# El Palo Alto **Domain:** Place / Living Monument / Regional History **Doc Type:** Canonical Landmark Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **El Palo Alto** is the historic coast redwood beside San Francisquito Creek from which Palo Alto takes its name. The surviving tree stands near the rail corridor at the edge of Palo Alto and Menlo Park and became a symbol of both the city and Stanford University. ## Nexus Context [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] places the tree beside the region's engineered systems as a living continuity marker. It predates the university, the railroad beside it and the computing industry that adopted the surrounding geography. Its interpretive function is scalar: a human institution can feel permanent while remaining a brief episode inside an organism's lifetime. That helps the continuity corpus resist technological presentism. ## Sources / Provenance - City of Palo Alto historical context: https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/files/assets/public/v/1/oes/lhmap/phase2_paloaltov2_no-comments.pdf - Stanford landscape history: https://trees.stanford.edu/landscape.htm ## See Also [[wiki/Sequoia sempervirens|Sequoia sempervirens]], [[wiki/Stanford University|Stanford University]], [[wiki/Long Now|Long Now]], [[wiki/Technical Archaeology|Technical Archaeology]]