Overview
History
Entertainment guide

Birthplace of Silicon Valley

Palo Alto is a bustling little city where the student population adds a unique buzz to the atmosphere both in the street by day and in the bars at night. Travelling by bike, bus or train is commonplace and a lot more beneficial here than other parts of the valley. It is a city built by people for people, not built by industrialists to keep cars happy, and its student-friendly layout is a reflection of its history as a town built for students.

History


Of all of the south bay cities, perhaps Palo Alto has the most colourful history. In the same way that the area now known as Sunnyvale was originally part of the estate that became Mountain View, Palo Alto was originally part of the city of Menlo Park. Palo Alto’s history is also incomplete without telling the story of Stanford University, which pre-dates the foundation of the city in which it now resides.

The bay area was initially inhabited by several tribes of North American Indians, and the area now known as Palo Alto was inhabited by the Ohlone tribe. A few artifacts and a dozen mounds remain, but most of the history of the Ohlones was sadly lost after the arrival of the European settlers.

The first Spaniards to arrive were led by Don Gaspar de Portola and were in search of Monterey Bay. They wanted to secure the bay and establish a port there for the benefit of the Spanish merchant fleet and navy. Instead they ended up finding San Francisco Bay and they set up camp in 1769 beside a very tall redwood tree called El Palo Alto (the tall tree) which was, and some say still is, situated beside San Francisquito Creek beside where the modern railway line is.
The next group of Spaniards were a group of Franciscan missionaries led by Padre Palou in search of a good location for a mission. They didn’t find one at Palo Alto, so they went back south and set one up at a more dependable water source at Santa Clara.

The third group had more staying power. A native of San Jose, Don Rafael Soto, got permission from the administration of the Santa Clara mission to create the 2,229-acre Rancho Rinconada del Arroyo de San Francisquito in the curve of San Francisquito Creek.

Soto's daughter Maria Luisa married a former British navy lieutenant who had served in the Mexican government, and was granted a large tract of land called Rancho Canada de Raymundo. He died a few years later. Maria Luisa moved back in with her father, but a few years later she married an Irish sea captain named John Greer who had left his ship to explore San Francisco Bay in 1850 and sailed into what is now the Palo Alto harbor.

Two other Irishmen purchased 1,700 acres of the 35,250 acre Rancho de las Pulgas. They named their estate Menlo Park, a shortened version of Menlough Park which was their birthplace on the shores of Lough Corib in County Galway.

Many wealthy San Franciscans were attracted by the beauty of Menlo Park, and many of them settled there in the 1870s bringing the railroad with them. The aristocracy was settling into the area and the Spaniards further south were still living the life of Reily on their ranchos, which were being granted at an ever accelerating rate as Spain withdrew its connections with Mexico. (Upper California was still part of Mexico at this time.)

As recently as 1863 the town of Palo Alto still didn’t exist as an entity in its own right. There was an old town called Mayfield which grew up around a hotel on El Camino Real. In 1863 the first train travelled to Mayfield on the San Jose - San Francisco line which was bought by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1868. This allowed the wealthy San Francisco aristocrats to commute to the city from Mayfield on an 80 minute journey compared to a 4 hour trip by stagecoach to get to San Francisco from Redwood City which was slightly closer. More importantly, the railroad helped the local farmers to get their produce to market in San Francisco.

Stanford University

The story of Palo Alto is intertwined with the story of Stanford University. Leland Stanford was a successful businessman from the east coast. Born and raised on a farm in Albany, New York, he went on to become a lawyer first in Albany, then on to Port Washington, Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan where he married Jane Eliza Lathrop, daughter of a wealthy merchant. Fire wiped out the offices of his successful firm in 1852, and he headed off to California (leaving his wife in Albany) to join his brothers who had a mercantile business in the gold fields near Auburn.

For two years he lived in very uncomfortable conditions, sleeping and working in his brothers’ store using the counter as a bed and his boots for a pillow. Flooding sometimes forced him to vacate his ‘bed’ to lift bags of sugar off the floor. Within three years he had bought out the store and he returned to Albany for his wife. He became very active in Californian politics, standing for election for the Republican party which was just getting on its feet at the time. By 1861 he had become state governor.

Stanford’s role as president of the venture that built the first transcontinental railway was one of the highlights of his career. San Francisco businessmen and a groups of merchants from Sacramento, who were already making a good living from the Pacific sea routes, took a gamble to build a railway through the Sierra Nevada mountains. They formed the Central Pacific Railroad and built eastwards to connect with the Union Pacific which was building westwards. After subsidies from the government and years of gruelling work meeting some demanding engineering challenges, the great project was completed in 1869.

Stanford’s only child, Leland Jnr, was born a year later, the family moved to the part of San Francisco now known as Nob Hill and purchased land on the peninsula that would become their stock farm and later the University.

Young Leland was with his parents on a trip to Europe in 1884 when he contracted typhoid fever in Italy. He died a short time later in Florence at the age of fifteen. The grief-stricken parents were devastated, and the next day Leland woke from a troubled sleep and made the famous declaration to his wife. “The children of California shall be our children.” They were to devote all of their resources to educational pursuits thereafter.

After their return to California Stanford immediately began discussions with the presidents of America’s established and prestigious universities who gave him advice on how to proceed with his educational plans. He decided to build a liberal institution that would be unlike any other before it. It would be co-ed and not single-sex. It would place as much emphasis on the practical as the academic.

The grand plans for the palatial low-rise campus were realised in 1891, by which time Stanford had become a US senator. A leading academic at the University of Indiana, David Starr Jordan, was appointed as Stanford University’s first president later that year, and from there the institution literally never looked back. Here was a place that looked to the future, where new technology and the teaching of practical business skills was given equal academic prestige as the classics. The detractors back East, who claimed that it would be an ornate architectural masterpiece but devoid of any students, were proved wrong as the student body grew to numbers far exceeding Stanford’s predictions.

Eventually Stanford realised that the students needed a town to service their needs, and the saloons of Menlo Park and Mayfield were providing too much entertainment for his liking. So he purchased 740 acres of vacant land between Menlo Park and Mayfield for roughly $300,000. The main thoroughfare, University Avenue, soon became the main street of the new town of Palo Alto. The street hummed with activity by 1892 with 318 permanent residents and 400 students living there during the academic year. Two years later the city was incorporated. So as not to distract the students with the temptation to indulge in drink and it’s related behaviour that was causing consternation in Menlo Park, Palo Alto remained a dry city for many years thanks to the influence of the University.

1906 was an eventful year for the whole bay area. Palo Alto got the Toonerville trolley (tram) system linking the town with the Stanford campus. The editor of the Palo Alto Times, Elinor V. Cogswell, remarked that the streetcars were "a social and cultural center. Faculty and students rode back and forth between town and Quad, studying, making dates, chatting with friends, weaving plots and plans . . .

"If the regulars failed to board the car at the usual corners, the motorman would wait for a few minutes while ears strained to hear hurrying footsteps. When the 'Toonerville' left the scene (in 1929), we townsfolk lost a sort of community center. And Stanford students lost a source of more-or-less innocent merriment derived from pulling the trolley off its wires, detouring the cars from established routes and pushing peanuts along the tracks with their noses."

But the one event that everyone remembers from 1906 was the great earthquake that caused major destruction in San Francisco. Palo Alto got away mostly unscathed and for a time tried to attract people to move down from San Francisco to where it was supposedly safer on the peninsula. It was a noble effort but in the long run it didn’t make much of an impact. Palo Alto just went on growing and living off the produce in the orchards in its own boundaries and in Menlo Park.

The next major milestone far the area was the construction of Camp Fremont in 1917. This was a sprawling 25,000 acre campus designed to house and train the 8th division of the US Army in preparation for battle in the First World War trenches of Northern France and Belgium. They eventually saw action in Siberia, but the war soon ended and the camp was closed only 18 months after its construction. However in the short life of the camp a lot of businesses and utilities had sprung up to support it, and these remained in place long after the camp had gone. The camp also left behind some of its 1,000 buildings. Today two restaurants, MacArthur Park and the Oasis Beer Garden are both former Camp Fremont buildings.

The Second World War also had an impact on the area. Since the West coast was considered to be under threat after Pearl Harbour, the early days of the war were characterised by fear and uncertainty. People of Japanese extraction found themselves on the receiving end of some harsh treatment. Practice blackouts were common, and rationing meant that supplies of everything from paper to steel were thin on the ground. But the biggest impact of all was in the number of people who left the area to go to war and not return.

The 50s saw Palo Alto and Menlo Park transform from small orchard towns into a grid of roads ferrying a rapidly growing population to the new elementary schools that had to be constructed to acommodate the post-war baby boom. The population more than doubled in the '50s, with over 26,000 new residents moving in thanks to GI housing and education loans as well as consumer credit.

Thanks to long term leases offered by the university, Stanford Industrial Park rapidly filled up with such names as General Electric, Lockheed, Link Aviation and Spinco. The construction of all of this generated even more wealth and a boom in consumer goods was well under way. 1956 saw the opening of Stanford Shopping Center, which for a time drained a lot of life out of University Avenue.

In the 60s a split emerged in the town. There were those in the council who wanted to build another Manhattan, and those (mostly residents) who wanted it to remain a small suburb. By 1967 the residents had won the argument after long and bitter disputes in the council. There were racial tensions in schools and colleges and the sex, drugs and rock & roll culture was coming to life. It was said that drink may have disappeared but, but the younger generation had found a substitute. Crime rose by 176% from 1960 to 1970 and people were protesting in the streets both against the Vietnam War and calling for something to be done about crime. Some protests were violent, the most serious of which caused $20,000 in damage to property at Stanford Research Institute which was conducting classified research. Such protests roared on right through to the end of the war in 1975.

The population aged in the 70s. A dozen schools had to close because of low enrollment. It was at this time that the ‘residentialists’ took firm control of the council and brought to an end the era when big business called the shots. Laws were passed to limit growth, put a lid on building heights to prevent any more office towers from going up and to preserve what green space was left. Bike lanes appeared, as did recycling schemes and support for various social programs. Many large scale developments were proposed throughout the 70s and into the 80s, all of which were put to public votes and defeated. The city could afford to limit growth and still raise revenue.

The decade ended with the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake measuring 7.1 caused some damage on the peninsula but Stanford was hit hard. $100 million worth of damage was done to some of the older sandstone buildings.

The 90s will doubtless be remembered as the age when the high-tech computer indistry took centre stage in the world, and most of its famous names are here. It is the home of the Xerox PARC research facility, birthplace of the graphical user interface that was later developed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple in nearby Cupertino. Hewlett-Packard was founded by two young men in their Palo Alto garage.

All of the industry and inventiveness that was attracted to the San Francisco Bay Area was attracted by Stanford University and the staff and students who built and populated the city of Palo Alto, a contribution to the world that continues to this day.

Entertainment Guide

Bars Pubs & Clubs Antonio’s Nuthouse 321 W California Ave Palo Alto (650) 321-2550 The Edge Nightclub (Formerly the Icon) 260 S. California Ave. Palo Alto (650) 289-0222 Fanny & Alexander’s 412 Emerson St Palo Alto (650) 326-7183 www.fannyalexander.com Live music at weekends. Popular with people after work and with students. The Island 4141 El Camino Real Palo Alto (650) 493-9020 Q Cafe 529 Alma St Palo Alto (650) 322-3311 www.qcafe.com Upscale bar food and dancing.

Galleries Tercera Gallery 534 Ramona St Palo Alto (650) 322-5639 www.terceragallery.com Stanford Art Gallery Serra St, between Hoover Tower and the main Quad Stanford University (650) 723-3404  Museums Museum of American Heritage 351 Homer Ave Palo Alto (650) 321-1004 www.moah.org Palo Alto Art Center 1313 Newell Rd Palo Alto (650) 329-2366  Music Lucie Stern Theatre 1305 Middlefield Rd Palo Alto (650) 903-6000  Cinemas Stanford Theatre 221 University Ave Palo Alto (650) 324-3700 Elegant restored 1925 movie house showing classic films. Movie listings - now showing...