A 1993 League of Women Voters report, “The Waterfront: It Touches the World; How Does It Touch Oakland?” sparked a concerted effort to devise a coherent revitalization scenario which in 1999, after many months of discussion, led the City and Port to adopt the Estuary Policy Plan. This plan, now being implemented, applies to the and on the nine-mile channel between Oakland and Alameda known as the Oakland-Alameda Estuary. Much of this land is held by the Port of Oakland, and much of it has fallen into disuse. The plan calls for the creation of new and expanded parks, a waterfront trail, residential development, and a reinvention of Jack London Square, the never quite commercially successful centerpiece of the downtown waterfront, as a hub for tourism, entertainment, conferences, offices, shopping, and dining. Further goals are to figure out how to deal with the barriers created by the Port’s busy high-tech container ship facilities and to link the downtown waterfront to a shoreline recently made accessible by closures of the Oakland Army Base and Navy Supply Depot.

Reflected in the Estuary Plan are visions of various interests who struggled to craft it: port planners; community organizations seeking more parks and green space; groups hoping to restore natural habitats and a visual link between the waterfront and the city; historic preservationists wanting to refurbish old buildings; and developers promising to enlarge the ailing city’s tax base.

Many of the Port’s properties are, by California law, tidal trust lands that are to be held in the public trust and, as a recent State Senate analysis spells out, “are reserved for uses associated with commerce, fishing, navigation, recreation, and the environment.”

With specific projects now under way to revitalize lands no longer needed for port activities, tensions among differing interests have again come to the fore, particularly over questions of how the priorities of public recreation and open space will be honored. The Estuary Plan bears the caveat that it is “a dynamic document, subject to change.”

Jack London Square—
How to Make It Work?

Jack London Square is not really a square; it is an area of about six blocks upon which the name of the Oakland-born writer was bestowed in hope of attracting tourists. Its center is a plaza at the foot of Broadway, the main boulevard running through downtown, but cut off from downtown visually by an elevated freeway and physically several times a day by long freight trains rumbling across Broadway on the tracks that run along the Embarcadero, the Square’s inland edge.

Anyone expecting to find a grand civic plaza at Jack London Square will be disappointed. Immediately inside the entrance arch is a valet parking operation that sets a tone of exclusivity and creates a hazard, or at least discomfort, to pedestrians who must share space with cars. The view of the Estuary is limited by a hotel on one side and a restaurant on the other. The effect of these buildings is to constrict, rather than define the open space between them.

You have to walk right to the water’s edge for an expansive view. To the north, giant white cargo cranes loom against the sky, with the Bay Bridge behind them. When a ship carrying ten stories’ worth of containers is docked below them, it seems so close you can almost touch it. Closer in, dwarfed by the cranes, is the Alameda–Oakland–San Francisco ferry landing and, just beyond, a floating maritime museum comprised of the decommissioned Coast Guard lightship Relief and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential yacht, the Potomac. To the south, past boats bobbing in the slips of the marina, another restaurant blocks the view.

For much of Oakland’s 153-year history, this area was the only sizable stretch of waterfront that welcomed the public. Here the first Oakland-to-San Francisco ferry service started in the 1850s, and much later (after the Port had wrested legal ownership back from individuals, including Oakland’s first mayor, who had grabbed the land), the Port began to lease spaces to businesses that would serve ferry passengers and others. The opening of the Bay Bridge in 1936 put an end to the ferry for 54 years, and this part of the waterfront became a marina and a place of seafood restaurants.

A Fresh Start—and Dismay

The next project for Jack London Square is now grinding into gear, with an ambitious scope. In 2001 the Port granted the contract for redevelopment of the Square to a partnership: Ellis Partners of San Francisco, and Jim Falaschi, of Transbay Holdings in Oakland, both of which had developed real estate in downtown Oakland, and had established some respect within the community.

When JLS Partners unveiled the detailed site plans and the City issued the draft EIR in late 2003, there was widespread dismay, even though the project included most of the components mentioned in the Estuary Plan. The Sierra Club’s Northern Alameda County group decried placement of the Bay Trail inland rather than on the water’s edge and charged in its EIR comments that, “The developer of this proposal seems to feel any open space is a vacuum that needs to be filled.” The Oakland Heritage Alliance advised that they “rejected completely” a proposal to demolish part of Heinhold’s, and also rejected the idea of enclosing it in a large five-story building. Others questioned the size and design of a new eight-story parking structure that would hide the handsome architecture of the new Amtrak station.

The developers examined the community’s concerns and responded with some changes. They agreed to restore the Bay Trail to the shoreline, to add several large entryways to the new Harvest Hall building to improve views of the waterfront, to preserve Heinhold’s as a freestanding building, and to get community input on a redesign of the parking structure so that it would harmonize with the Amtrak Station.

Gary Knecht, who heads the South of Nimitz Improvement Council and lives in the warehouse district near the Square, had advocated development of the Square as a water-oriented attraction. In his view, the community had its say, but the City and Port got their way. Jack London Square is to be a conglomeration of: a four-star hotel with spa, conference centers, and a restaurant overlooking the water; a two-story ten-theater movie complex; a retail corridor; an office building with its own garage; farmers’ market stalls; and the pièce de résistance, the five-story California Harvest Hall, dedicated to food, with informal ethnic eateries, formal restaurants, specialty food stands, a cooking school, and offices.

So far, work has begun on one site, at 66 Franklin Street, where a three-story building formerly housing offices and restaurants is being stripped of its 1950s wrappings to reveal the restorable stone façade of a 1920s warehouse. The building’s first new tenant is Multivision, a broadcast monitoring service. Next, says Rhonda Hirata, public relations manager of JLS Partners, comes the movie complex that’s expected to be the main draw for Oaklanders. Its construction on a prime site at the foot of Broadway will bring the number of movie screens at the Square to 19. Hirata said that because the box office is on the Square, patrons will be required to enter and see the Square.

Many Oaklanders doubt that the plan will become a spectacular visitor destination, but they wish the developers well. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Knecht said.

Will Condos Shrink Parks?

Sandra Threlfall, head of Waterfront Action, a public access advocacy organization, has acknowledged the immensity of the Jack London Square project, and is focusing her attention on securing more open space and waterfront views southward to a three-quarter-mile stretch known in the City’s general plan and the Estuary Plan as Oak-to-Ninth.

Extending from Oak Street, at the southern edge of Jack London Square, to the Port of Oakland’s Ninth Avenue Terminal, most of this 62-acre stretch is leased to industrial and business tenants. Here and there are vacant lots or old fenced-in warehouses. In the middle of the stretch where Fifth Avenue ends are some old privately owned two-story wooden buildings where artists have rented workspace and living quarters for decades.

At the Oak Street end is what some open space advocates refer to as Secret Park, although its official name is Estuary Park. You can walk to it from Jack London Square along the waterfront Bay Trail, but because there is a warehouse on its inland side, someone driving by on the Embarcadero cannot see that it’s there, nor are there any signs. It’s a delightful spot, with a picnic pavilion, water-view benches, and a broad lawn that’s popular with soccer players. Just beyond the warehouse southward, fortunately in plain view, is the new Jack London Aquatic Center, which is rapidly becoming a popular athletic resource for Oakland children who are unlikely to have been involved with the waterfront before. Sculls, kayaks, and small sailboats can be stored and launched there from a wheelchair-accessible dock, and a sailing school moors larger boats.

At the other end of this stretch of waterfront, the Ninth Avenue Terminal, a huge warehouse, stands on a wharf. It served the Port of Oakland well in the days before container ships, when smaller freighters handled most cargo, but now is used for storage. A colony of feral cats has made itself at home there, with easy access through at least one broken window. Some architectural preservationists would like to restore the warehouse, which has an Art Deco facade, for a new use, but open-space advocates envision a crescent-shaped waterfront park on the site, as was called for in the Estuary Plan.

Since the early 1900s, the Oak-to-Ninth properties, almost all held by the Port of Oakland, have by law been in public trust—that is, they are public land intended for uses that benefit the public, whether by generating revenue, supporting fisheries, or providing open space. The Estuary Plan called for increased parkland and trails, some sort of eatery, perhaps some entertainment venues and a hotel, but no residences.

Because the Jack London Square development plan has made some of the commercial components of Oak-to-Ninth redundant, citizen groups’ interests have turned toward creating large park areas, visible from the Embarcadero and from the parallel I-880 freeway nearby, and clearly inviting the public.

Now, however, condominium projects are being proposed for some of the projected park areas by Oakland Harbor Partners, an enterprise led by Signature Properties, which the Port selected as master developer for Oak-to-Ninth. The company plans to erect residential buildings ranging from five to 20 stories high, with 3,100 units, as well as some commercial buildings, with 27 acres of open space scattered throughout the area. Condominiums would replace the warehouse that now blocks the view of Estuary Park from the Embarcadero—a site that in the Estuary Plan had been designated for the park’s expansion—and would also be built on a large part of the proposed site of the crescent-shaped park at Ninth Street.

In 2001, when the Port issued a solicitation for proposals from developers, it noted that if the developer wanted to include housing, state legislation might be required to allow the port to remove the parcels between Oak and Ninth from the Tidelands Trust in exchange for lands elsewhere. Legislation introduced by now Senate Majority Leader Don Perata of Oakland, and signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in September 2004, did just that, allowing the Port to sell the Oak-to-Ninth land to a private developer. The legislation does not designate particular exchange parcels but sets priorities—first, land already lying within the Estuary Plan, and second, land contiguous to the area. Other possible exchange parcels would be along the Bay in or near Middle Harbor or Outer Harbor.

Although the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the State Lands Commission would have to approve such exchanges, open space advocates worry that allowing housing to be built along this stretch of the Estuary will create more barriers that will keep Oaklanders from their waterfront. In Threlfall’s opinion, the presence of private housing leads the public to “a perception of privatization” that tends to discourage people from exercising their public access rights. Patrick Van Ness, a project manager for Signature Properties, said these plans are in very early stages, with public hearings and an EIR yet to come. Marge Stanzione, Oakland’s city planning project manager for Oak-to-Ninth, said a public outreach effort conducted by consultants was to begin shortly. After community comments are incorporated into the final EIR, the City Council will have final say.

Stanzione described the development plan as “controversial.” John Sutter, a former Oakland City Council member and longtime open-space advocate, says: “I do think it [the Ninth-to-Oak tract] is public property, it’s publicly owned; it was acquired by the public after 75 years of litigation—all stemming basically from a theft by our first mayor—and not to take advantage of this public land for public purposes seems to me a terrible disappointment.”

Michael Ghielmetti, vice president of Signature Properties and spokesperson for Oakland Harbor Partners, defends private ownership of the land. He points out that the soil is contaminated and existing infrastructure is inadequate. “An incredible amount of money needs to be put in,” he said, to remedy that, to buy the property from the Port, and to “create a lively new waterfront district.”

Ten years from now, Oaklanders should know how well these revitalization projects have succeeded in helping the city get back on its feet. If the reasons for regularly visiting Jack London Square and the waterfront are strong enough, people will overcome the physical barriers of freeway, railroad, and working port. Those are not going away any time soon, but many vigilant eyes will be required to make sure no new barriers arise.

Trish Beall wrote “LNG for California?” Coast & Ocean, Autumn 2004.

To find out more about Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, a new waterfront park near Jack London Square, click here.