hen it was time to settle on a venue for her only daughter's wedding, Susan Weiner didn't even consider Atherton's Holbrook-Palmer Park. In fact, she admits she had never heard of it.
But after visiting the Watkins Avenue park on the suggestion of her wedding photographer, the San Mateo resident says she and her daughter didn't have to look anywhere else.
"My daughter immediately fell in love with it," she says. "It was very private, very serene, and being that it was outdoors made it nice.
"I think just the beauty of the whole place overwhelmed everyone," she says.
It's not hard to see why the Weiners and more than 80 couples last year looked to Atherton's only public park as the ideal setting to mark such an important event.
Tucked away between busy El Camino Real and Middlefield Road, the park is 22 acres of fields studded with historic buildings and decades-old oak trees, rising above clusters of purple agapanthus, yellow daylilies and roses.
But the notion that the park is an ideally suited spot for weddings and other private events, which can total as much as 500 a year, could change as the council begins a discussion August 16 on redirecting the focus of the park away from its money-making rental business, toward a community-oriented park that appeals to a changing town. That discussion is set to start at about 9 p.m. and is part of the council's regular meeting which will start at 7 p.m. in council chambers, 93 Ashfield Road.
The discussion centers on the site of many private events -- Jennings Pavilion. The council is considering upgrading and possibly doubling the size of the Pavilion so that the park can pull in more revenue and reduce, if not eliminate, the town's cost for park upkeep.
Weddings and other private events generated about $257,000 in the 1999 fiscal year with another $61,000 in service charges, according to figures provided by the town's finance department. The town, which recently lost about $1.6 million a year thanks to a defeated parcel tax, has had to chip in its own funds to cover costs associated with running the park, which totaled about $434,000 in the same time period.
But before the town spends as much as $900,000 to expand the Pavilion, the council is taking the opportunity to re-examine the role of the park and how that building could be used to satisfy other, more local needs.
Councilwoman Dianne "Didi" Fisher asks if the town should upgrade the building to raise more money to run the park, upgrade it for community classes, or for a mixture of classes and some daytime corporate events that would have less noise impacts on neighbors and provide more activities for residents.
The building could provide a community center for younger families who, flush with Silicon Valley wealth, are establishing roots in Atherton. It could also provide much-needed space for community groups such as the Atherton Dames, the fundraising arm of the Holbrook-Palmer Park Foundation, and the Arts Committee, which has been lobbying for an art center since the group was formed four years ago.
An endowment fund approved by the council this summer could eventually wean the park away from its reliance on the rental business and free up the Pavilion for those purposes. But what that will mean for two of the park's most prominent groups -- the Dames and Foundation -- is unknown.
Recreation or rentals?
Lacking any input from residents and a clear set of goals for the park, council members say they're not sure what kinds of community-type programs the park should include. Today, the park is a hodge-podge of facilities including tennis courts, a preschool, a children's playground, a hiking trail and most recently a Little League baseball diamond, which the council approved after a lengthy and controversial debate.
Other ideas, however, haven't fared as well over the years. One proposal to build a swimming pool was quickly drowned out as were a bonsai garden and golf putting green.
But one thing at least three of the five council members know is that they would like to use the Pavilion for community programs and get out of the rental business.
"I think several of us (council members) would love it if there could be an endowment fund and we could get out of the rental business," says Mayor Nan Chapman, who says she might favor a multiuse building there instead. "We could use those facilities for community groups and city functions."
Councilman Alan Carlson says no matter what the town decides, the Pavilion would have to be renovated, but perhaps not to the scale of a high-class wedding facility, which one architect said could cost as much as $900,000.
"We need to examine what we want that Pavilion to be," he says. "Should it be a cultural place, or something else? Is the Pavilion going to be used for rentals? I would hope that's not the case because of the endowment fund."
Councilman Malcolm Dudley, a strong proponent of an art center, says the Pavilion shouldn't be expanded just for the sake of raising more money.
"The park ought to be there for all of us to enjoy," he says. "If your focus is on raising funds to pay the bills, you lose the focus of the park to be used by citizens."
Some residents agree. One resident even went so far as to suggest the town tear down the Pavilion, build a new updated community center and rename it Elmwood, after the homestead of Charles Holbrook, who lived in what is now Holbrook-Palmer Park.
Jackson Lindow, 93, says he's been coming to the park for his stretching exercises every day since he moved to town 31 years ago. He doesn't want a larger Pavilion because he says it would cost too much and bring too many people to the quiet park.
Besides more people, Menlo Park resident Harvey Slate, who lives near the park, says a bigger party facility would bring more noise to his Felton Gables neighborhood, which he says is already struggling from noisy events.
"Parties and weddings go on very late and the noise from deejays is terrific," he says. "We're just asking for a little consideration for our quality of life."
Mr. Slate and Jim Boettcher, another Felton Gables resident, both contend that the town is in violation of the 1958 bequest that gifted the park to the town from the estate of Olive Holbrook-Palmer. The bequest forbids commercial enterprises and residences in the park and says any violation of the will would cause the town to lose the park to Stanford University.
"We've had attorneys look at the will and they said the town is in violation," says Mr. Boettcher.
But council members disagree with that contention.
"I think that's a harsh interpretation," said Councilman Bill Conwell. "If we were violating the will, it would have been tested in the courts sometime before now from members of the family."
Mayor Chapman agrees, saying that a rental business is not the same as a commercial enterprise. She said attorneys she asked to review the document concluded it was loosely written.
Endowing the future
But some wonder if an endowment fund, which Mr. Carlson envisions would accept large donations and grants, can actually get off the ground, and if it does, what that will mean to two of the park's longest-running groups, the Holbrook-Palmer Park Foundation and its women's auxiliary, the Atherton Dames.
Both organizations go back as far as the park itself and were founded to help raise money for capital improvements. Over the years, the Dames, which does the fundraising, has raised about $50,000 a year, according to Estelle Hoffman, Dames president. In fact, it was the Dames that raised money to build Jennings Pavilion.
Mrs. Hoffman says the Dames need space too, and have been meeting at people's houses over the years. But she isn't sure that replacing the rental business with an endowment fund is the answer.
"I don't know how the park would manage if they stopped renting it out," she says. "That's a lot of money to give up that goes to maintenance. So I don't know the answer."
Howard "Sandy" Crittenden, treasurer of the foundation, says he would like to see an endowment fund with enough money to pay for maintenance, but can't say for sure how that will affect the foundation's future.
"It's clear to me that the endowment will be in conflict with the foundation" and its own fundraising efforts, he says. "But I can't say whether the result will be good or bad."
