Facebook, which started out in a dormitory at Harvard, transferred to a rented house in Silicon Valley and now occupies a cluster of office buildings in Palo Alto, California, is about to make its biggest move yet: to a 57-acre campus in the small city of Menlo Park about 30 miles south of San Francisco.
Construction workers are already swarming over the campus, a series of stucco-covered low-rise buildings occupied by Sun Microsystems until Sun was bought by Oracle Corporation last year. Facebook plans to move in some employees by July and have most of its 2,000 workers, including its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, on site within 10 months. The campus will resemble an urban streetscape, with cafeterias by Roman and Williams, the New York design firm behind the Ace Hotel and its Breslin and John Dory restaurants.
But if the campus will be a microcosm of a city, it’s not clear that the real city around the campus — including the largely Mexican-American neighbourhood of Belle Haven — will benefit from Facebook’s presence.
For one thing, the Facebook site is surrounded on three sides by water, and separated from the rest of Menlo Park by railroad tracks and a divided highway.
The site is so insular that in the two decades it was occupied by Sun Microsystems it was nicknamed Sun Quentin (a reference to San Quentin prison, about 40 miles north). And because Facebook provides its employees with three meals a day in its own cafeterias, there may be little reason for them to venture off the property.
At Mi Tierra Linda, a Mexican food store on Willow Road (which dead-ends at the Facebook site), workers said they were not aware that Facebook was heading their way. But one customer, Freddy Bueno, 24, said he knew the company was coming and hoped it would be good for local businesses.
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“Facebook has a huge global presence,” said the city manager of Menlo Park, Glen Rojas, who said he was optimistic that the company would attract other businesses to the city, which has a population of about 30,000. At the same time, he said, there is concern about how large a presence Facebook will become. Sun had 3,600 employees on site; Facebook, with a work force that is growing by 50 percent a year, could exceed that number, said John Tenanes, Facebook’s director of global real estate.
In fact, because Sun’s engineers had private offices, while most Facebook employees work in unpartitioned spaces, Mr. Tenanes said the one million square-foot campus could handle a much larger population than it was originally designed for.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service