The Town Gets a Name
The village of Cupertino sprang up at the crossroads of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road (now DeAnza Boulevard) and Stevens Creek Road. It was first known as West Side, but by 1898, the post office at the Crossroads needed a new name to distinguish it from other similarly named towns. John T. Doyle, a San Francisco lawyer and historian, had given the name Cupertino to his winery, in recognition of the name bestowed on the nearby creek by Pedro Font. In 1904, the name was applied to the Crossroads and to the post office when the Home Union Store incorporated under the name, The Cupertino Store, and moved to the northeast corner of the Crossroads
Many of Cupertino’s pioneer settlers planted grapes in the late 1800s. Vineyards and wineries proliferated on Montebello Ridge, on the lower foothills, and on the flat lands below. Around 1895 the flourishing wine industry was struck by phylloxera (a root louse). It virtually destroyed 75% of the vineyards in 5 years. A few of the more substantial vineyardists resorted to grafting, while many others switched to French prunes (prunes are a type of plum which dries without spoiling), peaches, apricots, cherries, plums, walnuts, and almonds.
As these orchards flourished the valley became known for the spring profusion of blossoms. Many more people passed through the Cupertino area first by electric railway and later by car to view all the blossoms in the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.” Because of the electric railway, the Monta Vista area of Cupertino developed. Monta Vista was the name of its first housing tract.
Geography
Cupertino is located at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay. The eastern part of the city, located in the Santa Clara Valley, is flat, while the western part of the city slopes into the Santa Cruz Mountains. Cupertino borders San Jose and Santa Clara to the east, Saratoga to the south, Sunnyvale and Los Altos to the north, and Loyola to the northwest.
Several streams run through Cupertino on their way to south San Francisco Bay, including (from north to south): Permanente Creek, Stevens Creek, San Tomas Aquino Creek and its Smith Creek, the Regnart Creek and Prospect Creek tributaries of Calabazas Creek, and Saratoga Creek.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 11.3 square miles (29 km2), 99.99% of it land and 0.01% of it water.
Neighborhoods
Cupertino is made up of numerous subdivisions, most of them developed since the 1960s. Most of Cupertino’s contemporary properties were developed around 1960. The area between Stevens Creek Boulevard, Miller Avenue, Bollinger Road, and Lawrence Expressway contains 224 Eichler homes, built during the 1950s. Two of the newest parts of Cupertino are among its oldest housing tracts. Monta Vista and Rancho Rinconada were developed outside of the city’s boundaries in the 1950s and before. Rancho Rinconada was annexed in 1999 and the last part of Monta Vista was annexed in 2004. The neighborhood of Seven Springs is at the southwestern tip of Cupertino and was developed in the late 1980s. The newest and most northwestern neighborhood, Oak Valley, borders Rancho San Antonio Park and was developed around the turn of the millennium.
Cupertino is known for its high housing prices as the majority of residential properties are multimillion-dollar homes as of the priciest housing market peak of 2022, with the entry-point into a single-family home at around 2 million dollars in the Cupertino HS area, and the entry point at around 2.6 million dollars in the Monta Vista HS area. Many smaller homes start from the high $2 millions, mid-size homes start from the mid $3 millions, and larger executive homes start from mid $4 millions and can go up to as much as $7 million, as of the 2022 peak. However, townhouses and condos with similar square footage are relatively less expensive, owing mainly to negligible lot sizes and the many common walls and areas. Over the course of thirteen and a half years since the last late 2008 housing market crash, overall real estate prices have more than tripled.
Economy
Cupertino is one of many cities that claim to be the “heart” of Silicon Valley, as many semiconductor and computer companies were founded there and in the surrounding areas. The new worldwide headquarters for Apple Inc. is located there in a modern circular complex. It is a 150-acre campus between Interstate 280, N Wolfe Rd, E Homestead Rd and along Tantau Ave one mile east of the old campus. The nine properties (50-acre) south of Pruneridge Avenue were bought in 2006, the property (100-acre) north of it in 2010.
On June 7, 2011, Steve Jobs gave a presentation to Cupertino City Council, detailing the architectural design of the new building and its environs. The campus houses 13,000 employees in one central four-story circular building surrounded by extensive landscaping, with parking mainly underground and the rest centralized in a parking structure.
In 2002, Cupertino had a labor force of 25,780 with an unemployment rate of 4.5%. The unemployment rate for Santa Clara County as a whole was 8.4%.
One of the major employers in the area is the aggregate rock quarry and cement plant in the foothills to the west of Cupertino, the Permanente Quarry. Owned and operated by Lehigh Southwest Cement, it was founded by Henry J. Kaiser as the Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant in 1939. It provided the majority of the cement used in the construction of the Shasta Dam. It supplied the 6 million barrels (950,000 m3) of cement over a nine-mile (14 km)-long conveyor system. The cement plant is the sole reason for the railroad line that runs through the cit
