2111 University Avenue, East Palo Alto 94303
The last visible evidence of a late-1960s effort to bring health care to the low-income Black and immigrant neighborhoods of East Palo Alto lives on, for now, in an unassuming building in East Palo Alto.
The area is a study in contrasts. University Avenue stretches across just over four miles from the marshy edge of the San Francisco Bay to the old Southern Pacific rail lines that are now used by the commuter-rail CalTrain. At one end is Facebook’s headquarters campus in Menlo Park; at the other is Stanford University. In between, the town of East Palo Alto endures as a working-class Black and Brown enclave in the increasingly superwealthy peninsula.
In East Palo Alto, as is the case in many communities of color throughout the US, one of the forms racism takes is in limited access to basic medical care. In the late 1950s, what would become East Palo Alto was still an unincorporated and underdeveloped community (at the time it was still called Ravenswood). Private medical practices were sparse, and since the community lacked an organized municipal government, San Mateo County failed to provide much in the way of services. Because of this, families had to travel long distances to access care from clinicians who were not particularly attuned to the experiences or conditions of East Palo Alto residents. The result for many was poor health and premature death.
East Palo Alto residents, in connection with radical political movements and the expansion of Great Society programs, organized the East Palo Alto–Menlo Park Neighborhood Health Center in 1967. The center provided community-focused access to doctors and health advice—for example, counseling on sickle cell anemia—and a pharmacy. The clinic and information center opened on Bay Road. Within two years it had incorporated as a nonprofit, tapped into federal funding, and moved to its current location on University. Eventually the center established a foundation to oversee its multiple services and was renamed in honor of Black surgeon Charles Drew. In 1983 the pharmacy was split off as an independent entity; the Drew Health Foundation lost federal funding in the early 2000s and could no longer provide health-care services. And at the time of this writing, the land under the facility was slated to be redeveloped into (yet more) class-A office buildings to house the unabated expansion of Silicon Valley. (Ofelia Bello)