During the summer of 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook co-founders rented 819 La Jennifer Way in Palo Alto as their first base in Silicon Valley. A small team of coders worked here on development of the early site, and while there, Facebook raised its first external investment. This period was a central storyline in the movie The Social Network. Read more...
American journalist and author David Halberstam died, aged 73, in a car crash at the intersection of Bayfront Expressway and Willow Road in Menlo Park, California, on April 23rd, 2007. Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was a passenger in a car that turned left against a red light into the path of another car, and died at the scene from Read more...
The Facebook sign with the iconic thumbs up symbol is located outside the company’s headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park. On the reverse is the original sign of Sun Microsystems, who substantially vacated the site in 2010. Read more...
The Dish at Stanford University is a steerable radio telescope used for satellite calibrations, spacecraft command and telemetry, and radio astronomy measurements. Measuring approximately 150 feet (or 46 meters) in diameter, the steel and aluminum parabolic antenna was built in the early 1960s by the Stanford Research Institute with funding from the US Air Force to probe the scattering properties Read more...
SLAC stands for Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the original name of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Stanford University operates SLAC for the U.S. Department of Energy DOE Office of Science and it adopted its current name in 2008 when it shifted from a focus on particle physics to a broader research program including Read more...
McLaren San Francisco is actually located in Palo Alto at El Camino Real and Arastradero Road, some 35 miles south of San Francisco. The dealership offers new and used car sales and service facilities. Read more...
Frenchman’s Tower on Old Page Mill Road in Palo Alto is a doorless red brick folly built in 1875 by Frenchman Paulin Caperon, also known as Peter Coutts. Now empty, with windows bricked-up after years of vandalism, the tower reportedly once housed his library on the first floor and a water tank on the second floor for irrigation. The land is now Read more...
The corporate headquarters of electric carmaker and renewable energy technology company Tesla are located on Deer Creek Road on the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto, California. In addition to Tesla’s corporate offices, the site houses engineering and research staff and a powertrain manufacturing facility. Tesla relocated here in 2009 from its previous headquarters in San Carlos. The complex was Read more...
Former child actress and US diplomat Shirley Temple Black was interred in the Adobe Creek Mausoleum at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto. She died on February 10th, 2014 aged 85 years old. Read more...
Google’s global headquarters are located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. Known as the Googleplex, Google first leased office space on the corporate campus in 2003 from Silicon Graphics, Inc. before purchasing the buildings in 2006. Read more...
Guests may take water into Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View provided it is in a single factory-sealed plastic bottle no bigger than one gallon (or 4 liters), but alcohol or any other beverage is not permitted. Entry with empty aluminium or plastic water bottles is allowed, which can be filled at water refill stations by the main restrooms. Glass containers Read more...
Tolls are paid in the westbound direction on Dumbarton Bridge between Fremont and Menlo Park, California. This follows the convention for all the Bay Area’s state-owned bridges that traffic headed towards the San Francisco peninsula pays a toll. Read more...
Buck’s restaurant is at Woodside Road and Cañada Road in Woodside, California, about a mile from Exit 25 of I-280 that runs between San Francisco and San Jose. The eccentric diner is a Silicon Valley mainstay with many VC deals reportedly sealed at its tables. Read more...
Google does not own Moffett Field. The site, between Mountain View and Sunnyvale, is on federal property controlled by NASA. In 2014, Google subsidiary Planetary Ventures LLC entered into a 60-year lease on a 1,000 acre portion of the NASA Ames Research Center site that includes Moffett Federal Air Base, the three large aircraft hangars, and golf course. The corporation Read more...
Foothills Park in Palo Alto is open to everyone, regardless of residency, following a policy change introduced by Palo Alto City Council on December 17th, 2020. The lifting of admission restrictions has resulted in increased visitor numbers and the park gate closes if capacity limits are reached. Dogs are only permitted in Foothills Park on weekdays and must be on Read more...
After spending the summer of 2004 at a rented house in Palo Alto, the early Facebook team decamped to a new rented property on Westbrook Avenue in Los Altos, California. Dubbed Casa Facebook, the company was based here from September 2004 to January 2005, during the period that site reached 1 million users for the first time and was still Read more...
The colored ponds in south San Francisco Bay are salt evaporation ponds used for the commercial extraction of salt from the bay’s seawater. In a process spanning several years, seawater is allowed to flow into shallow enclosed ponds on the shoreline. In the south bay’s sunny, breezy, climate, the water gradually evaporates, leaving behind increasingly concentrated saltwater, which is pumped Read more...
