Since the building’s completion in 1984, the “townies” who lived at the base of the hill would joke that the tallest and newest addition in Atherton’s meager skyline liked to send everyone home early during winter by announcing nightfall several hours prematurely. By five-thirty, the last of the insurance adjusters and bank tellers made the short walk to the railroad stations where they would board commuter trains that would carry them as far as Boston and Connecticut, leaving behind an empty stage set of art deco entrances and sidewalks blown clean of litter by the increasingly ferocious winds off the bay. As the city below drained of life, Atherton Hill glowed with a corona of light. An early winter had stripped the hill; naked branches spiderwebbed among Gothic spires and Victorian rooftops and the streets snaked up the hillside toward the university campus, laid bare in winding concrete strips. The water of the bay usually warmed any snowfall into dreary sheets of rain.
