Recalling backwater that tech firms love to call home

NET RESULTS:When small I lived in a quiet town with a funny name. Palo Alto later grew into a tech nirvana

WALK DOWN University Avenue, the California city of Palo Alto’s main thoroughfare, and it’s obvious this is one of the world’s capital cities of tech. It’s not just the start-ups, consultancies, business incubators and venture funds scattered in office suites tucked into its curious mix of funky old buildings and duller contemporary ones (you can’t get much more “Palo Alto” than, say, No 165 on the avenue. Its small offices have been the first home of once tiny start-ups such as Google, PayPal and Logitech).

It’s more the always bustling, hyper-digital atmosphere as a whole. The coffee shops always full of laptop and iPad-using geeks – many start-ups being happy to have their developers head off to whip up some caffeinated code in such places. The be-chino’d geek army, wearing their tech-logo’d polo shirts and carrying their lidded coffees back to the office. The overheard conversations, sprinkled with tech jargon.

But it wasn’t remotely like this when I grew up here, several decades ago, before anyone referred to the area as Silicon Valley. The term apparently first appeared in print in an electronics publication in 1971, but certainly wasn’t in more general use until the late 1980s or early 90s.

When I was small, I lived in a quiet town with a funny sounding name – a town no one had ever heard of outside the region. I knew the name meant “big stick”, after a famous ancient redwood tree, El Palo Alto, near the railroad line. El Palo Alto, estimated to be nearly 1,100 years old, was given its name by Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola and his 1769 expedition, which shortly thereafter would discover and name San Francisco Bay.

Over a century later, when railroad tycoon Leland Stanford decided he’d use his vast tract of oak-covered land in the area to found a university, the tree was enshrined on the institution’s official seal.

I loved that tree. It is part of my earliest childhood memories. As with Hewlett Packard’s spread of offices on Page Mill Road, El Palo Alto regularly was pointed out by my dad as we drove past. An odd ritual, but he was impressed by both.

Now, for me to meander down the main street of this once sleepy town is to engage lots of hazy childhood memories.

I used to ride my bicycle up to this street by myself when only aged six or seven, a notion that seems utterly extraordinary these days when University Avenue is bumper to bumper with traffic all the time.

On this particular afternoon I am trying to figure out which building would have been Swain’s House of Music, which was a lovely and imposing old two-storey edifice on the avenue. One of my brothers and I dutifully attended music lessons at Swain’s – flute for me (as part of my elementary school band) and drums for him. I dimly recall small chairs, rickety music stands and many off-notes.

The best part was that after lessons, pupils were always given a much anticipated certificate for an ice cream cone at Baskin Robbins across the street. I’d rush downstairs and there my father often would be waiting, browsing the sheet music bins.

If I was really lucky, we bypassed Baskin Robbins and instead walked a few blocks to the Peninsula Creamery cafe for a milkshake. It’s still there, and does a mean pastrami sandwich (and heavenly milkshakes). But back then, it was an extension of the dairy whose bottling works was around the corner, which every Palo Alto child must have visited on a primary school field trip. A dairy. In Palo Alto! But even well into the 70s, there were orchards in San José and Santa Clara. The region may now be synonymous with silicon, but its rural past is not all that distant.

Another relic and symbol of changing times is the gorgeous old Varsity theatre, where I sat through many a double feature. Alas, it’s no longer the classic 1920s film palace it was but, still largely intact, with its old marquee still jutting out over the footpath, it had since become a Borders bookstore. That chain has now closed and there’s been much debate in the city about whether the Varsity should be further “developed”.

Finding a retailer to fill such a large space will be hard and many are resigned that it may be subdivided into yet more office space. While many local retailers struggle to stay afloat in an era of malls and online shopping, office space in Palo Alto is in massive demand – there are 99 per cent occupation rates at the moment, despite the recession. Tech companies want the city name in their address.

But retail is much harder. University Avenue has a regular turnover of shops and empty shopfronts, very different from my childhood when the street was filled with local markets like Liddicoat’s, little restaurants, shoe and clothing shops, stationers, drugstores – many of which had been there for aeons. Liddicoat’s, where my mother got our Christmas turkeys and big knuckle bones for our family dog, opened in 1923, but is now long gone.

Still, though restaurants and shops come and go, University Avenue is a flurry of activity every time I come back to visit. And Palo Alto is the place to be in San Francisco – the real estate is among the most expensive per square foot of any town in the region.

All of which, all these years later, I still find hard to believe – just as it seems endlessly strange that people all over the world know the name of my one-time hometown, once so quietly, untechnically obscure.