The Trail Companion

     ...continued.

Even as the state park system finally got off the ground in 1928, an opportunity for local regional park planning was created by the East Bay Municipal Utility District's purchase of the extensive land holdings of the East Bay Water Company. Much of this land was surplus to the new district's needs, and citizen groups soon arose to assess what portions might make good parks for recreational use of the hills. One such group, the East Bay Metropolitan Park Association, soon made a preliminary survey to that effect. This was followed up at the end of 1930 by a comprehensive one conducted by Olmsted and Ansel Hall of the National Park Service for the University of California's Bureau of Public Administration. The Olmsted-Hall Report recommended developing surplus watershed lands into a twenty-two mile chain of regional parks through the hills from Richmond to San Leandro as part of a larger Bay Area park and parkway system that would also include San Mateo County's watershed lands on the Peninsula, Golden Gate Park and the Presidio in San Francisco, and North Bay parks and watershed lands, all to be linked by the system of great bridges over the bay that was then just beginning to come into being.
     Aside from the East Bay parks this vision was never to be implemented in any systematic fashion, though subsequent decades were to see many of its proposals realized in a piecemeal basis. Even the prospects for the East Bay seemed bleak at first. The East Bay Municipal Utility District refused to support a proposal to include park functions among its powers. The way was only cleared for implementing the East Bay plan by the legislature's passage of the Regional Park District Act in 1933, which provided that two or more adjacent cities might form a park district within the boundaries of an existing utility district. Accordingly, voters in seven East Bay cities approved the formation of an East Bay Regional Park District in 1934. The new district started making land purchases in 1936, both from the East Bay Municipal Utility District and private owners. The first parks established under its authority were Redwood Regional Park, Roundtop Regional Park, Lake Temescal Regional Park, and Charles Lee Tilden Regional Park.
      The East Bay was not the only area in which an expiring water company created a windfall for conservation. On the Peninsula William Bourn II, longtime owner of the Spring Valley Water Company, sold both the company and its vast land holdings to the city of San Francisco in 1930. The transfer stipulated that the land be held in perpetuity as an ecological preserve devoted solely to water supply use. While the transaction brought no new parks or recreational areas with it, the long term ecological benefit of preserving a whole watershed by public ownership have been considerable.

All told, the Bay Area gained as a region more public recreational space in the 1930s than in any prior period. The large scale efforts detailed above were only part of the story. On a smaller scale, Bay Area counties were also starting to create parks and project park systems, though their initiatives were somewhat spotty. San Mateo County had previously inaugurated its park system with the establishment of Memorial Park on upper Pescadero Creek in 1924. Subsequently, in 1932, a new county charter established a park and recreation department, master recreation plan and land acquisition fund. Under the master plan the county acquired several miles of coastal beaches, and later encouraged the State Park Commission's purchase of additional beaches included in the plan. Santa Clara County had established Stevens Creek Park in 1924 and Mount Madonna Park in 1927, though it had no long-range program. A "save the beaches" campaign began in Marin County, though it was not to reach fruition until after World War II. No large tracts were set aside in Napa or Solano Counties.
      After the excitement of the 1920s and 30s, the next two decades were relatively quiet on the park building front. The state and the East Bay Regional Park district both augmented their holdings - Henry W. Coe State Park and Año Nuevo State Reserve, both established in 1958, were notable additions to the state system. San Mateo County continued expansion of its park system with Huddart Park in Woodside, donated by the state in 1944, Junipero Serra Park in the hills behind San Bruno, purchased in 1956, and Sam MacDonald Park near La Honda, willed to Stanford University for use as a park by Sam MacDonald in 1957 and given to the county by the University in 1959. In Santa Clara County, the City of Palo Alto added to foothill region already preserved by Stanford University by acquiring the huge Foothills Park in two purchases from Dr. Russel V. A. Lee.
      All in all, the Bay Area in the middle decades of the century seemed to have come to a certain equilibrium or stasis, even complacency, in relation to open space issues. It was more apparent than real. The postwar prosperity brought an unprecedented building boom, as new housing filled up the unprotected north and bayside of the Peninsula, turned San Jose into a little Los Angeles, and began to encroach on previously little disturbed farmlands in the East Bay. Whole new cities were built on land reclaimed from the Bay, and proposals for additional communities built on fill reached epic proportions. Awareness of the environmental consequences of gung-ho development was about to hit home with a bang. There would be nothing quiet about the 1960s.

To be Continued.

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