Palo Alto: Café Culture Takes Over. Finally.
by Jean-Louis Gassée
This week we look at one of the few nice consequences of the ugly pandemic: Palo Alto streets have become friendlier to pedestrians and café terrasses. Let’s hope that this is an example of a broader, permanent trend.
Hundreds of fires in the hills above the Valley, in the wine country and elsewhere in Northern California; campaign shouts and shots fired; strange bedfellows Microsoft and Walmart prodded by our Realtor-in-Chief to pay key money to the US treasury for the right to acquire TikTok’s US operations… The litany goes on and its not even Labor Day after which the noise will only grow stronger.
For this week, a shorter, lighter piece, a ray of optimism with, I hope, lasting consequences.
It goes like this.
Thirty-five years ago, at the start of our life in California, my wife and I had a befuddling experience when my better half joined an evening theater class at Foothill College. Her idea was to use stage work as a constraint to improve her spoken English. (I suggested her English was already quite serviceable and was told, rightly, to mind my own French accent.)
After the end of the semester Glass Ménagerie show, still thinking like Parisians, we descended from Los Altos Hills for an after-theater supper in Palo Alto. Surely, as a college town, as the home of Stanford University, Palo Alto would offer a choice of lively dining places.
You can guess where this is going. At this late hour, sidewalks had long been rolled back, lights were out everywhere. No supper on University Avenue.
Cultural misunderstanding. In Paris, we used to enjoy a 9:30 dinner at Brasserie Lipp (a restaurant that now offers post-confinement reservations up to 12:30 am). I still hear the dearly missed Alain Senderens, owner of Lucas Carton, complain about American tourists banging on his door at 7pm. ‘Can you imagine, 7pm!’ Parisian regulars knew not to show up before 8:30pm at the earliest.
So we learned. At first, it was hard to get used to 5:30pm dinner dates, but we’re not churlish. Different cultures, different schedules.
Then the pandemic virus happened.
Jeff Bezos has gotten much richer, some say by $80B, since the beginning of the lockdown. Tech companies that provide work-at-home and entertain-at-home products and services have also prospered. And we think we see a form of exodus from big cities towards airier — and less expensive — locales with good Internet connectivity. This leads to questions regarding the future of work that I’ll not tackle today. I will stick instead to the lighter fare mentioned at the beginning.
One pleasant consequence of the safety precautions we must take against the Covid-19 virus is the invasion of several Palo Alto streets by eateries that want to survive the pandemic.
Once upon a time, there were no tables on the sidewalks, to say nothing of spreading into the streets. Palo Alto’s city leaders saw the locomotive coming from the other end of the tunnel, on a collision course with the city’s small business community — and tax receipts. So, it closed big segments of two arteries.
Portions of University Avenue…
California Avenue…
…and some side streets are now closed to traffic, dedicated to pedestrians and eating establishment terrasses, sometimes called parklets.
(The pictures are from Apple Maps. Incomprehensibly, Google Maps doesn’t show blocked streets.)
Budget-minded eateries simply unroll Astroturf on the asphalt. The more enterprising establishments bring carpenters who delicately fit level wooden platforms to the camber of the street. The highest-end places, such as the Greek restaurant Evvia, pictured below, deploy olive trees and flowers, and unfold cover against the sun, all with socially distanced tables.
Having tried a few Palo Alto street terrasses, it’s a nice way to deal with the pandemic’s restrictions — and a safe one in the Bay Area’s constant light northwest breeze .
Of course, the blocked streets means that traffic has to be rerouted. University avenue, in particular, used to be a thoroughfare for fire engines heading out from the Alma avenue station, and ambulances heading back in to the Stanford ER. Surprisingly, the alternate routes work well with no obvious adverse consequences.
So, now, Palo Alto offers pleasant pedestrian plazas and a nascent café culture unfolding on liberated street space. I have civic-minded friends who have long petitioned the Palo Alto City Council to shut down University Avenue to traffic and create a pedestrian mall. Ironically, it took a pandemic to realize the desire.
But will it last?
We ask the same question about the new work-from-home normalcy. The answer is we really don’t know. Life without a long commute surely feels better, but not everyone has enough space for a home office and, more important, we’re social animals. I’ll just note that Amazon is still looking for more office space.
For transferring street space from cars to pedestrians and café terrasses in Palo Alto, for rethinking our daily pleasures, I’m hopeful. The transformation we witness doesn’t have to be temporary. No one seems to be suffering from it.
I won’t dwell on objections such as the weather. All we have to do is look at Europe. Even in much less clement climates than our local version, terrasses are crowded, covered, and heated (a sensitive topic) when needed.
I prefer ending on a happy note. I hope that what we see here is an example of a broader and lasting trend.
