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With such an evolving self-image, it’s fitting that the oldest city in in California's Amador Valley is a misnomer. Rancher and landowner Robert Livermore, whose image sits atop the town’s famous totem pole, had been dead for more than ten years when his friend William Mendenhall established the city of Livermore in 1869.
Ravenswood Winery picking crew (1940s)
Courtesy Livermore Heritage Guild
In the early nineteenth century, the area currently known as the Tri-Valley was merely grazing land for livestock. The Gold Rush and subsequent railroad growth brought prosperity; by the late 1800s Livermore boasted numerous cattle ranches and vineyards, some of which are still in operation today. Businesses and train depots for what later became the Union Pacific Rail soon created a bustling downtown district. Located off of Highway 84 and First Street, downtown Livermore now sports local gift shops peddling wines and Western garb, small restaurants and historic landmarks such as the Carnegie Building and town flagpole.
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The twentieth century saw Livermore’s agricultural beginnings develop into full-fledged suburbia. In 1952, the Department of Energy established the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a nuclear physics research facility. Four years later, the Sandia National Laboratories opened. With Livermore’s new labs came a new nickname, the “City of Energy and Progress.”
More job opportunities brought more residents, and the swelling population – from 4,000 in 1950 to 40,000 in 1970 – led to tensions between “old-timers” and recent arrivals. Fear of change supplanted fear of nuclear radiation as vineyards gave way to housing developments, four-lane highways paved over cattle fields and office complexes obscured the hills. Local photographer Bill Owens’s photo collection Suburbia and its depiction of boozing barbequers made Livermore an unwitting representative of post-war “suburban sprawl.”
According to former Livermore Mayor Cathie Brown, sixty percent of the Laboratory’s current employees live in the Tri-Valley. Population continues to increase at a rate of two-and-a-half percent a year, double the national and California averages. Livermore has grown younger: the median age is 35. Tract homes and refurbished Victorians now house young families, although the ethnic breakdown remains more than 80 percent Caucasian. With its four golf courses and vast parks, the city also maintains an average household income that places it at solidly middle to upper-middle class.
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Photo by Glenn James
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Thousands of windmills dot the green hills along the Interstate 580 and the old Altamont Pass. But these graceful turbines are actually one of the largest wind-fueled power plants in the world, generating energy for nearly a million homes each year. As the science and tech industries transformed Livermore’s image as well as its landscape, residents have struggled to preserve, as well as redefine, the town’s identity.
Livermore’s 22 square miles expanded with the implementation of the South Livermore Valley Area Plan, which devoted more acreage to vineyards and parks. When freeway megastores such as Target and Wal-Mart drove commerce away from the sleepier downtown district, the city announced plans to build a community center and arts facility to spur in-town spending.
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Photo by James Willard
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“The Livermore where I grew up in was the Livermore where you could see the farms,” says painter Tilli Calhoun. Possible extensions of Livermore’s borders north of I-580 could add even another 30,000 people to the population. Yet the town’s good-humored recovery from its famed time capsule burial misplacement proved that it hadn’t lost its identity along with the burial map. Through annual events such as the Sunol Bed Race (participants steer double beds through a 200-foot course) and the Livermore Rodeo (started as a World War I fundraiser and now a week-long televised event) Livermore demonstrates how a town can not only survive change, but also prosper as it navigates the seemingly contradictory space between rural and suburban and new and old.
View a photo tour of Livermore yesterday and today >>
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