THE CORN PALACE by lik roper
(excerpts from http://likroper.com/OGNFEBMAY2004WEB.html)


this is the now world famous CORN PALACE in sunnyvale, california - 5 acres of some of the last undeveloped land in the silicon valley - the santa clara valley was previously known as the 'valley of heart's delight' because of orchards that once covered the valley floor...it is now known as the silicon valley, and sunnyvale is the official capital of silicon valley regardless of what san jose says...in my roughly 37 years of life in california's santa clara valley, the CORN PALACE has been a permanent fixture...it has been said there used to be about 25 cars per hour that would pass the orchard on lawrence expressway, now there are that many in ten seconds...

the two brothers who own this land can afford to keep it because they also have acreage elsewhere in california, located in mt. view, morgan hill and chowchilla...they have tried over and over to get their own exit ramp from lawrence expressway, because at one time long ago, there was nothing keeping the cars from lawrence expressway from visiting...limiting access was probably the local government's way of trying to squeeze them out, cutting off traffic flow from the expressway...if so, it didn't work, because they are still there all these years later...

> (and while an exit from lawrence expressway would now cause much excess traffic for nearby residents, at one time there were not as many nearby residents to be affected, so i still believe that denying them of an exit from the expressway really was just one angle at getting the land to be less profitable, and ultimately sold...just like the old 'odyssey room' club in sunnyvale had its' maximum occupancy lowered to put them out of business and have a new shopping center built, government agencies help out other government agencies to ultimately accomplish their goals...whatever they want, they get...except for the corn palace, that is...a nurse lady told me that she had to take care of one of the old farmers one time because the city was pressuring him so much that it literally gave him a heart attack) >

even after their passing, they said their sons will proudly continue to work this same land, because the family loves its' work and still manages profitability...they love to grow food...corn is obviously the main crop at the corn palace, but the crops are regularly rotated to maintain quality topsoil...canadian geese make annual visits to the land to get a bite to eat and fertilize after harvest, feasting on the crop remains...

my favorite time of the year is spring and summer when water is pumped out of the ground for irrigation to get the crops growing... water spreads out from the pump house as it feeds into the irrigation canals, and i still find it enjoyable to pass by and watch it in action (this practice of irrigation supposedly originated in ancient egypt, as the annual overflowing nile river was tamed and controlled to grow crops...there are some very ancient terraced gardens supplied by distant water sources in the mountains of south america as well)...

when i moved to the santa clara valley with my family back in 1967, it was a bucolic orchard paradise with orchards extending out as far as the eye can see; > what is now a kmart (which is shutting its' doors after roughly 32 years in business because of president bush's ass-backwards policies) used to be an orchard when i moved here in 1967 - and what used to be an open field behind that became a condominium complex sometime in the 1970s (lucky for me, because a friend of mine who eventually moved into that old orchard was the singer of jetboy, and he's the guy who recommended me to fill in on drums for jetboy on an arena tour back in the late 1980s, so development is not all that bad i guess)

(there also used to be a cement foundation from an old house right at the corner of lawrence expressway and lillick...my friends and i used to call it 'hippy hideout', because supposedly it was a place where the homeless lived in the bushes surrounding the old house foundation...it had an old pool that was filled with dirt)

during the internet boom of the 1990s, the process of land eating accelerated drastically...it seemed like every week i would drive by another orchard and literally see it disappear...cities were competing against neighboring cities to develop more and more land because of the economic benefits...farmers were selling their orchard land for millions of dollars because cherries and apricots were no longer profitable...the taxes on the orchard land increased because of all the new industrial development, and semiconductors were making all the money in the silicon valley, not fruit...i actually grew up in a home built on old prune orchard land, and when i first arrived here in 1967 during the summer of love, there was a prune orchard right down the street!...some of my earliest memories were of playing in the houses while they were being built on that same orchard land, and at that time i did not see development as a problem in particular...one of the funnest things my friends and i ever did was repeatedly jump from a half-built two story roof, down onto a huge sand pile, and it was not until way later that i realized the problems that come along with excessive development...

traffic congestion, smog, groundwater pollution - everything from the 70,000 or so chemicals commonly used in the semiconductor industry - to the polluted ground at moffett field - and now a near ghost land of empty and seismically unsafe cement stand-up semiconductor industry buildings, and overpriced rental housing...this is the high price of excessive development...

the development all started after world war II with the moffett field airbase and lockheed corporation...lockheed engineers flooded the valley and housing was needed...in the early eighties it was apple computer in cupertino and the mac...but around 1982, when everyone had bought a computer, the local economy stalled...bill gates then took over by selling them all new software, and eventually new computers, etc...and even though bill used heavy handed techniques for squashing competitors, he still got all of our money and is now the richest man in the world...he also paved over many acres of old orchard land in mountain view, among many other places...you can bet that many an endangered owl and ground squirrel lost their habitat for old bill's semiconductor campuses...

there was no real democracy in the silicon valley during the internet boom; if you were the head of the silicon valley manufacturers group, for example, you could babble on for ten minutes at a public hearing - but if you were joe or jane blow down the street, it was three minutes and shut up or we're going to arrest you (i watched it on tv, so i should know) as they were off 'spreading democracy' or something in, what was it then? kosovo? democracy was non-existent here at home in america...it was gut wrenching to witness the heart of this once beautiful valley cemented over and developed by greedy land developers (that continued their building even when they knew the economic bubble was about to burst in the year 2000) > and the local governments did not stop until almost every square inch of this valley was paved over...

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all this development took a toll on the local wildlife, as endangered ground squirrels and burrowing owls were nearly pushed out of existence on the valley floor by local leaders who more often than not allowed their homes to be destroyed and paved over for now empty buildings...since the owls often use abandoned ground squirrel holes as homes, the loss of ground squirrels pretty much meant an equal loss in the owl population as well - the winners were the ravens, seagulls, pigeons, and doves (as they are either omnivores or just good scavengers - and tree squirrels because habitat in residential areas is abundant)

there is also thriving flock of wild parrots from south america living in sunnyvale!...residential backyards still support several other species of avian wildlife...the city of san jose established the guadalupe river parkway, which thankfully provides some protected wildlife habitat amidst all the development...

> development like the pond at 1333 lawrence expressway in santa clara that was illegally paved over a few years back - it had an endangered species - a blue herring etc - using it as a food source > or the old olson family orchard that vice-president gore once visited in sunnyvale...it was plowed for a new apartment complex called 'cherry orchard apartments'...this orchard should not have been sold, as it was the heart of sunnyvale, and even the olsons regretted it afterwards...when that orchard went, the heart of sunnyvale was ripped out, and i still have not recovered from it...

you can read all about it @ http://www.svcn.com/archives/sunnyvalesun/03.04.98/Orchard.html - the murphy family also owned some other land down the road a piece that was originally seized by the city of sunnyvale years back...it was eventually given back to the family as the 'heritage orchard', which is located right next to the community center in sunnyvale...

the olsons originally owned a whole swath of land stretching along the el camino real (i heard that an old olson trick to boost cherry output in the spring was growing garlic around the base of the trees in the winter)...

> or the land set aside as a nature preserve just next to mission college in santa clara that was allowed to be plowed over even though some of the last remaining burrowing owls, ground squirrels and jack rabbits in the area lived on the land...(i brought this up at a santa clara city council meeting one night, it was on the tv news soon afterwards, and someone got a big ass fine for destroying endangered species habitat...if you blow your whistle on public record at a city council meeting, they are required to act)...

> or the orchard right across the street from billings chevrolet in milpitas that originally had land set aside to protect the burrowing owls, but instead eventually turned into a parking lot for a deserted post internet boom cisco corporation campus...yes, the heartless gentrification of the internet boom was not limited to humans, as the local wildlife paid a major price as well...

> i miss the endless fields of yellow mustard grass (which as legend has it was planted by early christian missionaries along the trail, to make it easier to navigate between missions) some of the fields still remain, but only a fraction of what once was...

> i miss the old cherry orchard at lawrence expressway and homestead road...even though this land sits right on top of one of the countrys' biggest superfund cleanup sites, they are now building a new kaiser permanente hospital on this site regardless of all the community opposition...perhaps to take care of all the local people possibly sickened by the pollution left there back in the 1970s?...

(an old friend of mine said that he went down to the creek for a grade school project and noticed something very wrong...he told his teacher and it was later determined that the creek had been polluted by some upstream source...a semiconductor plant...and now i am worried about the runoff from the giant new kaiser building and parking lot now built near the same spot as the old polluting semiconductor plant...how will it effect the creek ecosystem now? i don't know, it is technically illegal now to access the creek)...

> i miss having a cherry orchard right down the street...my friends and i used to walk home from elementary school and fill our baseball caps full of ripe cherries during the springtime...i don't know how many hours of fun my friends and i had in that orchard...and there was always the legend of the farmer with the salt pellet gun...word had it that someone had been shot by the farmer with a salt pellet for stealing cherries..if i wanted to startle my friends, i would just yell 'farmer!'...

there used to be a 'KB spot' (or 'kick back spot') right by creekside in the middle of the orchard, right under an big old oak tree...it once had a tree swing that people would often use when the water was high after a rain, swinging from a rope over the rushing waters...it had a tree fort as well...i think it still does...

and for some reason when the creek was widened for flood control purposes in the mid 1990s, the KB spot and tree were both saved as an island that allows water to rush by on both sides, instead of just one side like it used to...this will always be a monument of my childhood...the creek that ran through the old cherry orchard used to be much more biologically diverse than it is today...while there are still ducks, and lots of frogs and lizards at the creek, it is not nearly as teaming with life as it was when i was young...i had to gather insects once for a test at the end of the sixth grade, and i went down to the creek and gathered about 100 different bugs in about an hour...i would be lucky to get 10 or 20 now...

and like i said before, now that developers have paved over the old cherry orchard surrounding the creek, it has warning signs telling people to stay out of the creek area on the gates outside...nature is not something you can touch anymore here in the silicon valley, unless you want to drive 15 minutes to the hills, that is...

the hills are what ultimately saved us from completely out of control development...a law was passed to protect the greenbelt surrounding the santa clara valley to control development in the hills where ground can often be unstable and undevelopable...but what did that really mean to the government and developers? that practically every square inch of acreage in between would soon be cemented over! - and it soon was...

> despite all the new and old development in the central valley and the santa clara valley in california - and now the coyote valley - these are still some of the best locations to grow food on the face of the earth, and i believe that future populations will demand that at least some of the presently cemented acreage be taken back for food production purposes >

i delivered BAM and DRIVE magazine in fremont for about fifteen years and saw the beautiful orchard fields disappear one by one...the funny thing is, while most of the bay area gave out to excessive development about half way through the 1990s, fremont stayed surprisingly like it did in the beginning, until the last few years of the 1990s when every last square inch of land got sucked up there as well...

it made me so sick, i dropped all delivery routes in fremont and pulled out for good, and i hope i never go back, as the place is a cement jungle now just like the santa clara valley...most people moved out of the area as a way of dealing with all the traffic and congestion, i just took on a new lifestyle that ruled out any getting on any of the clogged roadways - between 7-11 am to 3-7 pm (except when i worked, of course) - the roadways were packed with thousands of cubicle rats madly racing to their dotcom startups that were about to shut down...

people got regularly run over by these insane dotcom people, and the local governments didn't seem to care...their attitudes seemed to be - "we must keep commerce running smoothly and watch the bottom line...who cares if a few people get run over in the process, this is like a war, and you win a few - lose a few"(!?!)...(one sunnyvale man was even supposedly given a restraining order after almost being run over by an irate neighbor!)

i stopped visiting the mountains and going to san francisco, or driving pretty much anywhere during the internet boom...it was the biggest godawful uncoordinated traffic mess i have ever seen in my life, and it was painful watching locals leaders pat themselves on the backs for making the mess...the late 1980s gangs that once flooded this valley were replaced by a new gang of equally heartless folks, high on their stock options and looking down their noses at you...

and while it is nice to have this powerful computer - which came out of the dotcom booms' development - it would be even nicer to have kept more of the orchards...the 1990s dotcom boom in silicon valley was like a tidal wave of developmental destruction that ate up everything in its' path, and once that dotcom boom was over, all that was left was a giant semiconductor industry ghost town, and a near environmental dead zone on the santa clara valley floor...and the developers didn't care, they took their money and ran - regional planning came along a little too late, the valley of heart's delight was paved over...

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>>> the local silicon valley manufacturing group had a little too much clout with local governments back in the 1990s (and still do for that matter) and it seemed that money ruled over almost every development-oriented decision, no matter how bad it was...and once that original cement is laid in a new development, it is difficult, if not possible, to turn back...this rams the developmental foot into the doorway, and eventually forces it to stay open once that cement hardens...

the human gentrification that occurred during the internet boom in the silicon valley during the 1990s allowed rental housing prices to go through the roof because of the lack of rent controls in the area, and the out of control rental price increases - from around $500-$700 for a one bedroom apartment in 1990, to about $2000 + at the peak of the internet boom - have held to this day, making the santa clara valley one of the most expensive places to live in the US - (there is a huge overpriced rental housing glut now in the silicon valley, and some in government still talk about building more!)

i see this whole 'milk-them-till-they-are-dry' rental spike mentality as being just a precursor to the energy price manipulation that occurred shortly after during the california energy 'crises'...sure, energy price manipulation milked mostly the big electricity users, like big corporations - but rent increases continue to milk the poor who had a fixed income level, and monthly $100 rent increases ate up most of their disposable income supply, and continue to do so...

and don't wait for city councils to pass rent control laws, some city leaders actually own apartment complexes, or are closely connected to those that do...there is too much money in it for everyone...your money is their money if the 'powers that be' want it... the corn palace orchard has been targeted for development many times over, but the two brothers who own the orchard have turned down millions of dollars many times over...these old guys are 'holding their ground', and like i said before, their sons are (supposed to be) poised to take over the business when they are gone...one of the old corn palace farmers repeatedly spit on the ground as he told me about the government folks who came around to get him to sell his orchard land awhile back...he told them where to go, and they never came back...



> this is the corn palace pump station - the well is about 500 feet deep


a) new tax laws need to be created to protect those who inherit farmland, so they are not forced to sell the land because of sharp increase in taxes once officially handed over - b) embrace an expanded williamson act by which farmers can receive property tax breaks when faced with encroachment from excess suburban sprawl - c) mandate urban growth boundaries requiring developers to pay all new infrastructure costs to serve their projects and require voter approval of all new community plans - d) limit existing urban service boundaries beyond which property owners would be ineligible for city services (sewer water etc...) to then discourage excessive new development in undeveloped areas - e) introduce important blanket land policies to create progressive habitat preservation ratios that allocate land more efficiently towards future human encroachment especially in over-developed areas - f) always favor commercial rezoning and redevelopment over the new development of wildlands or agricultural zones, and offer full transitional compensation to those affected - g) support regional rapid transit systems and high speed rail lines that utilize pre-existing transportation corridors to abate inevitable future traffic headaches, and connect local, state and federal transportation officials for the creation of new regional traffic abatement policies like widespread federally mandated, irretractable residential speed hump installation to save money on law enforcement costs - h) create high rise development over sprawl whenever possible, and surround it with 1/3 orchard land, 1/3 wildland and 1/3 development (residential commercial-educational-government etc) - greenbelt wildlife corridors w/elevated rail lines running through - connecting different land sections, airports, communal childcare facilities, communal gardening zones, athletic fields, open space, etc...

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> in summary, let this be a warning to all of you out there, the bulldozers and eminent domain could be coming your way soon, unless you take action against it - for instance; 1) become an internet gadfly by emailing your opinions to your city, county, state and federal leaders @ http://www.firstgov.gov/ - 2) start a neighborhood group by handing out flyers to neighbors that may be affected by an upcoming local government decision, and list the email addresses or phone numbers of city council members on the flyers in case neighbors cannot make it to a hearing...email makes people feel less inhibited so they can express themselves better than at a public hearing where 3 minute time limit constraints make people flustered and forget what they were going to say - 3) circulate a petition about something you are passionate about changing or keeping the same...you have to be a gadfly to get the government to do their work (as they can be lazy) so be persistent - 4) organize a 'march on the whitehouse' in washington dc on every full moon for the remainder of the election year, and try to make crowds larger than the 100,000 + that surrounded the whitehouse during the nixon administration...

a few other things; just remember that governments often have 'dissent clauses', or laws that allow them to investigate anyone showing dissent at a public hearing (yes, just like in the republic of china) so just make sure that you are not breaking any stupid laws as the US government loves to take activists 'out of the fray' so to speak, and especially effective ones, by selectively enforcing stupid laws...

STUPID LAWS

> to make sure you are not breaking any stupid laws, check these links:http://www.stupidlaws.com/ - http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~jimella/laws01.htm - http://www.ahajokes.com/stupid_laws.html - http://www.justicejunction.com/judicial_injustice_stupid_laws.htm - (or go to: http://www.google.com/ and search 'stupid laws' - and watch out, during the clinton years the FBI was dedicating roughly half of its' resources to root out corruption in local government, and i can assure you the current bush administration is not doing the same, because they actually seem to like corruption...and for all of those other criminals (or miscreant youth) out there who may be reading this; people in government do not like you (especially the violent ones) and many of them would just love to lock you all up in their prisons...

BUT, those same government people also generally dislike (more like despise) activists almost equally as much as criminals, because: 1) you bring to light when they make mistakes, and make them do their jobs when they would not otherwise. - 2) you cause them to not get elected next time - 3) you point out the egg on their faces, ectetcetc...trust me, our presently republican-dominated government hates activists, and democrats really only like activists when they support democratic party causes...the green party wants to turn everyone into an activist and deepen democracy to create a more natural, and therefore more beautiful reality...and hopefully that new beautiful reality will be reflected through art -- so, take all your rebellion and turn it into activism, and boldy tell your government leaders about the egg on their faces...