Photo post: Sunnyvale library

Sunnyvale is a small city that sprouted a lot of housing in the postwar development of the California suburbs, and then both new industry and more housing when it found itself in the middle of Silicon Valley. In the second half of the 1970s, the city decided to bulldoze most of its downtown and build an enclosed mall. That included City Hall, a small Spanish Colonial-style building surrounded by redwood and cedar trees that residents had donated/stealth planted. The new city hall was post-and-beam with a red-brick veneer, with a fireplace in the main hall and lots of wings with peaked roofs and ending in pretty windows, in a park setting. The parking lot was laid out with pink oleander bushes and flowering cherry trees along the median strips. When the city outgrew the building, it became the library, with a new city hall across a winding road through what had become a government campus, including the public safety building (unified police and fire service) and a courthouse. The third city hall was much more private, like the public safety building, and had more flowers and colorful shrubs and fewer big trees around it, but the same architect put them all up; the ensemble is the only Sunnyvale entry in the Bay Area AIA guide. At some point a warren of single-story timber office buildings with covered boardwalks were added, housing overflow from the continuously expanding city bureaucracy as well as some businesses and, after its own building was sold to a private pre-school, the regional branch of the state unemployment and retraining office. These were once a hive of activity but had become so dilapidated by the 2000s that the state condemned them.

In the 2010s, with considerable nudging from the city, the residents voted to demolish the whole shebang and replace it all with new buildings in a new layout. Even the trees will get the chop, and I believe the accepted plan slightly moves the road (which has two useful bus stops) and turns it into a pedestrian path.

Demolition has started on city hall, so I took some photos of the library (previous city hall) while it's still standing.



( The rest are back here. )