Geology

Codornices and Cerrito Creeks are geologically very young. They were born in the sideways friction of great plates. Rupturing along the Hayward Fault system, one block of crust tilted downward to the east. Its west portion formed what is now the hills of San Francisco and Marin; its eastern portion formed a long valley. Tilting just east of this valley similarly formed the Berkeley Hills, an uplift that began as recently as a million years ago and probably continues today. The rising mix of old sediments, volcanic outpourings, and scrapings from the clash of the great plates was deeply fractured. It eroded rapidly as it rose, washing for a time to a short-lived great river that emptied a vast inland lake that had filled the Central Valley. Some 10,000 years ago, as the last ice age released water from glaciers, sea level rose and the valley between the San Francisco and Berkeley Hills became today's San Francisco Bay. A few hilltops on the downward-tilting block remained above water as El Cerrito del Sur (Fleming Point), Cerrito de San Antonio (Albany Hill), Brooks Island, and Potrero San Pablo (the hills of Point Richmond).

The Waterfront before Bay fill

The young creeks flowing from the rising Berkeley Hills to the Bay quickly built today's flatlands as their flood plains, grassy and covered with wildflowers in spring. Near the creek mouths the distinction between Bay and dry land was sometimes hazy. Codornices Creek, for example, apparently had no year-round channel in its lowest reaches. Rather, it seems to have spilled onto a marshy grassland that edged into salt marsh bordering a long slough that ran north-northwest from about today's Virginia Street to the northeast corner of Fleming Point, where it emptied in the Bay. South of Fleming Point and west of this slough, a sandy beach and low dunes edged the Bay about where the I-880/580 freeway runs now. Sandy beaches are a rarity in the Bay; this one seems to have formed because of the strong tidal currents just opposite the Golden Gate, while the salt marsh behind it - the area's largest - formed due to the shelter of Fleming Point.Schoolhouse Creek south of Codornices, and Marin Creek farther north also emptied into this slough and salt marsh.

North of Albany Hill, a fan of creeks, the largest of them Cerrito Creek, meandered toward the Bay in a large tidal marsh that began just west of today's San Pablo Avenue and continued north behind Point Isabel, which was an island except at low tide. On the northeast side of Albany Hill, Middle Creek (the lower part of Blackberry Creek, coming down from today's John Hinkel Park) found its way to Cerrito Creek through a willow marsh, or sausal.

This formed an almost perfect village site for the Native Americans who began to create permanent settlements in the area perhaps 4000 years ago. The hill provided shelter from winter winds; marshes provided shellfish and waterfowl for food; the creek provided fresh water and easy transport to the Bay. Mortar holes in rocks and deep deposits of shells show this was a village site. (Neighboring villages south and north were at the mouth of Strawberry Creek, on Pt. Isabel, and at Stege in Richmond.) European diseases and missions wiped out most of these settlements before the East Bay was divided into huge land grants in the early 1820s. Some of the survivors worked as ranch hands on land that once was theirs.

The land grant ranchos

The land grantees shared their vast holdings among their numerous children. On Rancho San Antonio, Jose Domingo Peralta received Berkeley and much of Oakland; he built his house on the south bank of Codornices Creek at today's Albina Street, a bit northwest of today's Monterey Market. In 1818, he and his brothers had named the creek after finding quails, or quails eggs, there. On Rancho San Pablo, Vincente Castro built his more elegant home near the south border of his father's holdings, on the north bank of Cerrito Creek at today's El Cerrito Plaza. The 13 rooms in several buildings, including a chapel and stables, surrounded a patio edged by a shaded veranda. Nearby were an orchard and vegetable gardens.

The rancheros' short tenure was doomed by the Gold Rush, whose wealth seekers descended like locusts. Domingo Peralta sold El Cerrito del Sur to a San Francisco butcher named Fleming, who used it to fatten cattle. But the rest dribbled away to squatters and in lawsuits; he was evicted and died landless and penniless. Castro did better, operating a ferry for miners from San Francisco to Point Isabel (named for his daughter). He held onto his adobe until he died, but ruinous lawsuits among his siblings left the family with nothing but a few acres surrounding it and his father's adobe in what is now San Pablo. Both fell into decay. Victor's adobe was refurbished in the 1930s as a gambling casino and dance hall, but it closed during World War II and was burned in an arson fire in 1956, shortly after the property was purchased to build El Cerrito Plaza. Two 15-year-olds confessed to setting the fire for fun.

Farms and industry

Grazing, with some haying, wheat, and dairying, remained the main uses of the land along the lower creeks into the 20th century. But industrialization accelerated with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. The broad tidelands edging the Bay were divided by the state and sold in the 1870s - the dream of filling the Bay began early. Dynamite manufacturing, driven out of San Francisco's dunes by the frequency of explosions, moved to Fleming Point at the mouth of Codornices Creek. This plant was forced out after an 1883 explosion that killed some 35 workers and knocked out windows in San Francisco and Oakland. But it was replaced by acid manufacturing. Meanwhile, dynamite manufacturing resumed on the northeast side of Albany Hill along Cerrito Creek. There the powder companies planted eucalyptus trees to muffle the sound and force of explosions, but were driven out nevertheless, after a particularly large 1905 explosion and fire. Explosives manufacturing also took place on Point Isabel.

In the early 1850s, trader James H. Jacobs built a wharf on Domingo Peralta's land at the mouth of Strawberry Creek, and the young county of Alameda began to improve the trail that is now San Pablo Avenue, leading north from Oakland. A roadhouse and grain mill sprang up near Jacobs' landing, and gradually industry took over most of the Berkeley waterfront. When Berkeley incorporated in 1878, with Codornices Creek as its north boundary, the town had two foci: the area around the University and today's downtown, and the more blue-collar village of Oceanview near the waterfront. Canneries, flour milling, paint, soap, glass, tanning, and other factories loomed behind docks in Central and South Berkeley. The air was often rank; raw sewage combined with manufacturing waste turned Bay water black and peeled paint from buildings.

The northern waterfront was less developed; despite the acid works, the sandy beach south of Albany Hill was a popular swimming and picnic spot. Inland, grazing continued until most of the land that is now University Village was purchased by Hiram Gill, a pioneer nurseryman and horticulturalist. Not many years after the dynamite makers were driven out, the old Nobel train station at Albany Hill was abandoned; the area became a hobo jungle. But the area was under attack from two directions. The sand on the beach was mined out - it had disappeared by the end of the 1920s - and in the 1920s, over the protests of conservationists, Berkeley began filling its waterfront with garbage, starting south from Codornices Creek. Fill reached Virginia Street by the 1940s. The Meadow and Brickyard areas were filled in the 1950s and 1960s. Today's Cesar Chavez Park operated as a landfill into the 1980s, as did the Albany Bulb, the next artificial peninsula south.

The railroads

At first, the Central (later Union and Southern) Pacific Tracks dominated the waterfront. They forced the Santa Fe Railroad to build its spur from Richmond to Oakland inland, on the line of a failed narrow-gauge railway. The Santa Fe railroad built the massive concrete abutments at Schoolhouse Creek and at Codornices Creek, where Friends of Five Creeks recently built a new bridge rail. (The northern part of this route is today's BART right of way. Farther south, the route was turned over to Berkeley in the 1970s, but mostly remains unused because of lack of agreement on what to do with it.)

The Santa Fe Railroad, however, turned the tables by secretly acquiring most of the tidelands along the Berkeley waterfront. Its grand plans for an ocean-going port were thwarted mainly by a rival plan that had piers running at right angles. But its subsidiaries and spinoffs, Santa Fe Land Improvement and later Catullus, remained owners of nearly all the filled lands west of the freeway.

Albany and El Cerrito

Inland, the early 20th century saw bedroom subdividing, as ferries and steam and then electric railways speeded transportation and the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake sent frightened residents searching for safer ground. A real estate syndicate acquired control of most of the land in the Berkeley Hills and began subdividing with appeals to the well-to-do. The less-well-off settled for the flats. In 1908, working-class residents of the flatlands between Cerrito and Codornices Creeks incorporated as Ocean View, in large part to stop Berkeley from dumping garbage at the mouth of Codornices Creek. (The men had held one undecided meeting when a group of women, who then could not vote, met the slop wagons with guns one morning. At the next meeting, the vote to incorporate was conclusive.) The new town's name was changed to Albany the next year.

In Contra Costa across the county line, settlement remained thinner. But William Rust had opened a blacksmith shop on San Pablo near Cerrito Creek, and the area, far from thick settlement and accompanying law enforcement, was a popular site for roadhouses. In 1917 the settlement around Rust's and one around Stege Landing farther north combined to incorporate as El Cerrito - named for the prominent hill in the neighboring town and county.

The decline of creeks

Suppression of Native American burning and trampling by the heavy hooves of cattle began the transformation of the flower-filled grasslands along the lower creeks. Erosion probably increased and channels were cut deeper. With urbanization, land for development increased in value - even land over creeks. And the creeks that had been vital assets for the first settlers began to become liabilities. Sewage polluted the water - early creekside houses often had drains emptying directly into the creek, and storm drains and sanitary sewers were inadequately separated if at all. As more land was covered by roads and buildings, storm water could no longer soak into soil and instead flowed too quickly to the creeks, which became raging torrents during rains. The high storm flows led to flooding and at the same time cut the creek channels deeper, creating cliff-like, unstable banks. By the 1930s, with the Works Progress Administration looking for projects for those thrown out of work by the Great Depression, putting the creeks into culverts was welcomed. And while older creekside houses generally face creeks, those built from the 1930s onward generally ignore or turn their backs to them.

Codornices and Cerrito Creeks escaped much of this, probably because they were political boundaries, which made such projects cumbersome. (Cerrito Creek's deep upstream canyon also defied filling.) The escape wasn't complete: during the 1930s a portion of Codornices' flow was diverted north to what appears to have been the old Marin Creek Channel. This unnatural forking remains today, a problem for restoration plans.

The Depression and the War

As the country began to come out of the Great Depression in the late 1930s, there was increasing development in what had been empty land along the lower creeks. The University of California had bought the Gill Tract in 1928. In 1939, the U.S. Department of Agriculture began building its Western Regional Laboratory on part of this land. UC Berkeley soon moved its experimental fields to the tract to be near the new facility. There were plans for a new veterinarian college.

Plans to dynamite and dig out the top of Albany Hill were foiled, but beginning in 1939 the Santa Fe railroad blasted off the top of Fleming Point to build Golden Gate Fields race track. The debris was bulldozed north into the Bay, forming the tracks' northwest parking lot. The track opened in 1941, but storms forced immediate closure. By the time the racecourse dried out, the track was bankrupt and World War II had begun. The track was commandeered first by the Army as a camp, but found too muddy. By 1944 the Navy had taken over, using the area to refurbish and test landing craft, which were then shipped out for landings in the South Pacific.

Meanwhile, the Richmond and Mare Island Shipyards had gone into full wartime production. Liberty ships were turned out in less than five days from keel to launching. The dog track that had occupied today's El Cerrito Plaza closed (and with it the casino in Victor Castro's adobe). The area became a trailer park for workers. What is now University Village extended south about to Camellia Street in Berkeley; this Codornices Village had almost 2000 simple apartments for war workers (later partly used by Navy families as well), with a community center and child-care facility that still function. The village also became a bold and largely successful experiment in racial integration, then a rarity both in California and public housing.

With gasoline rationed and tires all but unavailable, getting the war workers to the shipyards was critical. In 1942 and 1943, the Richmond Shipyard Railway was cobbled together in six months, using rails from abandoned streetcar and electric rail lines, pilings from dismantled ferry piers, used girders, and antiquated mothballed rail cars from New York's IRT. Running more than 90 trains a day, it was an ironic last gasp of urban mass transit in the East Bay - most of the scrap and junk material was available because completion of the Bay Bridge and increasing automobile ownership had led to abandonment of the ferries and commuter lines that had networked the area.

Through most of Berkeley, the line used recently abandoned Interurban Electric Railway tracks along Ninth Street. Codornices Creek at 9th apparently was culverted in order to extend the rails into Albany. This culvert was removed in 1995 with a small grant and lots of volunteer labor, creating the restored channel that we see today.

North of Codornices Creek, in what is now University Village, the railway curved up to the northwest to cross the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, and then passed under the Eastshore Highway near Buchanan, where Codornices Creek reached the Bay.

In the post-war years, increasing numbers of Codornices Village tenants became returning veterans and their families going to school on the GI Bill. Although some land and buildings were transferred back to the University of California in 1948, Codornices Village in both Albany and Berkeley continued as public housing, given new impetus by the Korean War. Not until 1955 was the Berkeley portion closed and demolished. In 1956, the Albany buildings were sold to UC Berkeley, which continued to use them as student housing, adding 500 new apartments next to Codornices Creek in 1961 and 1962. As part of this project, woods along what had been a meandering stream were cut down, and the creek was channeled into a narrow artificial channel. Another reach of the lower creek flowed through the Union Carbide plant, which reportedly turned the water green or red at times.

What can we restore?

Surprisingly long reaches of Codornices and Cerrito Creeks can be restored as urban greenways for walking, bicycling, play, and just relaxation, and encouraging us to get out of our cars. Check out our Projects to find out what is planned and what is being done.