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In the 1940s and 1950s, over eighty subdivisions were recorded. With the minimum size of one acre, the era of the large estates was over.
Menlo Park had only 3,258 residents. Between 1943 and 1946, another military installation, Dibble General Hospital, was built to care for the thousands of soldiers injured in the South Pacific in World War II. Anticipating a wave of wounded soldiers from the Pacific operations during World War II, the U.S. Army bought the estate of Mark Hopkins, of California railroad and hotel fame, including the mansion formerly known as Thurlow Lodge, to care for the thousands of soldiers injured in the South Pacific in World War II.
Originally, the post was named Palo Alto General Hospital but was soon renamed “Dibble Army Hospital” to honor Colonel John Dibble, who was killed in an aircraft crash in 1943. Between 1943 and 1946, Dibble Army Hospital specialized in plastic surgery, blind care, neuro-psychiatry and orthopedics.
At its peak, it had 2,400 beds, about two-thirds of the population of the entire town. Dr. Bernard Silber was working at Letterman Hospital in San Francisco when he was transferred to the new Dibble Hospital. But first, he had to ask four or five people where Menlo Park was.
“It was a quiet, pleasant place,” he recalled, noting that there weren’t any stores yet on Santa Cruz Avenue except at the corner of El Camino Real.
A post-war boom occurred in Menlo Park after World War II. By the mid-’40s, returning soldiers and newcomers were swelling the ranks of Stanford University, bringing undergraduate enrollment from a bit more than 3,700 in 1945 to 8,200 in 1947. Although facilities were jammed, construction on campus was limited by continuing material shortages. But in 1945, Stanford established its first Planning Office to study space, soon figuring out that it could eke out more space in classrooms, labs and dorms, just in time to meet the post-war demand from discharged veterans.
Where was everyone to live? Realizing there simply wasn’t room on campus, the university snatched up the Dibble Hospital site in Menlo Park, renaming it Stanford Village and providing 300 apartments for married students as well as 1,500 dorm beds. Under the leadership of former Menlo Park Mayor Charles Burgess, the City acquired 29 acres of Dibble General Hospital grounds for $4000 an acre. The civic center was built on this land. Pioneering steps were taken in zoning control, which attracted such enterprises as Stanford Research Institute and the U.S Geological Survey. This led to the City’s first Master Plan in 1952.
Today, the Menlo Park area shines as a beacon for the venture capital market, and the corridor along El Camino Real between Valparaiso and Stanford Shopping Center remains one of the most crowded traffic areas on the peninsula.
Everything else is just history
