There are sweeping views of Mount Tamalpais, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the San Francisco skyline, as well as of the East Bay hills. The enhanced and restored areas provide habitat to hordes of waterbirds, including less-common visitors such as the wandering tattler, red phalarope, black skimmer, and common murre. Oyster beds and rocky reefs have been built just offshore. Tractors are furrowing and seeding gentle dunes. At different sites, workers have hauled out garbage and delivered truckloads of fresh dirt. ![]() Today the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park is a place of recovery and gradual rehabilitation. It took lawsuits and legislation, zoning changes and lobbying campaigns, bond measures and propositions, and determined individuals who refused to take no for an answer. What started as a small movement grew into a large and determined coalition of environmental and community groups and five East Bay cities. “People willed this park into existence,” says Robert Cheasty, a former Albany mayor and current executive director (and founding member) of Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP), which works to conserve habitat and secure public access to the shoreline and was established in 1985. Then, if all that could be accomplished, there was this: Clean up the mess, make it beautiful, and welcome the public. They needed to permanently protect it through official park designation. Money had to be found to buy the shore land. She and her allies faced four big hurdles: They needed to halt shoreline development and activities that were filling in the Bay, in order to protect the Bay. “I said, ‘Well, it’s our dump … and we want it to be our park.’” “Somebody said, ‘Well, it’s just a dump,’” recalled McLaughlin, a housewife-turned-crusader who passed away a year ago. Beginning in the 1960s, she helped launch a nearly 50-year campaign that prevailed, against all odds, to turn the damaged Berkeley Meadow and the East Bay shoreline into a 2,000-acre sanctuary now managed by the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD). (Photo by Rick Lewis)Įast Bay environmental activist Sylvia McLaughlin was appalled. Burrowing owls make a home at Eastshore State Park. The Santa Fe Railroad Company and its allies would have benefitted handsomely. Yet another set of development plans embraced by many civic leaders in the 1980s called for ten million square feet of construction, roughly equivalent to 14 buildings the size of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid. There were visions of office buildings, restaurants, and shops in Berkeley, as well as shopping centers in Berkeley and Albany. One development proposal wanted twin 18-story hotels, and another a “stilt city” of high-rises, at the Emeryville Crescent. The land-an 8.5-mile waterfront stretch from Emeryville to Richmond-worth millions, seemed destined to be paved over. But for a long time it was a polluted and legal quagmire that not even California State Parks really wanted. The 72 acres of re-created coastal prairie and scrub lie at the heart of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, today a necklace of open public spaces along the bayshore north of the Bay Bridge. ![]() Raptors circle overhead, as if doing victory laps. You wouldn’t know that underfoot lies a layer of construction refuse-old asphalt, concrete, and building materials-12 feet thick, covered now by a lush landscape of willows, coyote brush, and native grasses. A walk through the Berkeley Meadow along the San Francisco Bay is a walk among the healing ruins of the fiercest and most protracted battle for a state park in California history.
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