Taking advantage of the times; one cities success story

Catholic Church in Livermore, California

Yesterday I drove six teenagers to Livermore where they participated in a drum line competition. I've done this before. Last year they performed at Livermore High School and I got to spend some time walking around their town center. It is laid out on a small grid and features a highly pedestrian friendly main street.

Livermore is located approximately 15 miles directly east Hayward, and about 20 miles directly west of Tracy, just below Mount Diablo (another wonderful place to visit).

Last year I enjoyed the luxury of shopping for birthday presents in an independent toy store, eating delicious Mexican food in an independently owned Mexican restaurant and doing my homework in my car. I was not fully aware of the size of the town but was impressed by the successful renewal of an old main street into a vibrant and very busy tourist/shopping district and the pleasant quite neighborhood of old houses int he surrounding grid.

This year they competed at Grenada High School, a newer campus on the west side of the town. The campus was surrounded by suburban developments and it wasn't really clear what, if anything was in walking distance to the school. So when lunchtime rolled around, or should I say, when I finally got the chance to get some lunch after rolling around back drops, I opted to drive around until I found a place to eat. It wasn't too long until I spotted a large Safeway and it's variety of parking lot eateries and shops. Fortunately for me there was an 'Una Mas' Mexican restaurant, which, if your going to eat at a franchise, is a great choice. After good lunch of enchiladas I decided I had enough time t0 drive around and find out just what made Livermore tick. Was it a bedroom community for San Jose or San Francisco, was it thriving on the success of the silicon valley or did it have something of its own to maintain growth?

Last years pedestrian explorations led me to a museum where I learned that William Mendenhall established the town amongst vineyards and ranches because he knew the railroad was coming through and, intelligent man that he must have been, figured that if the people of Livermore valley had a town the railroad would probably put a stop in it. He was right, and the town became a successful agricultural center.

I went into this years auto explorations expecting to find evidence of a small town turned into a bedroom community for commuters from the Bay Area and the Silicon Valley. The west side of town gave some indication of this because it morphed abruptly from the old original town to new developments including the Safeway, Una Mas and typical taupe colored suburbs of fairly recent origin. However exploration to the east side of downtown Livermore revealed a completely different picture. Development seemed to stretch out with houses from every decade of the 20th century and there seemed no abrupt 1980s or 1990s change at any point. In fact there was a good amount of development from the 1950s through the 1970s. The timing of the development did not add up in my mind with timing of the Silicon Valley explosion.

I didn't have time to go to deep because I had to get back to the high school to roll props into a gymnasium and watch a bunch of amazing West Campus High School students act out a Winter Survival story with drums and drama. So today I spent some time researching Livermore on the Internet and discovered that Livermore, for a second time, became a success story of its own.

At one time the valley was home to a surplus naval base (1). After WWII the Cold War changed our tactics from real wartime to research and development in the military sector. The naval base was converted to a research facility in 1953 called The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. They are apparently quite famous and develop military technology still today. In 1956 Livermore gained another lab called Sandia National Laboratory, which also conducts military research.

Once I learned of these two laboratories the development patterns made sense. So my next question became, what then, are the demographics of the area? Is it still a fairly self sufficient town or has it been overtaken by commuters from the aforementioned areas? Here's what census data tells me.

As of the 2000 census Livermore had a population of approximately 73,000. Nothing surprising there. The racial demographics show that at that time over 60,000 of those people were white. 35,000+ were employed with a median household income of over 75,000 a year (which is pretty impressive). Most notably is that approximately 1/3 of the working population has a commuting time of less than 20 minutes.. That means that at least that many people are working fairly locally rather than commuting all the way to San Jose or San Francisco. So while I'm sure there are a good many people commuting to other locations to work, I'm also pretty sure that Livermore is not the bedroom community I expected it to be. Instead, it is an established city which was established and grew by means of its own ingenuity and the government's infusion of research money.