Charleston Meadows, Palo Alto Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

Long before the tract houses, this was rancho land. In 1847 Don Secundino Robles and his brother Teodoro bought the 8,418-acre Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito, which took in south Palo Alto and Barron Park. The park on Park Boulevard now carries his name. When Joseph Eichler's crews arrived a century later, the ground was still unincorporated, with no city water. Early buyers remembered it as open country, with plank walkways laid over the mud.

Charleston Meadow, as the Eichler tract is known, was one of his first in Palo Alto; the city's Eichler map dates it to 1950-51. Architects Anshen + Allen drew seven floor plans, plus mirrored versions, for about 100 houses. Sales opened at the start of 1951, while streets, fences and yards were still unfinished. The first houses had three bedrooms and one bath, about 1,250 square feet, a narrow kitchen screened from the living room by cabinets, and a Dutch door to the yard. An original owner told an Eichler publication it was one of the last Eichler tracts sided in tongue-and-groove redwood rather than scored plywood. Eichler and architect Bob Anshen helped found the tract's original architectural control committee, which the Charleston Meadow Homeowners Association later revived.

The edges filled in later. County records date the blocks near West Meadow Drive to the early 1960s. On El Camino Real, Hyatt Rickey's hotel opened in May 1952 as Rickeys Garden Hotel and closed in June 2005; its site is now the townhouse and condo blocks on Rickey's Way and the lanes around it, mostly built between 2005 and 2014. The 1950s core has held up: an Eichler publication describes it as largely intact, with a handful of replacement houses and a few two-story additions, and the city has since mapped a single-story overlay over it.