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.