| The Palo Alto History Project |
| Foreign Friends Embarcadero Road at Waverley Street |
| Foreign Friends: Decapitated Friendship It was not exactly The Statue of Liberty, but Palo Alto once had a gift of public art given in frienship from a foreign country. Those art-appreciative folks in Linkoping, Sweeden---Palo Alto’s sister city---sent a wooden statue of a couple sitting on a bench that was installed on the grassy corner of Waverley and Embarcadero. For a piece of art called “Foreign Friends,” it certainly suffered a rather unfriendly fate. In no more than a decade Foreign Friends---wooden and certainly on the eccentric side---was ridiculed, splashed with paint, doused with fuel and set afire, smashed, sawed, and twice decapitated. It was once beset by a large, addressed postcard inscribed with the words “Return to Sender.” While community donations paid for repeated restorations, the friends were eventually placed in storage, rotted and finally destroyed in 2000. Let’s hope the news didn’t get back to Sweden. -Matt Bowling |
| Sitting proudly in the old days |
| Linkoping, Sweeden |
| The Foreign Friends' old stomping grounds at Waverley and Embarcadero |
| The map below shows the Embarcadero Road area |
