The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area

2. Fields of Gold - Resources at Close Quarters

C ity and country are necessarily interwoven. Urban demand calls forth the products of the countryside. Cities are encircled by necklaces of farms, reservoirs, and quarries supplying food, water, and building materials. San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose’s immediate hinterlands have lain within the Bay Area, which has been intensely mined for natural resources and agricultural commodities. Having already looked at the redwood timber industry, we shall now consider agriculture, water, and mining. As cities grow, they do not expand neatly into a previously settled countryside like a wave from a stone thrown in a pool. Instead, city and countryside develop in tandem. This is especially true of California, which “became the scene of ruralized urbanization, a rush of simultaneous town founding and orchard planting.”1 San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose had farms within their city limits well into the twentieth century, while the rural areas were dotted with towns such as Vallejo, Petaluma, and Gilroy. With the coming of suburban sprawl, the built-up areas advanced in bursts that look more like solar flares than tidy suburban rings (see map 4). These flares project deep into previously rural areas, especially along transportation corridors such as Highway 101 through the North Bay or Highway 24 beyond the East Bay hills. This flaring is especially marked in a place with the rolling topography of the Bay Area, where development 35 2 fields of gold Resources at Close Quarters m a p 4. Bay Area Urban Area, 1910, 1954, 1990. Drawn by Darin Jensen. Courtesy of Bay Area Open Space Council, GreenInfo Network, Greenbelt Alliance. fields of gold: resources at close quarters 37 slinks along coastlines, up valleys, and over passes, all the while lapping at the foothills of the Coast Ranges. The city’s embrace of the rural means, too, that elements of the countryside are incorporated into the urban landscape itself. The country is not entirely bulldozed away. Some things are mere remnants, such as old farmhouses or windmills, which can be picturesque or forlorn reminders of the past. But others are part of present-day land-use patterns, operating like mitochondria in the cells of more-complex life forms. These patterns include urban nodes such as Redwood City, street grids such as at Alvarado in Union City, and turnpikes such as old Monterey Road in San Jose. These are an enduring part of the city, living on as neighborhoods, commuting routes, property lines, and political identities. agricultural heartland While the term “greenbelt” evokes parks and woodlands, more than half the open space around the Bay Area is still agricultural. It used to be far more. Of a total of 4.5 million acres in the Bay Area in 1980, farmland constituted 2.7 million (2 million in rangeland, 700,000 in cropland). As farming continues to be pushed outward, it is easy to forget how vigorous and substantial agrarian production once was: miles upon miles of orchards and vineyards on terraces, hillsides busy with cattle and sheep, vegetables and berries on the flats, hay and forage in the seasonal wetlands, and chickens by the millions. The Bay Area’s agrarian economy did not hit its peak until the 1920s. Agriculture took off under the impulse of local demand during the 1849 Gold Rush. Farms grew up along the transport and settlement route from San Francisco to the Mother Lode mining region in the Sierra foothills to the east. Agriculture encircled the bay’s margins, then moved up the fertile valleys of the Coast Ranges—Sonoma, Napa, San Ramon, Livermore, and Santa Clara. Later, agriculture moved into the San Joaquin Valley, the Central Coast, and Southern California. Most people think that because the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys are the heart of agribusiness today, it was always so. Nature influenced this geography: river transport, ample sunshine, good soils, winter rains, and, most importantly, the location of gold. Northern California had the money, consumers, workers, farmers, merchants, and riverboats. As Rodman Paul observes, “When a new American agriculture began, its birthplace was not in Southern California, where Hispanic settle- ment had started, but rather in the central part of the state.” The high rank of Alameda and Contra Costa counties in the state’s nineteenth-century farm economy would surprise people today, as would a contemporary observation that Solano County was “one of the most wealthy, populous and large productive agricultural counties in California.” Better known for...