![]() The other side of the channel, on the left, is steeper and less obscured by buildings. Atop the rise is the natural platform of downtown Oakland, around 10 meters in elevation the county courthouse and neighboring landmarks stand on it. The original shoreline, the edge of the marsh, is visible farther to the right where 12th Street starts to rise near the museum’s back end. Both buildings lie on landfill inside the original, natural channel shown on the old map. On the channel’s west bank, to the right, is the 1914-vintage civic auditorium next to the 1969-vintage Oakland Museum of California. This place where land and sea and air converge is Oakland’s natural center, its shimmering heart.ĭownstream from the 12th Street bridge, the lake’s outlet channel snakes in a narrow trough. Its windpipe, so to speak, is the narrow channel to the Bay where the water can be seen rushing, in or out, at almost any hour. The flow and ebb of tidewater past the scene is Lake Merritt’s daily breath. (Mitchell, Edward H., courtesy of the Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Center Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Center) Right: View of Oakland Municipal Auditorium from Lake Merritt, 1949. Left: “The Willows” a low area on the western shoreline of Lake Merritt popular for picnics and public gatherings the photo may have been taken in 1915. These human features now define the mouth of the lake. The wrist of this inlet is braceleted by the wide 12th Street vehicular bridge, a pedestrian bridge over the outlet channel, and the Lake Merritt Amphitheater. The slough’s natural shape is that of a person’s forearm, thumb raised as if to shake hands, truly an arm of the sea in a gesture of welcome. The long stroke of the Y was once twice as long as it is today. The earliest good map of this area, published in 1857, shows the slough continuing southwest to the Bay in an open channel as wide as the rest of the lake. But it’s important in geology to distinguish the human imprint from nature’s handiwork. On the map, Lake Merritt has the outline of a lower-case letter Y, defined by a long fat stroke slanting northeast–southwest and a short narrow stroke extending northwest to the mouth of Glen Echo Creek. The geologist, ever attentive to landscape, notices that different types of terrain around the lake give it a visual rhythm, part of what keeps it so interesting. Its entire shore is a city park with attractions for people-watchers, bird-watchers, garden lovers, exercisers, and more. Compared to lakes, estuaries are dynamic places, prone to waves and tidewash, cloudy with microscopic life and mineral nutrients, where a riot of species thrive in mingling waters. Dredging has turned the San Antonio Slough to open water, but it remains an estuary, a brackish zone between fresh and salt water. The early English-speaking visitors called it a slough-a tidal backwater with slow-moving currents and muddy banks-and named it for the Rancho San Antonio, the Spanish private land grant that once extended from Berkeley to San Leandro. In Oakland’s early days it was a barrier, always in the way, but we’ve come to embrace it as the centerpiece of the room, framed like a sculpture, the city’s focal point.īut Lake Merritt is not really a lake. ![]() An inside-out island, a marine habitat surrounded by land, it is truly a mediterranean sea. Our lake is a world-class oddity, an arm of the Bay in the midst of a city. Lake Merritt’s story is a combination of two stories, each a million years long: the repeated cycles of the sea during the ice ages and the steady rearrangement of the land by the Hayward Fault. Although a century-plus of human action has thoroughly changed the lake itself, the landforms around it are still plain to see. The landscape around Lake Merritt, near Oakland’s historical core, is rich with geologic features dating from a million years before the city was founded. Unlike the fault-invisible, inexorable, indifferent-the lake is open to all of Oakland, an intimate civic partner that registers and responds to every human touch. ![]() Whereas the Hayward Fault, which runs the length of Oakland, perturbs us with energy from the Earth’s interior, Lake Merritt connects us to the world ocean, the world atmosphere, and the cosmic cycles of the solar system. ![]() This is an edited excerpt from Andrew Alden’s Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City (Heyday, 2023).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |