Atherton was built to not need a downtown. No Main Street, no commercial core, nothing zoned for foot traffic. The town has run this way since its earliest days, and it works, mostly, because everyone quietly agrees to route their public life through a single 22-acre garden at 150 Watkins Avenue. If you want to play tennis, watch fireworks-adjacent civic events, rent a hall for a wedding, or just walk a dog past the rose garden, you go to Holbrook-Palmer Park. There is no alternative, because the town never built one.
This year, that arrangement got tested twice. First, residents who had spent three years lobbying for more pickleball time finally forced the town's hand on how to divide six tennis courts that were never going to be enough for everyone. Second, and for the first time, an outside institution opened its own grounds to the public and offered Atherton something Holbrook-Palmer never has: a second place to gather. Neither story is really about a park. Both are about what happens when a town with one shared space runs out of room to keep splitting it evenly.
The Park That Doesn't Get a Backup
Holbrook-Palmer Park is Atherton's only public recreation site, and it carries the weight of that singularity. Between the Main House, the Jennings Pavilion, the historic Carriage House, six tennis courts, a children's playground, and the Willie Mays Ball Park where Menlo-Atherton Little League plays, the park has to be a wedding venue, a sports complex, a concert hall, and a neighborhood commons at the same time. There's no overflow lot. When something in the park closes, breaks, or gets contested, the whole town feels it, because there's nowhere else to send the demand.
That's exactly what happened this spring. The town posted notice that Holbrook-Palmer's playground would close for renovation and upgrades starting Monday, May 4, 2026. As of early September, the town's official park page still carries that closure notice with no announced reopening date, which means families who used to default to the playground have spent most of a summer without it. If you're planning a visit with young kids, it's worth calling the town first rather than assuming the structure is back.
The Court Fight Nobody Outside Atherton Noticed
While the playground sat closed, a quieter and more revealing dispute was playing out on the park's tennis courts. Pickleball has been growing in Atherton for years, but the town never built it a permanent home. Instead, players shared court time with tennis under a patchwork reservation system that satisfied nobody. By July, the Atherton City Council voted to convert the park's only clay tennis court back into a hard court and to dedicate the existing mixed-use court exclusively to pickleball, a fix the town plans to fund through its Tennis Fund, which Vice Mayor Rick DeGolia said holds roughly $200,000, along with resident donations.
The backstory is what makes the decision interesting. This wasn't a sudden council whim. It followed a 2024 survey in which 73 percent of respondents said they supported a permanent pickleball court, after a six-month trial period that started in January of that year. Two years is a long time for a 73 percent mandate to sit on a shelf, and Mayor Stacy Holland acknowledged as much at the July meeting.
"It's been three years of asking for more, more, more pickleball, so we should give them more pickleball."
Residents who'd lived the friction firsthand backed that up with specifics. Catherine Westover, a frequent pickleball player at the park, told The Almanac that players often wait until midnight a week ahead just to lock in a weekend reservation. M.J. Davey, another Atherton resident, said she wanted more afternoon slots because her work schedule didn't line up with the limited windows the town had carved out.
Here's what those windows currently look like, before the hard-court conversion is finished:
| Day | Pickleball Access on Court No. 1 |
|---|---|
| Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday | Before noon |
| Tuesday, Thursday | After 4 p.m. |
| Sunday | All day |
| Any day | Opens to pickleball if no tennis reservation 24 hours out |
Tennis keys, which are required for any court access at Holbrook-Palmer, go on sale each year at the Town Hall front desk, with locks changed every February. The 2026 keys became available in late January. It's a small mechanical detail, but it says something about how Atherton operates: even recreation here runs through a municipal counter, not an app or a kiosk.
What Actually Filled the Calendar This Summer
Set against that court dispute, the rest of Atherton's summer ran on its usual, low-key civic rhythm. The town's Sounds of Summer concert series brought three free evening shows to Holbrook-Palmer Park, each paired with a food truck and running 6 to 8 p.m.:
- June 18: Take 2 Dance Band
- July 16: Maya Band, playing Selena covers
- August 20: Soul Practitioners
National Night Out followed on August 4, also at the park, continuing the annual tradition of turning the town's one shared green space into a stand-in for whatever a block party would look like in a place with no blocks to speak of.
None of this is unusual for Atherton. It's the same park hosting the same kind of low-key civic life it always has. What's unusual is what happened next door.
The First Try at Something New
On September 12, Menlo College is hosting its first Art & Wine Festival on its Quad at 1000 El Camino Real, a few minutes from Holbrook-Palmer. The event runs 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., is free and open to all ages, and brings together local artists and makers, regional wineries, food trucks, and live jazz. Wine tasting is available to guests 21 and older, priced at $12 for one ticket, $30 for three, or $50 for five, and the first 100 people to register online get a free event cup.
It sounds like a small campus event, and in most towns it would be. In Atherton, it's something closer to a milestone. This is a private college, not a public park, choosing to open its grounds to the surrounding community for a festival that has nothing to do with admissions or fundraising in the traditional sense. For a town that has functioned for over a century with exactly one place where residents gather in public, having a second option appear, even briefly, even once, is worth noticing.
What This Adds Up To
None of these threads read as dramatic on their own. A pickleball court got repainted. A playground is still closed. A college held a wine festival. But put together, they describe a town quietly running up against the limits of relying on one shared space for everything, and finding, in small and different ways, that the answer isn't always more construction. Sometimes it's better allocation, as with the tennis-pickleball split that took three years of resident pressure to finalize. Sometimes it's an outside institution stepping into a role the town never built for itself, as Menlo College just did.
If you already live in Atherton, none of this changes your address. But it might change where you end up on a Saturday in September, and it's a useful reminder that even a town built around privacy and large lots still runs on the same small, human negotiations over shared space that every neighborhood does. Keep an eye on the Atherton neighborhood page for more on how the town's day-to-day character continues to take shape.
If you're weighing a move to Atherton, thinking about how a property here might fit your family's routine, or just want a local's read on what a specific street or estate is really like to live near, David Bergman knows this town from the inside. Let's Connect.