City Hall Plaza, Palo Alto

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City Hall is kind of a plain 1960s-ish building with a brick and grass plaza called Martin Luther King Plaza. In fact, this area was just designated King Plaza in 2008, and a new plaque reads: "This public plaza is dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, both of whom made this world a better place for all of us."

In 2005 an odd art project begun and is still ongoing. The city paid an artist some $10,000 to work for six months or so and photograph all of the houses in the city in an effort to determine the crucial average color of Palo Alto. The project continued for some three years and is now on display. In the center of the plaza you will find a ramshackle trailer that might have come straight from the mountains of West Virginia if it weren't for the fact that it solar powered. This was supposedly the "artist's" office during the project.

On the side of City Hall you will see plastered 17,680 photographs of every property in the city. You can read the instructions and find your house on the wall using the telescopes provided at the far end of Civic Center Plaza.

Read the news story about this wacky project here: http://voice.paly.net/view_story.php?id=2788