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Sleepy suburbs
Modern Sunnyvale is a sprawling suburb with sleepy residential
streets and an air of tranquility. In the compact and quaint
downtown area you will find an impressive array of small shops,
resturaunts, bars and cafes. You can wander from shop to shop,
sit outside a cafe playing chess with your friends, or duck
into a pub for a drink to escape the afternoon heat. You can
jump on a train and go to up San Francisco or down to San
Jose.
The impact of the Irish community here is considerable. The
main street, Murphy Street, is named after one of the earliest
developers of the area. Many other streets carry ladies' names,
they were named after his daughters. On Murphy Street you
will find no fewer than three lively Irish pubs, most of which
are frequented by members of our own club.
History
At the beginning of the 1800s people began to settle in the
area now called Sunnyvale when the stagecoach lines started
to run between San Francisco and San Jose. Many settlers came
to the area from Europe, but it was the son of an Irishman,
Martin Murphy Jnr, who was most prominent in its development.
He bought land from the Rancho Pastoria de Borregas of the
Castro family in neighbouring Mountain View and proceeded
to plant the first of many orchards there. Another of his
notable contributions to the development of the area was allowing
the Southern Pacific Railroad to run their tracks through
his land.
Later in 1898, builder W. E. Crossman began to lay out streets
on the 200 acres that he bought. For a time he called this
settlement Encinal, (a place where oak trees grow,) but that
name was already taken by another town in the East Bay, so
another name had to be devised. Crossman looked out over the
fields on a sunny day and said, "Let's call it Sunnyvale."
The name stuck and in 1912 Sunnyvale was incorporated.
In the wake of the 1906 earthquake the city began to give
away land to attract industry, and after the Second World
War many aerospace firms began to locate there near the US
Naval Air Station at Moffett Field and local firm Lockheed
Martin Space Systems, today best known as producers of high-tech
commercial and civil satellite systems, the most famous one
being the Hubble Space Telescope. These firms were also attracted
by the close proximity of Stanford University at Palo Alto
which was churning out a highly educated workforce and pursuing
research in the emerging technologies of aerospace engineering
and electronics.
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