Palo Alto has always been about burning shit down. That’s the story they tell themselves, anyway. That’s the mythology. Their myth, the one they made up to sell shit.
I grew up there. Elementary school, middle school, high school. The whole fucking journey.
The Ohlone had a thing for this big redwood tree, El Palo Alto, they’d eventually call it. Sacred ground. Then Gaspar de Portola rolls through in 1769, camps under it, probably doesn’t give a damn about what it meant to the people who were there first. Five years later, Father Palou plants a cross. You know, marking territory. Possible mission site. The usual playbook.
Down the road, Mayfield springs up in 1855. Stagecoach stop. A saloon called “Uncle Jim’s Cabin.” Working people. Drinking people. Thirteen saloons eventually. A real town. No doubt a better night life than what they have now.
Enter Leland Stanford, 1876. Robber baron. Railroad money. Starts buying land for a horse farm. Then his kid dies. Tragedy. So he and Jane decide to build a university, Leland Stanford Junior University, in their son’s name. Noble enough. But here’s the thing: they want to put it in Mayfield, but only if Mayfield goes dry. No booze. Mayfield, to its credit, tells them to go fuck themselves.
So Stanford and his buddy Timothy Hopkins, another railroad guy who’d already bought 740 acres nearby, they just create their own town. University Park. Later, Palo Alto. Clean. Sober. Controlled. And in 1925, Palo Alto swallows Mayfield whole. Annexed it. Erased it, really. Everybody’s going to bed at 9PM.
Then come the disruptions. Real ones, not the Silicon Valley marketing-speak version. Those same assholes who are trying to co-opt the word ”creative” as if writing an algorithm that makes a fourteen year old want to kill themselves is the equivalent of writing “The Day of the Locust.” Lee de Forest invents the vacuum tube in 1911. Gertrude Stein’s brother Michael and his wife Sarah set up shop in 1935, hosting salons like they did in Paris. Artists. Ideas. Diebenkorn sees his first Matisse at their place. Hewlett and Packard make spending time in your garage not only look cool but look like your ambitious in 1939. Nabokov shows up in ’41, teaches at Stanford, and somehow the place inspires Lolita. The Grateful Dead. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
This was disruption when it still meant something: art, literature, music, ideas that actually changed how people thought and felt.
Now? Now disruption is meaningless. It’s inevitable. It’s just the water we’re drowning in. They’re not disrupting anything for progress, for improvement, for any kind of better future. They’re fucking with us for fuck’s sake. Because they can. Because the business model demands it. Because next quarter’s earnings call requires a new product cycle, a new interface, a new way to make last year’s perfectly functional thing obsolete.
It’s not disruption as progress. It’s disruption to keep us off balance. To keep us consuming. To keep us wallowing in the muck, in the filth of our own waste, both literal and digital. Mountains of discarded phones, obsolete laptops, bricked devices. All that data exhaust, all that surveillance, all those terms and conditions we don’t read.
They call it innovation. But it’s just shit. Constant, exhausting, purposeless shit. And we’re supposed to be grateful for it. We’re supposed to line up at midnight for the privilege of replacing the shit we already have with some infinitesimally different shit.
That’s what disruption means now. Not change. Just motion. Not revolution.
But then the seventies hit. PARC opens on Stanford land. The personal computer. WYSIWIG. And suddenly “disruption” means something else entirely. Something narrower. Something you can monetize. Apple. Google. Facebook. The whole circus.
You know what they don’t tell you in the brochures? One of my middle schools had to change its name. Turns out the guy it was named after was a major mouthpiece for eugenics. That’s the thing about Palo Alto, scratch the surface of all that innovation and progress, and you find some real ugly shit underneath.
I spent a year trying to escape. A whole year. And where did I end up? College. At Stanford. Right back where I started. You can’t make this up.
Disruption is the only religion that matters here. What lasts is boring. What destroys itself fastest wins. And everywhere you look in Palo Alto, you see the wreckage. The disruptors and the disrupted. Planned obsolescence. Engineered waste. A culture eating itself alive, calling it progress. Today, what’s unique about Palo Alto? Izzy’s Bagels, but other than that, not much.
It’s tragic, really. A community built on contradiction. All that money, all that power, and underneath it all, decay. Pain. The cost of all this creative destruction that isn’t particularly creative anymore. That’s the real story of Disruption Town.
And here’s the part that should tell you everything you need to know about this place: they have to watch the train tracks. Vigilantly. Guards. Protocols. Fences. Hotlines. Because the children of Palo Alto keep throwing themselves in front of trains. Their own children. The ones who are supposed to inherit all this disruption, all this innovation, all this wealth. They’re choosing the rails instead.
I’ve lost four friends that way. Four. Let that sink in. Four people I knew, who grew up in this pressure cooker, who couldn’t see any other way out except the Caltrain barreling through at 79 miles per hour.
You want to talk about disruption? That’s disruption. That’s what happens when you build a culture that treats human beings like beta versions, always needing an upgrade, never quite good enough. When you create a place where failure isn’t just unacceptable—it’s unthinkable. Where your worth is measured in admissions letters and startup valuations and whether you’re changing the world by the time you’re twenty-five.
That’s not disruption. That’s annihilation. And maybe that’s what it was always going to be.
“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 OG. The first Fry’s, before the empire, before the madness spread across the valley like some beautiful, doomed fever dream.
And they went Wild West with it.
Not ironically. Not in that winking, aren’t-we-clever way that makes you want to put your fist through drywall. They committed. Each location had its own thing, its own weird, ambitious theme park aesthetic… but this one? Saloon doors. Wooden facades. The whole cowboy fantasy, right there between the RAM modules and the HDMI cables.
It was absurd. It was perfect. It’s gone now, of course.
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 Pigpen was fourteen when he landed in Palo Alto. Found work at Dana Morgan’s Music Store downtown, where he met Jerry Garcia. Two kids in a music shop. You know how this goes.
McKernan, Garcia, Bob Weir, they started playing together. The Zodiacs. Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Names that sound like someone’s putting you on, but this was real. This was the beginning.
Bill Kreutzmann shows up on drums, and now you’ve got something. The Warlocks. Around ’65, Pigpen, because this is his story, he’s the one pushing them to go electric. Phil Lesh comes in on bass. They need a new name. The Grateful Dead.
And here’s the thing: Pigpen was the Dead. The original frontman. The best singer they had. Before Jerry became Jerry, before all the myth-making and the parking lot economy and the tie-dye industrial complex, it was Pigpen’s band.
Twenty-seven years old. Dead in Corte Madera.
A week before, he’d recorded something on a tape cassette. They found it in his apartment after.
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
They buried him in Alta Mesa Memorial Park. Across the street from Gunn High School. I went to Gunn.
Twenty-seven years old in the ground. The dead watching the living. The living, mostly, not noticing.
The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.
Jean Baudrillard
Elizabeth Holmes. Nineteen years old, Stanford dropout, 2003. She was going to disrupt healthcare. Because that’s what you do in Palo Alto, you don’t just start a company, you disrupt an entire industry. You revolutionize. You change the world.
Theranos. Therapy plus diagnosis. Cute.
September 2014: Forbes puts her on the cover. One of America’s richest women. Fifty percent stake in a company worth nine billion dollars. Nine. Billion. She’s got 800 employees, black turtlenecks, a voice she borrowed from a Bond villain. She’s the real deal.
Except.
The blood tests, the ones that only needed a single drop, the ones that were going to save lives and democratize medicine, they didn’t work. They were a lie. The whole thing was a lie.
June 15th, 2018: Federal grand jury indictment. Holmes and her COO, Sunny Balwani. Nine counts of wire fraud. Two counts of conspiracy. Years of lying to investors, doctors, patients. An elaborate con. The blood tests were theater. Expensive, dangerous theater.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)
November 2018: 1701 Page Mill Road. The old Theranos headquarters. Someone turned it into a stop on a treasure hunt. A game. Hunt down the failed startups of Silicon Valley. Visit the crime scenes.
That’s Palo Alto for you. Even the failures become content.
Late sixties, they built this thing on pilings. Right at the edge of a salt marsh, because that’s all it was, marsh, mud, open water, the kind of land nobody wanted. A quarter-mile boardwalk takes you out there, across the wetlands to the bay. San Francisco sitting across the water like a promise.
The Lucy Evans Baylands Nature Interpretive Center. Nature walks, workshops for kids learning about animals and fossils, tide pools, all of it. The city says 130 classes a year, 3,000 elementary school kids, 80,000 visitors. Some people still give a shit, apparently.
Lucy Evans. Born in Wyoming, 1903. Came west at two years old. Stanford graduate, Phi Beta Kappa, taught at Mayfield School for twenty-three years. It was the field trips that did it, got her into the Audubon Society, got her out into the Baylands. She fell in love with that marsh. Fought to save it when everyone else saw dollar signs and landfill opportunities. “Baylands Lucy,” they called her.
She died suddenly in 1978. They renamed the center after her that same year.
Now? Sea level’s rising. The city’s tearing down the old boardwalk, building a new one four feet higher. But here’s the thing: they can only work September through January. The rest of the year belongs to the Ridgeway’s rail. Breeding season. And if a worker spots a rail or a harvest mice during construction? Everything stops. Full stop. Until the bird moves on.
Finished in 2021. Four feet higher. Ready for what’s coming.
In Silicon Valley, land of disruption and nine-billion-dollar lies, they still stop construction for a bird.
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
Late twenties, they built the first Palo Alto Airport right next to Stanford Stadium. Biplanes and college football. Different times.
By ’34, they’d moved it. New spot on the bayfront, took two years to build. That’s where it stayed.
Fifty years under Santa Clara County. Then in 2015, the lease runs out and the city takes over.
Same runway. Different landlord. The bureaucracy shuffles on.
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
Seventy-two telephone poles, standing in a field. The artist, Peter Richards, put them there to make a point: this isn’t real land. It’s garbage. Trash with a clay cap and some grass on top. A landfill pretending to be a park.
The poles are sinking now. Leaning. The garbage underneath is settling, compacting, doing what garbage does. The art is more honest than it ever intended to be.
1960s: San Francisco Bay’s shoreline dumps get a makeover. Garbage becomes recreation. Very American. In 1990, Palo Alto hires Hargreaves Associates to design Byxbee Park, 150 acres of former sanitary landfill. The brief is impossible: give people a picturesque 19th-century park, but remember, you’re building on trash. No impermeable surfaces, so the paths are crushed oyster shells. No trees, roots might puncture the clay cap and release whatever’s rotting below. No irrigation, only native grasses that can survive on their own.
They tried. They actually tried to honor the place. The hillocks represented Ohlone middens, the native people who were here first. The oyster-shell paths referenced the shellfish harvests, back when this was a living bay, not a dump.
But recently? The city started tearing it down. Leveling the hillocks. Burying the oyster-shell paths.
Erasure on top of erasure on top of garbage.
The poles keep sinking.
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.
Hydrogen fueling station. Barron Park. The future, supposedly.
But before Palo Alto will let you build the future, you’ve got to check some boxes. ADA compliance, fair enough. An electric vehicle charging station, because hydrogen alone isn’t enough, apparently. And a bike rack. Can’t forget the bike rack.
Three to four million dollars. For one fueling station.
This will be the thirty-sixth hydrogen station in California. Thirty-six. In the entire state. Twenty-nine more planned, which means if everything goes perfectly, and when does it ever, you might have sixty-five of these things. Eventually.
That’s the thing about Disruption Town. The future costs millions, serves dozens, and requires a bike rack to get approved.
Stapleton’s. Except it’s not Stapleton’s anymore, it’s Michaela’s Flower Shop now. The original owners are gone, but the building? The building doesn’t give a fuck. It’s still here, faded pink paint chipping off in the downtown Palo Alto sun, surrounded by high-end specialty boutiques selling $400 candles and artisanal olive oil.
This rectangular relic shouldn’t exist. Not here, not in the middle of Palo Alto’s relentless march toward whatever’s next. But it does.
And I like it. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because it refuses to pretend. Maybe because in a town that’s bulldozed everything that came before in the name of disruption, this weird little time capsule with its peeling paint and vague smell of the Summer of Love is still standing.
Defiant. Anachronistic. Real.
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. Quonset Garage Auto Repair, 1955. Working-class place. Guys fixing cars, oil under their fingernails, doing honest work. Became Combes Auto Repair in ’65. Same story, different name.
Then 2001 hits and the doors close.
Turns out decades of fixing cars leaves a mark. Gasoline. Petroleum hydrocarbons. BTEX—benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, if you’re keeping score at home. The kind of chemicals that seep into groundwater and stay there. They’ve been monitoring and sampling since 1995. As of 2010, still elevated. Still contaminated. Still fucked.
Environmental remediation. That’s the phrase they use. Remediation. Like you can just apologize to the earth and move on.
Twenty-plus years sitting empty. Poisoned ground. A monument to the work that used to happen here, before Silicon Valley decided mechanics weren’t the kind of workers Disruption Town needed.dFrey 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? They’re considering redevelopment.
Of course they are.
PARC. Palo Alto Research Center. Xerox PARC, back when Xerox actually owned it.
1970. Jack Goldman and George Pake set it up as Xerox’s R&D division. August ’73, they break ground at 3333 Coyote Hill Road, land leased from Stanford, and the scientists move in.
“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)
What happened next is legend. Tragedy, really, depending on how you look at it.
They invented everything. Laser printing. Bitmap graphics. Ethernet. The personal computer as we know it. The graphical user interface, windows, icons, the mouse, all of it. WYSIWYG text editors. Object-oriented programming. Ubiquitous computing before anyone knew what that meant. E-paper. Semiconductor advances that made modern chips possible.
They built the future. The entire future. Right there on Coyote Hill Road.
And then Steve Jobs walked in, saw what they had, and walked out with it. The GUI, the mouse, the whole concept of the Mac. Xerox had shown him the promised land, and he took it. Microsoft followed. Everyone followed.
Xerox? Xerox made copiers.
PARC invented tomorrow. Other people got rich off it. That’s the Valley. That’s always been the Valley.
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
Number 9 Perry Lane. Just to the right of that telephone pole. That’s where Ken Kesey lived from 1959 to ’63 while he was enrolled in Stanford’s Creative Writing Center.
His neighbor, Vik Lovell, a Stanford psychology grad student, had an idea. The CIA was funding research. MKULTRA. Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital. They wanted to know what happened when you gave people LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, DMT, all of it. Kesey volunteered. Then he got a job there as a night aide.
Those night shifts, those drugs, that hospital, that’s where Cuckoo’s Nest came from. Published in 1962. Written on Perry Lane.
The parties. Jesus, the parties. Hawaiian luaus spilling into the street. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh playing music.gLesh, Phil Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Black, white, brown, everyone together, which in 1960s Palo Alto was apparently too much for the cops to handle. Racially mixed gatherings. That was the crime.hPaul De Carli: Hanging out with Ken Kesey on Perry Lane
The Perry Lane Olympics. A naked woman on the back of a convertible, holding a toilet plunger with a burning rag jammed in the cup, riding up and down the lane like some kind of dionysian torch bearer. That happened.
August 1963: developers show up. Number 9 and the other cottages get bulldozed. Ranch homes go up. Clean. Respectable. Boring.
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters pack up and head to La Honda. The party moves on.
Perry Lane becomes just another address. The weirdness, erased.
1920s. John Steinbeck’s at Stanford, barely getting by. He rents a toolshed behind 330 Palo Alto Avenue, right on the San Francisquito Creek. The landlord is Elizabeth Smith… or Elizabeth Anderson, or John Breck, depending on the day, a wealthy English Club member in her thirties with a pen name and a tolerance for eccentric tenants.
The toolshed. No electricity. No gas. No water. An army cot, a wooden box for his Corona typewriter, and a collection of gallon jugs filled with wine he made himself. Five bucks a month. Seventy-one dollars in today’s money.
He called it “The Sphincter” at first. Then “The Den of Pegasus.” But Pegasus was wrong, too graceful, too noble. So he renamed it “Pigasus.” A flying pig. “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.
That was Steinbeck. That was always Steinbeck.
Smith and Steinbeck threw parties. Music, books, politics—everything on the table. His Stanford roommate Dook Sheffield said it best: “This is John’s real university.”jibid. The professors had no idea what they had. Steinbeck knew more than most of them, and they didn’t notice because he was too busy failing their classes and making wine in a shed.
Early sixties: developers tear it down. The toolshed, the house, gone. They combine the lot with 320 Palo Alto Avenue and put up a three-story apartment complex. You can rent a unit there now for $5,000 a month. That’s $272 in 1925 money.
1964. Steinbeck writes to Dook: “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.”
The lousy student who lived in a toolshed and made his own wine went on to win the Nobel Prize.
The toolshed became luxury housing. That’s Palo Alto
One RV. One of hundreds in Palo Alto. Families living in these things because rent in Disruption Town is no longer a number that makes sense to anyone who actually works for a living.
State and city laws say they have to move every 72 hours. Can’t get too comfortable. Can’t put down roots. Keep moving, keep moving.
This family? Parked in the foothills. Fifty meters from Tesla headquarters. Fifty meters from SAP. You can practically see the executive parking lot from their window.
Tesla, of course, has since moved its headquarters to Texas. Elon’s a genius like that. Take the tax breaks, the infrastructure, the talent pool California built, then leave when it’s time to give something back. Genius.
Meanwhile, the family in the RV moves again in three days.
The future, they keep telling us. This is the future.
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
University Avenue. Torn up.
Disruption Town needs an upgrade. The irony is not lost on anyone.
Seventeen traffic poles. Eighty-four directional signs, because apparently we need that many to tell people where to go. Over 16,000 linear feet of gas pipes. Forty-seven utility boxes. Thirty streetlight pull boxes. 2,470 linear feet of streetlight conduit. More than 2,750 linear feet of fiber optic cable, the lifeblood of the future, threaded through the ground like veins.
Sidewalks widened. Twelve new bike racks, because this is Palo Alto and we’re very serious about bikes.
All those billions in tech, all that talk about disruption and innovation and changing the world, and here we are. Jackhammers. Orange cones. Guys in hard hats digging trenches the same way they’ve been digging trenches for a hundred years.
You want to move fast and break things? Start with the street.
Traffic’s fucked for months.
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 story in California history is weirder than the guy who sold Leland Stanford the land for his university.
Peter Coutts. Except that’s not his name. His real name is Paulin Caperon. He’s French. He shows up in Mayfield, Santa Clara County, and starts building—a tower, tunnels, the whole nine yards. Then he sells everything and goes back to France.
But here’s where it gets strange: he puts the property in the name of his children’s governess, Eugénie Clogenson. Who is she? Nobody knows. Some people think—and I’m not making this up—that she was actually Empress Eugénie. You know, the Empress of France. Hiding out in Mayfield, California. Incognito.
Why did Caperon come here? Why the tower? Why the tunnels? Why did he leave? Who was Eugénie Clogenson, really?
Good questions. Everyone’s got a theory. The story’s been told over and over again, a hundred different ways.
And nearly always wrong.
That’s California for you. Even the founding myths are bullshit. mDeFord, Mairiam Allen (June 1954). “Palo Alto’s “Mysterious Frenchman””. California Historical Society Quarterly. pp. 169–174.
Victor Arnautoff’s murals. Behind a chain-link fence now, because of course they are.
On one side: the heroes of Western medicine. Emmett Holt, pediatrician. Sir William Osler, Canadian internist. Harvey Cushing, Boston neurosurgeon. The great men. The pioneers. Progress incarnate.
On the other side: the contrast. The “before” picture. A Native American mother using a board to reshape her child’s head. A witch doctor casting out devils. Some poor bastard getting a wound cauterized with a hot poker.
See the difference? See how far we’ve come? That’s the message. Civilization versus savagery. Science versus superstition. Us versus them.
Except it’s not that simple. It never is.
The murals are from another era, painted with all the assumptions and blind spots of that era. The chain-link fence is there because people finally started asking questions. Why this narrative? Who gets to be the hero? Who gets reduced to a caricature of backwardness?
So now they’re fenced off. Not destroyed, not painted over. Just… contained. A relic behind bars.
Make of that what you will.
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. From 1965 to 1973, they made small electronic transformers. Circuit boards from ’65 to ’87. The building blocks of the tech revolution, made right here.
Acids. Metals. Solvents. All part of the process. They stored the chemicals in a shed until ’73, then upgraded to a “bunker” from ’74 to ’87. Because calling it a bunker makes it sound safer, I guess.
The site, now re-addressed as 3181 Porter Drive, like a new number will make people forget, is part of the Hillview Porter regional plume. That’s the polite term. What it means is: the groundwater is fucked. The whole Stanford Research Park area. Poisoned.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control oversees it now. Ongoing operation and maintenance activities. Translation: they’re still pumping and treating groundwater contaminated with tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, and their “associated daughter products.” Chlorinated volatile organic compounds. The kind of stuff that doesn’t go away on its own.
This is what innovation looks like from the ground up. Literally. The stuff they don’t put in the press releases.
HP made transformers and circuit boards. The chemicals they used to make them are still there, decades later, seeping through the soil.
Progress has a price. Someone always pays it.
Thousands have lived without love,
not one without water.
W. H. Auden, First Things First, 1956
Seventy-eight feet of reinforced concrete. Corner of Alma and Hawthorne. Built in 1910.
A water tower. 155,000 gallons. It helped establish Palo Alto’s city-owned utility system, back when the city actually built things for the public good, imagine that. It did its job for seventy-seven years. Then in 1987, the water utility walked away.
1995: someone has an idea. Turn it into a six-story home. Why not? It’s there. It’s solid. It’s got history. Make something useful out of it.
Disruption Town says no.
So it stands there. Empty. A monument to nothing in particular. Can’t tear it down, can’t use it, can’t reimagine it.
Just a 78-foot concrete cylinder on a street corner, reminding everyone that Palo Alto has never met a creative solution it couldn’t reject
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.’ Stanford’s mascot from 1930 to 1970. Forty years of putting a race on a jersey, on a banner, on the field for entertainment.
1972: fifty-five Native American students and staff at Stanford had enough. They put forward a petition. Not just asking, demanding. The University had made promises about its Native American Program. Improve it. Support it. Make Native American education a reality instead of a PR footnote.
And while you’re at it, stop using the name of a race as mascot for your football team.
The petition didn’t mince words. The Stanford community was “insensitive to the humanity of Native Americans.” By removing the Indian as a symbol, the “University would be renouncing a grotesque ignorance that it has previously condoned.”
Grotesque ignorance. They said it.
Stanford listened. The mascot went away.
But this sidewalk on Emerson Street? Laid in the early 1950s. The Indian is still there, pressed into the concrete.
You can get rid of a mascot. Changing what’s already been poured into the ground, that’s harder.”
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
Mission-style church on El Camino Real. Built in 1940 as St. Aloysius Church. But the story starts way earlier.
November 1868. Archbishop Joseph Alemany comes down from San Francisco to dedicate a simple wooden structure. Bare floors, canvas windows, seating for 148. First place of worship in what would become Palo Alto. Less than a mile from where we’re standing now.
Storms in 1939 damage the original building badly enough that they build this new one. Catholic church, doing its thing for decades.
1994: Ananda buys it. $2.14 million. Ananda, “divine bliss” in Sanskrit. They’re looking for a home for their spiritual community.
1998: a Redwood City jury hands down a different kind of judgment. $1.8 million against Ananda’s spiritual director, Donald J. Walters… Swami Kriyananda to his followers, another senior official, and the church itself.
Sexual exploitation of a former church member.
Six women testified under oath. Said Kriyananda took sexual advantage of them when they came looking for spiritual advancement. When they were vulnerable. When they trusted him.
Divine bliss. Right.
Same story, different building. Different faith tradition, same abuse of power. People come looking for God, for meaning, for something higher. And someone in a position of authority takes what they want.
The building’s still there. Still looks peaceful from the outside.
The Stanford Movie Theatre. Built in the 1920s as a proper movie palace. Neoclassical Persian and Moorish architecture, the kind of ornate, over-the-top design that doesn’t exist anymore because it costs too much and takes too long. Three hundred grand. That’s $5 million in today’s money.
June 9, 1925. I’ll Show You the Town was the first film. Opening night. Can you imagine? Reginald Denny, the star of the film, made a personal appearance that night.
Fast forward to 1987. The place is falling apart. Run-down, forgotten, a relic nobody wants to pay for. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation buys it for $7.7 million and decides to bring it back. Restore it to what it was.
1989: grand reopening. The Wizard of Oz. Full circle. Magic returns.
But between ’87 and ’89? That’s when the real work happened. Construction crews. Dust. Noise. I was there for a few days in the late eighties, running a jackhammer. Me and a crew, tearing up the old to make way for the new. Or the old made new again.
Nobody remembers the guys with the jackhammers. They remember the grand opening, the ribbon cutting, the foundation that wrote the check.
But the jackhammer? That’s how you save a movie palace. One broken piece of concrete at a time.
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