Palo Alto is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, occupying the San Francisco Peninsula between San Francisco Bay and the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Home to roughly 68,000 residents, it is one of the defining communities of Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco Bay Area. The city takes its name from El Palo Alto — Spanish for "the tall stick" — a centuries-old coastal redwood that stands along San Francisquito Creek near the Caltrain tracks and marks a boundary between Palo Alto and neighboring Menlo Park. The city's identity is inseparable from Stanford University, whose large campus and endowment have shaped the Peninsula for more than a century. Leland and Jane Stanford founded the university in 1885 in memory of their son, and the surrounding community grew up around the campus. In 1951, Stanford and the city established the Stanford Research Park, widely considered the world's first university research park. The park has hosted generations of technology companies — including Hewlett-Packard, Tesla, SAP, and Broadcom among more than 150 tenants — and helped cement the region's reputation as a global center of innovation. Palo Alto's residential character is equally distinctive. Older neighborhoods such as Professorville, named for the Stanford professors who built homes there in the university's early years, preserve shingled and Craftsman-era houses, while Crescent Park offers wide, tree-lined streets and larger lots. Midtown and Barron Park provide a more family-oriented feel, and Downtown North places residents steps from the shops and restaurants along University Avenue. Residents enjoy an unusually rich mix of open space, from the 1,940-acre Baylands Nature Preserve along the bay to Foothills Park in the western hills. Caltrain's Palo Alto station and the U.S. 101 and Interstate 280 corridors connect the city to San Francisco to the north and San Jose to the south, while the Palo Alto Unified School District is among the region's most sought-after. The result is a city that blends academic prestige, technology employment, and a leafy, established residential character.