Ah, Alameda — that suburban island with its waving palm trees, main-street parades and beach with sun-kissed views of San Francisco. Is there any more pleasant place to traipse around than the “Island City”?
But it wasn’t always so. In place of dog-filled beer gardens and kid-filled bistros, there once was stinking mud, noxious weeds and at one point, a pretty rough-and-tumble populace. People traveled by street cars called “Dinkeys,” and for a time, there was a risk of a sludgy Salton Sea and 32-lane highway obliterating the quality of life. Heck, Alameda wasn’t even an island at first — it was latched to Oakland before the largest dredging operation prior to the Panama Canal carved it loose.
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“I think you can make the argument that Alameda was the first Bay Area suburb as early as the 1870s. There were upper-middle class professional people – lawyers and business people – who lived in Alameda and met everyday in downtown San Francisco by using the ferry,” says local historian Dennis Evanosky, who gives walking tours of the island and talks at the Alameda Museum. “But there were areas that were all underwater during high tide, so it didn’t just develop into a full community right off the bat.”
In the beginning the parts of Alameda not below water were briny marsh and thickets of dense vegetation. In the mid-1800s, when Westerners began to colonize the land, elk and quail and cottontail rabbits roamed freely. Oak trees appeared yellow with their thousands of canaries and goldfinches. And those coastal live oaks – how grand they were!
“Trees stand everywhere interspersed in wild fields and have a determined look. There are so many trees that you can’t see the place,” said an early female settler, as recalled in Imelda Merlin’s 1977 tome, “Alameda, a Geographical History.” “It gives the general feeling that everyone is camping out. (Trees) are scattered everywhere, bending low and spreading their branches wide, so you could almost live in them.”
Among the first non-indigenous residents was a French fisherman named Peter Parfait, who lived with his Native wife in an adobe pile. One of the earliest houses to arrive was built in France, shipped around the Horn and floated across the Bay in 1850. Shortly after, four brothers built a hotel for San Francisco sportsmen who wanted to hunt waterfowl on Alameda. One of the owners’ children is said to have rowed a boat into what’s now the Oakland Estuary to bring fresh milk to Robert Louis Stevenson, whose yacht was parked there for renovations.
Back then, Alameda was really three separate hamlets: Woodstock in the west, The Encinal in the middle and Alameda in the east. These communities were linked by a janky central road full of mud holes and poison oak. It wasn’t the only thing that was a little rough.
Streets were named after fish – Mullet, Pompano, Leviathan, Perch – and were only changed in the 1870s to more “desirable” men’s names. And law and order were distinctly lacking.
“Alameda is a paradise for roughs,” a local newspaper opined in 1877. “For striking a policeman with a knife the tax is $6; for knocking a policeman down, only $3; and for being a third party who assisted the first two in their sport, no tax was imposed.”
Alameda was connected to Oakland by a spit of land near current-day Fruitvale — one could walk across at low tide wearing high boots. That began to change as Oakland developed what would ultimately become a major port. The problem was that sandbars, driven by currents, appeared in the estuary at different, unpredictable locations. To make it safer for large ships to navigate, a major dredging operation commenced in the late 1800s. It was beset by delays, bureaucracy and lack of money, but by 1902, Alameda was a free island.
“People were kind of relieved about it, because that canal sat empty without water for some time. It started smelling bad, and people were throwing their trash in there,” says Evanosky.
It wasn’t the last of the construction on Alameda. Around the same time, seeing their land erode at a rate of 3 to 7 feet a year, residents toward the south began building bulkheads. Then in the 1920s, the area was filled in with 43 acres of new land to expand Neptune Beach, the so-called “Coney Island of the West.”
The amusement park opened in 1917 and drew throngs from San Francisco and beyond. Located by today’s Crab Cove, it was one of several play paradises operating around the Bay. There was also the sprawling Sutro Baths and Playland-at-the-Beach on the Pacific Coast and Idora Park in Oakland with its mountain slide, Japanese garden and ostrich farm. Oakland also had the Piedmont Baths, a swimming complex with 20 types of baths that drew water from Lake Merritt, filtered to remove unpleasant gases.
Fun-seekers arrived at Neptune Beach via ferries or trains running from the Alameda Mole, a Southern Pacific Railroad spur on the island’s west side that served electric commuter trains called Big Reds. For a time, Alameda was something of a public-transit utopia, complete with small street cars called Dinkeys. Residents were allowed to choo-choo all around the city free of charge, and a newspaper declared the island “enjoyed the best transportation facilities of any city west of the Mississippi River.”
For 10 cents admission, visitors to Neptune Beach could paddle in the largest outdoor swimming pool in the U.S., see movies like Buster Keaton’s “What! No Beer?” and watch Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympian star of “Tarzan the Ape Man,” break the world record for 100-meter freestyle. There were mock aerial dogfights, rides from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and roller coasters called the Lindy Loop and the Whoopee, responsible for at least two deaths.
Frights and hazards were a given. “The Whoopee jerked its petrified customers around to the point of whiplash,” notes the Alameda Museum on an exhibit placard. “The Merry Mix-Up got people dizzy in the big swimming pool. It was deemed so dangerous by local authorities that it was relocated from the pool onto dry ground. The Flying Airplanes gave riders the illusion of flight, complete with nausea bags.”
The park took a one-two punch from the Great Depression and the opening of the Bay Bridge, which decimated ferry service, and the gates closed permanently in 1939. “It had a rather sad ending, because the family that owned it just overextended and defaulted on a bond measure,” says Evanosky. “They sold everything for a penny on the dollar.”
But there was more bad news for Alameda in the form of a man called John Reber, who was hell-bent on reshaping not just the island but all of the Bay.
Reber was a charismatic actor from Ohio who had met many politically well-connected people while working on community pageants across California. Though he didn’t seem to have much of an engineering background, he believed the Bay Area was “a geographic mistake” – particularly in its unpredictable access to fresh water. His solution was to build two massive earthen dams, one by today’s Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and another by the Bay Bridge, to trap river water and create the “greatest fishing hole in the world.”
The early 20th century was a fertile time for far-fetched infrastructure schemes. Atlantropa, a 1920s concept from German architect Herman Sörgel, would have dammed the Mediterranean Sea to lower the water level by 600 feet and create new space for colonization. Construction commenced in the 1930s on the Cross Florida Barge Canal, a pseudo-Panama Canal cutting through the state, before President Nixon put the kibosh on the on-again, off-again project.
Water needs seemed to fuel these pipe dreams in drought-ridden California. In the 1950s, engineers envisioned a network of 400 gigantic fountains — nicknamed “The Big Squirt” — spitting high into the air, one to the other, to transport water across the state.
“At this time, the idea of big public infrastructure projects was a big deal in America, with a lot of support and faith,” says local historian Charles Wollenberg. “Reber’s proposal began in the 1920s but took off in the 1930s during the time of the New Deal.”
The mayor of San Francisco, California farmers and even Herbert Hoover, who had come back to teach at Stanford, his alma mater, supported the so-called Reber Plan. In 1950, Congress appropriated $2.5 million to fund a study. In the meantime, the plan’s author – calling it “the greatest pageant on Earth” – tinkered and added to the vision. The massive dams would have railroads and freeways on top, enough to hold 32 lanes of traffic, which could be used as an evacuation route in the event of atomic attack. And there would be new warm-water beaches.
Warm and not fresh, it turned out. In the late 1950s, Army engineers simulated the plan using a massive concrete replica of the region called the Bay Model, complete with 100,000 gallons of fresh and saltwater showing tide and sediment flows, in a warehouse in Sausalito. (It’s still open to the public Tuesday-Saturday at 2100 Bridgeway.)
“Come winter, so much water could be coming down the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers that the dam would actually back fresh water up into the Delta and farms would be flooded,” says Wollenberg. “Then in the summertime, so little water might be coming down that the water level in the dams would fall below the level of the saltwater in the Bay. That would mean, if you opened up the locks to get ships back and forth, saltwater would pour into freshwater lakes.”
The ultimate thing that killed the plan was military worries.
“We were building a huge naval base in Alameda. Aircraft carriers and other ships needed to come in and out, but they were going to have to go through a lock first,” Wollenberg says. “The Navy made the point that if we did get involved in a war, it would be relatively easy for an opponent to simply bomb the locks and make them unusable – our ships would be trapped behind these dams.”
The Naval Air Station was eventually built — on land that used to be underwater, necessitating 1.5 million cubic yards of silt and sand be pumped from the Bay bottom for fill. Thanks to projects like these, Alameda’s size has more than doubled since the 1850s.
Befitting its suburban growth when that naval station closed in the 1990s, it was colonized by places that should please both adults and kids. Notably, Alameda Point’s “Spirits Alley” has a tasting room for St. George Spirits, breweries like Almanac Beer Co. with a beer garden and children’s ball pit and vast-open spaces to fly kites and model planes.
The main drag, Park Street, is a trove of nostalgic businesses from Tucker’s Ice Cream, which opened in 1941, to Scolari’s Good Eats, which makes a mean Blueberry Bacon Blue Cheese Burger. There’s Subpar putt-putt golf and High Scores Arcade with its unique and homemade Super Smash Bros. Melee cabinet. Critically lauded dining isn’t hard to find: The Michelin-recognized Utzutzu offers Tokyo-quality omakase and Fikscue, a Texas-style barbecue joint with Indonesian flavors, recently was dubbed one of the best restaurants in the U.S. by the New York Times.
And you can still catch glimpses of the past all around the island. The USS Hornet is a decommissioned aircraft carrier parked on the waterfront that’s full of fascinating exhibits about its role in the Space Race. The Alameda Museum is a treasure trove of quirky history, from models of ships that once cruised the Bay to a locally manufactured 6-seat bicycle to a shrine to Phyllis Diller, the famous stand-up comedienne who lived here for a spell. Diller fondly remembered Alameda as the “pristine, beautifully manicured little island across the Bay” — come visit, and you’ll find yourself nodding in agreement.
Alameda Museum: Open on weekends at 2324 Alameda Ave. in Alameda; https://alamedamuseum.org/.
St. George Spirits: Open Friday-Sunday at 2601 Monarch St.; https://stgeorgespirits.com/.
Almanac Beer Co.: Open daily at 651 W. Tower Ave.; https://almanacbeer.com/
Tucker’s Ice Cream: Open Wednesday-Monday at 1349 Park St.; https://tuckersicecream.com/.
Scolari’s Good Eats: Open daily at 1303 Park St.; www.scolarisgoodeats.com.
Subpar Miniature Golf: Open daily at 1600 Park St.; www.subparminigolf.com/alameda.
High Scores Arcade: Open Friday-Sunday at 1414 Park St.; www.highscoresarcade.com/.
Utzutzu: Open Wednesday-Sunday by reservation at 1428 Park St.; Resy.com.
Fikscue: Open weekends at 1708 Park St., Suite 120; www.fikscue.com/.
U.S.S. Hornet: Open Friday-Monday at 707 W. Hornet Ave.; https://uss-hornet.org/.
