Palo Alto

Palo Alto is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city of Palo Alto was established in 1894 by the American industrialist Leland Stanford when he founded Stanford University in memory of his son, Leland Stanford Jr. Palo Alto later expanded and now borders East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park.

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. In the mid-1950s Palo Alto had a railroad village feel and the streets were lined with bungalows and prim storefronts. At a time when only 7 percent of American adults had completed your years of college, more than a third of men living in the Palo Alto suburb had a college degree.

source: wikipedia.org