I was going to make my bike into a light organ. I looked at everything that entailed, and figured out the first step was to get a soldering iron. Then some home maintenance things popped up. To make a long story short, these were the first two connections I soldered this millennium.

  

It so happens that I was looking at the map, and it reminded me that back during the first or second electronics revolution that swept through this area National and Fairchild were the big names. They were headquartered in the corner of Mountain View, on the streets that still bear their names. I decided to go down there and check it out.

     

The area is sort of a ghetto of high tech offices. Some of them are interesting buildings. One thing that's dramatic about this one at the end of Ellis St. is that if you stand in the light reflected off the blue windows you feel quite a bit warmer than you would standing almost anywhere else. It being a cool winter day, that warmth was appreciated, but not enough to make me want to stay there.

     

It's nice how one end of National has a mature redwood tree (California's State Tree) and a company named BristleCone (a famous Bristle Cone pine tree was just a few votes shy of a place on California's state quarter). A lot of the businesses on National seem like everyday high tech companies. Some of the sights are the kind of thing that collect on untraveled streets like barnacles on a boat.

  

Lots of neatly trimmed bushes.

This place was a big Halloween merchandise warehouse for a couple of weeks last fall. I don't know how temporary that was.

No name on the sign. It doesn't look like an empty building though.

I really like that wildly overgrown bush. With the xeriscaped pebble lawn it has an odd sort of appeal. This is probably the kind of engineering company that doesn't expect foot traffic from the customers. The kind where the office is mainly a place to answer the phone and do (whatever) between visits to off site installations and visits from the UPS and FedEx guys.

Notice that storm fence around the perimeter of the property? That's the border around the complex formerly known as National Semiconductor's big plant. In the early days of the semiconductor industry, they didn't realize how toxic the materials they were working with were. They threw the stuff around too casually. Then they started to learn when the cancer clusters and so forth marked the place as dangerous to human health. That was in the '70s or maybe early '80s. It's been a long time now since anybody has worked there.

Probably that was an exciting place to work back in the '60s. Now it's a ghost complex. I wonder how many of the former employees died before their time... It must have been too many from the way they treat it now.

     

I see this place as somehow symbolic of the USA's national debt. People that should have known better played fast and loose with their responsibilities. They didn't see how what they did in the course of their daily lives would affect the future. Maybe they solved messy disposal problems by taking it outside and pouring it on the ground. Now the place is nothing but a drain on somebody's wallet, and not exactly an eyesore.

I remember going to meetings in Sacramento where we discussed how these pollution problems came up again and again. Everybody just wanted to get rid of their problems in the easiest possible way. That meant these chemicals that should have been collected and reprocessed got thrown away. Now we have super-fund sites instead of community assets in many places. Maybe its been five years since the last time I read a gripping article about another business that caused another cancer cluster because they didn't care about their junk pile. I've met many, many people that were affected by such clusters. Some were mothers that lost young children to them. Those were the kind of people that closed this place down.

It didn't bother me much until lately. The last of my upstairs neighbors that had lived here longer than I died of cancer. The other one had died of cancer a few years previously. My sister lived near another toxic waste dump in Virginia. She mentioned long time neighbors of the junk yard that had gotten cancer. Now I'm wondering if maybe I'm going to go like that to.

     

Across the street are perfectly normal office buildings. The parked cars seem to indicate that nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

     

National ends at a wall. I turned left on Fairchild.

Fairchild has much more of a fancy quality for about two blocks. Somebody explained to me that some companies like that kind of rounded architecture because that way more VPs get "corner offices". Instead of one they get a whole row of them. After that it gets charmingly low rent.

  

Fairchild is long gone from the area. Fairchild Deli & Grocery got it's name from the Street it's on, not the other way around. That rail is a good place to park a bike, so I left mine there and browsed up Fairchild on foot.

     

     

The two story apartment buildings with the exterior staircases are older than I can remember. They were already here the first time I explored this area, maybe thirty years ago. The private street is new though. That's the kind of complex they only started building after property values went way, way up.

  

That retired gas station that's being reused as a construction equipment parking lot must have been in the family for a long time. Anybody with property taxes based on recent valuations would not be so casual about what they are using the spot for.

  

I like to think that life moves a bit slower in the mobile home parks. Anyhow, it did back in the late 1980s. I learned when I walked precincts in this area for Anna Eshoo back in '88. The people I'd meet in this kind of place wanted to talk a lot. Nowadays I look at the place and I think "this was probably somebody's farm until they sold it to a guy that moved out from back east. He converted it to a mobile home park and collected a percentage of other snowbird's social security payments as rent for the rest of his life." Not sure why the place is still there now. Probably just another grandfathered situation.

  

This was the only home with a green lawn on the whole length of street I walked. It's so out of character for the area it borders on comical. Must be the home of somebody that wasn't here during the drought of the '80s.

Walking precincts back in the '80s, I found those "garden apartments" to be the smallest homes in Mountain View. Each unit is a small bathroom, kitchenette, and room separated from the outside by a sliding glass door. The garden was an eight foot square porch inside a fence. There are similar homes on Easy Street. I imagine the rent there must have been something like $499/ month a mere generation ago. The kind of place anybody could afford. Now they probably cost upwards of $1000/month. You can't even dream of living there unless you make good money.

  

Fairchild runs parallel to 101, which has been the main artery connecting California's coastal cities for longer than I've been alive. It has way more lanes than it had when I came out here though.

Somehow it makes sense that the litter on Fairchild would include "my California."

  

There are also lots of empty buildings on Fairchild right now. Some of them are quite nice. Wouldn't that fountain and palm tree look good in your corporate annual report?

Caroline, whose husband worked at Fairchild in their semiconductor fab back then (and died of cancer in his early 40s), told me "Fairchild looks VERY different from the way it looked in the seventies."

  

I missed that Honda sign the first time I went down National. There must have been an RV parked in front of it earlier. (Would somebody really commute in one of those?) Anyhow, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Honda picked that address for their "Research Institute" at least partly because they serve the national marketplace.