Los Benditos & Thurston Park, Los Altos Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

This triangle was mapped for houses in the 1940s, a few years before the tracts across Foothill Expressway. The first map in the county's map books is Tract 222, recorded in January 1945 along Fremont Avenue, with Richardson and Kensington avenues and Grant Road. In July 1948 came Los Benditos, Tract 532: 31 lots on Kensington, Miguel, Brucito and Peninsular avenues, most of them 85 feet wide and about 112 feet deep, drawn by Palo Alto civil engineer Arthur G. James. Thurston Park, Tract 657, followed in September 1949 on part of the old Granger Subdivision, adding Thurston Avenue down to Grant Road. Two small maps in 1950, the Jolly Smith Tract and the Hazelaar Tract, filled in the narrow west tip with Jolly Court and Hazelaar Way. Despite the name, Thurston Park is a tract, not a park.

The triangle's long side is a railroad line. The 1948 Los Benditos map labels the land along its southwest edge as property of the Peninsula Railroad Company, with Peninsular Avenue running beside it. The city's history page says Southern Pacific service in Los Altos ended in 1964 and the right-of-way became Foothill Expressway, which is what runs along that edge today.

City parcel records show the result: 23 of the 123 houses here date from the 1940s and 58 from the 1950s, and none from the 1960s. About one house in five has been built since 2000.