Full transcript
A Memorial, Not a Monument
In 1884 Leland and Jane Stanford took their only child to Europe. In Florence, their son caught typhoid fever and died on the 13th of March. He was 15. Leland Stanford was one of the richest men in America — a railroad baron, a former governor, a sitting senator. What he did with that money afterward was decided in a hotel room in Italy. The line that came out of that room was: the children of California shall be our children. The university opened in 1891 and it is still legally named Leland Stanford Junior University — not a founder's vanity name, a dead boy's name. There were no tuition fees for the first three decades. The Stanfords are buried on campus, in a mausoleum you can walk to, alongside their son.
The Quarrel With Olmsted
To lay out the campus, Stanford hired Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park and was the most famous landscape architect in America. They disagreed almost immediately. Olmsted wanted to build in the foothills — higher ground, better views, better drainage. Stanford wanted it on the flat plain where his horse farm was, and Stanford was paying. Olmsted lost that argument and designed the plain instead: long low sandstone arcades, red tile roofs, connected quadrangles, and a single ceremonial axis running north from the railroad, which is Palm Drive. Here is the part worth knowing: this is the same Olmsted whose plan for Golden Gate Park — native, drought-tolerant, suited to sand — San Francisco rejected because it wanted a Central Park instead. He read this landscape correctly twice and was overruled both times, and both places are famous for the version he lost.
Broken Twice
Walk into the Main Quad and look at Memorial Church. In 1906 its 80-foot spire and clock tower came down onto the chancel roof, the facade collapsed into the Inner Quad, and the great mosaic was blown out and destroyed. Every stone was dismantled, labelled and rebuilt with steel connections, and the church stayed shut from 1906 until 1913. In 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake closed it again until 1992. Almost everything you are looking at has been rebuilt at least once. The sandstone is original where it survived and matched where it did not. Two things to do while you are here, both free: step inside Memorial Church and look up at the replacement mosaics, then take the elevator up Hoover Tower. From the top you can see the whole Peninsula, and on a clear day you can trace the fault line that broke this place twice.