East Palo Alto
From Palo Alto Wiki
East Palo Alto (often called EPA) is a city in San Mateo County, California. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 29,506 (31,915: 2003 estimate). It is situated on the San Francisco Peninsula, roughly halfway between the cities of San Francisco and San Jose. To the east is the San Francisco Bay, and to the west the prosperous city of Palo Alto. While East Palo Alto is still widely assumed to be part of the city of Palo Alto [1] [2], it has always been a separate entity from Palo Alto, even before it became incorporated as a city, with an entirely different demographic makeup. Though the two cities are separated only by San Francisquito Creek, they are worlds apart culturally and economically. (Although they are in different counties, East Palo Alto and Palo Alto share both telephone area codes and postal ZIP codes.)
East Palo Alto has an unenviable reputation for crime and poverty, a reputation well deserved during the 1980s and early 1990s (in 1992, the city had the highest per-capita murder rate in the country with 42 murders[3]). Since then the city's crime problems have somewhat subsided, although the prosperity which lavished the Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s largely by-passed East Palo Alto. The Ravenswood City School District, which serves East Palo Alto and part of adjoining Menlo Park, has struggled with low academic performance and allegedly corrupt leadership. Eventually, however, the Peninsula's shortage of land and soaring property prices meant that even East Palo Alto became an option for urban regeneration. Until recently, East Palo Alto has been spared gentrification.
East Palo Alto also includes a small piece of land across the Bayshore Freeway from the shopping center, a roughly triangular area between Highway 101 and the San Francisquito Creek, which includes a former two-block-long retail business district known as Whiskey Gulch. (The name dates back to the time that Stanford University, in Palo Alto to the west, was dry and prohibited alcohol sales within a radius of one mile from the campus: Whiskey Gulch was just outside the limits, and was home to a number of liquor stores and bars.) The city has torn down Whiskey Gulch and replaced it with the University Circle office complex. A 200-room Four Seasons hotel opened in University Circle in 2006 after numerous delays to serve the Silicon Valley market. The new hotel is being promoted as the most lavish and luxurious full-sized hotel available in the mid-Peninsula and West Valley area, but has had problems with settling into the bay landfill onto which it has been built (evidence of which was not noticed until windows built for it would not fit into their frames).
[edit] Footnotes:
- ↑ http://www.epa.net/info/epa_history.html History of East Palo Alto
- ↑ http://www.ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us/publicworks/EastPaloAlto2005UWMPFinalComplete.pdf City of East Palo Alto
- ↑ http://www.epa.net/info/epa_history.html History of East Palo Alto
