Geology
Why does Berkeley have
a waterfront? A good place to begin
is in fairly recent geologic history,
with the sideways
friction of the North American and
Pacific Plates, cause of our area’s
famous earthquakes. Just a few million
years ago, the ruptures resulting
from this friction led a longish
block of crust to tilt downward to
the east. Its higher west portion
formed what became the hills of San Francisco and Marin; its
eastern portion formed a long valley.
More recently, perhaps as little
as a million years ago, the sharp
scarp on the block just east of this
valley was similarly tilted, with
the uplifted edge forming the Berkeley
Hills – probably still rising
today. These rocks -- a mix of old sediments,
volcanic outpourings, and scrapings
from the clash of the great plates – was already
deeply fractured, and eroded rapidly
into the valley as they rose.
Some
10,000 years ago, as the last Ice
Age released water from glaciers,
sea level rose. The valley between
the San
Francisco and
Berkeley Hills was flooded, forming
today’s San Francisco Bay. A few hilltops
on the down-tilted edge of the long
block remained dry, forming El Cerrito
del Sur (Fleming
Point), Cerrito de San Antonio (Albany
Hill), Brooks Island, and Potrero San Pablo (the hills of
Point Richmond).
Creeks
flowing from the rising, eroding
Berkeley Hills to the Bay built today’s
flatlands as their flood plains,
grassy and covered with wildflowers
in spring. Near the creek mouths,
the distinction between Bay and land
was often hazy. Strawberry Creek
and Schoolhouse Creeks broadened
into willow marshes. Codornices Creek
probably spilled onto a marshy grassland
that filtered into a north-flowing
slough and salt marsh that ran behind
the sandstone hill later called Fleming
Point – now the site of Golden
Gate Field Racetrack. This slough
ran from today’s Virginia Street to the north edge
of the point, receiving water from
Schoolhouse and Marin Creeks. On
the Bay side of this marsh, strong
tidal currents just opposite the Golden Gate formed
a strand of sandy beach and low dunes
from just north of Strawberry Creek
to Fleming Point.
North
of Albany Hill, a fan of creeks,
the largest of them Cerrito Creek,
meandered toward the Bay in a tidal marsh that began
just west of today’s San Pablo Avenue and continued north
behind Point Isabel, then an island
at high tide.
Native
Americans
Native
Americans established permanent settlements
thousands of years ago; their earliest
homes are drowned beneath today’s
Bay. Remains we can still see show
that they chose areas near creeks
and marshes that supplied them with
fresh water, shellfish, and waterfowl.
Island locations may have offered
safety. There were villages at the
mouth of Temescal Creek
in Emeryville, the mouth of Strawberry
Creek, the confluence of Middle and
Cerrito Creeks on the northeast corner
of Albany Hill, Point Isabel (then
an island), Brooks Island, Stege, and Ellis Landing (also
formerly an island).
Mounds
15 or more feet high grew up at these
settlements – shells, bones,
artifacts, and human remains. The
Native Americans also affected the
landscape by burning it regularly.
Burning helped retain oak woodlands
and grasslands where bulbs and wildflower
seed were gathered. Keeping the area
open also reduced surprise attacks
by grizzly bears.
Ranchos
European
diseases, resettlement at missions,
and slaving decimated the Native
American population. Most Bay Area
Indians were moved to aptly named
Mission Dolores. A few remained to
work as “hands” on the
Spanish ranchos, as the Spanish and
later Mexican governments parceled
out the East Bay in large land grants
to to government workers and ex-soldiers,
beginning in the 1820s. The Estudillos got San Leandro, the Peraltas Oakland
and Berkeley, the Castros El
Cerrito north. With the rancheros
and their cattle came invasive non-natives – wild
mustard and grasses wild wild oats.
The Indians’ regular burning
was stopped. Hooves of cows were
heavier than even those of elk, and
unlike elk and deer, cows are fond
of loafing along streams. Cattle
trampled plants and compacted soil,
especially along streamsides.
On the waterfront, though, the created
only small landings – Victor
Castro had one at Point Isabel, for
example.
Gold Rush to cities
Wealth
seekers poured like locusts into California from 1849 on, opening
an era of radical change. The rancheros,
squeezed by squatters and greedy
lawsuits, mostly lost their land.
Only a few of the newcomers paid them – one
was butcher John Fleming, who bought
the near-island El Cerrito del Sur (now
Fleming Point) to fatten cattle for
booming San Francisco. Domingo Peralta,
who had owned all of Berkeley, died penniless
in 1865. The Castros hung on longer – Victor
Castro, whose elegant adobe edged
Cerrito Creek at today’s El
Cerrito Plaza, operated a ferry for
miners from his Point Isabel landing.
Grazing,
dairying, haying, and wheat-growing,
all supplying the mining boom, soon
took over the flood-plain areas between
hills and Bay. Sailor and trader
James Jacobs in 1853 built a landing
at the firm land at the foot of Strawberry
Creek (today’s Delaware Street). Basic industries
like flour and lumber milling sprang
up around Jacobs Landing in the 1850s,
soon after the new Alameda County improved the trail
that became San Pablo Avenue. The real boom
in waterfront industry, however,
came after 1878, when the Transcontinental
Railroad was extended north along
the waterfront. The tracks ran close
to the Bay shore along the South Berkeley waterfront, then
on dry land just east of the slough
that drained Schoolhouse and Codornices
Creeks, then on trestles or fill
across the salt marshes on both sides
of Pt. Isabel. The state platted
and auctioned off the submerged tidelands
in the 1870s, and small-scale filling
west into the Bay began almost immediately.
Soon, canning, tanning, soap making,
paint, cigars, starch, flour, lumber,
beer, and other manufacturers grew
up along the tracks; nearby piers
were crowded with sailing barges.
Sewage combined with manufacturing
waste turned Bay water black and
peeled paint from buildings.
Explosives
were vital to Califonia’s mining.
Driven out of the San Francisco dunes, dynamite
manufacturing moved to the north
side of Fleming Point in the 1870s.
But the deadly explosions didn’t
stop, and the manufacturers were
forced to move north, this time to
the northwest side of Albany Hill,
where they planted eucalyptus trees
to muffle the sound of explosions.
Nevertheless, they were forced out
again in 1905, after a particularly
large explosion and fire. Before
World War I the old Nobel train station
at Albany Hill was abandoned; the
area became a hobo jungle.
The
beach south of Albany Hill remained
a popular swimming and picnic spot
into the 20th Century,
but its sand was steadily mined out.
In its place came refuse fill. In Berkeley, most of the land
that is now Eastshore State Park was created by
garbage fill beginning in the 1920s,
when garbage collection became a
city responsibility. Over the protests
of conservationists, Berkeley began filling,
working south from Codornices Creek.
Building the shoreline highway (now
I-880) in the late 1920s created
a lagoon south of University Avenue, made into Aquatic Park by a public works
project of the Great Depression.
The vision, and use, was of a highly
urban park – with the smaller
south lagoo,
for example, set aside for racing
model yachts.
Meanwhile,
sewage had polluted the many small
creeks that ran from hills to waterfront,
and storm runoff quickened by paving
and building made them prone to flooding.
Most residents welcomed putting the
creeks into pipes. Culverting accelerated
in the Great Depression, as the country
sought public-works projects for
the out of work.
Adventures
on landfill
Moving
south, garbage landfill reached Virginia Street in the 1940s. The
Meadow and Brickyard areas were filled
from the late 1940s to the 1960s.
Garbage surrounded and buried much
of the Berkeley Wharf, built in 1875
and extended in the 1920s for a short-lived San
Francisco auto-ferry
service. (The restored end is now a fishing
pier.) The wharf’s massive
timbers, however, remain under lower University Avenue. Bumps forcibly
remind you that the beams do not
sink as garbage rots. Today’s Cesar Chavez Park, north of the marina,
operated as a landfill into the 1980s.
As
dumps smoldered along the waterfront,
other communities also advanced their
landfill peninsulas into the Bay.
To see the future they envisioned,
draw a line joining the ends of the
Emeryville Marina, Berkeley Marina,
Albany Bulb, and Pt. Isabel. Imagine
all that as dry land. Some fill was
domestic garbage. Other areas were
devoted to construction waste (e.g.
the Albany Bulb) or characterized
by nearby industries. “Battery
Point,” north of the channel
at Pt. Isabel, has battery casings
under its clay cap. The “Brick
Yard,” never used for manufacturing,
was named for large quantities of
waste brick.
Many
and various plans were advanced for
the waterfront. The Central (later
Union and Southern) Pacific, by building
the first transcontinental railroad,
forced the later-arriving Santa
Fe toward
an inland route (now used by BART
in our area). But Santa Fe turned the tables
by secretly buying up the Berkeley tidelands. It advanced
plans for a huge commercial port,
only to deadlock against another
plan, with piers running at right
angles to its desires.
In
the 1940s, an international airport
was proposed for the Berkeley waterfront; in
the 1950s, a virtual town doubling
the size of Berkeley. Another proposal
was a World Fair site, on fill stretching
from Richmond to Oakland. In Albany, where
fill most of construction debris
created the peninsula now called
the Bulb from the 1950s on, plans
for high rises, hotels, and restaurants
fell apart when consultants pointed
out that the fill and Bay mud would
not support the buildings.
The
fill also took on its own life. Urban Ore, Berkeley’s recycle-and-resale
emporium, got its start on the landfill
that is now Cesar Chavez Park. A few people moved
into barges or old boats and declined
to leave. In the 1970s, Berkeley made an idealistic
attempt to let the homeless camp
on what is now the east side of the
park, but “Rainbow Village” lost its
shine with murder and robbery. An
artistic City of Berkeley employee created stonehenge-like
sculpture with huge fragments of
concrete. In a more lasting effort,
nonprofit Design Associated Works
with Nature (DAWN) pioneered in attempts
to restore native vegetation in the
1970s. They grew native plants on
the fill; you can see the wind-sculpted,
almost maintenance-free thickets
and glades they created on the west
ridge of Cesar Chavez Park. Although Berkeley’s final plans
for the park left this as a token
gesture to restoration, DAWN metamorphosed
into Native Here Nursery, the California
Native Plant Society’s nursery
in Tilden Park that supplies locally
native material for restoration projects.
Creating the Eastshore State
Park and
Shoreline Trail
Conservationists
opposed fill from the outset. They
began gathering strength in the 1950s,
after communities began sending raw
sewage to the EB MUD treatment facility
rather than dumping it along their
waterfronts. In the 1960s Berkeley matrons Sylvia
McLaughlin, Catherine Kerr, and Esther
Gulick were spurred to action by
maps showing the Bay’s future
as little but a deep-water ship channel.
They formed Save the Bay in 1961,
pressured the state to form the Bay
Conservation and Development Commission
to regulate shoreline development,
and after a twenty-year effort finally
all but halted Bay fill in the 1980s.
In
1982, plans by Catellus (successor
to the Santa Fe land holdings) for 4 million square
feet of offices and stores on the
waterfront galvanized residents.
The proposal led to the founding
of Citizens for the Eastshore State
Park (CESP), led by the San Francisco Bay, Golden Gate Audubon
Society, and the Sierra Club. Their
lobbying led to a 1986 resolution
to create a state park, funded by
State and Regional Park bond money. Purchase
of the land was finally completed
in late 1998. In combination with
existing parks such as Pt. Isabel
and Cesar Chavez, park lands linked
by the Bay Trail will from Richmond to Emeryville.
The last remaining gap is through
Golden Gate Fields’ property.
Also with that exception, the Bay
Trail is now complete from Powell Street in Emeryville through
the Richmond Marina, with an on-street
extension into Miller-Knox Regional Park.
Planning and restoration
A park plan adopted in late 2003 envisions
parking, headquarters, and visitors center,
as well as retention of the Sea Breeze
Deli or something like it, at the
southwest corner of University and
Frontage Road.
Park plans envision a “promenade” along
the west shores of the Brickyard
(now occupied and weeds and temporary
soil dumping) and along the west
shore of the North Basin Strip. The
northwest corner of the Brickyard
peninsula may be removed to create
better circulation in the cove at
the mouth of Strawberry Creek.
In the 72-acre Berkeley Meadow, 17
acres are being restored with enlarged
seasonal ponds and native plants;
the dirt mountain north of Virginia
Extension will be used in this area.
The project, financed as mitigation
for destruction of 2.4 acres of wetlands
on Port of Oakland lands, also will
pay for trails in the area and fencing
to protect wildlife habitat.
North of the Meadow, Save the Bay and
Friends of Five Creeks have completed
a feasibility study of “daylighting” the
mouth of Schoolhouse Creek – replacing
the creek’s concrete culvert,
once used to bring sewage and creek
water to the Bay, and creating a
new tidal channel and small salt
marsh. The project is do-able, but
costly due to lead in the former
landfill.
CalTrans will attempt to
establish eel grass in the North Basin itself, as mitigation
for Bay Bridge construction. In
the northern part of the North Basin
Strip, Golden Gate Fields has sold
15 acres to be developed as ballfields run by a consortium
of neighboring cities. A boat ramp
is planned for this area. Separately
from park plans, Ferry enthusiasts
are eyeing the foot of Gilman as
a possible location for an East Bay ferry terminal.
Although the owners of Golden Gate
Fields have promised to complete
the Bay Trail, set aside their immediate
waterfront lands as park, and enlarge
the salt marsh at the mouth of Codornices
Creek, the future for the area remains
problematic. The owners withdrew
a proposal for extensive development
in the area of the grandstand, but
have announced plans for a mall complex
that could be even larger. Although
expansion of building or most new
uses would require a vote by the
residents of Albany, Proposition 68
on the November ballot would allow
major expansion of gambling at the
track, overriding local ordinances.
Groups such as Citizens for Eastshore State Park and the Sierra
Club advocate making most of the
property into park, but costs might
be quite high.
Contacts:
Friends
of Five Creeks,
510 848 9358, f5creeks@aol.com,
www.fivecreeks.org.
Citizens
for Eastshore State Park, conservation-oriented group responsible
for park creation, (510) 461-4665
e-mail: eastshorepark@hotmail.com, www.eastshorepark.org
Save
San Francisco Bay, works on many Bay
environmental issues, (510)452-9261
savebay@saveSFbay.org,
www.savesfbay.org.
Friends
of Albany Beach,
525 3125, susanmoffat@sprintmail.com
Let
It Be (wants to keep
art and off-leash dogs on Bulb), www.albanyletitbe.com
Berkeley Path Wanderers Assn., www.berkeleypaths.org. To
join, send $5 to BPWA,
1442A Walnut Street, #269; Berkeley, CA 94709
Aquatic
Park EGRET, (510)
549-0818, markl@lmi.net
Modern
and original shoreline, from Creek
and Watershed Map of Oakland & Berkeley,
by Janet M. Sowers, William Lettis & Assoc., & San
Francisco Estuary Institute, published
by Oakland Museum of California,
www.museumca.org/creeks
