National Park Service and Town of Danville Launch Zero-Emission Shuttle and Restored Courtyard at Eugene O’Neill Tao House

Rangers with the National Park Service and cultural heritage coordinators from the Town of Danville inaugurated a zero-emission battery-electric visitor shuttle and unveiled a newly conserved historic courtyard garden on Saturday afternoon at the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site (Tao House) at 1000 Kuss Road in the Las Trampas hills west of downtown Danville. Built in 1937 by America's only Nobel Prize-winning playwright, the Spanish Colonial and Chinese-inspired hillside estate is where O'Neill wrote his final masterpieces, including The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Because narrow, winding Kuss Road is closed to private passenger vehicles to preserve neighborhood safety, all visitors board a complimentary National Park Service shuttle departing from the Museum of the San Ramon Valley at 205 Railroad Avenue in downtown Danville. The new 16-passenger Ford E-Transit cutaway minibus features a whisper-quiet electric drivetrain, a hydraulic wheelchair lift, and panoramic hillside windows, eliminating diesel exhaust along the 1.5-mile climb into the Las Trampas Regional Wilderness corridor.

At the 158-acre historic site, preservation masons repointed the whitewashed basalt-and-adobe zig-zag garden walls designed by Carlotta Monterey O'Neill to ward off evil spirits, restored the koi reflection pond, and stabilized the historic walnut orchard paths with permeable decomposed granite. Visitors can also borrow bilingual audio-description headsets in the Old Barn performing arts center.

The $310,000 transit and preservation upgrade was funded through the National Park Service Legacy Restoration Fund and the Eugene O'Neill Foundation, Tao House. Reservations for Wednesday through Sunday shuttle departures at 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM can be booked free of charge on the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site Portal.