On the evening of June 18, the Take 2 Dance Band set up under the trees at Holbrook-Palmer Park and a crowd of Atherton families spread blankets across the lawn for the season's first Sounds of Summer concert, food truck included. A little more than a month later, on July 15, a much smaller group of residents sat through a town council meeting about the same park, arguing over who gets access to a cracked clay tennis court. Different crowd, same lawn. That overlap is not a coincidence. It is the story of how public life works in a town with almost no commercial center to speak of.
Most Peninsula towns spread their civic energy across a Main Street. Menlo Park has Santa Cruz Avenue. Palo Alto has University Avenue. Atherton has Holbrook-Palmer Park, a former estate at 150 Watkins Avenue that now functions as concert venue, movie theater, tennis club, pickleball court, and occasional council battleground, all at once. When something changes at the park, it is effectively the only thing changing in public view.
The court fight that took three years to resolve
The most consequential thing happening at Holbrook-Palmer this summer has nothing to do with the concert series. At the July 15 council meeting, Atherton's town council directed staff to draw up plans converting the park's lone clay tennis court back into a hard court, freeing up the adjacent mixed-use court for pickleball players full time. The clay court had become a maintenance headache and, according to longtime player Bob Roeser, a safety hazard he says he nearly injured himself on.
"(It's been) three years of asking for more, more, more pickleball, so we should give them more pickleball," Mayor Stacy Holland said at the meeting.
The town plans to fund the conversion largely through its Tennis Fund, which Vice Mayor Rick DeGolia said holds roughly $200,000 as of this summer, supplemented by resident donations. Reservation rules are changing too. Pickleball players currently have to compete for slots on a single shared court, and Catherine Westover, a regular at the park, told the council that reserving weekend time often means being online at midnight a week ahead. The fix on the table pairs the physical court conversion with a reservation policy change, expanding advance booking access for tennis-only hours from one day out to four.
| Before | Under the council's July direction | |
|---|---|---|
| Court No. 2 (clay) | Shared tennis use, frequent maintenance issues | Converted to a dedicated hard court |
| Court No. 1 | Mixed tennis and pickleball | Permanent pickleball court |
| Booking window for tennis-only hours | One day in advance | Four days in advance |
None of this is dramatic by the standards of a big city parks department. But in a town with no shopping district and no other public forum to speak of, a court conversion funded by a roughly $200,000 town account, argued over by name at a public meeting, is close to the biggest thing happening. It is also a fairly clean example of how Atherton actually governs itself: slowly, then all at once, when enough residents show up and ask.
The same lawn, three nights a summer
Set against that, the rest of the park's calendar reads almost gentle. Sounds of Summer runs three Thursday evenings a year, not weekly, which is part of why each date gets circled on calendars months out:
- June 18 – Take 2 Dance Band, described by the town as an Atherton favorite returning to the North Meadow
- July 16 – Maya Band, playing a set built around Selena's music
- August 20 – Soul Practitioners, making their first Sounds of Summer appearance after being recommended by residents
Movies in the Park kicked off the season on June 4 with a screening of How to Train Your Dragon (2025) in the North Meadow, free popcorn and lawn games included. Both series draw from the same small stretch of grass that hosted the pickleball hearing. A town with a real downtown would split concerts, movie nights, and civic arguments across several blocks. Atherton runs all three through one gate.
What else changed at the park this year
Two other details matter if you use the park regularly. The playground has been closed since May 4, 2026, for renovation and upgrades, with no public date yet posted for reopening. And just this past week, on August 4, National Night Out brought the same neighborhood-block-party energy that usually fills Holbrook-Palmer out into individual streets across town instead, a rare night when Atherton's public life happened somewhere other than Watkins Avenue.
If you are also a regular on the Stanford Dish trails just over the Menlo Park line, note that the Dish area closed August 3 through August 16 for annual maintenance and wildfire fuel reduction work, so the usual loop is off the table for another week.
Why this matters if you already live here
None of these updates individually would justify a headline anywhere else. A court conversion, a concert schedule, a two-week trail closure: on their own, they are calendar notices. Stacked together, they describe something specific about how a town this size and this private actually functions. Atherton does not have a chamber of commerce district or a business improvement association steering its public identity. It has one park, one budget line for tennis and pickleball, one summer concert series, and a council meeting where residents like Catherine Westover and Bob Roeser show up by name to argue about court surfaces. The town's civic bandwidth is genuinely narrow, and that narrowness means small changes at Holbrook-Palmer carry more weight per square foot than a similar change would in a town with more places to spread its attention.
That holds true whether you are heading to the park for Soul Practitioners on August 20 or just trying to figure out why a $200,000 tennis fund became a three-year conversation. In Atherton, the park is not one option among many for a summer evening. It is close to the only one, which is exactly why residents keep showing up for it, on the lawn and in the meeting room both.
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