Frenchman's Tower

The Frenchman's Tower stands as a red brick anomaly in the middle of a Palo Alto residential neighborhood, rising forty feet with a prominent iron lantern at its peak. Peter Coutts, a French immigrant who arrived in California in the eighteen seventies, built it as a folly to decorate his sprawling estate. Local legend claims he constructed it as a lookout for his daughter or as a hiding place for gold, though records suggest he simply favored the aesthetics of European rural architecture.