Public tours of the Bay’s marginal
zones were conducted by the CLUI, as part of the Back to
the Bay exhibit, including an all-day, guided bus tour that
touched the edges of each of the three bays that make up
the Bay Area (Suisun, San Pablo, and San Francisco). We
examined sites typical of the built shoreline of this part
of the Bay system, and stopped to meet with local representatives
at a number of places, who helped us interpret the contemporary
human history of the Bay shore by studying what we saw in
front of us. Some of the themes that emerged included petrochemicals,
explosives, and redevelopment at closed military sites.
Treasure
Island: Built to Celebrate the Bay
Vital Fluids: Petroleum, Fish Oil, Wine
Old West Meets New: Explosives and John
Muir
Benicia: Camels to Kias
Mare Island Shipyard
Crockett: How Sweet it Is
Back Over the “Other” Bridge
Leaving downtown San Francisco, the sold-out tour first
looped around Treasure Island. A landmass created from scratch
in the middle of the Bay for the Golden Gate International
Exposition in 1939, Treasure Island was soon shuttered to
the public for over half a century when the Navy took it
over in WWII. The old fair buildings were mostly torn down
and a new, sequestered military community took shape. The
island was officially returned to the people of San Francisco
a couple of years ago, however most of the buildings are
still unused. The bus drove around this artificial island,
past empty buildings, as a film from 1940 about the abandoned
World’s Fair site, from the Prelinger Archives, played
on the video monitors overhead: one period of abandonment
superimposed on another.
Down the road, as we passed the Chevron refinery in Richmond,
bumper to bumper traffic on the 580 allowed us time to see
a corporate video from Chevron, that describes operations
at that refinery (one of the largest in America) down to
the molecular level. We turned off the highway at Point
Molate, another shoreline site in transition. Point Molate
was developed by the California Wine Association in 1908,
as a central winery for processing grapes from all over
the state. The Winehaven Winery, as it was called, became
the largest winery in the United States, producing 12 million
gallons of wine and port per year at its peak, before being
shut down during prohibition (though it continued to make
Sacramental wine until 1937). In 1942, the Navy purchased
the 400 acre property for use as a fuel supply depot. Most
of the fuel was kept in 20 underground concrete tanks, with
a capacity of over 40 million gallons, built on the hillside
above the winery. The facility was officially closed in
1998, and the City of Richmond is in the process of taking
it over, once clean-up issues are resolved.
Further down the "Do
Not Leave Roadway" road through Point Molate, a Port
of Richmond official opened the gate for the bus to be allowed
into the normally off-limits Point San Pablo site. In 1950,
the shores of Point San Pablo were lined with docks and
reduction plants for animal processing, such as the production
of fish oils and tallow. The last rendering plant burned
down around 1990, by which time the facilities at the site
were used for storage and logistics for chemical industries.
Metal tanks on the hill stored everything from ammonia to
sulfuric acid to molasses. The site, part of the Port of
Richmond, is being cleaned-up by the last tenant, the PakTank
company, owned by the large Dutch chemical distribution
conglomerate Vopak. Many tanks have been removed, and the
site may be redeveloped in the future.
Here the bus stopped so
people could wander around the ruined piers where the last
whaling station to close in the United States used to be
located. During the late 19th Century, the Bay Area contained
the nation’s largest whaling fleet. This last whaling
station was shut down by the federal government in the 1970’s.
The bus then lumbered out
of this crumbling waterfront site, back to the main roads
leading through the stark industrial landscape of North
Richmond’s railyards, junkyards, and chemical plants,
while playing, on the monitors overhead, the ambient and
lyrical film Castro Street, shot on this same stretch of
road by the experimental filmmaker Bruce Baille. The huge
West Contra Costa County landfill – a mountain of trash
built in the Bay- appearing on the right, was followed by
a shooting range, where skeet is flung out over the bay,
no doubt forming a reef of clay pigeons on the muddy bay
bottom. Back
to top
Next was Point Pinole, a 2,100 acre park on the site of
a explosives plant, one of several plants around the Bay
that provided explosives for the "building" of
the west through mining and railways, as well as munitions
for Indian battles, security, and overseas wars. In 1892,
after disastrous explosions at two San Francisco sites,
and another at the relocated plant in Albany (the current
site of Golden Gate Fields racetrack), the Giant Powder
Company relocated to Point Pinole and stayed until 1960.
Giant was the first American company licensed to use Alfred
Nobel’s newly patented product: Dynamite. In 1915 Giant
was bought by the Atlas Powder Company. With the invention
of ammonium nitrate explosives in the 1940’s, the plant
slowly became obsolete. Walt Disney bought the narrow gauge
railway that moved explosives around the plant, and installed
it at his new amusement park, Disneyland.
After the plant closed,
Point Pinole was considered as a possible site for NASA’s
mission control center for the Apollo program, but Houston
was eventually selected instead. Bethlehem Steel bought
the site, and was going to build a large steel mill there,
but changes in the industry and, perhaps, environmental
concerns, caused them to change their minds. An unrelated,
smallish steel plant did eventually open on edge of Point
Pinole, operated by the MSC Steel Company, which one park
ranger from Point Pinole calls the UFO building, due to
mysterious goings-ons there. After passing the park entrance
and a neighboring prison complex, the tour bus stopped to
get a glimpse of the unusual-looking building.
From this point the San
Pablo Bay shoreline becomes a labyrinth of residential streets,
so the tour headed inland, past the Hilltop Mall, and on
to Interstate 80, past the distant bayside ruins of the
Hercules explosives plant, next to a new office park which
contains the world headquarters for the BioRad company,
at the intersection of Alfred Nobel Drive and the John Muir
Parkway. Curiously, John Muir, the celebrated environmentalist,
founder of the Sierra Club, and Bay Area resident, never
seems to mention the Bay in any of his published writings.
Instead, he reportedly asked, when arriving by boat in San
Francisco Bay, "Which way to the mountains?" This
story was recounted to the tourists on the bus as we pass
by his home, visible right next to the highway in Martinez.
September 11th being just
a few weeks back, the scheduled visit to Port Chicago, an
active military munitions base, famous for a 1944 explosion
that killed 320 dock workers while loading a munitions ship,
was cancelled by the military. The tour bus instead turned
north on to Highway 680, through the impressive petrochemical
corridor that includes the Shell refinery and a number of
chemical plants, and over the Benicia-Martinez Bridge, with
sweeping views of Carquinez Strait and Suisun Bay. The Mothball
Fleet, a collection of over 50 dormant military ships tied
together in clusters in Suisun Bay, was visible as we crossed
the tall span, and an episode of Huell Howser’s California’s
Gold provided impressive aerial views of the fleet on the
monitors overhead. Back
to top
In Benicia, the bus looped through the Benicia oil refinery,
which was built by Exxon from 1966-1969, and which has the
distinction of receiving the first shipload of crude to
be delivered from the Alaskan Pipeline, in 1977. Like most
of the five major refineries in the Bay Area, the crude
processed here comes from the pipeline, via ship from Valdez,
or from crude oil pipelines bringing oil from the San Joaquin
Valley. When Exxon and Mobil merged, Exxon had to divest
itself of some of its assets, including this refinery, which
it sold to a young oil company called Valero in 2000.
The oil refinery and the
surrounding industrial park were built on the grounds of
a former arsenal, and munitions storage bunkers can be seen
poking out from under petroleum storage tanks. The Benicia
Arsenal opened in 1849, making it the first army arsenal
established on the West Coast, built to provide a defense
for the gold mines of the Sierras, and to supply the Army
with weapons for wars against the native Americans.
During its life, it served
as a manufacturing, service, and storage center for military
armaments. During the Korean War it was a repair center
for cannons, tanks, and trucks, and after the war it served
as a Nike missile maintenance depot for some of the dozen
or so Bay Area Nike missile sites. In 1964, most of its
functions were transferred to the larger Tooele Depot in
Utah. Clean-up of the sprawling arsenal grounds, which include
most of the land around Benicia, is ongoing. Unexploded
ordnance surveys, conducted by the Army Corps, routinely
unearth bombs, and sections of the hillside are occasionally
closed off.
Many of the old arsenal
buildings remain intact, converted to other uses. The tour
bus pulled into the compound with some of the oldest arsenal
buildings, now part of the Camel Barn Museum, to pick up
our local briefer, Ron Rice, a museum representative. The
bus chugged up the hill to the clocktower building, overlooking
the Port and surroundings, for a talk about the region by
Mr. Rice, who, among other things, explained the story of
how the Army Camels came to Benicia, and their connection
to General Beale, and Fort Tejon, in Southern California.
Visible below, along the
shores, is one of the more impressive sights in Benicia;
row upon row of parked cars. Amports, an international automobile
logistics company, uses Benicia to store as many as 40,000
cars at a time, mostly Kia’s right now, enroute from
manufacturer to market. The huge paved spaces around the
old arsenal facilities, that once shipped military equipment
to the war in Korea, are now filled thousands of new Korean
cars, soon to be spread throughout America. Back
to top
Video programs played on the bus to prepare the group for
the next stop, fifteen minutes away: Mare Island, a self-contained
industrial city, with over 1,000 buildings, that once employed
42,000 people, and is now being redeveloped. From 1854 through
the early 1990’s, it was one of the most important
Navy shipyards in the country, building and servicing vessels,
from destroyers to nuclear submarines.
In addition to the shipyards
and housing, weapons manufacturing and storage operations
operated for over 100 years at the southern end of the island
(including a brief visit here by one of the atomic bombs
being shipped to Japan in WWII). Many of the buildings there
have thick walls and tin roofs, to direct the blast upward
in the event of an accident. An air raid siren tower remains
in the center of the weapons manufacturing complex, and
rows of concrete air raid shelters line the streets on base.
Clean-up of contamination and unexploded bombs in some of
the industrial areas continues, with over 11,882 ordnance
items unearthed so far (not including bullets).
Access is still restricted
to the site, though many civilian industries have moved
in already. The working waterfront area is the dominant
feature of the site, where several drydocks, cranes, and
large engineering and assembly buildings continue to be
used by civilian companies and reserve military forces.
We disembark at "the oldest drydock on the West Coast,"
for a briefing from Ken Zadwick, Director of the Mare Island
Historic Park Foundation. The group was then led on a drive
through of the island by Tom Sheaf from the Lennar Company,
one of the largest developers in the West, and the company
in charge of Mare Islands conversion to civilian use. Back
to top
Back on the road, the bus headed through Vallejo to the
spectacular Carquinez Bridge, the highest bridge in the
world when it was built in 1927, and the largest cantilever
bridge in the United States for many years. The bridge is
actually two parallel bridges, the original 1927 bridge,
and a similar bridge built next to it in 1958, for the Interstate.
Now a third bridge is under construction as part of Caltrans’
seismic retrofit program, which is rebuilding many of the
Bay Area’s superlative bridges in preparation for the
next earthquake. Once the third Carquinez Bridge is built,
the 1927 bridge will be torn down.
The Bay system is at its
narrowest point here at the western end of Carquinez Strait,
a six mile long submerged canyon that separates San Pablo
Bay from Suisun Bay. The Strait has some of the deepest
water on the Bay, over 100 feet deep in places, and was
an important shipping point for Central Valley farms in
the late 1800’s, a time when the Straits town of Port
Costa was part of the largest wheat port in the world, and
when most of the ships passing out of the Golden Gate were
grain-laden ships heading from here to the ports of Europe.
Our next stop was the early
20th Century industrial town of Crockett, at the base of
the bridge. The large C&H factory, familiar to motorists
heading over the bridge, started life as a flour mill. Since
1906 though, the C&H plant has processed sugar from
the company’s vast cane plantations in Hawaii ("C&H"
stands for California and Hawaii), and the plant is still
said to be the world’s largest sugar cane refinery,
processing over 6 million pounds of sugar per day. These
facts and many others were asserted by our local briefer,
Keith Olsen, from the Historical Museum in Crockett, who
boarded the bus outside the plant to address the group.
The afternoon was wearing
on, but there was time for one last side trip, up the hill
west of town towards the refinery at Rodeo. Along the way,
the bus drove through a set of gates and out onto a massive
black pad on the shore (which happens to have good views
of the Maritime Academy, Mare Island, the Straits, and the
towers of Betty Crocker cake mix plant in Vallejo). The
black pad is a cap on top of the contaminated ground of
a former smelter operation, located here for decades, and
recently torn down. It is a strange site, this expanse of
black gravel, extending to the shore, an engineered, post-industrial
landscape. Many of the other shoreline sites we have seen
may be headed this way too.
Half a mile up the coast,
the road passes right through the Rodeo Refinery, offering
a good view of its workings. It was built in 1896, the first
of the five major oil refineries now operating on the shores
of the Bay Area. It processes 100,000 barrels of crude per
day, to make mostly gasoline, which is sold under several
brand names (including Exxon and Mobil) and is also distributed
through the thousands of "76" stations and "Circle
K" stores owned by Tosco.
With all the recent mergers
in the oil industry, Bay Area refineries change ownership
like musical chairs. The Rodeo plant was Unocal until 1997,
when it was bought by Tosco, a company that was then acquired
(for $7 billion) in 2001 by Phillips. Texaco just merged
with Bay Area-based Chevron, and the refinery in Martinez
is operated by Equilon, a company owned by both Shell and
Texaco-Chevron. The other Bay Area Tosco refinery, east
of Martinez, was sold before the Phillips purchase to Ultramar,
which bought Diamond Shamrock before that…Back
to top
As the bus passes through the "biggest toll plaza in
the world" and rises up over the outfall of Oakland’s
sewage plant, and onto the yet-to-be-replaced portion of
the Bay Bridge that collapsed in the last earthquake, the
video monitors play a remarkable film called "The Other
Bridge," a rhapsodic, Vivaldi-soundtracked portrait
of the very bridge we are passing over - the dance of the
cables flickering past the windows in synch with the rhythmic
web of those portrayed on the screen. The Bay beneath us,
now behind us, as we head back over the western cable anchorage
that locks the span of the bridge to the San Francisco shoreline.
A boat tour was also conducted
around the Bay too, but that’s another story... Back
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