Unlike its brash neighbors, Menlo Park doesn’t draw much attention to itself. Our downtown is sleepy compared with Palo Alto’s techy/trendy College Method or Redwood City’s expanding theater area.
The Peninsula suburban area’s reluctance to transform is reflected in our roadways. There’s no excellent way of making clear town, thanks to decades of resident resistance to expanding tasks. Traffic Jams on Sand Hillside, Marsh and Willow roadways have made the crosstown drive nearly difficult during commute hrs. And after that there’s the mess called El Camino, with a redevelopment job that’s taken for life and still hasn’t gotten off the ground.
What Menlo Park does have is near-perfect weather and clean streets lined by numerous mature trees that cars’ satellite radio maintains eliminating. And also currently, lastly, it has its very own traveler destination.
The Facebook university, which grew out of the old Sun Microsystems facility at the corner of Willow and also Bayfront Expressway, attracts a constant stream of camera-toting site visitors on weekends, much of them international vacationers. Lots of people position with thumbs up, mimicking the “like” symbol, however if you stick around for 15 minutes or two, you’re practically sure to see some jokers turning thumbs down.
But Facebook’s visibility has actually additionally added to the inflation in housing prices, which is a lot more remarkable here than in the majority of places apart from fashionable San Francisco neighborhoods.
The rise is a windfall for long time homeowners, yet there’s an undercurrent of despair amongst us Menlo Park moms and dads that it will be next-to-impossible for the children that matured in town to live here except in Mom and Dad’s residence.
With ceremonies for the 4th of July and Halloween, fund-raisers for the extremely successful foundations supporting the primary as well as senior high schools, Little Organization as well as football at Citizen Park, roads that don’t allow fast driving, the raison d’être of Menlo Park is that it offers an excellent setting for children.
Too bad they will not fully appreciate it till they’re gone.