Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Good idea! No more B******y Hills!
  

    
Oh DANG Jef! I’m off to prepare my new case!

Chuck, part of my case was that, in fact, there are very very few
maybe even no examples of people calling the highlands of Oakland
the “Berkeley Hills,” neither on maps nor in news stories.
  

    
'east bay hills' isnt in common parlance?
  

    
Sorry, <mazz>, that you got that downer email. Maybe someday we can ban
"Berkeley" from all our nomenclature.
  

    
The city is fine, though, and the hills overlooking it, which are mostly in
Oakland.
  

    
That was ALSO part of my argument!

OK, to turn from my hobby back to your book: I learned that,
geologically speaking, I am living on a gravel fan. In fact, the
gravel fan bisected by Sausal Creek and Dimond Canyon gives much of
Oakland its physical shape. Can you explain how it got there and
what that meant in terms of how the land got used?
  

    
And once you discuss the above, could you please give your opinion of this
paragraph from Mitchell Schwarzer's _Hella Town: Oakland's History of
Development and Disruption_?

". . . Warren Hinckle penned an . . . appraisal in Ramparts, a onetime
liberal, Catholic magazine that now, with Hinckle as editor, had become a
voice of the New Left. 'Oakland was doomed by its own geography,' he
lamented. 'Its flatlands provide a natural base for industrial expansion of
hilly San Francisco, an expansion that assumed forest-fire proportions as
the 20th century pressed on.' Piers, factories, warehouses, storage tanks,
and worker cottages crowded those working districts. As time went on,
however, those precincts were both losing their industrial edge and becoming
a place of last resort for white residents. 'Race begins at sea level in
Oakland, Hinckle continued. 'Some 90,000 Oakland Negroes, constituting
almost one quarter of the city's total population, are jammed into
restricted and blighted flatland areas on both the east and west sides of
the city. As the height above sea level increases, the population becomes
paler. The attractive, sylvan hill areas are reserved for expensive homes
for whites.' His message: Oakland's geographic, race-based divisions were
dragging it down." (200-201)
  

    
I don't know enough to critique Hinkel's reasoning, but his facts were
correct. The flats, especially near shore, were the only places where
Black and other non-White residents could buy property. Foothill Boulevard,
as its name suggests, runs along the base of the gravel fan that Mary refers
to. I offer a scenario, a hypothesis, for the presence of that fan of low
hills in chapter 6 of DEEP OAKLAND: the block of rocks that the city of
Piedmont sits on was heaved upward about a thousand feet by interactions
along the Hayward fault around a million years ago. The gravel hills
surround the Piedmont block and represent the ancient gravel that remains
deeply buried everywhere else in the East Bay. That is my theory.

In human terms, those foothills above Foothill Boulevard were premium ground
for desirable suburbs in the decades right after the San Francisco
earthquake of 1906, when a huge wave of displaced people settled across the
Bay. The big landowners pushed streetcar lines into them and created classic
residential tracts around them, free of "Africans, Mongolians and Hindoos"
and with strict covenants guaranteeing that residents would be surrounded
with people just like themselves in houses comparable to their own. The
newspaper ads were all about property values, views and fresh air,
convenient transit and, in a word, privilege. It was that geological
accident that created a wide swath of gentle hills, which in turn allowed
the growing city to stratify itself by race and class.
  

    
It's ironic that in my parents' home state, folks on the hilltop
would wish they could afford some of that good bottom land, while
out here, the aspiration was to be elevated enough to catch a
healthy breeze.
  

    
At least that's what the real-estate men said. They also touted the good
drainage, which probably meant septic tanks. And good breezes meant you
didn't have to smell horseshit and garbage. But the soil was truly good
everywhere. The East Bay was always excellent farmland, and the climate was
always considered to be exceptionally healthful, although in the old days
there was a racist overlay: tropical peoples were considered to be indolent
and enervated by excessive warmth whereas northerly peoples were energized
and invigorated by the bracing coolth. The land got into the blood.
  

    
You can still find feral fruit trees in Dimond Canyon and Joaquin
Miller Park; the oranges from my neighbor's tree are outstanding.
  

    
I love sampling the free foods as I walk around Oakland. Early spring I pick
miner's lettuce; figs in the fall; blackberries in July, and nasturtium
blossom almost year round.
  

    
I guess it is also ironic that the now-upscale neighborhood north of
Fruitvale Avenue, Trestle Glen, was considered "a rugged canyon of
revolting appearance" in 1904.

It almost became a park linking Lake Merritt to the hills, which
would have dramatically changed the city.
  

    
!!!
  

    
Chapter 7 of DEEP OAKLAND goes deep into Indian Gulch, the valley containing
the Trestle Glen neighborhood. It not only is Oakland's most nearly ideal
stream valley, but also is a good case study in how the city has dealt with
issues related to public parks and private development. I enjoyed poking
through the newspaper record when I researched this chapter. The struggle
over Trestle Glen lasted decades, and what could have been "a gem of a
natural park" ended up as it began in prehistory: the best residential site
in the area.

I've learned to discount the rhetoric of Hearst-era journalism, when the
papers wore the interests of their owners on their sleeves. But I found some
juicy quotes like that one.

I came to realize that "natural parks" aren't what the general run of
citizens prefer. They want playgrounds and lawns and facilities, which is
what became of Adams Point. Even the nature preserves of the high hills are
equipped with attractions, with the exception of Sibley Volcanic Preserve.
We only have as much natural park land from a historical accident, the
switch from local water sources (formerly based on groundwater wells and
surface reservoirs) to the Sierra thanks to East Bay MUD. The new agency
acquired all the existing watershed land in the 1920s and spun off big
chunks of it, no longer needed for water production, to a new parks agency.
  

    
The Indian Gulch chapter really highlighted for me how differently
our predecessors saw the environment. They were looking for
resources to exploit; we tend to want to preserve the familiar,
whether by keeping a landscape open or landmarking a building.

There is still a hidden path that goes up part of the canyon behind
the houses, but it would have been amazing to be able to walk
through a natural landscape between the lake and Montclair Park.

Even though we have a wealth of natural parks in Oakland, it's easy
to get greedy for what might have been.
  

    
I found that chapter enlightening as well, though I don't know the
neighborhood well.
  

    
The thing is, it wasn't a natural landscape any more -- whatever that means
-- at the time. Photos of the old trestle across the glen, built to carry an
electric streetcar line into the Crocker Highlands area to support home
development, show the hills there covered with hay bales. This was still
during the horse era, and huge acreages were needed to support horses.
  

    
As you can probably tell, after reading your book I moved on to _Hella
Town_, whose thesis seems to be "X was envisioned, and X did not happen."
It's a very dispiriting read, and now the As possibly moving to Las Vegas is
just the latest example of Oakland's dreams expiring in a puff of smoke.

Is there any way Oakland's geology can provide a better future for it?
  

    
Well, the city can avoid making more trouble for itself. The Hayward fault
will, over the next couple of major earthquakes, clear itself a nice
greenbelt. The city could stop allowing homes to be built in the landslide-
prone high hills, although I see no prospect of that. The city could open up
the stream beds in the flats, although that would be a tedious and expensive
undertaking. The city could work harder to encourage earthquake-resistant
housing construction -- this is why I unreservedly favor new apartment
towers everywhere in town.

The city needs to foresee, and plan for, the destruction that the next major
Hayward fault earthquake will cause. There will be large swaths of those
classic century-old residential neighborhoods that will be wiped out by
fires. Some ground near the shore will undergo liquefaction and should be
abandoned. Geologists can be rather ruthless about these things. We also
need to regain some of the Ohlones' sense of land management and stop
letting trees grow willy-nilly and become firestorms in the making. I hope
that DEEP OAKLAND will loosen people's minds and think more ambitiously
about the possibilities we can envision for our city. Oakland was built into
a great city by just such ambitious people.
  

    
In contrast to the gravel fan, which shaped the city's lowlands, we
have the Piedmont Block. 

There are political and social explanations for Piedmont, the
independent small city entirely surrounded by Oakland, but it turns
out that geology had an influence, too: That big lump of Franciscan
Complex in the middle of the city collected water, and water helped
make Piedmont what it is.
  

    
I'm loving *Deep Oakland,* though I haven't had a chance to read very
far yet. The excellent writing makes it a much easier read than I was
expecting.
  

    
Piedmont used to have a mineral-springs resort! The upper valley of Bushy
Dell Creek, where Piedmont Park is today, had sulfur springs that were
trendy in the 1870s. There's commemorative signage in the ravine today with
a picture of Mark Twain visiting.

Another of Piedmont's stream valleys, what's now called Moraga Canyon by the
locals, used to be a family-friendly fantasy park full of water attractions
and pavilions and groves and trails. Blair Park, created by Piedmont's
founding citizen Walter Blair. It went downhill after he died and was
eventually acquired by the rapacious Realty Syndicate, which put a rock
quarry there that was callously named the Blair Quarry.

The rock in Piedmont was its other geological source of wealth. The
quarries, conveniently close to downtown and the harbor, supplied Oakland
with much-needed material starting early on. After a few decades, though,
they became undesirable parts of the upscale Piedmont we know today.
  

    
Sumac slipped in while I was writing that. Thank you for the compliment. In
a book of this kind, the writing is as important as the facts and ideas. I
was careful to introduce geology exactly where it was needed, in just the
amount needed. I saw an online review from a reader the other day that said
they didn't learn much geology. I take that as a vote of confidence, far
preferable to "there was too much."

You don't need to digest a whole textbook to appreciate what Oakland offers.
  

    
I would counter that there is actually a fair amount of geology in
there! But yes, "I wanted yet still more geology" is probably where
you want to fall if you're aiming at a general audience.

Even knowing how much I enjoyed the book, I have been a little
surprised by how much buzz it is getting locally!

I want to let people know about some places they can hear and see
you talk about the book, including this great interview with Liam
O'Donoghue of East Bay Yesterday:

https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/from-volcanoes-to-potholes/

And this interview with Alexis Madrigal of KQED's Forum program:

https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101893356/the-history-of-oakland-told-through-i
ts-geology

You have also started hitting the bookstore circuit. Any upcoming
dates?