Strange, but true proposals for Bay Area

Imagine screaming in your roller coaster seat as it reaches 190 mph rocketing down a 700-foot drop atop the Golden Gate Bridge.

In 1929, a dam was proposed as an alternative to the now-famous bridge; San Francisco Bay would have become Lake San Francisco.

For a century, seemingly outrageous proposals that could have forever changed the character of the Bay Area were seriously considered.

Some of those ideas -- like erecting a dam at the Golden Gate -- seem patently absurd today.

Others -- like paving over much of the Marin Headlands -- aren't necessarily outrageous. They are just way out of character with the Bay Area we have come to know.

For Earth Day 2005, the Times put aside a tree-killing stack of press releases about environmentally friendly festivals to focus instead on a half-dozen not-so-modest proposals.

A wild roller-coaster ride. Damming the Bay. Marin suburbia. Freeways crisscrossing the East Bay. Lopping off San Bruno Mountain. The Peripheral Canal.

Whether it was environmentalist opposition, or just plain common sense, each of these proposals died.

The "Greatest Project Ever Conceived" crowed a 1947 newspaper headline about the popular plan to build two dams across the Bay.

The dams would have exacerbated water shortages, decimated fisheries and caused untold ecological damage to the Bay.

Environmentalists are quick to note that not every proposal they consider outrageous died a just death.

Who would have thought, they say, that San Francisco, one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the country, would take its water from a reservoir built in Yosemite National Park?

Hetch Hetchy Valley, favorably compared to Yosemite Valley before it was flooded in the 1920s, supplies the city's water. (Environmentalists now have an outrageous proposal of their own: Tear out the dam.)

So, go ahead: Today is the day to hug a tree-hugger and then read on to see what might have been if they hadn't hugged the trees.

In 1929, when plans to build the Golden Gate Bridge were moving forward, C.C. Walker published a pamphlet called "Dam -- Bridge, Which?" He proposed the Bay Area build a dam instead of the bridge.

Various types of salt water barriers to protect Delta water supply had been proposed since the 1860s, but Walker's was particularly grand.

"The proposal is to make a great fresh-water lake of all the interior part of San Francisco Bay by constructing an earthen causeway or salt-water barrier, to hold the fresh water in and the salt water out," Walker wrote.

Walker's plan did not get far, but in the 1940s a plan hatched by teacher and actor John Reber did.

The Reber Plan called for two dams across the Bay -- one from Richmond to Marin and the other, a 2,000-foot-wide dike, from San Francisco to Oakland.

Two freshwater lakes would be formed. Cars and trains could roll across the Bay along the tops of the dams. A fish ladder would enable migrating salmon to reach the Sacramento River. Ship locks and channels would allow commerce to continue.

Congress held hearings. Politicians rallied behind it. Water districts supported it.

The Pacific Rural Press newspaper called the Reber Plan the "Greatest Project Ever Conceived."

The plan's opponents, the newspaper commented, were "men with stiff-pride, selfishness, lack of vision and misinformation."

Supporters were "distinguished engineers and Army and Navy men of broad vision."

California, it turned out, does not have enough water to keep fresh-water lakes in the Bay and satisfy other water users, according to a 1949 engineering report.

"From the above, it is evident that in dry years there is not enough water available to operate the Reber Plan," wrote San Francisco engineer C.W. Schedler.

"In very dry years, the choice will have to be between keeping the lands in the valley irrigated, or keeping the water in the lakes of the Reber Plan fresh."

The next time you're trapped in gridlock on Ygnacio Valley Road in Walnut Creek, chew on this: It was supposed to be a freeway.

Back in the 1950s and '60s, the heyday of California's road-building era, state engineers designed the "California Freeway and Expressway System" -- about 16,000 miles of proposed freeways.

Consider these East Bay roads on the state's 1966 road map that were never constructed:

• Highway 77 linked Piedmont to Moraga to St. Mary's College, then veered northward into Pleasant Hill to join Interstate 680 at Pacheco.

• Highway 93 started in Moraga, snaked through Orinda and past San Pablo Reservoir, across Interstate 80 and south into Richmond. Today, part of the route roughly follows the Richmond Parkway and San Pablo Dam Road.

• Highway 13 ran the breadth of Berkeley from where it meets Highway 24 to its intersection with I-80. Today, it's known as Ashby Avenue.

• Highway 24 stretched from Walnut Creek roughly along Ygnacio Valley Boulevard, though Clayton and over Kirker Pass to Pittsburg and Antioch. Today, every city along this route meters the traffic in the hope of discouraging its use.

A confluence of forces doomed many proposed highways throughout the state, routes that exist today only as lines on old maps in museums.

Beginning in the late 1960s, rising construction costs brought on by the oil embargo coupled with the environmental movement stripped the state of both money and power, said retired state highway program manager Heinz Heckeroth.

"After World War II, California had a love affair with freeways and everyone wanted one," Heckeroth said. "But later, after money ran short and the environmental movement gained speed, lawmakers started removing the freeways one by one."

Unlike Dorothy in Oz, California can never go home to those days of whirlwind construction.

"If your goal is simply to move traffic, the state engineers clearly knew where the demand was going to be," said Contra Costa Transportation Authority chief Robert McCleary.

"But the state was not at that time looking at the impacts those roadways would have on the community, urban form and the natural environment. That's not the case today."

In 1964, Gulf Oil Corp. and Thomas Frouge unveiled plans to develop a community of 18,000 on the Marin Headlands.

They called it "Marincello," an Italian word that means "hell" in the environmentalists' official dictionary. (Just kidding about that dictionary.)

Had the plan gone through, Marin County might have looked more like a typical Bay Area suburb.

"It would have been Daly City North," said Marjorie Macris, the county's planning director from 1978 to 1984.

Conservationists and Northern California politicians lined up against the plan, and Marincello was never built. Eight years after proposing the project, Gulf sold the Marincello property to The Nature Conservancy.

The land, along with Alcatraz and land on the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate, eventually formed the beginnings of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Today, the recreation area formed in 1972 sees 16 million visitors a year, making it one of the country's most popular National Park Service areas.

The granddaddy of ill-fated plans affecting the Bay is probably the Peripheral Canal.

By the time the 1970s rolled around, no one had any enthusiasm for putting up a wall to keep sea water out of the Bay and Delta.

So, state leaders thought, why not build a big ditch and take southbound water from the Sacramento River around the Delta to the pumps sending water south?

After all, the late Gov. Pat Brown had successfully shepherded legislation in the previous decade for the State Water Project. The canal would be the project's phase two.

The Legislature liked the idea. Gov. Jerry Brown, Pat's son, signed it into law.

But the North hated it, and in 1982 the canal became one of the first California decisions to be put to the now-popular referendum.

Northern Californians thought the South would use the canal to drain the north of water.

"It was a dumb idea," said Joseph Campbell, board president of the Contra Costa Water District and a leader in the anti-canal campaign.

How's this for ambition? Take the top off a mountain, spread the dirt along the bay shore, and voila, instant real estate.

That's what Westbay Community Associates proposed in the 1960s. The plan was to remove the top of San Bruno Mountain and fill in the San Mateo County bay shore.

Atop the fill, they would have built a convention center, restaurants, etc. And on the flattened mountain top, they would erect houses with killer views.

It was an era when the Bay was being filled to create real estate, but the battle over the West Bay proposal was pivotal in garnering public support for protecting the Bay.

The State Lands Commission and environmentalists objected, and the project was defeated after nine years of litigation.

But in 1988, the late Esther Gulick, one of the three co-founders of Save the Bay, recalled it as one of the key episodes in the history of protecting the Bay.

"The result is that there has been virtually no further encroachment on these tidelands. That was a very major victory," Gulick said.

OK, this proposal carries no earth-shattering consequences, but it was just too good to pass up.

Back in 1938, a Hamden, Conn., architect lobbied the precursor to Caltrans, the state Division of Highways, for permission to erect roller coasters on the Golden Gate and Bay bridges.

Joseph Bazzeghin billed the coasters as major attractions for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island.

Bureaucrats nixed this nifty idea on the grounds that rubber-necking motorists would crash into each other on the bridge deck like bumper cars at the county fair.

At the rate of speed and descent proposed by this architect, motorists might well have seen passengers launched out of the open-air cars and clear into Sausalito.

A 700-foot descent at 190 mph on the Golden Gate, or the 500-foot drop at speeds up to 150 mph on the Bay Bridge, far exceeds the speed and height of any roller coaster on Earth.

But wait, there's more: As an added feature, the Bay Bridge coaster was to drop into a tunnel below the water level.

And if so desired, Bazzeghin could speed up the Golden Gate attraction to 220 mph if he was allowed to build a 30-story extension on top of the existing tower, although "such a ride might not be feasible since it might scare away more people than it would attract," he wrote.

He might have been on to something there. But fear was unwarranted, Bazzeghin said in his proposal.

"Suffication (sic) due to high wind velocity, nerve tension, etc., can be remidied (sic) by using a cheap, pressed paper mask to extend over each passengers (sic) mouth, nose and eyes."

"It does sound fraught with technical problems," observed Golden Gate Bridge chief engineer Denis Mulligan. "An architect designed this, right? (pregnant pause) Sometimes people come up with ideas that they get excited about and they sketch them out, but you can't build them."

On the other hand, given Caltrans' money woes, perhaps the state ought to reconsider.

At $20 a pop, the state would need to sell only 180 million rides to raise enough cash to finish the new Bay Bridge.

good article........I still think they should have converted Alcatraz to an amusment park and called it "Prisnyland"........lol

They really, really, really should have done this. People haven't stopped taking the route - they just have to do it very slowly, these days. ;)

Anyone who lived through the drought years of the 1970s would be able to see that the next time there is a water shortage, it will be much worse. There have been no new reservoirs built, Mono Lake is drying up, and hundreds of thousands of people have moved into the bay area since then. When the next drought happens, the governor at that time will fast track this kind of project just like Grey Davis did with all of those power plants during the grey-out crisis. Damming up the bay for fresh water isn't so strange, no stranger than any other reservoir. Where were all the protests from environmentalists when Grey Davis fast-tracked a bunch of power plants? They stayed at home, turned on their air conditioners, and watched TV.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.