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 few weeks 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 reflects the park’s role as a setting for public life in Atherton.
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 discussion, all at once. The park is a prominent setting for the town's public life.
The court plan that followed three years of requests
The most consequential thing happening at Holbrook-Palmer this summer has nothing to do with the concert series. According to The Almanac, 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.
The Almanac quoted Mayor Stacy Holland at the meeting: "(It's been) three years of asking for more, more, more pickleball, so we should give them more pickleball."
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 | Planned conversion to a dedicated hard court |
| Court No. 1 | Mixed tennis and pickleball | Planned as a 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 Holbrook-Palmer serving as a focal point for public life, 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. In other towns, concerts, movie nights, and civic arguments may take place 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 earlier this month, 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 a few more days.
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. Holbrook-Palmer is a focal point for Atherton's public life, so changes there can carry particular weight for residents.
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 a central gathering place for summer evenings, which is why residents keep showing up for it, on the lawn and in the meeting room both.
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