Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From 722 Ramona St., between Forest and Homer (my house) to 566 Emerson St., at the northwest corner at Hamilton (the Palo Alto Creamery, a standard place for Saturday breakfast with my daughter Elizabeth in the old days), along a route fixed in its details (there will be a map, with commentary). Now notable in that the Creamery is the only business or office on that route that has been there all the time since Jacques and I came to Ramona St. in 1986. This is urban life, with everything in flux.

Peripatetic background. I have been seriously sick, and essentially housebound, for a very long time. But my condition is much improved and, though I have to use a walker to get around, so I can’t go out walking in the rainy season, the rains are over, and my helper Isaac has taken to accompanying me on longer and longer walks, systematically exploring all of the Downtown South neighborhood of Palo Alto (full of surprises and delights of all kinds — houses, stores, restaurants, flowers, trees). Recently working up to 6 1/2 blocks, venturing south into the Professorville neighborhood. Stopping frequently to talk about things we were seeing, chatting about our lives and the state of the world as well as the passing scene.

Yesterday I was on my own, and decided to replicate the Saturday breakfast walk. And this is my first report, on a few of  the businesses along the way. In a separate posting, to come, I’ll provide some botanical notes.

The route. First, the neighborhood map:

(#1) The little blue house symbol marks 722 Ramona (my house), and the yellow knife and fork symbol at Emerson and Hamilton marks 566 Emerson (the Palo Alto Creamery)

The map is oriented to standard compass directions, but locally directions are calculated with reference to San Francisco (as “north”) and San Jose (as “south”). In ordinary talk, north means ‘northwest’ and south means ‘southeast’.

The route: up the west side of Ramona St. and across Forest. west (left) on the north side of Forest, right (north) around the corner at Emerson, to go north on the east side of Emerson for a block to Hamilton. Passing Rumble Boxing, which is marked on the map. Yesterday, I didn’t cross to the northwest corner, just across Emerson to the southwest corner.

At this point, I break for a 2/23/19 posting of mine, “A walk up Emerson St.”:

[a walk] … in Palo Alto, this morning, for breakfast with Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky. Which took me past a fitness club that closed down a while back, but is now in the process of being replaced by an even trendier sort of fitness club, Rumble Boxing; to the Palo Alto Creamery for breakfast

… The [Palo Alto] location [of Rumble Boxing] — with big picture windows on the street … — is more or less across the street from what is now the Nobu Hotel Epiphany Palo Alto (formerly just the Epiphany), with rooms at $750 a night and up, and with the stratospherically expensive Restaurant Nobu in it.

My walk south then took me on the west side of Emerson, down to Forest, where I crossed to the southeast corner and walked down the south side of Forest to the corner at Ramona, where my condominium complex stretches to the south.

Notable locations. Every single location along my route has changed hands since 1986. Here I’ll comment on just five of them:

— 1 currently (and since 1996) at 643 Emerson: Buca di Beppo

— 2 current facade of the Acme Glass Co. (built in 1938) at 635 Emerson, housing the tech firm the Melchor Corp. since 1979

— 3 site of Rumble Boxing Gym (opened 2019, now closed) at 611 Emerson (see above)

— 4 current site of Nobu Hotel Epiphany and Restaurant Nobu (both opened in 2017) at 180 Hamilton at Emerson

— 5 current site of Meyhouse Turkish Restaurant (opened in 2023) at 640 Emerson

Notes:

— on 1: Buca di Beppo is a chain of Italian-American restaurants (40 sites across the US), noted for their large portions; I don’t know what was at 643 Emerson before 1996

— on 2: the facade is from the Moderne-architecture Acme Glass Co., of historical interest. From Wikipedia:

Moderne architecture, also sometimes referred to as Style Moderne, Art Moderne, or simply Moderne, Jazz Age Moderne, jazz modern or Jazz Style, describes certain styles of architecture popular from 1925 through the 1940s. It is closely related to Art Deco.

The facade, from 1938:

(#2) 635 Emerson St.: photo from the Palo Alto Historic Buildings Inventory, from Google Maps on 12/17/22

— on 4: in 2014, the site was the Hotel Epiphany, with a separate restaurant; from Palo Alto Online, “Palo Alto’s newest hotel opens downtown” by Jocelyn Dong on 3/10/14:

Until 2009, the building was Casa Olga, a residence for disabled and elderly people, and was best recognized by its six-story-tall mosaic mural of El Palo Alto, the thousand-year-old coastal redwood that gave the city its name. The building at the corner of Hamilton and Emerson Street was rebuilt [preserving the mural] under the direction of Palo Alto-based Steinberg Architects and McCartan Interior Design, who aimed to give the hotel the same “sleek yet warm” look of Joie de Vivre’s Hotel Vitale, in San Francisco, the press release stated.

Then in 2017, Restaurant Nobu opened at the site, and the hotel became Nobu Hotel Epiphany.  From Nobu’s Wikipedia site:

Nobu Hospitality, LLC is an American company founded by Nobu Matsuhisa, Robert De Niro, and Meir Teper in partnerships with Drew Nieporent as an operator with Myriad Restaurant Group.

… the first Nobu opened [on 9/17/94]

… [Matsuhisa’s] signature style [melds] Japanese techniques with Peruvian ingredients. Nobu’s famous signature dish is black cod with miso.

… As of 2023, there are 56 restaurants worldwide.

— on 5: in 1965 640 Emerson St. opened as the Bijou Theatre (which is how I first knew it), then was totally reworked as the restaurant and brewery Gordon Biersch in 1988. One of my favorite places, figuring in many postings on this blog. In 2016 it reopened as Dan Gordon’s, specializing in barbecue, but closed in 2020, a victim of the coronavirus. Finally, it reopened in 2023 as the Turkish restaurant Meyhouse.

Now I tell you that there is more, much more: our representative in the US Congress used to have their office at 698 Emerson St., and various restaurants, little shops, frozen yogurt places, and tech firms (among other things) have come and gone along the two and a half blocks between my house and the Peninsula Creamery.

Then there are the flowers and trees. For another posting.

 

 

This entry was posted on March 16, 2026 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Architecture, Language and food, My life, Palo Alto. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.