Evergreen Park

Framed by Alma Street, Page Mill Road, El Camino Real and Park Avenue, Evergreen Park is split between a modest, strictly middle-class community and a small commercial hub. It spans 0.3 square miles of busy/dense residential terrain, but does share its western border with the prestigious Stanford University. For perspective residents, homes were built from the 1950’s to the most recent developments popping up within the last two decades. There is also your choice of condominium and apartment complex living. And not that anyone notices, but the neighborhood is the epicenter of Palo Alto’s local government.

Evergreen Park’s residential aesthetics are somewhat unglamorous. For the most part, the neighborhood is outfitted with either small, single-story cottages or bland two-story condominiums, both with little family-friendly appeal. They usually sit on long, narrow properties that afford little to no space rather than a shallow driveway and a small grassy yard. There are a couple larger homes sprinkled throughout, but they’re few and far between while condominiums are only concentrated along Sheridan and Grant Avenue. Prices for these residences tend to circle around $1.5 million for homeowners and $550,000 for a typical condo.

For your commercial needs, there is a small shopping strip that lines South California Avenue that elicits a kind of small-town feeling. Here you can find a number of different eateries, sandwich shops, small cafes and a few places for lodging. There are also a couple mildly attractive, anonymous, mid-rise office buildings that dot the area. If you’re looking for local transportation, a bus line travels down California Avenue and connects residents to destinations around town. Elsewhere, the California Avenue Caltrain station skirts the district’s northern limits for more long-distance travel. These options might help considering street parking can be a bit hard to come by (especially the closer you get to downtown).

S. California Street is the main drag here in Evergreen. I temped down here for a few weeks at the end of last summer so I got to know S. California Street pretty well. It is one of those commercial streets that gets packed during the lunch hour and that benefits from having the California Avenue Caltrains station on one end and the El Camino on the other, the campus nearby and some local businesses as well. Pretty much, you get lots of traffic here.

You find lots of copy shops and coffee shops here to cater to local businesses and students, and you have your share of bland restaurants and stationary stores and the like—about what you expect in an area like this. But there are also some pretty good spots to grab a bite as well. Some of my favorite restaurants here are:

--The Counter: A great burger place—I think it is a chain now, I feel like I saw them somewhere else in the Bay Area as well. Really great burgers, and worth the slightly higher prices. I am glad I don’t work nearby anymore, I’m not sure I can afford the gym membership it takes to work off the extra pounds.

--Baume: A French place where you will have to mortgage one of your kid’s education funds just for a night’s meal but that I hear is worth it. My goal is to go here once before we leave (hint, hint).

--the Anatolian Kitchen: a Turkish place that is much more affordable than Baume, and that we go to about once a month. It’s really nice (its actually just off California Avenue on Birch).

--Joanie’s Café: this is where to go for breakfast or a weekend brunch if you can find a place to sit.

You are relatively close to campus here, so it is not just California Avenue, though that and the Cal Trains station is definitely the draw. There are also a number of apartment complexes around here, where a 1-bedroom will cost you about $1800 and a 2-bedroom will run you $2600. Too expensive for us, like pretty much everywhere else in Palo Alto.

On the northwestern end of Evergreen as you get closer to campus you get about 3 blocks worth of quiet residential streets filled with nice older homes. The proximity to campus and the leafy, classic college feel will cost you though. Homes here go for more than $1 million. (Actually buying a condo on the southern end of this neighborhood is not much better—they average close to $1 million as well with some actually climbing above that range.)

Put simply this is a great spot to live if you or your partner go to school and one of your jobs requires you to commute. So long as you can afford it, this would be an ideal area. It was a little beyond our range but I can see where this might work for others.