By Khalida Sarwari
Long after its headquarters moved to Hayward in 2016, the Ampex sign remained at the company’s former site in Redwood City, a beloved fixture for drivers on Highway 101 and a standing testament to the birth of Silicon Valley’s Golden Age.
For decades, someone would light the sign every night. But last week that came to an end. The last vestige of Silicon Valley’s pioneering companies of digital recording systems was finally removed to make way for Stanford University’s new satellite campus, leaving many who worked for the company or have a nostalgic connection to the sign somewhat sad.
James Glover started his business career at Ampex in the early 1980s when the company was still in its heyday. Though he now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he has fond memories of driving past the iconic sign on return trips to the Bay Area. Even so, he was surprised it had taken this long to come down.
“It was a visual reminder of how great that company once was,” he said. “I’m a bit sad that a final bit of Ampex’s legacy, its history, is removed. Now, there’s really no memory of such a great company.”
Founded in 1944 by Russian-American electrical engineer Alexander Matveevich Poniatoff, the company was moved from San Carlos to Redwood City in the early 1950s where it ushered in an era that led to significant and lasting impacts on the radio and TV industries. In 1954, in a Memphis recording studio equipped with an Ampex reel-to-reel audio tape recording machine an unknown truck driver named Elvis Presley recorded his first single, “That’s All Right.” And in 1956, the company created the world’s first videotape recorder in a string of other successes that cemented Ampex’s status as one of Silicon Valley’s first tech titans.
Stanford, which owns the land Ampex occupied for several decades, started taking down the sign last week amid a last-ditch effort by a dedicated group of residents and former employees to preserve the landmark. All five letters have been dismantled and placed in storage; now the university is working to remove the structure that held the letters.
Not everyone agrees on the sign’s historical significance. Jim Gernand served on Redwood City’s Historic Resources Advisory Committee when Stanford first notified the city of its plans in 2009. He said he found it unusual that the historic reports were prepared by Stanford employees instead of an impartial source.
“Their conclusion was that it wasn’t historic but when we looked at the evidence… we had concluded that the Ampex sign had special meaning to the community and recommended to the planning commision that it be treated as a historic resource,” Gernand said. But ultimately, the City Council disagreed, he said.
In an email today, Redwood City’s Mayor Ian Bain explained that the council had approved a development agreement that stipulated the project pay respect to the site’s historical elements.
“Retaining the sign somewhere on the campus would be consistent with that requirement, however, it was not clear what Stanford would do with it,” he said.
He said he recognizes that Ampex was an important part of Redwood City’s history and that he’d be willing to work with Stanford to find a location for the sign.
“I would like to see Stanford come up with a creative way to incorporate the sign into its campus, where people could visit it and learn a bit about the company’s history,” he said. “If possible, I would like to see the sign stay in our community.”
E.J. Miranda, a spokesman for Stanford, said the university has offered the sign to a variety of local historical groups as well as Ampex.
“We are primarily interested in groups that have some affiliation to preserving historic and/or technological elements of the Peninsula,” he said. “The size of the letters is a limiting factor in who would be able to take the sign.”
For Nick Cuccia, a network engineer who lives in Merced, the sign’s removal symbolizes the loss of “old times.” He remembers seeing the sign from the bus on school trips from Santa Barbara and later when he’d attend swap meets at the Ampex building.
“One of the things I remember seeing on 101 was the Ampex sign,” he said. “After the first trip that became the touchpoint for me; it was a landmark.”
He added, “When I come back to the Bay Area three or four times a year now, I find yet another thing is gone.”
