Established as "Ravenswood" in 1849, East Palo Alto was still a sleepy farming community in 1940, with the exception of Whiskey Gulch, a string of bars and liquor stores erected after Stanford University banned alcohol from a 1.6km distance from campus. After the Bombing of Pearl Harbor, most of the Japanese-American population was interned, while large numbers of migrants flooded into the San Francisco Bay Area for jobs in the great shipyards of the Bay. After WWII, redlining and other racial quotas forced most African-Americans of the South Bay to East Palo Alto, which made the city around 50% black. During the Civil Rights movement, there was a brief plan to rename East Palo Alto "Nairobi", but the plan failed. By the 1990s, East Palo Alto had a notorious reputation as the center of drugs and crime, reaching a nadir of 42 murders in 1992, with a population of 24000 making it the murder capital of the United States. A massive cleanup operation announced by the city and supported by neighboring communities, managed to successfully drop that murder rate, though crime and gang activity still persist. The city is now around 60% Latino.
In the 2000s, gentrification started to spread to East Palo Alto, one of the few areas of affordable housing left in the South Bay. The city destroyed most of Whiskey Gulch to replace it with offices. Around 2005, 25% of East Palo Alto was controversially demolished to make way for a massive shopping complex, including IKEA and Mi Pueblo Grocery, bringing jobs and increased tax base to the city, as well as the first full grocery, but also removing much of the land and pricing out locals.
Here, Four Corners was the original center of East Palo Alto. It has seen better days.
East Palo Alto, California
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