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    Alameda
    Alameda
    Alameda
    Ebook191 pages1 hour

    Alameda

    By Greta Dutcher and Stephen Rowland

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    About this ebook

    Through its many incarnations, Alameda has never lost its charm and ability to draw people from all walks of life. Originally a peninsula inhabited by Native Americans, it was purchased by Don Luis Peralta in 1818 and developed into a bedroom community of San Francisco. Alameda became an island in 1902, and a short time later, it was a new home to many refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The Neptune Beach amusement park attracted tourists who enjoyed the bathing, beaches, and rides, making Alameda the Coney Island of the West. Modern transportation carried people and cargo in and out on ferries, trains, ships, and planes, which landed at the busy Airdrome. The creation of the Naval Air Station in 1938 and World War II made Alameda a military town. The 1990s brought Alameda back to its first purpose, as a small town amongst big cities, its streets lined with graceful Victorians and with a diverse and lively population.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateJan 5, 2009
    ISBN9781439620885
    Alameda
    Author

    Greta Dutcher

    Bay Area native Greta Dutcher is a collector who specializes in vintage East Bay postcards. Working with fellow enthusiast Stephen Rowland, she draws from both her own archives and that of collector Edmund Clausen, selecting the best images to recall Alameda�s charming public face in the 20th century.

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      Book preview

      Alameda - Greta Dutcher

      caption.

      INTRODUCTION

      We are back for another journey into Alameda’s past, with a little difference this time around. Our first book for Arcadia Publishing’s Postcard History Series did so well, and the response from the community was so positive, astonishing, and downright motivating, that here we are again with a book for the Images of America series. We have more variety in our images: besides postcards, we include photographs and other ephemera, including our personal Holy Grail—the only known photograph of a certain Alameda landmark. Read on; you’ll get to it!

      The foundation of Alameda can be summarized fairly easily for the uninitiated. It all started with land owned by the Peralta family (local, powerful farmers and landowners) that was purchased by Gideon Aughinbaugh and William Chipman in 1851. Densely forested and not without its share of marshland, locals from the Bay Area (importantly those from San Francisco) saw potential in the land, and soon it was being bought up and farmed, and a community was forming. Schools, churches, hospitals, neighborhoods of lovely homes—all the necessities sprang up during the next 50 years, and then our claim to fame was dug out of the earth, making Alameda, once a peninsula, an actual island in the San Francisco Bay in 1902. With a new waterfront, business boomed, and with the addition of a naval base in the 1940s, Alameda thrived. The naval base has been shut down, and times change, leaving some businesses along our partially man-made Estuary obsolete, but that does not change the fact that Alameda is so distinct, in mainly positive ways, from its East Bay neighbors.

      That passage of time, though, is not always a positive thing. Frankly, it can be heartbreaking. Just take our own experiences, for example, writing our last book, but more relevantly, writing and researching this one. When you are looking for an address where a 100-year-old home in a photograph should be but instead find a monstrous apartment complex from the 1960s, it hurts. Seriously, experiences such as these were far too common while working on this book.

      We mentioned, with pride, in our previous book that Alameda had resisted such change as well as any town can, but only a few years have passed since then, and we are seeing an escalation in those changes. More beautiful, old, single-family homes are being stripped inside and divided up into multiple units, which leads to squeezing additional people onto a small island. New housing developments have been built, and others are planned. Traffic has increased; open spaces are disappearing. This density threatens one of Alameda’s most important qualities: its historic, small-town charm in the midst of big cities.

      We must be preservationists; we must also resist over development and the bland homogeneity that comes with too many chain restaurants and big-box stores, which is erasing the uniqueness of America’s small towns. Read this book; look at the images. Cherish the glorious things that are still here, and ponder the ones that are not. Nothing can bring them back; if we tear down or alter a house that should be protected, it is gone. And it is often done in the name of money. But our history, our heritage, is—and will always be—more important than money.

      We truly hope that not only will people enjoy the rare, glorious images in this book and the written histories that accompany them, but that it will also cause readers to think about where we have been, what we have been, what we have had, and who we are now.

      Looking from Bay Farm Island, this 1907 postcard view is actually of San Leandro Bay and the East Bay hills. The structure to the left is one of the small wharfs used for loading produce from the farms onto the boats. The island was also known for its oyster beds, which a young Jack London supposedly raided. (Cardinell-Vincent Co.)

      One

      THE ESTUARY

      Government Island is visible in this c. 1914 aerial image of the Estuary, which is populated with large sailing ships. The Alameda Mole can be seen in the distance, stretching into the bay. At the lower left is the Alaska Packers fleet, which docked there from 1904 to 1929. (Cardinell-Vincent Co.)

      The central focus of this c. 1907 postcard is a ship that may be completed or is under construction, yet the most interesting aspect is the United Engineering Works building seen off to the left. This building, located at 2900 Main Street, was part of the United Engineering Company Shipyard and was built between 1910 and 1915. Among other things, this facility was a maintenance yard for the Red Trains and was used for maritime conversion during World War II. (Cardinell-Vincent Co.)

      This is a view of the Talabot launching off on November 14, 1916. The photograph was taken by a company located at 2295 Third Street in San Francisco. Written a day before the launch in the Alameda Evening Times-Star on November 13, there is a story with the headline Launching of Big Ship … In Alameda Marks New Era Here. Apparently, recent ship launching had been the catalyst to the many drastic changes in Alameda’s transportation and industrial zones, including converting the swing-type bridge at Webster and Harrison Streets into a lift bridge. The beginnings of the consideration of a tube (the current Posey Tube) are even mentioned.

      This postcard shows the Talabot launching from the Bethlehem-Alameda Shipyard on November 14, 1916. This was more than likely a passenger or cargo ship. Judging from the two pictures of this launch, it seemed to be quite an event back then as it was really bringing in crowds.

      Here is a view of the SS Pacifico and its energy conversion by the Barnes and Tibbitts shipyard. Walter Tibbitts and his family came to the Bay Area in the 1890s, and by 1915, he was operating W. G. Tibbitts and

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