Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 richard white Photographs by Jesse White Deconstructing Reconnaissance in the ruins

The detritus still he has become driveover country. Beginning around Vallejo and running roughly six miles to , , and the Sacramento possesses a T Delta, the Strait has, in the daily life of , reduced down to the Carquinez and Benicia-Martinez bridges. Motorists are as likely to be searching for grim grandeur. their toll as looking at the land and water below. Few will exit the interstates. Why stop at Martinez, Benicia, Vallejo, Crockett, or Port Costa? They are going west to Napa or or east to Sacramento. Like travelers’ destinations, California’s future also appears to lie elsewhere. Once, much of what moved out of came through these communities, but now the Strait seems left with only the detritus of California’s past. The detritus still possesses a grim grandeur. To the east, the Mothball Fleet— originally composed of transports and battleships that helped win World War II— cluster tightly together, toxic and rusting, in Suisun Bay. Just west of the bridges, Mare Island (really a peninsula with a running through it) sits across the mouth of the . The established a naval base and there in 1854, and the island remained central to US military efforts from the Civil

Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, Number 2, pps 55–69. ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2012.2.2.55.

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War through Vietnam. When base closures washed across All along the Carquinez Strait, past and present cohabit California, Mare Island Naval Shipyard shut its gates for in a grand, confusing jumble. The ugly and the beautiful good in 1996. The Navy transferred most of the island to are not so much juxtaposed as combined. Let the light Vallejo, and over the last decade the base has declined into change, or step back a few yards, and what seemed sad and a kind of industrial Pompeii. A recent quixotic attempt to derelict becomes enchanting. The Carquinez Strait can make it a national park went nowhere: the National Park appear exhausted and worn down, but like California as a Service considered even a mostly cleaned-up island too whole, it is a resilient place. toxic to touch. Until a few years ago, Vallejo presented Mare Island as a Mare Island is a partial ruin among other ruins. Some symbol of that city’s resilience. City officials, state officials, are inconspicuous, like the lines of posts along the shore developers, urban planners, and the Navy claimed to be at Benicia and Port Costa that once held wharves along successfully recycling the island. They were refurbishing which nineteenth-century workers carried bagged wheat the old buildings and constructing new ones, preserving to load on schooners bound for England. Others advertise sweeping marshlands, and cleaning up the toxic debris of themselves. The Sperry Mill across from Mare Island closed a century. They would fill the island with new homes and in 2004. A sign across it reads: “For Sale: 707-863-0188.” new jobs. The Sperry Mill succeeded the Starr Mill, which Carleton But today what they appear to be doing on Mare Watkins photographed in 1869. The Starr Mill had become Island is deconstructing California and shipping it away part of Sperry Mills and then General Mills, before burning as scrap. In a place that for more than a century built down in a spectacular fire in 1934. things and projected American power, Californians are

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now demolishing what they previously built. At first, NCM, a provider of demolition and remediation services, to second, and third glance, there is something vaguely post- handle the dirty work. The workers in the hazmat suits were apocalyptic about parts of the island. It is unclear whether a remediation crew, and given the flaking lead paint and the our past is a burden or a foundation, but clearly, we cannot toxic metals—lead, zinc, barium, and more—they needed avoid reckoning with it. the suits. An old crane swung slowly over and took the bin away. The crane then replaced the first bin with an empty one. By August, Allied Defense Recycling had cut away much First glance of the bridge, which sat like a decapitated head alongside the The dry docks at Mare Island turned out their first vessel—a partially disassembled vessel. Shipping containers belonging wooden side-wheeler, the USS Saginaw—before Abraham to the Korean company Hanjin waited nearby. Lincoln was president. Last summer workers were Dismantling the ships at Mare Island certainly makes disassembling the USS Abraham Lincoln, part of the Mothball more sense than towing them through the Panama Fleet. In June the Lincoln was still flying the American flag as Canal or around Cape Horn to Gulf Coast for three workers in white hazmat suits carried what looked like scrapping. And fifty jobs dismantling ships, while not much old metal window and doorframes across the rusting bridge employment, is something. Workers who once built ships to a debris bin. tried hard to get these jobs. They missed the shipyards, and Allied Defense Recycling took the contract for dismantling they needed the work. Judging from the parking lot, not all the ships, and it, in turn, hired Marcor, which was part of of Marcor’s jobs went to locals. In August, California plates

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were a minority. Most were from Washington, Nevada, and We eat at a taco truck, a good one—the best on the Virginia. island, Jesse tells me—watching the pickups pull in. A semi The museum at Mare Island memorializes the time when leaves carrying a shipping container with a side that reads workers built ships instead of tearing them apart. In World Dongfang. The driver stops as he is pulling away to put War II workers in the yards constructed 16 submarines and something in his car parked nearby. The car is a new and 392 ships; they repaired 4,000 more. Every working day, shiny GT. As we drive back down Azuar, we pass a middle- roughly 43,000 people paraded through the gates. aged man with a shopping cart. He is bent over, scavenging the side of the road for metal.

Second glance Third glance There is little attempt to reuse the island’s old naval base north of G Street. Alco Iron and Metal sits across from When the shipyards were in their prime, some of the workers abandoned and partially burned barracks. Alco seems the and most of the military personnel lived on Mare Island. perfect business for the island. The pickups and flatbed A century of the architectural and horticultural history of trucks return to the company warehouse like bees to a hive. California courses through the ruins, recycled buildings, and Warehouse workers weigh the loads and the trucks vanish abandoned gardens. On Walnut Street, old houses with their inside. My son, Jesse, who has been taking photographs columned porches have been refurbished. They are available here for more than a year, points out that the trucks always for lease. Everything on the old naval base has an identifying contain at least one bicycle frame. I watch. They do. number or letter, and these—Quarter D and Quarter E—have

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a museum-like quality to them. Beautiful specimen trees—a On the southeastern island, near a large concentra- camphor planted in 1948, a healthy Douglas fir, a Canary tion of munitions bunkers, a fence separates the old Island palm, and one of the biggest Monterey pines I have workers’ quarters from a new natural area. The fence ever seen—have labels. A Hollywood crew was filming on simply ends there, and you can walk among the boarded Walnut Street in June. They had 1930s cars lining the street. houses. Their clotheslines remain in place. The exotics It was easy to turn the place into a prop as long as the camera people planted here—palms, eucalypti, figs, and Europe- stayed focused on a few houses. an rockroses—still thrive among the oat grass and this- Near Walnut Street there are fewer grand houses from tles. Fruit trees, unpruned and full of dead limbs, barely the 1920s and next to them 1950s duplexes. Farther away, hang on. an apartment complex, a strip mall, and a supermarket cluster together. All are abandoned. The enlisted men lived Resilience in barracks that have now largely rotted. Some of the roofs have collapsed and the walls are covered with graffiti. The Developers promise the world, sometimes cynically, insides are littered and looted. Broken glass covers the sometimes naively, sometimes because they simply can’t roads leading to them. risk large projects unless against all reason, they convince Not all the old buildings remain in place. Mare Island themselves of success. Voters need city councils that are also contains what amounts to a used house lot. Buildings suspicious of developers’ promises and worried about that once sheltered officers and their families now sit on consequences, but in the late 1990s the Vallejo City Council blocks hoping for a life beyond scrap. was desperate.

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Vallejo had lived off the Mare Island shipyard, which to the developers and eventually to various state entities. still employed roughly 7,000 people when the Navy shut Vallejo, like other California cities, desperately needed jobs the base in 1996. In return for the lost jobs, the city got a and taxes. It lacked a diversified economy and was plagued toxic island that the Navy promised to clean up. The federal by a seemingly intractable crime problem. Plans called for government did not just walk away. It provided hundreds the development of roughly 1,400 acres of the over 5,000 of millions of dollars for the Navy to “remediate” the acres that made up the Mare Island shipyard and associated island, which contained old munitions, PCBs, radioactive federal lands. The rest would become parks, recreation, and materials, and more. The Navy entered a cooperative natural areas. arrangement with Vallejo, the state of California, the Lennar The plan produced a mating season for development Corporation of Miami, and Weston Solutions to fast-track companies. Lennar Corporation and one of its subsidiaries remediation and development. Vallejo’s goal was to replace combined to produce an incestuous child, Lennar Mare all the lost jobs by 2010. Island, to develop the roughly 650 acre “eastern parcel” of When the Navy turned over the first 3,996 acres, the city the island. It embraced the shipyards and the part of the retained title to only about 100 of them. The rest would go naval base that was to form the heart of redevelopment.

The plan produced a mating season for development companies.

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Lennar Mare Island brought in LandSource, then owned by was to clean up the area and get rid of discarded munitions Lennar and Weyerhauser. It would prepare building sites and from the island’s dredge ponds, landfill, and disposal infrastructure for a planned 1,400 homes and apartments. areas. Progress proved slow, but Weston has completed the In 2004 California Construction magazine did a story remediation of 2,800 acres and handled its transfer from on Mare Island, which had then arrived at the supposed the Navy to the State of California. This did not mean that midpoint of its transformation. Lennar had already sold or the whole island was clean. The Navy itself still controls the found tenants for three million square feet of space. Seventy most polluted areas, which it plans to have cleaned up in businesses had moved to the island. It was about to break 2018. Cleaning up the past takes time. ground on 450 homes. By 2008 it was supposed to have sold The Mare Island that planners and city officials or leased a total of seven million square feet of old factories envisioned for 2011 is visible on the streets spilling off and office buildings. In 2007, Lennar was still lauding Mare the northern section of Flagship Drive. Here are the four Island as a success story. It had started demolition for the new neighborhoods whose construction began in 2004: creation of a new “Town Center,” which was supposed to Kirkland Isle, Alden Place, Gardener’s Glen, and Farragut anchor “the largest mixed-use development in California.” Lane. The Lennar Mare Island website says the company Not much was demolished; less was built. Today there is only has sold 274 homes out of the 1,400 planned. Neighbors a sign, only a little more incongruous than many others on talk; people walk their dogs; children play. The detritus the island. It reads “Future Historic Core.” here is of everyday life. Flagship Drive eventually leads Weston Solutions, meanwhile, had taken the contract to Touro University, which advertises itself as providing on the western parcel—roughly 3,200 acres. Weston’s task “quality educational programs in the fields of health care

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and education in concert with the Judaic commitment to that many of these jobs come from city, state, and federal social justice, intellectual pursuit, and service to humanity.” offices that have relocated on the island. Besides the Forest Touro has leased some of the buildings on the base and Service, there is the Field Station has, according to U.S. News and World Report, 542 students of the United States Geological Service, which occupies a paying $41,000 a year in tuition. Near the university, in beautiful, if decaying, old Art Deco building near the marsh; a building that looks like a bunker with windows, is the dead plants fill the planters. The Veterans Administration Pacific Southwest Headquarters of the US Forest Service. also has an office on the island, as does the Coast Guard A golf course abuts it and the university. The golfers’ view and the Army Reserve. encompasses and, in the other direction, the Some industry and manufacturing have moved onto shipyards and Vallejo. the island, but ruined and empty buildings far outnumber What the planners and city officials did not envision was those that are occupied. American Pipe works out of the the section of Flagship Drive that connects the completed old ship-fitting building. And Lennar has, at considerable homes with Touro University. Houses vanish. There are only cost, refurbished Building 680. It contains 256,330 graded lots with the utilities ready for builders who never feet of naturally lighted space, including an eighty-foot come. The new houses missing from Mare Island match high central bay and seven bridge cranes with 5 to 75- the new jobs missing from Mare Island. Development was ton capability. Building 680 is magnificent. It was also supposed to provide 8,000 jobs. The city claims that the empty. eighty companies on Mare Island have produced “over Many of the businesses on the island, like Alco and 1,900 new jobs,” but a drive around the island indicates American Defense, seem to involve cleaning up toxic messes

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on the island or scrapping the products of past industry in special tax districts. The city established a Mello Roos tax the region. On the whole, the island is a quiet place. district, which needed the approval of two-thirds of the affected voters, to provide the necessary services to Mare Island homes and businesses. Among the services the Broke Town USA district was to provide was fire protection. In early summer Mare Island did not rejuvenate Vallejo. Vallejo filed for of 2011, the Mare Island fire station still had gleaming fire bankruptcy in 2008, becoming “Broke Town, U.S.A.,” as engines inside. There was, and is, a large sign out front: a New York Times headline put it. The city tried to throw “Fire Station Closed. In Emergency call 911.” Lennar Mare its retired workers under the bus in order to escape Island, which was supposed to create the development that pension and health care obligations. Retirees fought back, would provide the necessary taxes, filed for bankruptcy in protecting their pensions but losing much of their health June of 2008. LandSource also went bankrupt. care. The city reduced or suspended interest payments to Everything but the city’s boundaries and its general fund bondholders, but individual bond purchasers unemployment rate of about 15 percent seems to be did not suffer much. The banks that guaranteed the bonds shrinking. A bankrupt Vallejo has had to discharge public had to take the loss. Under the city’s plan for emerging employees. Its population has declined. Its taxable retail from bankruptcy, the banks appear to have recovered only sales have shrunk from $721 million in 2004 to $526.5 some their losses. million in 2009. Its property tax and utility tax revenue With Proposition 13 limiting the ability to raise property are declining. Mare Island, which was supposed to provide taxes, Vallejo, like other cities, has survived by creating revenue for the city, drains Vallejo’s nearly exhausted

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resources. Expenditures in the city’s leasing fund for the the bottom of Suisun Bay to a depth of 3.3 feet and San island exceed revenues. The City Council expects to exhaust Pablo Bay, adjacent to Mare Island, to a depth of 2.5 feet. the fund in the coming fiscal year. After that, the city will But now the dams on the Sacramento and its tributaries have to use its general fund to fill the gap between revenues have created an opposite but just as dire problem. They and expenditures. block sediment, erosion exceeds deposition, and the bay A resurgent natural world might seem the silver lining cannot replenish its marshland. to economic and social decline, but here, too, things get complicated. Allied Defense actively works the cranes of The long view two dry docks, but the ospreys use more than that; they nest on top of abandoned cranes. Marshes, on a scale hard On the Carquinez Strait, California has not buried its past. to find over much of San Francisco Bay anymore, still It has sought to preserve it, recycle it, or scrap it. This dominate the western island, but the marshes are starving. is not the same thing as coming fully to terms with the In his forthcoming book on San Francisco Bay, Matthew consequences of the state’s history. In part, despite the Booker tells the story of how Americans seemed initially failures and fiascos, what is happening here is encouraging. set on burying the area around the strait in debris and It makes sense to scrap the Mothball Fleet that pollutes now starve the marshes of the sediment they need. During Suisun Bay, and it makes far more sense to do it on Mare the late nineteenth century, tailings from hydraulic mines Island than in Texas. If scrap goes, among other places, snaked down the Sacramento and its tributaries, covering to China, well then, scrap goes to China. It may be sad to

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Boom0202_06.indd 66 07/06/12 2:24 PM think that we scrap our past and the Chinese sell us back Politicians seem both things made from that scrapped past, but this is better than leaving it to rot while we mine more metals. The efforts of devious and punch-drunk. the Navy to clean up the island are good things, as are the attempts to preserve the wetlands. Council seems determined to develop the wetlands, long We are probably more ready today than ever before in used as saltworks, that even with dikes are certain to flood. our history to try to ameliorate the past harm we have done A rising bay means good money will follow bad in what will to the natural world, but we have created a set of political probably be fruitless attempts to protect new development. conditions that threaten to undermine our efforts. The As the past encroaches upon us, politicians and developers planet is warming and climatic events are becoming more leave the future to worry about itself. Why? Vallejo is broke, extreme. In Northern California, we often think about and as in other cities, politicians listen to the siren song the threats global warming poses to our infrastructure of developers. The politicians will be out of office, and the Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 in terms of the Sacramento Delta just east of the Strait. developers already will have pocketed their money when Diked, remade, and increasingly precarious, the Delta is in the water rises and the city and its citizens are left to cope nature’s crosshairs. A series of bad winter storms, unusual with the consequences. Vallejo needs taxes and jobs, and if and sudden runoff from the Sierras, an earthquake, or a disastrously dumb growth is the only growth available, they combination of such things threaten to collapse it into a will take it as long as it creates some jobs and increases California version of New Orleans. Political and planning the tax rolls. The Carquinez Strait seems to be an eloquent failures and inevitable natural events invite environmental case for thinking in the long run, but politicians appear disaster. oblivious. As in New Orleans, it will be a mistake to blame the I sympathize with them. In California, we demand public weather for what is a political failure. This is true all along services and responsible public officials, but we won’t pay the Bay. With global warming, San Francisco Bay will rise. for them. Proposition 13 knocked local government to the How fast and how much, we do not know. In the very ground, and we have been kicking it ever since, demanding long run—roughly two centuries from now—estimates that it get up and help us. No wonder politicians seem predict up to a five-meter rise, which would place virtually both devious and punch-drunk. The same kind of clueless the whole northern part of the island and the shoreline of optimism and desire for short-term gains that pervaded the the southern island under water. Most of the shoreline of redevelopment of Mare Island are typical of our approaches Benicia will also go, as well as a sizeable hunk of Vallejo. to the future. They are hardwired into our current politics. A five-meter rise is now a long way off, but smaller rises We seem incapable of starting up the engine of growth of a half-meter or more can come within the lifetime of that has rescued California time and time again. From the many readers. At half a meter—now estimated to occur 1860s to the turn of the twenty-first century, the government between 2050 and 2100—the dry docks will become subject fueled growth on the Strait. When wheat flowed to Benicia to regular inundation, which means, of course, they will no and Port Costa, it came on either subsidized railroads or longer be dry docks. At a meter, which could happen by on steamboats and barges traveling on cleared and 2080, much of the western shoreline facing Vallejo could maintained by the government. The wheat grew on land go underwater. At a meter and a half, estimated to occur largely given away by the government or sold at a pittance. about 2105, large swaths of the industrial part of the island The military posts that grew up along the strait and San will be underwater. Benicia, Martinez, and Vallejo all will Francisco Bay, including Mare Island, were the outposts of lose large sections of their waterfront. With the current American empire. When the nation needed ships in World melting of the ice caps occurring faster than predicted, War II, Mare Island and other shipyards built and repaired such rises could come earlier rather than later. them. Federal dollars paid for all this. After World War II, Vallejo and Lennar continue to push development, Mare Island built and maintained nuclear submarines. and their seeming recklessness is understandable and Today the federal government is in shambles; the common. Where I live, in Redwood City, the Redwood City state’s governance has become a national joke. The great

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achievement of California during the twentieth century, its But the security guard who ambled slowly over to see us state education system and its infrastructure, which both by the bandstand, with its peeling paint and monuments enjoyed large federal subsidies, are crumbling. Vallejo’s vanishing into overgrown bushes and ivy, was friendly school district went into receivership in 2004. When we most and not alarmed. We chatted in front of abandoned need collective action, we disavow our collective institutions. buildings with the relicts of old wars all around us. He Yet in this sour summer of 2011 among the ruins, had a niece who had gone to Stanford Medical School. failures, bad management, and worse news, it is still hard Neither he, nor probably she, thought the state’s best to feel depressed or discouraged about the Carquinez Strait days were behind us. or California. We have admittedly mucked up the Strait and And on the way back to the car we ran into Barbara, who much of the North Bay pretty badly. On Mare Island, over directs the Mare Island Museum. She told us to “tell Jerry the last century and a half, it looks like we’ve squeezed the that Barbara said we could go back in.” You pay once at the juice and left the rinds. But with the breeze off the Bay and museum and come and go as you please. All this was like the osprey nesting on the cranes, I don’t feel that way. an older and sweeter California that had somehow survived We have, to be sure, occasionally retreated into a country amidst the ruin. of multicolored alerts, constant surveillance, and dismaying The same feeling permeated the Mare Island Shoreline greed. Jesse and I were not an hour on Mare Island when Heritage Preserve, which is less a remnant of primeval someone turned us in. We were taking pictures of the California than a set of trails up through the fennel and scrapping of the USS Lincoln, which apparently led us to oat grass that cover the island’s open spaces. The preserve be mistaken for the world’s sorriest terrorists coming to is so well intentioned, earnest, and cheerful that it’s hard destroy what Allied Defense was already tearing apart. not to like it. It values the California that we have, and the

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Boom0202_06.indd 68 07/06/12 2:24 PM people who run it expect the best of the people who visit. emblematic messes along the Strait; but without them, we They assume visitors will pay admission whether the gate don’t stand a chance. I still think they’re closer to core of is manned or not, and that they will, of course, pay for the California than the mean-spiritedness and anger apparent water bottles placed in coolers along the trail. These are not in the reader-response column of any newspaper, magazine, people expecting to make money; these are people who see or blog in the state. Things have gotten serious now. The something in this torn-up place and value it. past has consequences. Our California is the wreck, ruin, Good sense, generosity, and an appreciation for the beauty, bad judgment, and generosity of places like the beauties of what we have are not going to get us out of the Carquinez Strait. B Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

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