If you've been to Ithaca, N.Y., you know that Palo Alto is no Ithaca. Nor is it Eugene, Ore., Princeton, N.J., or State College, Pa. It most definitely is not Berkeley, Calif.
Perhaps that’s a plus. However, the comparisons to the hometowns of Cornell, University of Oregon, Princeton, Penn State and Cal make it clear that Palo Alto comes up short in one significant way: it’s no college town.
A college town should be a place that is overrun by college life—by students crowding into a tradition-bound pub, by professors living in old homes behind the main drag. A college town should be deserted during the summer, a community where anyone over 25 feels oddly out of place.
It should have cut-rate movie houses and second-hand bookstores, mom-and-pop beer joints and pizza places. From September to June, you should be able to pay $400 a month to live in a musty former mansion that has been sliced and diced into a 12-room boarding house, with a dumpy couch on the porch, a stack of pizza boxes in the kitchen and a one-speed coaster bike leaning on the front rail.
Downtown Palo Alto has Spago, the world-class restaurant featuring Wolfgang Puck cuisine. One-bedroom apartments rent for well over $1,000. There are dozens of pricey boutiques and designer furniture stores and art galleries, but try to find a poster for your dorm room and you may be out of luck.
“I go to pick up movies, and go out to dinner every now and then, like once a quarter, but that’s about it,” says Nina Curley, a sophomore from St. Louis. “I kind of try to avoid spending money in general, so I don’t spend a lot of time in Palo Alto.”
Not many students do. Unless she is out of toothpaste, requiring a bicycle trip to Walgreens on University Avenue, sophomore Dana Mauriello seldom heads downtown. “Palo Alto’s main role is to give us all a break from Stern dining,” says Mauriello, a Ridgewood, N.J., native.
Considering that it’s the epicenter of Silicon Valley, that it attracts billions of investment dollars and topflight talent, it might not be surprising to learn that Palo Alto has gone upscale, thrown off its college-town identity and priced students out of its mix.
But while gentrification may have exacerbated it, there has always been a psychic distance between the town and Stanford students. “I don’t remember Palo Alto as ever being very much a part of the daily routine of undergrads,” says Bill Stone, ’67, MBA ’69, former president of the Stanford Alumni Association.
Virtually everyone agrees: Palo Alto isn’t a college town and never really has been. And history suggests that it was never meant to be.
Palo Alto was conceived in the 1880s by Leland Stanford and developed by Timothy Hopkins, overseer of the fortune accumulated by Mark Hopkins, one of the Big Four who built the Southern Pacific Railroad.
From the beginning, two decisions dictated how closely University students and the town would interact. One was a conscious effort to keep students housed, fed and entertained on campus. The other involved access, or the lack of it, to alcohol.
Leland Stanford originally wanted nearby Mayfield to become the University’s hometown, but Mayfield—located on what is now California Avenue—had more than a dozen saloons, and the residents refused to close them. Stanford was not a teetotaler, but he was aware of the growing Prohibition movement, and he wanted his local town to be dry. So he asked Hopkins to subdivide a parcel of land one mile due east of the campus. Hopkins laid out the first plots for the University’s teachers, including a snug, four-block-square area that came to be known as Professorville.
At Stanford’s request, Hopkins included in every property deed a provision that banned the manufacture or sale of any intoxicating liquor. In 1894, when the town of Palo Alto incorporated, the original city charter included a similar provision, outlawing “any tippling-house, dramshop, cellar, saloon, bar, bar-room, sample-room, or any other place where spiritous, vinous, malt or mixed liquors are sold or given away.”
Just to make sure, in 1909, state Sen. Marshall Black, a Palo Alto businessman, won passage of a state law prohibiting the sale of liquor within 1.5 miles of a university.
In the 1930s, attorney and state Assemblyman Frank Crist, ’24, JD ’26, made several assaults on the deed restrictions, finally breaking through by winning the right to operate a liquor establishment across the San Francisquito Creek in what is now East Palo Alto. Others followed, and generations of Stanford students came to know the area as Whiskey Gulch.
But it wasn’t until 1970 that a Santa Clara County judge tossed out the deed restriction, and in 1971, Henry’s, a classic, wood-paneled bar and restaurant in the lobby of the old President Hotel (so named to honor Herbert Hoover) became the first establishment in Palo Alto to serve a legal drink. Its comfortable decor—timbered ceilings, tiled dining room floor and wainscoted walls—gave it the ambience of a neighborhood watering hole in New York or Boston, and it became a student favorite. By then, however, the liquor restrictions had effectively inhibited student-centered social activity off campus, with a few notable exceptions (see sidebar).
The repeal of the liquor laws occurred during a period in which bohemia gained a tentative foothold in Palo Alto. Hoping to establish a student hangout, Vernon Gates, MA ’57, in 1959 opened St. Michael’s Alley, a coffeehouse on University Avenue.
Gates installed what he says was the first espresso machine south of San Francisco, and the place was immediately swamped. He served open-faced sandwiches, offered newspapers from all over the world, put in comfortable chairs and opened up the place for live entertainment. Budding folk singer Joan Baez would hold forth regularly.
St. Mike’s attracted a young, artsy crowd. Among the regulars were two guys who would order one cup of coffee and stay for hours, and who once got caught drawing graffiti on the bathroom wall. Gates gave them the boot. A while later, Jerry Garcia and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan returned—as performers in a jug band named The Grateful Dead.
By the 1970s, the town had 10 movie theaters, most of them small, independent venues showing cheap double features. The most notable were the x-rated Paris Theater, the Festival—a revival house where patrons sat on mattresses and beanbag chairs—and the New Varsity.
Like St. Mike’s, the New Varsity, with its faux-Spanish plaza, offered the whole counterculture variety pack—art-oriented double features, a bar, live theater, film festivals of erotic and independent movies, speakers and benefits for a wide range of causes. Jazz and avant garde music acts such as Tuck & Patti and Michael Hedges performed there, and political activists including Jane Fonda and Burt Lancaster spoke.
In the ensuing decade, other student-oriented businesses opened—Ramona’s, a wood-interior pizza and pasta place where students could find good, cheap food, and 42nd Street, an East Coast-style bar and restaurant.
All these places had two things in common: they depended on the University community as a whole, not just students, for survival. And as the high-technology boom in the ’80s and ’90s transformed Silicon Valley, rising rents and changing demographics pushed them out of business or forced them to relocate.
St. Mike’s moved off University, and Gates eventually sold it. The New Varsity became a Borders store, with only the landmark theater marquee still in place.
Two theaters remain downtown—the Stanford, a revival house supported by a nonprofit foundation established by David W. Packard, ’62, and the Aquarius, which shows independent films.
Henry’s closed in 1995, a victim of trendy microbreweries, gourmet restaurants and a new clientele. Managing partner John Peterson told the San Francisco Chronicle when he closed the doors that his customer base had changed from students and drinkers to lawyers and bankers, who preferred one glass of wine and an early departure to pitchers of beer and hours of conversation.
Ramona’s owners left their downtown location for another spot in town. And 42nd Street was out of business by the mid-’90s, driven away, owners said, by the same trends that closed Henry’s and Ramona’s.
A walk downtown today finds a high-end commercial neighborhood. At Restoration Hardware, a set of sheets costs $299. Liddicoat’s, a warren of inexpensive takeout eateries, has been replaced by Z Gallerie, where you can buy a framed Picasso reproduction for $89, a set of coasters for $36, and iron and stone curtain rods for $70.
In Professorville, the modest two-bedroom homes that sold for less than $500 when the town was built are now valued at well in excess of $1 million.
And Whiskey Gulch is now named University Center, the liquor stores replaced by two office buildings. Negotiations are under way for a Four Seasons Hotel.
With the possible exception of that brief interlude bracketing the ’60s, students always seemed to regard Palo Alto from afar, which was partly by design. Keeping students on campus was part of the original Stanford plan, aided considerably by the sheer size of the grounds and the distance to any nearby community.
Andy Coe, University director of community relations, says the Stanfords “felt from the beginning that campus life should be a full and complete life. That’s why they wanted to have housing on campus.”
In most true college towns, undergraduates living in local apartments promote a kind of symbiosis between the school and its host community. In Berkeley, for example, roughly 77 percent of Cal undergrads live off campus. At Stanford, 94 percent of the 6,500 undergrads live on campus, according to Coe. Among the 7,500 grad students, nearly 50 percent live on campus and the University plans to increase that to 70 percent by the end of the decade. In addition, about 30 percent of the University’s 1,700 faculty live on the Farm.
In recent years, the University has taken further steps that have kept the campus the center of student life. For example, it has prohibited freshmen from bringing cars to school and has increased on campus the kind of fast-food places, such as Jamba Juice, that customarily appeal to students and that might otherwise draw them elsewhere. Students frequent on-campus hangouts such as the Treehouse and the Coffee House, which stay open at night and sell beer and wine. Some of the dorms, most notably Stern, are open late for dining and snacks. And a new program, Stanford After Midnight, keeps many recreational, social and study facilities open until the wee hours, seven days a week—including workout rooms, the ground floor of Meyer Library and the eateries at Tresidder.
Students like the mix. “There’s enough to do [on campus] for me—hanging out with friends, going for coffee every night and watching videos,” says sophomore Rachel Rubin, sitting with four friends at a table at the second-floor Stanford Bookstore Café.
Nevertheless, “I definitely see things I miss about Texas,” says Veronica Flores, a sophomore from Fort Worth. “I miss how the town will surround itself with the college.”
And sophomores May Allen and Tatiana Taylor, both Southern Californians, wax enthusiastic about the late-night life of Westwood, the neighborhood where UCLA is located. Students are on the street, delis and restaurants are open late, and movie houses feature late showings.
By contrast, most Palo Alto destinations are beyond walking distance, and parking is difficult at both ends of the trip. Given that, says Dean of Students Marc Wais, “Most students would just as soon go to San Francisco.”
Students say that whatever they miss in a college town atmosphere is compensated by the wonders of the Bay Area at large. “Palo Alto is a good place because it’s central to a lot of stuff in the Bay Area,” says Allen, who loves making a quick dash to the coast for some surfing. “The fact that Palo Alto isn’t a college town doesn’t keep me from doing anything.’”
Despite Palo Alto’s arm’s-length relationship with Stanford students, the city is inextricably bound with the University itself. In addition to business development—often incubated at Stanford or at its research park—that has allowed Palo Alto to prosper, the University has contributed an intellectual and cultural ethos that has shaped the town’s character. Palo Alto’s development of its own arts-and-culture scene and its classically liberal way of doing things reflect the heavy influence of a progressive educational institution. The city formed its own utility district and embraced no-smoking ordinances, recycling and bike paths early on.
Stanford’s presence is everywhere—from the Cardinal paraphernalia and sports schedules displayed in windows downtown through the thousands of alumni who call Palo Alto home. “Many of us stayed in Palo Alto or chose to return to Palo Alto because of its cultural and academic attributes,” says developer Jim Baer, ’72, JD/MBA ’78, one of many alumni who have been active in Palo Alto politics, business and community service.
“I became a native of the Peninsula my freshman year,” says Bill Stone, who came to Stanford from Illinois and never left.
“While Palo Alto lacks the charm of a typical college town, I think it has a charm of its own,” says Dan Fink, a freshman from New Jersey. “I mean, where else could you find an indie theater and Spago within one square mile?”
Mountain View native Mark Simon writes about the Peninsula for the San Francisco Chronicle.
