Alameda |
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Address
2263 Santa Clara Avenue
Alameda, CA 94501
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Phone
510 747-7400 |
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The city was founded on June 6, 1853. Alameda was not originally on an island; rather, it was a peninsula off Oakland, with the area between the estuary and San Leandro Bay low-lying and marshy. Aside from the salt marshes, the peninsula was home to one of the largest coastal oak forests in the world. Original inhabitants were the Coastanoan Indian tribe. The peninsula was part of the Mexican land grant to Don Peralta and the early Mexican inhabitants referred to the land mass as "the purse." Early European settlers at the onset of the Gold Rush in the 1850s included French lumberjacks supplying lumber to the quickly expanding San Francisco and Chipman and Auginbaugh, major landowners who founded the village of Alameda near the corner of Encinal Avenue and High Street in Alameda.
Originally three small settlements grew in town "Old Alameda" which was the village at Encinal and High, Hibbardsville at the North Shore ferry and shipping terminal, and Woodstock on the west end where the railroad terminus met the Ferry at the Alameda Mole. Eventually as Park Street developed as the major thoroughfare of the city and the location of the main Alameda train station, residents of Old Alameda pulled up stakes and moved across town to the new downtown. The need for expanded shipping facilities in the late 19th century in both cities led to a shipping and tidal channel that was dug between the two cities in 1902, extending and deepening the natural estuary, which resulted in Alameda becoming an "island" with most of the dug up soil used to fill in some sections of the nearby marsh land.
Bay Farm Island was originally a small island which was enlarged and connected to the mainland by filling. In his youth, author Jack London was known to take part in oyster pirating in the highly productive oyster beds near Bay Farm Island, today long gone. In the 1950s, Alameda's industrial and ship building industries thrived along the Estuary, where the world's first-ever, land-based, containerized shipping crane was used. Today, the Port of Oakland across the Estuary serves as one of the largest ports on the West Coast, using the shipping technologies originally experimented with in Alameda. As of March 21, 2006, Alameda is a "Coast Guard City," one of seven in the country.
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