A University Built From Grief, a Tower That Was Never a Nozzle

Stanford exists because of a fifteen-year-old's death. Leland Stanford Jr. fell ill with typhoid while touring Europe with his parents in 1884 and died in Florence before he made it home. His father, railroad baron Leland Stanford, told his grieving wife that "the children of California shall be our children" — and within weeks the two of them decided to found a university in their only son's memory rather than build a private monument. The Main Quad you're walking through today is, in a very literal sense, a grave marker that grew into one of the world's leading research universities.

Coit Tower looks so much like an old brass fire-hose nozzle that most visitors assume it was built that way on purpose, as a tribute to the fire-obsessed socialite Lillie Hitchcock Coit who funded it. The tower's actual architect, Arthur Brown Jr., said explicitly and repeatedly that the resemblance was coincidental — pure architectural styling, not a firefighting reference. The myth took hold anyway, fed by newspapers that liked the story too much to check it, and it's outlived every correction issued since the tower opened in 1933.