Byxbee Park, California

Palo Alto meets the Bay in an interesting collection of terminal sites. A former landfill for the city lies next to the wastewater treatment plant for the region, which discharges into the adjacent slough. When the runway for the local airport was built, the small yacht harbor’s drainage was hampered, and the harbor silted up and was abandoned, although some of the old club buildings remain next to an aerated duck pond. Land art constructed on the closed landfill, called Byxbee Park, include a collection of sculpted mounds, poles, K-rail, and other structures. Next to the park is an abandoned radio station, KFS, a famous old shortwave broadcasting facility, which transmitted its final radiotelegraph message in July 1999 in Morse code, using the words Samuel Morse uttered 155 years prior, at the invention of the telegraph: “What hath God wrought.”