The Hostess House

Most people who walk into the MacArthur Park restaurant at 27 University Avenue come for dinner. They are also stepping into one of the oldest public buildings in Palo Alto, designed by one of California's most celebrated architects. The building began life in 1918 at an Army camp across the creek. A year later the town moved it here and made it the heart of civic life.

This page tells that story from the war through the restaurant years. It also explains the building's landmark status and what to look for inside. For the camp it came from, read our page on Camp Fremont.

What was a hostess house?

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Army built training camps across the country. Mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts traveled to visit the soldiers. Officials worried about where those visits would happen. According to the building's National Register nomination, the War Department asked the YWCA to build, equip and run hostess houses at 40 Army training camps on the mainland.

A hostess house was a supervised, homelike meeting place. Soldiers could sit with their families by a fire, share a meal and talk. Women staff ran the house and kept visits respectable.

Sources disagree on one detail. The nomination and most histories credit the YWCA. The state plaque placed in 1976 says the building was designed for the YMCA, which ran separate recreation huts at Camp Fremont. Our landmarks guide notes the same conflict.

Julia Morgan's design

Julia Morgan was the first woman licensed as an architect in California and is best known today for Hearst Castle. The nomination calls the Hostess House a distinguished example of her simple, functional design on a tight budget. It opened in May 1918 and served the camp until October that year.

The building is a one-story, light wood frame structure with board-and-batten walls, laid out in an H-shape. Its key parts were:

• A central reception hall with exposed roof trusses and six dormer windows.
• Brick fireplaces at each end of the hall, set under overhanging balconies and wrapped by built-in benches. They were the only heat.
• Verandas along the front and the back.
• A men's wing with a dining room and kitchen.
• A women's and children's wing with an apartment for the resident director.

Morgan painted it light gray with bright furnishings and lanterns. The nomination says it and the camp library were the only two painted buildings at Camp Fremont. It also points out a resemblance to her 1910 St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, a classic of the Bay Region tradition.

The move to Palo Alto in 1919

The war ended in November 1918 and the camp was sold off for lumber. Palo Alto wanted the Hostess House. The YWCA handed it to the city for $1, a token payment made for legal reasons.

1. April 10, 1919: Morgan met with the city's committee and approved a new site, an oak-shaded spot near the railroad station on land leased from Stanford. She agreed to raise the building four feet, add heating and brick terraces and repaint it gray.
2. May 1919: Workers detached the wings and cut the building into nine sections. Teams of horses pulled them on rollers across San Francisquito Creek.
3. November 11, 1919: The city dedicated the building to those who died in the war. Ward Winslow's centennial history of Palo Alto describes a procession of about 3,000 people led by the Stanford Band, the Base Hospital Band and the Stanford ROTC.

The first city community center

Renamed the Community House, the building became what its state plaque calls the first municipally sponsored community center in the nation. That was the main reason it won landmark status. Palo Alto had no other large public hall and the town filled it.

• Dances, club meetings and public lectures.
• Amateur plays. In the 1920s the back veranda served as a stage for an outdoor theater, with mounded earth seating for about 500.
• Night classes, an employment bureau and a health center.
• Meetings of World War I veterans.

When the city founded its Playgrounds and Community Department in 1929, the new department set up its offices here. The area around the building became known as El Camino Park, a name the nomination traces to the Community House activities.

The building soon proved too small. According to Winslow, the city gladly accepted a larger community theater from philanthropist Lucie Stern in 1933. The Lucie Stern Community Center on Middlefield Road, designed by Birge Clark, took over most of the work. Read more on our Birge Clark page and see what plays there now in our theater guide.

Decline and a close call

After the community programs moved out, the city leased the building to private tenants. They changed it a great deal. Leaseholders removed the balconies, boxed in the hall ceiling to save on heat and painted or boarded over many windows. By the 1970s it was painted olive green and looked tired.

In 1974 the city manager announced a plan to tear the building down when its lease ran out in October 1976. Preservationists moved first. The state had already recorded it as a Point of Historical Interest in 1969. Dorothy F. Renery prepared a National Register nomination for the Palo Alto Historical Association in October 1975. The council of the day was friendlier to preservation and the demolition plan died.

• July 30, 1976: Listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
• November 11, 1976: State plaque placed as California Historical Landmark No. 895.

The plaque calls the Hostess House the only remaining structure from California's World War I Army training camps.

MacArthur Park restaurant

The restaurant company behind MacArthur Park rented the building in 1979 and renovated it into a dining room. Local press dates the opening to 1981. An architectural database gives 1982. Its American menu has long centered on ribs, tri tip and burgers.

The pandemic nearly ended the run. In August 2020 MacArthur Park announced it would close until 2021, then quickly reopened for takeout after customers asked it to stay. It was still open in October 2026 and its website listed dinner service Tuesday through Saturday. Check the restaurant's site for current hours before you go. Our food and drink guide covers other downtown choices.

The 2012 plan to move it again

In 2012 developer John Arrillaga proposed four office towers and a theater for the 27 University Avenue site. The plan called for moving the Hostess House. The latest drawings that year suggested a spot in nearby El Camino Park, where it would become a community center again. The City Council dropped a planned ballot measure on December 4, 2012, after public outcry over the size of the towers and the process. The next day the Historic Resources Board criticized the move. Board members warned that relocation could cost the building its National Register status. One member noted that the building had spent only a year in Menlo Park, so its Palo Alto site is essentially its original home. The towers were never built and the Hostess House stayed put.

Visiting the Hostess House

The building stands at 27 University Avenue between the Caltrain tracks and El Camino Real, a two-minute walk from the Palo Alto station. The state plaque is outside. Inside, look up at the hall's trusses and dormers and find the brick fireplaces at each end. The interior is a working restaurant, so the polite way to see it is over a meal or a drink. Our Caltrain guide covers getting there by train.

Frequently asked questions