Embraced by the ‘Stanford bubble’

I’ve never taken an antidepressant, but if the time comes, I’m hoping the effect will be like that of driving onto the Stanford campus for the first time.

As the towering palm trees march past in the raking light of a fall afternoon, the gentle declivity of a grassy oval comes into view, gamboling youths upon it and a cluster of red blossoms in the shape of an “S.”

Then you notice the first stately sandstone buildings, the glittering Memorial Church facade beyond them, a beaming undergrad gliding down an arcade on her bike. And as a gentle breeze brushes past the campus lake and golf course, you try to imagine a bitter argument between those who say these buildings are more Richardsonian Romanesque and those who insist they’re more rooted in Mission Revival.

But ultimately, you find yourself asking: What is there on this Earth to worry about, really?

OK, maybe getting in. Or affording tuition. But if you’re just here to drink in the atmosphere, Stanford is just plain dreamy.

My wife, Mary Frances, 4-year-old daughter, Grace, and I rolled in on a Friday, peeked at the campus, then headed back to University Avenue, the main drag. We crept along under the tree-lined street, gazing at the gleaming shops, the twinkling lights strung in the trees, the lines for Miyake and Thaiphoon, the crowds at Madison & Fifth and the Cheesecake Factory.

Eventually, we settled in a block off University at the Palo Alto Creamery, a bustling soda fountain and grill that traces its history to the 1920s. This is a family-friendly place with the usual nostalgic overtones but also an extra sheen of affluence. Along with the sandwiches and shakes, risotto was on the menu, as was the Bubbly Burger -- a hamburger with a bottle of Dom Perignon for $195.

“We sell a couple a month,” Eric Beamesderfer, Creamery operations director, told me later. “After all, we are in Palo Alto.”

The real world seems even farther away when you stroll the university-owned Stanford Shopping Center, where Neiman Marcus, Burberry and company ply their wares.

No doubt, they’re feeling some of the current economic unpleasantness, but I couldn’t see any sign of the strain among the shopping throngs that day. And the security guards looked really cool, patrolling by Segway.

Palo Alto (population about 58,000 in 24 square miles) counts itself among the wealthiest U.S. college towns, with a median income of $90,000 (twice Berkeley’s) and a median home price around $1.4 million.

Based on the few ragged folks I saw hanging around Lytton Plaza, I would have estimated the city homeless population at, oh, 17, but Santa Clara County counted 196 here last year. (Five years ago, Alameda County estimated Berkeley’s at 830.)

We slept at the Stanford Park Hotel, a U-shaped ‘80s building that’s a short drive to campus but just across the line in Menlo Park. Everything went right: our spacious $189 room, the swimming pool, even the courtyard wedding that we half-crashed (peeking down from our second-story window above the harpist). And because it’s mostly a business hotel, rates are usually lowest on weekends. (If you insist on greater luxury, there’s a Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley in East Palo Alto, and in April, the Rosewood Sand Hill is scheduled to open in Menlo Park.)

In town, we breakfasted in the sun at the University Cafe and shared dinner on the patio at La Strada, watching the sidewalks fill with well-heeled walkers. I grabbed coffee at the Prolific Oven and witnessed the escalating Saturday evening mayhem at the Old Pro, a popular sports bar.

And even though atmospheric Bell’s Books gave us a very happy hour of browsing new, used and rare volumes (collected works of Lord Byron, 1833, $450), the three of us also slipped into Menlo Park for more book-browsing at Kepler’s, where the building had less character but the business had a remarkable history: The bookstore was founded by peace activist Roy Kepler in 1955, closed in 2005, then was resurrected within months by a community campaign.

Our campus tour came on Saturday morning. The core of Stanford is mostly flat, the grassy expanses broken up by stately old buildings and dozens of sculptures from artists including Auguste Rodin, Andy Goldsworthy and Maya Lin.

On the facade of Stanford Memorial Church, a 22,000-tile mosaic gleamed. And somewhere outside San Jose there’s a quarry that gave up tons of sandstone so this place could project so much gravitas.

Our guide was Ono Nseyo, a 21-year-old biology major and rugby player from Florida. (Her family is from Nigeria.) She marched about 20 of us through a 60-minute itinerary, covering topics as diverse as bicycle traffic and the class time capsules buried near the church. (A Michael Jackson “Thriller” album rests there.)

The site was a farm before 1885, when railroad magnate and U.S. Sen. Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, looking to honor their recently deceased 15-year-old son, decided to create Leland Stanford Junior University.

With millions to spend and ambitions to compete with the Ivy League, the Stanfords hired Frederick Law Olmsted, of Central Park fame, to design the landscape. The first students, including Herbert Hoover, arrived in 1891. Today the campus, a.k.a. the Farm, covers about 8,200 acres.

“That’s 27 Disneylands,” Nseyo pointed out. “Or 40.8 UC Berkeleys.” (She was counting only the Cal campus’ 200-acre central core.)

The student body -- about 6,800 undergrads and 8,200 grad students -- is about 39% Californian, 38% Caucasian and 18% Asian American or Pacific Islander, with others represented in smaller numbers. About 21% come from other countries (mostly grad students). About 13% are involved with fraternities or sororities. The university says the average undergrad living on campus this year will spend $48,938. About 75% of students receive financial aid.

The faculty of Stanford counts 16 living Nobel laureates and scads of alumni, beginning with David Packard and William Hewlett of H-P fame, that have gone on to glory in Silicon Valley. (One Nobelist that Stanford doesn’t count is John Steinbeck, who dropped out not once but twice in the 1920s.)

“The Stanford bubble,” some people call it: Unlike most universities, Stanford is arranged so that nearly all undergraduates live on campus, along with most grad students and about 30% of professors. But the outside world does intrude, and the ‘60s happened here too.

In 1969, student protesters occupied the Applied Electronics Laboratory for nine days, opposing the school’s connection with military research. The following year, scores of arrests and injuries were reported and tear-gas clouds rose -- events that these days can seem as remote as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The biggest campus landmark, the 285-foot-high Hoover Tower, was completed in 1941 as a homage to President Hoover (who managed the football team as an undergrad). Though the tower’s observation deck was closed during our visit, it has since reopened, and visitors who pay $2 can check out the view. Not far from there is the showcase Bing Wing of Green Library. The comfortable leather chairs are in the Lane Reading Room. The papers of Allen Ginsberg, Buckminster Fuller and Huey Newton are in Special Collections.

I glimpsed plenty of other fascinating buildings and would have loved to have hiked to the Dish (an oversized antenna that is a hikers’ landmark in the hills beyond Lake Lagunita). But that will have to wait until the next visit, perhaps when they invite us up to give the kid a full ride.

Our last stop before leaving campus was the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, an art museum that also includes family artifacts history -- a spooky casting of young Leland Jr.’s death mask, for instance, and an oil painting of Jane Stanford’s jewelry collection. You know you’re wealthy when you can commission a portrait of your jewels.

Just a few steps away, we found the gold spike that completed the first transcontinental rail route at Promontory, Utah, in 1869.

The spike was smaller than I expected. But the museum restaurant, Cool Cafe, more than made up for that. It’s run by chef Jesse Ziff Cool.

The atmosphere was nothing revolutionary: a bright room with chalked specials and a view of a sculpture garden, like many other museum eateries. But my ham and Cheddar sandwich, concocted with tomato chutney and honey mustard, made me stop and think: Wow.

I don’t know about $48,938 a year, but I can afford $8.75 for that taste every time.

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chris.reynolds@latimes.com

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Planning this trip

CAMPUS TOURS

Free one-hour tours begin at the front steps of Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium (Visitor Center, 551 Serra Mall, [650] 723-2560) at 11 a.m. and 3:15 p.m. More info: www.stanford .edu/dept/visitorinfo/.

WHERE TO STAY

Garden Court Hotel, 520 Cowper St.; (650) 322-9000, www.gardencourt.com. Doubles from $369.

Stanford Park Hotel, 100 El Camino Real, Menlo Park; (650) 322-1234, www.stanfordparkhotel.com. Doubles from $169.

WHERE TO EAT

La Strada, 335 University Ave.; (650) 324-8300; www.lastradapaloalto.com. Dinner entrees $15 to $25.

Cool Cafe, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, 328 Lomita Drive, (650) 725-4758, www.cool eatz.com. Entrees up to $14.

Palo Alto Creamery Fountain & Grill, 566 Emerson St.; (650) 323-3131; www.paloalto creamery.com. Entrees up to $17.75, except Bubbly Burger, which comes with a bottle of Dom Perignon for $195.

TO LEARN MORE

Destination Palo Alto, www.destinationpaloalto.com. Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce, www.paloalto chamber.com/visitor/