in what is being called a “silent title” lawsuit. (Mark Zuckerberg similar lawsuits used in an effort to secure control of a 700-acre estate in Hawaii in 2017)
“In order for Google to continue with its development plans for the Project, the title of the fee in the Subject Properties in Google needs to be perfected,” reads a lawsuit filed by Google and the City of San Jose in the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara, in April.
A number of Frederick Billings’ descendants are still prominent, including a few who married into the Rockefeller family. Many of the defendants can claim direct descent from Peachy and Naglee. None of those contacted by WIRED wanted to comment on the matter.
Others prove more difficult to detect. In May, Google and San Jose admitted in a filing that “despite reasonable care, [they] of a number of defendants have not been able to find addresses or locations,” and asked the court for additional time to serve their subpoenas.
To complicate matters, Adams filed a counterclaim in Santa Clara in early May — later joined by five other descendants of the men — and demanded that the court confirm their ownership of the two larger lots. Google would not answer questions regarding the lawsuits, but spokesperson Bailey Tomson gave this statement: “We are working with the City of San Jose on a land transfer process. It is our shared goal to maximize the public benefits of this project, including reconfiguring streets into open space and bicycle and pedestrian paths to give the community a more walkable, public transport center.
Although the city had stated that construction could begin in 2023, the matter may move that date. “It’s impossible for me to give a time frame,” Klein says. “But you have to master the land before you put the shovel on the ground.”
It seems unlikely that a few dusty old deeds de an estimated $19 billion Downtown West project all together. In late June, Google dismissed its complaint against eight of the descendants after accepting payouts of undisclosed magnitude. And last week, Adams and his co-defendants dismissed their counterclaim, possibly as a result of a different settlement.
Whether or not the remaining descendants of Billings, Peachy, and Naglee lined up, the original entrepreneurs would certainly have been impressed that their modest real estate investment is still yielding returns a century and a half later.