The Creation of Eastshore State Park
In 1961, Save the Bay was founded by Sylvia McLaughlin, Esther Gulick, and Kay Kerr to stop the wide-spread practice of dumping garbage and fill materials into the shallow edges of the San Francisco Bay. These early efforts grew into a movement to preserve the shoreline and to provide permanent access to it by creating a shoreline park. Over the next four decades, Save the Bay, Sierra Club, and later, Citizens for the Eastshore State Park, successfully organized opposition to dozens of proposals for commercial development on the 8.5 miles of waterfront from Oakland to Richmond. In the 1970s, park advocates got the support of then-State Assemblyman Tom Bates and were able to pass successive rounds of state and regional bond measures to fund the creation of what is now known as the Eastshore State Park. Despite the success of the bond measures, the California Department of Parks and Recreation (CDPR) was less than enthusiastic about an urban park on former landfill sites and made the park a low priority. Park advocates were able to get legislation passed in 1992, designating the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD) the lead agency for acquisition and planning for the Park. This effort created an unusual, but effective, collaboration between EBRPD and CDPR that led to the purchase of the current park lands. Today, Eastshore State Park is comprised of 260 acres of dry land and 2,002 acres of tidelands, protecting most of the undeveloped shoreline sites from the foot of the Bay Bridge in Oakland to the Marina Bay neighborhood in Richmond.