The Valley

About

Palo Alto is a California city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The city borders with Mountain View, Los Altos, Stanford and Menlo Park. It is named after a redwood tree called El Palo Alto. The city includes portions of Stanford University, is headquarters to a number of Silicon Valley companies, including Hewlett Packard, VMware, Tesla Motors, Palantir Technologies and has served as an incubator to several other high-technology companies, such as Google, Logitech, Sun Microsystems and PayPal.

Many of Stanford University first faculty members settled in the Professorville neighborhood of Palo Alto. Professorville, now a registered national historic district, is bounded by Kingsley, Lincoln, and Addison avenues and the cross streets of Ramona, Bryant, and Waverley. The district includes a large number of well preserved residences dating from the 1890s. The Federal Telegraph laboratory site, situated at 218 Channing, is a California Historical Landmark recognizing Lee de Forest's 1911 invention of the vacuum tube and electronic oscillator at that location. While not open to the public, the garage that housed the launch of Hewlett Packard is located at 367 Addison Avenue. Hewlett Packard recently restored the house and garage.

Palo Alto serves as a central economic focal point of the Silicon Valley, and is home to more than 7,000 businesses employing more than 98,000 people.