Disruption Town highlights and documents Palo Alto’s origins and culture as being steeped in an ideology of disruption. Ohlone Indians revered a redwood tree that later became known as El Palo Alto. Gaspar de Portola and his expedition camped beneath this tree in 1769, and five years later Father Palou planted a cross on the site to mark the spot as a possible location for a Spanish mission. A few miles south of El Palo Alto the town of Mayfield formed in 1855 with a stagecoach stop and saloon known as “Uncle Jim’s Cabin.” Leland Stanford began purchasing land in the area in 1876 for a horse farm he called the Palo Alto Stock Farm. In 1891 he and his wife, Jane, founded Stanford University, dedicated to their late son Leland Stanford Jr. The Stanfords originally proposed founding the university in Mayfield on one condition: no alcohol. Mayfield rejected their request as the town was by that time known for its thirteen saloons. With his friend Timothy Hopkins of the Southern Pacific Railroad (who in 1887 bought 740 acres just north of Mayfield), Stanford founded the town of University Park, and a few years later incorporated with the name Palo Alto. In 1925, Palo Alto annexed Mayfield.
Acts of innovation.disruption, both technological and cultural, have continuously reshaped the town and had significant impact beyond its borders. The town is home to the second oldest opera company in California. At the Federal Telegraph laboratory Lee de Forest invented the vacuum tube in 1911. Gertrude Stein’s brother Michael and his wife Sarah arrived in Palo Alto in 1935 and continued their Paris tradition of hosting salons that brought art and artists together. Many curators, collectors, as well as artists such as Richard Diebenkorn saw their first Matisse, Picasso or Braque at the Stein’s residence. In 1939 Hewlett and Packard chose to formalize their partnership. Vladimir Nabokov arrived in Palo Alto in 1941 with a teaching appointment at Stanford University and found the inspiration for Humbert Humbert, the narrator of his 1955 novel, Lolita. The Grateful Dead came together in Palo Alto in the sixties and Ken Kesey formed the Merry Pranksters there in the late sixties. Since the seventies the value and definition of disruption has narrowed. At the beginning of that decade Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was founded on land leased from Stanford, and over the next several years made such technologically significant developments as the modern personal computer. Most recently Palo Alto has served as an incubator to companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook. The artistic enterprises, the creative acts of disruption seem archaic and irrelevant in relation to Palo Alto’s current immersion in the political and economic forces of the country and of the world.
For Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, and the larger tech economy whatever lasts is boring, what demands its own replacement energizes the imagination. With Disruption Town , I hope to explore the mythology and idealization of disruption and go deeper into the substance of what these acts of rupture really entail. Ever visible in Palo Alto is the detritus of a culture focused on disruption upon disruption; the disruptors and those disrupted. This is a tragic vision, one of decay and pain as witnessed in a community of contradiction, a culture of planned waste and engineered obsolescence.
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.aWalter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969: 249.
The Palo Alto location was Fry’s oldest. Each Fry’s store had a distinct aesthetic, this location was Wild West-themed…
The Fry’s chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they’re gone for the day—if not the week—and can’t be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair.
Microserfs
Ron “Pigpen” McKernan moved to Palo Alto at age 14 and worked at Dana Morgan’s Music Store in downtown Palo Alto with Jerry Garcia. McKernan, Garcia and Bob Weir, started their musical careers together in the groups the Zodiacs and Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. When drummer Bill Kreutzmann joined the band evolved into the Warlocks. Around 1965, McKernan pushed the Warlocks to switch to electric instruments with bassist Phil Lesh joining soon after, and the group renamed themselves the Grateful Dead. At this point in the Dead’s history McKernan was considered the group’s original leader and best signer.
A week before he died at age 27 in Corte Madera he recorded the following lyrics on a tape cassette found in his home.
Don’t make me live in this pain
no longer
You know, I’m gettin’ weaker, not
stronger
My poor heart can’t stand no more
Just can’t keep from talkin’
If you gonna walk out that door,
start walkin’
I’ll get back somehow
Maybe not tomorrow, but someday
I know someday I’ll find someone
Who can ease my pain like you once doneb‘Pigpen’ McKernan Dead at 27, Rolling Stone
Pigpen’s grave is in Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto across from Gunn High School.
The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.
Jean Baudrillard
Quintessential Disruption Town: Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University as a 19-year-old sophomore to disrupt healthcare. Her goal was to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of disease. She said the company name was created by combining the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.”
On September 29th, 2014, Forbes Magazine named Holmes as one of the richest women in America as a result of her 50% stake in Theranos which was valued at that point at $9 billion. At its peak, the company had more than 800 employees.
Theranos’ claim to have invented blood tests that need just a single drop of blood was a lie.
On June 15th, 2018, following an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and former Theranos COO and president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors allege that Holmes and Balwani engaged in two criminal schemes, one to defraud investors, the other to defraud doctors and patients in an “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”cSecurities and Exchange Commission v. Elizabeth Holmes, et al., Civil Action No. 5:18-cv-01602
Securities and Exchange Commission v. Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Civil Action No. 5:18-cv-01603 (U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California)
On November 1st 2018, the Theranos Headquarters at 1701 Page Mill Road in Palo Alto was one of the sites on a treasure hunt game focused on failed start ups in Silicon Valley.
The Center was built in the late 60s on pilings at the edge of a salt marsh. A plank walk leads a quarter-mile across the marsh to open water and views of San Francisco Bay. The Center offers various programs and activities such as nature walks, animal and fossil workshops for children, an ecology laboratory, and displays of tidelands flora and fauna. According to the City of Palo Alto The Lucy Evans center serves approximately 130 classes and camps attended by roughly 3,000 elementary school students and 80,000 visitors each year.
Lucy Evans, born in Wyoming in 1903, came to California with her family at the age of two. She graduated from Stanford in 1929, having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She taught at Mayfield School for twenty three years. Class field trips led to her joining the Audubon Society and exploring the Baylands. Evans fought for their preservation and earned her the appellation “Baylands Lucy.” She died suddenly in 1978. The Baylands Nature Interpretive Center was rededicated to her memory in December 1978.
The city is currently in the process of tearing down the existing boardwalk and replacing it with one roughly four feet higher to survive a projected sea-level rise and to provide additional viewing areas and benches. Construction can only occur September 1st through January 31st on account that the rest of the year is breeding season for the Ridgeway’s rail. And if workers see any Ridgeway’s rails or harvest mice during construction, they must cease all work until the creatures are gone. Completion is estimated for 2020.
And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar quality in my eyes. All that gentleness became a trap. In my mind’s eye I saw that vast white trap laid out, right under my feet. Beneath it reigned neither the restlessness of men nor the living tumult and motion of cities, as one might have thought, but a silence that was even more absolute, a more final peace. That viscous whiteness was turning before my eyes into the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. And I was already beginning to sense that a spectacle has no meaning except when seen through a culture, a civilization, a professional craft.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
The original location of Palo Alto Airport was adjacent to Stanford stadium and built in the late 1920s. Between 1934 and 1936, a new airport was constructed along Palo Alto’s bay front. In 2015 the City of Palo Alto took over operations from Santa Clara County, after a 50-year lease ended.
American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness — chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
According to the artist Peter Richards the 72 telephone poles draw attention to the artificial and unstable nature of the landfill park. Today many of the poles are no longer vertical on account of the subsidence of the garbage buried underneath. In the 1960s, garbage dumps along the shore of the San Francisco Bay were converted into public recreation areas. In 1990 the City of Palo Alto hired Hargreaves Associates to create a master plan for the 150-acre Byxbee park located on the sanitary landfill. The design’s goal was to balance a public desire for a 19th-century-style picturesque park with the necessities of highly sensitive environmental systems and with site development restrictions inherent to building on landfill — no impermeable surfaces (all paths are of crushed oyster shells); no trees whose roots might pierce the clay cap; no irrigation (so only native grasses are used). However, in recent years the City of Palo Alto has begun destroying several of the original park’s features such as leveling most of the hillocks that represented the middens of the native Ohlone people of the region, and burying oyster-shell paths that were a reference to the shellfish harvesting of the past.
Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.
Francis William Aston, English chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
A Disruption Town hydrogen fueling station located in the Barron Park neighborhood being installed. To be approved for the renovation, Palo Alto required the station to upgrade their station to conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as include an electric vehicle charging station and a bike rack. The entire renovation cost between $3 million and $4 million and will be the 36th hydrogen fueling station currently operating within California with another 29 stations planned for development.
The real perfectibility of man may be illustrated, as I have mentioned before, by the perfectibility of a plant. The object of the enterprising florist is, as I conceive, to unite size, symmetry, and beauty of colour. It would surely be presumptuous in the most successful improver to affirm, that he possessed a carnation in which these qualities existed in the greatest possible state of perfection. However beautiful his flower may be, other care, other soil, or other suns, might produce one still more beautiful.
Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population
Our people are steadily increasing their spending for higher standards of living. Today there are almost nine automobiles for each ten families, where seven and one-half years ago only enough automobiles were running to average less than four for each ten families. The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage. Our people have more to eat, better things to wear, and better homes.
Herbert Hoover Campaign speech October 22nd, 1928, New York
3585 El Camino Real was originally established as Quonset Garage Auto Repair in 1955 and ultimately became Combes Auto Repair in 1965. Since 2001 the site has been unoccupied and gone through an environmental remediation process due to the discovery of hazardous materials or wastes. Ground-water monitoring and sampling have been performed at the site since 1995; as of November 2010, elevated concentrations of gasoline petroleum hydrocarbons and BTEX were found beneath the propertydFrey Environmental, Inc., 2011, Fourth quarter 2010 groundwater monitoring and sampling and corrective action site status update, former Combes Automotive Repair, 3585 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, California. Project No. SJ029-01, February 21. . Today the site is under consideration for redevelopment in Disruption Town.
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) was founded in 1970 by Jack Goldman and George Pake as a division of Xerox Corporation. Ground was broken for PARC’s permanent headquarters at 3333 Coyote Hill Road in August of 1973 on land leased from Stanford University.
“The governing principle of PARC was that the place existed to give their employer that ten-year head start on the future. They even contrived a shorthand phrase to explain the concept. The Alto, they said, was a time machine.” eMichael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperCollins, New York, 1999)
PARC has made significant contributions to such technological developments as laser printing; computer-generated bitmap graphics; Ethernet as a local-area computer network; the modern personal computer, the graphical user interface, featuring windows and icons, operated with a mouse; the WYSIWYG text editor; object-oriented programming; ubiquitous computing; electronic paper; amorphous silicon (a-Si) applications; and advancing very-large-scale integration (VLSI) for semiconductors.
As bohemias go, Perry Lane was Arcadia, Arcadia just off the Stanford golf course. It was a cluster of two room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest, only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of Arthur Rackham and Honey Bear. Not only that, it had true cultural cachet. Thorstein Veblen had lived there. So had two Nobel Prize winners everybody knew about though the names escaped them. The cottages rented for just $60 a month. Getting into Perry Lane was like getting into a club. Everybody who lived there had known somebody else who lived there, or they would never have gotten in, and naturally they got to know each other very closely too, and there was always something of an atmosphere of communal living. Nobody’s door was ever shut on Perry Lane, except when they were pissed off.
It was sweet. Perry Lane was a typical 1950s bohemia. Everybody sat around shaking their heads over America’s tailfin, housing-development civilization, and Christ, in Europe, so what if the plumbing didn’t work, they had mastered the art of living. Occasionally somebody would suggest an orgy or a threeday wine binge, but the model was always that old Zorba the Greek romanticism of sandals and simplicity and back to first principles. fWolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Ferrar Straus and Giroux, 1968. p.34
Ken Kesey lived at #9 Perry Lane (just to the right of the telephone pole) while enrolled in the non-degree program at Stanford University’s Creative Writing Center from 1959 through 1963. At the invitation of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student Vik Lovell, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA financed study under the aegis of Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital, where he later worked as a night aide. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT) on human subjects. During this time, while living on Perry Lane, Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, published in 1962. Perry Lane was notorious for street parties and Hawaiian-style cookouts. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh often performed at these street parties.gLesh, Phil Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Often these parties were broken up by police on account on account of the attendees being racially mixed.hPaul De Carli: Hanging out with Ken Kesey on Perry Lane, http://inmenlo.com/2010/05/29/paul-dicarli-hanging-out-with-ken-kesey-on-perry-lane/ Probably the most famous of those parties was the Perry Lane Olympics which opened with a naked women holding a toilet plunger with a burning rag stuffed in the cup as she was driven up and down the lane while sitting on the back of a convertible.
In August of 1963, Perry Lane #9 as well as some of the other cottages were torn down by developers and replaced with ranch style homes, forcing Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to relocate to 7940 La Honda Road in La Honda, CA.
While attending Stanford in the 1920s John Steinbeck rented a toolshed attached to a barn behind fellow English Club member Elizabeth Smith’s home at 330 Palo Alto Avenue along the San Francisquito Creek. Smith (aka Elizabeth Anderson) was a wealthy student in her thirties and went by the pen name John Breck. The structure, which he first named “The Sphincter” had no electricity, no gas, and no water, only an army cot, a wooden box where he placed his Corona typewriter, and an assemblage of gallon jugs for the wine he made. His rent was five dollars (seventy one dollars today). He later renamed the toolshed “The Den of Pegasus” ultimately deciding it should not be a flying horse, but a flying pig called “Pigagus”: a lumbering soul trying to fly, with “not enough wingspread but plenty of intention.”iJohn Steinbeck, The Good Companion: His Friend Dook’s Memoir Carlton A. Sheffield. Edited and notes by Terry White. Introduction by Richard H. A. Blum. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Company, 2002.
Smith (Breck) and Steinbeck threw many parties at 330 Palo Alto Avenue. Carlton “Dook” Sheffield, Steinbeck’s original Stanford dorm mate, noted the importance of his relationship with Smith: “This is John’s real university. Everything was up for discussion: music, books, politics. I think everyone was surprised by how knowledgeable John was. It would have surprised most of his professors.”jibid.
In the early sixties, Smith’s home and Steinbeck’s toolshed were demolished and the lot was combined with 320 Palo Alto Avenue to accommodate the three-story apartment complex currently on the site. An apartment there now rents for approximately $3800 or $267 in 1925.
In a 1964 letter to Dook, Steinbeck asked, “Do you ever go near Stanford? I don’t think I would like to go. It would be kind of embarrassing because I was such a lousy student, I suppose. Anyway, I have no call for the Groves of Academe.”
One of hundreds of RVs in Palo Alto housing families who can no longer afford rent in Disruption Town.
State and City laws require they move every 72 hours. This family parked in the foothills 50m from Tesla and SAP HQ.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity,
nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor
by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Disruption Town upgrade: 17 traffic poles, 84 directional signs, 16,000+ linear feet of gas pipes, 47 utility boxes, 30 streetlight pull boxes, and 2,470 linear feet of street-light conduit, 2,750+ linear feet of fiber optic cables, sidewalks widened, 12 new bike racks.
I had three chairs in my house;
one for solitude,
two for friendship,
three for society.
Henry David Thoreau
Apple CEO Tim Cook made an appearance at an Apple Store in Palo Alto, California, helping to open the store and welcoming the first people from the queue into the store to pick up their iPhone XS order.
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” Robert OppenheimerkRobert Oppenheimer: Interview about the Trinity explosion, first broadcast as part of the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), produced by Fred Freed.
Disruption Town legacy: there are two active superfund sites in an East Palo Alto residential neighborhood on Bay Street – neither is on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priority List.
Rhone-Poulenc, Inc., formerly manufactured pesticides containing arsenic at a plant at 1990 Bay Street. Zoecon Corp., which purchased this site in 1972, produces agricultural chemicals, but no contamination has thus far been traced to their operations. The other site at 2081 Bay Road was a chemicals processing plant called Romic Environmental Technologies Corp. The 12.6-acre site where the plant stood was used for recycling toxic waste, from companies such as Hewlett Packard, as early as 1956. The facility was closed in 2007 after a series of environmental and safety violations.lMarie C. Baca, Toxic-Waste Sites Haunt Silicon Valley, Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2010
Monitoring wells in this area are contaminated with arsenic and metals such as lead, cadmium, mercury, and selenium. Approximately 58,000 people depend on wells within three miles of the site as a source of drinking water.
No tale in California history has had stranger diversities than the one about the man who sold to Leland Stanford the land on which he built his university. Why Peter Couttes –or Paulin Caperon, to give him his right name– came to California, why he build his tower and his tunnels in Mayfield, Santa Clara County, what happened to make him sell out and return to France, why he put the property in the name of his children’s governess Eugeénie Clogenson, and who she herself “really” was (including a wild guess that she was the Empress Eugénie, incognita)– all this has been told over and over again, and nearly always inaccurately. mDeFord, Mairiam Allen (June 1954). “Palo Alto’s “Mysterious Frenchman””. California Historical Society Quarterly. pp. 169–174.
Victor Arnautoff’s, murals, now behind a chain-link fence, depict three notable doctors providing care: pediatrician Emmett Holt, Canadian internist Sir William Osler and Boston neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing. Contrasting the physicians are the following images: a Native American mother using a board to reshape her child’s head, a witch doctor casting out devils, and a medical practitioner using a hot poker to cauterize a wound.
Clown at the entrance to the Palo Alto Farmers Market singing Violent Femmes tunes.
I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.
Edgar Allan Poe
Antonio’s Nut House on California Avenue was originally opened in the 1970s by the late Tony Montooth. After the Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17th, 1989 and the resulting power outage The Nut House hooked up a generator and was the only business open in Disruption Town.
Hewlett-Packard Building 15 manufactured small electronic transformers from 1965 to 1973, as well as circuit boards from 1965 to 1987. Acids, metals, and solvents were used throughout the manufacturing process and chemicals were stored in a storage shed from 1965 to 1973, and then in a chemical storage “bunker” from 1974 to 1987.
The site, which has been re-addressed as 3181 Porter Drive, is part of the toxic Hillview Porter regional plume, which encompasses facilities in the Stanford Research Park.
The site is overseen by the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) for ongoing operation and maintenance activities, which include groundwater monitoring for an on-site groundwater extraction and treatment system, which currently operates to treat chlorinated volatile organic compounds (tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and trichloroethylene (TCE), and their associated daughter products).
Thousands have lived without love,
not one without water.
W. H. Auden, First Things First, 1956
A 78-foot-high cylinder of reinforced concrete on the corner of Alma Street and Hawthorne Avenue. Constructed in 1910 and abandoned by the water utility in 1987, the 155,000-gallon tower played a significant role in establishing Palo Alto’s city-owned utility system. In 1995 Disruption Town turned down a proposal to turn the Tower Well into a six-story home.
En el amor nadie piensa en la conveniencia.
Isabel Allende, Ripper
The now-shuttered store operated until recently in Palo Alto since the 1920s.
Everyone thinks of changing the world,
but no one thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy
A Starship Technologies robot in Palo Alto. Founded in 2014 their robots have been delivering for DoorDash and Postmates.
How do?
Welcome to my shop
Let me cut your mop
Let me shave your crop
Daintily, daintily…Hey, you!
Don’t look so perplexed
Why must you be vexed?
Can’t you see you’re next?
Yes, you’re next, you’re so next!
Bugs Bunny, Rabbit of Seville (1950)
The Cardinal Barber Shop opened in 1925 and Gerardo Macareño has been cutting, shaving and trimming customers their since 1982.
This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad, and funny. My life was made of this. Stuff like this.
James Franco, Palo Alto
The Peninsula Creamery was founded in 1923 by John Santana II and J.B. Howell. At it’s peak the creamery operated nearly 60 delivery trucks.
Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.
Vine Deloria Jr.
The “Indian” was the mascot for Stanford from 1930 through 1970. In 1972, 55 Native American students and staff at Stanford put forward a successful petition to the University to “fulfill its promise to the students of its Native American Program by improving and supporting the program and thereby making its promise to improve Native American education a reality.” The petition noted how the Stanford community was insensitive to the humanity of Native Americans with the name of a race being placed on its entertainment. In removing the Indian as Stanford’s symbol the “University would be renouncing a grotesque ignorance that it has previously condoned”. This sidewalk on Emerson Street in Palo Alto was laid in the early 1950s.
The eye exists in its primitive state. The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow. It is present at the conventional exchange of signals that the navigation of the mind would appear to demand. But who is to draw up the scale of vision? There are those things that I have already seen many a time, and that others tell me they have likewise seen, things that I believe I should be able to remember, whether I cared about them or not, such, for instance, as the facade of the Paris Opera House, or a horse, or the horizon; there are those things that I have seen only very seldom, and that I have not always chosen to forget, or not to forget, as the case may be; there are those things that having looked at in vain I never dare to see, which are all the things I love (in their presence I no longer see anything else); there are those things that others have seen, and that by means of suggestion they are able or unable to make me see also; there are also those things that I see differently from other people, and those things that I begin to see and that are not visible. And that is not all. […]
Andre Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 1928
The present Mission-style church was built on El Camino Real in 1940 as St. Aloysius Church, but this catholic church had its beginnings more than two decades before there was a city of Palo Alto. In November 1868, Archbishop Joseph Alemany of San Francisco dedicated a simple little structure with a bare wooden floor, canvas windows, and seating for 148 worshipers. It was the first place of worship to be established by any religious community in Palo Alto, That structure, located less than a mile from the current site, was seriously damaged by storms in 1939, prompting the construction of the new structure. In 1994, Ananda (“divine bliss” in Sanskrit) bought the former St. Aloysius Church for $2.14 million. In 1998 a Redwood City jury handed down a 1.8 million dollar judgment against Ananda’s longtime spiritual director, Donald J. Walters (known generally as Swami Kriyananda), another senior official of the church, and the church itself, for the sexual exploitation of a former church member. Six women testified under oath that Swami Kriyananda had taken sexual advantage of them when they were in search of spiritual advancement.
The Stanford Movie Theatre was designed and built in the 1920s as a movie palace styled in neoclassical Persian and Moorish architecture. at a cost of US$300,000—about $4,480,000 in today) I’ll Show You the Town was the first film shown at the theatre on June 9, 1925. In 1987 the David and Lucile Packard Foundation purchased the now run-down theatre for $7.7 million and restored it to its former glory for a 1989 grand opening of The Wizard of Oz. For a few days in the late 80s, I worked a jackhammer on a construction crew remodeling this iconic movie palace.
References