Mountain View
Like most cities in Silicon Valley, Mountain View owes its existence not to technology but agriculture. It wasn’t until the 1950s, hundreds of years after the first settlers arrived and decades past its heyday as the “Valley of the Heart’s Delight,” that technology companies came to the Santa Clara Valley to make their mark.
In Mountain View, Shockley Semiconductor was founded in 1956 by William Shockley. Others soon followed. Sleepy Mountain View, which entered the 1950s with a long history of agricultural success and a population of around 6,000 residents, grew by 370 percent during the decade. By 1960, the people of Mountain View, the new center for aerospace and electronics, were 30,889.
Mountain View has again doubled in size since then. Today it has 74,000 citizens living in nine separate districts. Technology still drives the city’s economy, with numerous upper-case names calling Mountain View home. The most significant of these is Google, which moved its headquarters to the former home of Silicon Graphics in 2003. The “Googleplex” employs over 20,000 and is looking to grow. Since 2010, Google has purchased 24 buildings in Mountain View.
The influence of Google, Symantec, Linked In, Intuit, and others on Mountain View cannot be overstated. For example, Mountain View’s downtown has undergone a complete overhaul in recent years. Beginning in 1990, Mountain View city leaders took a sharp turn from decades-old policies that had turned their town into what some were calling a “dormitory for high-tech workers,” transforming downtown into a pedestrian hub and a transit hub, thanks to CalTrain and light rail stations at the foot of Castro Street.
Downtown is now where you’ll find all manner of restaurants, shops, and lively pedestrian traffic. It’s where on Sundays you’ll find a farmers market and where, during the summer, Castro Street is closed to vehicles every Thursday night for Thursday Night Live, a community celebration with live music, children’s activities, and, at times, a classic car show. Once a year, downtown hosts a holiday tree lighting ceremony, and every September since 1971, it’s hosted the Mountain View Art & Wine Festival.
Downtown is surrounded by neighborhoods dating back to the early 1900s, classic Victorian and Arts & Crafts homes, and slight hints of the city’s agricultural past. West of El Camino Real, the streets lose their gridded pattern, settling into the curved lanes and cul-de-sacs of the 1950s and 60s suburbia. The city built these neighborhoods for the middle class, but they’ve become upper-middle-class as Mountain View’s status as a tech mecca has grown.
As that status grows, demand to live in Mountain View grows; recently, the city responded by creating a new neighborhood on top of the 55-acre former GTE Sylvania campus. Oriented around the VTA’s Whisman Station light rail stop, the Whisman neighborhood features condominiums, townhouses, single-family homes, community pools and center, and the Stevens Creek Trail, a 4.8-mile paved pedestrian and bicycle path that passes woodlands and tidal marshes on its way through town, all conveniently located for commuters and reasonably close to downtown.
While one of Mountain View’s most prominent landmarks, Moffit Federal Airfield, isn’t even in Mountain View, another, the newer landmark has grown up along something many people may not even know Mountain View has: its bayfront. Shoreline Park, Mountain View’s epicenter of recreation, with a 50-acre lake, a golf course, driving range, and vast network of trails including segments of the San Francisco Bay Trail, was once San Francisco’s landfill. In 1983, after years of transformation, it was reborn as a park. In 1986, the city added the Shoreline Amphitheater, one of the region’s biggest outdoor concert venues, to the park.
Also located in Shoreline Park is the Rengstorff House, the 1867 home of city pioneer Henry Rengstorff. Once left destitute, the Italianate mansion was restored and moved to Shoreline Park in 1991, where it’s open to the public as a museum. The house is a rare reminder of Mountain View’s roots, aptly placed less than a mile from the Googleplex, the present symbol for Mountain View, the quintessential Silicon Valley city.