How Alameda Became an Island Will Be Dearly Missed
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I S S U E N U MBER 1 • MARCH 2019 HO W alaMeda becaMe an island t he story of the tidal canal by Woody Minor Excavation underway in the summer of 1889, looking north to Oakland. Image: Bay Area Electric Railroad Association [#37366a]. e’re an island because of the tidal since the gold rush. Local shipping interests lobbied Wcanal—the name of the narrow stretch of water Washington, and in 1873 Congress authorized a study by that extends from the vicinity of Park Street to the vicinity Army engineers. The board was headed by Col. George H. of High Street. This section of the harbor is actually a ditch Mendell, a distinguished West Point graduate and Civil laboriously cut through the neck of the Alameda peninsula War veteran. As commander of the Corps of Engineers’ and first filled with water in 1902. Consuming thirty years western district from 1871 to 1895, Mendell would direct from conception to completion, the canal stretches more the implementation of the plan to make the estuary a than a mile from the estuary to San Leandro Bay and is functional harbor. spanned by four bridges. It was planned and executed by Approved by Congress in 1874, the plan sought to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of an elaborate harness the tides to scour shipping channels. Parallel harbor plan, and it was paid for with federal dollars. stone training walls would extend some two miles into The Harbor Plan the bay, cutting through the bar into deep water. A dredged channel would run between the jetties and The natural inlet separating Alameda and Oakland, originally divide into two channels beyond the Webster Street known as San Antonio Creek in deference to the rancho Bridge, terminating in a dredged tidal basin—a catchment but commonly called “the estuary,” was notoriously shallow. area for tidal waters—at the estuary’s east end (Brooklyn Basin). Shoaled channels and a sandbar had impeded navigation Continued on page 2 . AAMEDAL M U SEUM Q U ARTERL y • I S SUE NUMBER 1 • MARCH 2019 Tidal Canal . .Continued from page 1 One of the landowners was A.A. Cohen whose Fernside estate bordered the route. He declined his share and sued A tidal canal cut through the neck of the Alameda peninsula the government, but he couldn’t stop the project. would connect the tidal basin to San Leandro Bay, enclosed by a dam by the Bay Farm Island Bridge. Congress made its first appropriation for excavation in 1888, allowing Col. Mendell to award a one-year contract Here’s how it was supposed to work. During high tide for the west end of the cut. The successful bidder was the water would gather in San Leandro Bay. The dam gates San Francisco Bridge Co., with the firm’s chief engineer, would close, funneling the accelerated ebb tide through Hermann Krusi, serving as project manager. Raised in the narrow canal to the estuary tidal basin. The combined New York, where his Swiss-born father taught college-level outflow would enter the open bay between the jetties, philosophy, languages, and mathematics, Krusi graduated scouring the channels along the way. from Cornell in 1882 with a degree in civil engineering. Between 1874 and 1900, Congress made around He joined the San Francisco Bridge Co. in 1885; two years twenty appropriations totaling nearly $2.5 million (at later he married and moved to Alameda, residing in a least $100 million in today’s dollars). The Army Corps mansion on Central Avenue. directed the work of dozens of contractors. The training On February 18, 1889, a rail-mounted steam shovel walls went in between 1874 and 1894, and dredging for broke ground “at a point in a field of wild mustard” near the shipping channels and tidal basin began in 1877. The Fruitvale Avenue. As the dig widened and deepened, final construction project under the plan was the canal. tracks were laid and relaid along the bottom of the cut; Its cost with bridges approached $700,000, or about 30 the swivel bucket filled dump cars which were hauled percent of the total budget. The dam was never built. onto spur lines along the shore where the material was used to build dikes and fill marshland tracts under Phase I: 1874-1891 contract to landowners. As the dig proceeded west, a The canal route was surveyed in 1874. The 86.5-acre floating dredge cut eastward through marsh, pumping right-of-way extended through the neck of the peninsula, material to build an earthen dam to keep out the estuary. straddling the boundary between Alameda and Oakland— The Alameda Argus noted in June that “the canal cut is so a treeless expanse bordered by marsh and traversed by deep that the cars may ascend and descend with the tops Park Street and High Street as well as train tracks at of their smoke stacks still below the level of the banks.” Fruitvale Avenue. Condemnation proceedings began in Krusi predicted that the cut would be finished by the end 1876, and about $40,000 was allocated among eleven of the year. landowners in 1882, exhausting funding for several years. Continued on page 3. Looking west to the recently completed Fruitvale Bridge with the Park Street Bridge in the distance. The canal was nearing completion in this 1901 view. Image: Bay Area Electric Railroad Association [#42221]. 32 AAMEDAL M U SEUM Q U ARTERL y • I S SUE NUMBER 1 • MARCH 2019 Tidal Canal . .Continued from page 2 But then the rains came and kept coming, eventually totaling 45 inches—one of the wettest winters on record. Disaster struck on a stormy night in January, when Sausal Creek overflowed its banks at Fruitvale Avenue and flooded the ditch and equipment. It took two months to pump out the water; then more storms set in. By the time the contract was completed, in November 1890, nine months behind schedule, SF Bridge had lost thousands of dollars on the job. Yet the firm promptly took on a second contract in 1891 for the other end of the cut, east of the High Street. This job went smoothly as the dredge ate its way up the slough from San Leandro Bay through tideland and marsh. The dredge “Olympian” alongside the High Street Bridge, October As the east cut drew to a close, construction was 1901. Image: Bay Area Electric Railroad Association [#23770]. completed on the long-awaited Park Street Bridge, the first of the bridges to be built in conjunction with the canal. object to the stench arising from the sewer-polluted More than two years had passed since the steam shovel waters of the tidal basin,” he wrote in 1897. “This is very severed the road, disrupting traffic flow at the city’s main annoying, no doubt, but is strictly an issue of municipal entrance, but Mendell had refused to move on the project sewerage, and not of harbor improvement…I can see no until the west cut attained full width. The Corps finally reason whatever for recommending the completion of awarded contracts for a substantial iron draw, and the this canal, but on the contrary, am of the opinion that the Park Street Bridge opened to vehicular traffic on west end should be bulkheaded off and filled up by pump December 7, 1891. dredgers to at least high water mark. This would at least prevent it from remaining a stagnant cesspool.” Hiatus: 1892-1898 Then all work on the canal ceased, not to resume for completion: 1899-1902 seven years. The reasons were both economic and political. Federal policies have a way of shifting like the tides, and Funding shrank as depression set in, and new appropria- Washington came around. Following the appointment of a tions were earmarked for channel dredging at the behest of new district engineer, work resumed on the canal in 1899. Oakland shipping interests. Mendell’s retirement in 1895 The first contracts under the new appropriation were for came in the midst of these setbacks, removing the project’s drawbridges at High Street and Fruitvale Avenue. Both chief advocate. At the same time, new studies suggested were built on dry land —pits were excavated and construction that plain old dredging was a more cost-effective way of completed before water flowed under them. At High Street maintaining channel depths—a view held by Mendell’s the excavation was done by a dredge working west through successor as district engineer. The intra-agency dispute the marsh from the old cut which was dammed off. At went on for years. landlocked Fruitvale Avenue, where a steam shovel did The impasse had noxious consequences. Alameda’s the work, the deeper cut and harder material increased and Oakland’s new sewer systems discharged raw waste the cost. The bridge at High Street was the first to open, into the harbor under the assumption that the canal in 1900, followed by Fruitvale in 1901, the latter a combi- would flush the communal toilet. Instead, fetid water nation railroad-vehicular span. awash with dead fish lapped against the dam and seeped The final bids for canal excavation were opened on into the ditch, emitting a pervasive stench. The pollution May 23, 1901. Two weeks later the quarter-million-dollar was seen as Alameda’s problem, since it fouled the main contract was awarded to the Atlantic, Gulf & Pacific Co., entrance to the city, and the canal became an Alameda a new firm co-owned by Hermann Krusi. The job called for cause; Oakland’s priority, as ever, was the shipping the removal of 1.3 million cubic yards of material, mostly channel.