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The price of ‘paradise’

About the above photo: A couple walks underneath vibrant gingko trees on Greenwood Avenue in Palo Alto in 2016, one of many streets in the city where mature trees form a canopy over the road. File photo by Veronica Weber. East Coast native George Richardson arrived 50 years ago to attend Stanford Law School. Like […]

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Survival of the nimblest

About the above photo: Pedestrians walk along University Avenue, one of Palo Alto’s main roads that house many businesses, in 2017. File photo by Veronica Weber.  What makes a business last nearly half a century or more? Often it’s being in the right place at the right time — or buying the property before values shoot […]

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40 years of news

Scroll sideways through the timeline to view events at your leisure. Looking back at history through the lens of news coverage reveals the contours of a community: historic events that defined an era, ideas that rose and then fell away, movements that seized people’s collective imagination and created change, annual traditions that marked the passage […]

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Strumming to its own beat: Gryphon Stringed Instruments goes gold

When Frank Ford and Richard Johnston first met as college students back in the 1960s, introduced by a mutual friend, it was evident they were kindred spirits. “I was startled to find somebody who knew so much about old instruments. He was really surprised to meet somebody who, upon getting his first guitar, started modifying […]

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Uneven Ground

East Palo Alto is a cut-through haven, observes Susan Barnes, who has spent the last year puzzling exclusively over how to solve the city’s traffic woes. For the former city of Palo Alto economic development and redevelopment manager, it’s a huge challenge, but one that excites her. As an executive fellow with Fuse Corps, a […]

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Uneven Ground

When Kendy Mendoza of East Palo Alto and his wife experienced health scares over the last few years, they took action to turn their lives around. Eight years ago, when his wife was diagnosed with diabetes, she cut out bread and tortillas from her diet, he said. Two years ago, after a heart-related health scare, […]

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Uneven Ground

The year was 1957, and two women, one white and one black, set out on an undercover investigation in Menlo Park and Palo Alto. Their task was to investigate the hypothesis that real estate agents were conspiring to sell homes in certain neighborhoods to white people, and homes in certain other neighborhoods to black people. […]

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Troubled Water

The day he left East Palo Alto to attend his grandmother’s funeral across the country, Justin Turner’s water was shut off. He had to leave his wife, nine months pregnant and due to deliver any day, at home without water, after trying fruitlessly for months to have a simple question answered by his water company, […]

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Four wheels. Cramped quarters. But no rent. Why people are living in RVs on Palo Alto’s El Camino Real.

The more than 40 recreational vehicles parked along El Camino Real, just outside Stanford University, have been deemed eyesores and nuisances, but inside them are people facing diverse circumstances: among them, families struggling to make ends meet and traveling contractors who work locally but have permanent homes in other California cities. Over the course of […]

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He was a married hospital technician and a Boy Scouts leader. Was former Palo Alto resident John Getreu also a serial killer?

By Sue Dremann Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of violence. The 74-year-old man who has been charged in the 1970s cold-case murders of Stanford University graduate Leslie Marie Perlov and local resident Janet Ann Taylor, both 21, has been a Boy Scouts troop leader, the “exalted ruler” of the Fremont Elks Lodge, a […]