Glossary

The words you’ll hear around Mountain View — places, history, weather and local ways, explained

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Architecture

Adobe Building: The 1934 community hall on Moffett Boulevard, built of adobe bricks made on site, and Mountain View’s first community center.
Rengstorff House: Mountain View’s oldest home, an Italianate Victorian built about 1867 by Henry Rengstorff and now in Shoreline Park.

Events

Art & Wine Festival: The free September street festival on Castro Street, held for more than half a century.
Community tree lighting: The city’s December evening of music, crafts and the lighting of the community tree outside City Hall.
Farmers’ market: The Sunday farmers’ market in the downtown Caltrain station lot, running since 1994.
Fourth of July at Shoreline: The city’s Independence Day fireworks with the San Francisco Symphony at Shoreline Amphitheatre.
Monster Bash: The city’s free Halloween festival in Rengstorff Park each October.
Prune & Apricot Exposition: A Mountain View fruit festival first held in 1915 that grew to six days and 25,000 visitors by 1927.

History & People

Castro family: The Californio family that owned Rancho Pastoria de las Borregas and gave Mountain View its main street, its cemetery and its church land.
Jacob Shumway: The storekeeper and first postmaster credited with naming Mountain View.
Japanese American incarceration: The forced removal of Mountain View’s Japanese American families in 1942 under Executive Order 9066.
Mary J. Gates: Mountain View’s first historian, whose history of the rancho ran in the Mountain View Register in 1894 and as a booklet in 1895.
Pacific Press: The Seventh-day Adventist publishing house that moved to Mountain View in 1904 and printed books in dozens of languages until 1984.
Rancho Pastoria de las Borregas: The 1842 Mexican land grant, “ranch of the ewe or lamb pasture,” that covered most of today’s Mountain View and Sunnyvale.
Rancho Posolmi: The 1844 land grant to Lupe Yñigo, an Ohlone man, which covered the land that is now Moffett Field.
Stage stop: The stagecoach station on the San Francisco–San Jose road where Mountain View began in the early 1850s.
USS Macon: The Navy’s rigid airship, 785 feet long, based in Hangar One from 1933 until it was lost off Point Sur in 1935.
Valley of Heart’s Delight: The old name for the orchard-covered Santa Clara Valley before Silicon Valley, when Mountain View shipped prunes, apricots and cherries.

Local Life & Customs

Mountain View Voice: The city’s independent local newspaper, founded in 1992 and online-only since 2020.
Parisian burger: The double-patty burger of Linda’s Drive-In on El Camino Real, named for the Parisian Bakery roll it came on.
Pedestrian mall: The car-free stretch of Castro Street between Evelyn Avenue and California Street.
Sister cities: Mountain View’s twin towns: Iwata in Japan and Hasselt in Belgium.
Spanish Town: The neighborhood north of the tracks, along Alma, Washington and Jackson Streets, settled by immigrants from Spain by the 1920s.

Nature & Wildlife

Burrowing owl: The small ground-nesting owl that lives at Shoreline, one of four Bay Area sites where it still breeds.
Monarch butterfly: The migrating butterfly the city plants milkweed for under the Mayor’s Monarch Pledge.
Permanente Creek: A 13.3-mile creek from Black Mountain through Los Altos and Mountain View to the bay, named for its year-round flow.
Stevens Creek: The creek that runs from Black Mountain through Mountain View to the bay at Whisman Slough, named for wagon-train captain Elisha Stephens.

Places

Castro Street: Downtown Mountain View’s main street, running seven blocks from the Caltrain station to El Camino Real, named for Crisanto Castro.
Civic Center Plaza: The plaza on Castro Street shared by City Hall, the Center for the Performing Arts and the public library, home of the community tree lighting.
Computer History Museum: The museum of computing at 1401 N. Shoreline Boulevard, in a former Silicon Graphics building, open since 2002.
Deer Hollow Farm: The working homestead farm in Rancho San Antonio that the City of Mountain View runs, with goats, pigs, sheep, a cow and an 1850s cabin.
El Camino Real: The old Spanish road, State Route 82, that marks the southern end of downtown and carried the stagecoaches that founded the town.
Googleplex: Google’s headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, in the former Silicon Graphics campus.
Hangar One: The eight-acre airship hangar built at Moffett Field in 1933 for the USS Macon, one of the world’s largest freestanding structures.
Moffett Field: The former naval air station on the bay between Mountain View and Sunnyvale, now Moffett Federal Airfield run by NASA Ames.
Moffett Field Museum: The volunteer museum of the Moffett Field Historical Society, beside Hangar One.
Monta Loma: A neighborhood of mid-century modern homes, including about 200 Eichlers, where Steve Jobs spent part of his childhood.
Mountain View: A Santa Clara County city on the southwest shore of San Francisco Bay, named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with 82,376 residents in 2020.
Mountain View Station: The railroad town laid out beside the depot in the 1860s, and today’s downtown Mountain View station for Caltrain and VTA light rail.
North Bayshore: The district north of U.S. 101, home to Shoreline Park, the amphitheatre, Google and the Computer History Museum.
Old Mountain View: The original stage-stop village on El Camino Real near Grant Road, and today the name of the residential neighborhood south of downtown.
Pioneer Memorial Park: The downtown park beside the library on the site of Mountain View’s first cemetery.
Rancho San Antonio: The county park and open space preserve in the foothills, home of Deer Hollow Farm and trails up Black Mountain.
Rengstorff Park: The city park on Rengstorff Avenue with the community center, pool and skate park, and the home of Monster Bash.
Shoreline Amphitheatre: The outdoor concert venue for 22,500 people built by the city with Bill Graham, open since 1986.
Shoreline at Mountain View: The 750-acre bayside park and wildlife area built over a closed landfill, open since 1983.
Shoreline Lake: The 50-acre saltwater sailing lake at the heart of Shoreline Park.
Stevens Creek Trail: The paved walking and biking trail along Stevens Creek, about five miles from Shoreline Park to Heatherstone Way.

Tech & Science

Birthplace of Silicon Valley: The IEEE Milestone, dedicated in 2018, that marks 391 San Antonio Road as where silicon electronics began in the valley.
NASA Ames: NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, founded in 1939 and home to the world’s largest wind tunnel test section.
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory: William Shockley’s 1956 company at 391 San Antonio Road, the first in the valley to make silicon devices.