I currently live in San Francisco's Peninsula. It is not, strictly speaking, a peninsula; it is the narrow section of easily-usable land that juts south from the city between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Bay before it widens out towards the Bay’s southern end. You may also know this area as the northern end of Silicon Valley.
This area has many charming characteristics, including housing costs that tend to exceed Manhattan's, excellent dining at nearly random price points, and communities such as Palo Alto -- America’s city of the future, home to prestigious organizations like Facebook and Stanford University, and the sort-of setting for history’s greatest webcomic. Just southeast of Palo Alto along the Royal Road, you will find Mountain View, which housed the first silicon manufacturing company in Silicon Valley and is now the site of the gorgeous and ravenously hungry Googleplex. Further south from Mountain View lies Sunnyvale, the borderlands between the Peninsula proper and the greater San Jose area.
If you went northwest from Palo Alto instead, you would find two more Peninsular cities focused principally on the tech industry: first Menlo Park, then Redwood City. And, lying very quietly between these, you would find Atherton, one of the wealthiest communities in America, which focuses on no industry at all. It takes its name from Faxon D. Atherton, the nineteenth-century land baron who once owned most of the land it occupies. His daughter-in-law, Gertrude Atherton (tragic widow, booster of Californian literature, and student of Ambrose Bierce) described the personality of this part of the Peninsula in her 1898 novel The Californians:
Menlo Park, originally a large Spanish grant, had long since been cut up
into country places for what may be termed the "Old Families of San
Francisco." The eight or ten families who owned this haughty precinct
were as exclusive, as conservative, as any group of ancient county
families in Europe. Many of them had been established here for twenty
years, none for less than fifteen. That fact set the seal of gentle
blood upon them for all time in the annals of California,--a fact in
which there is nothing humourous if you look at it logically; there is
really no reason why a new country should not take itself seriously.
And, although the modern-day city called Menlo Park is much like the other major communities of the southern Peninsula and bears no resemblance to a series of "country places," the chunk of the region which still bears Faxon’s name retains this character: exclusive, conservative, and, above all, very self-serious.
The Athertonian distaste for disturbance of any kind has a number of tragicomic consequences, including an unwillingness to light the streets sufficiently and a generalized hatred of air traffic (leading to repeated attempts by the City Council to banish or at least penalize those commercial airplanes that dare penetrate its airspace; see p. 307 here and p. 7 here for instances).
It also means that the Atherton Police Blotter has long been a source of great interest for other residents of Silicon Valley on those occasions when Atherton’s finest (a misnomer — though the Atherton Police Department appears to be of excellent quality, little of their staff likely resides in Atherton) have released some of their more daring exploits to area newspapers. However, these updates have often been sparse and far-between.
Recently, however, the Atherton Police Department have begun blogging all or most of their incident reports at athertonpolice.wordpress.com. Through written in raw, technical language, these reports nevertheless offer a valuable perspective on life in Atherton, and on the wide reach of the modern security state. In the interests of more widely disseminating this information, I will thus occasionally begin commenting on some of these reports.
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