Oakland Geology

I was asked to lead a walk in the old part of Oakland for a group of engineering geologists that ends at a brewpub. The 3.8-mile route I chose feels too good to keep private. It’s as much about interesting parts of town as about interesting bits of geology.

Here’s how it relates to the geologic map.

Start down by Heinold’s near the wolf, in Jack London Square.

Admire the fountain, check the nearby bathroom, then head along the shore, past the pavement, to the point where Lake Merritt Channel reaches the Estuary. Admire the hills running from here to Mission Peak, down the waterway in Fremont. This is the shape of the East Bay: a row of high hills, a level plain, a wide bay.

The channel, once upon a time, separated the villages of Oakland and San Antonio (later named Brooklyn). Boats were the usual way between the towns — Oakland the squatter village of farm estates wrangling with Don Vicente Peralta over ownership of his ranch land, San Antonio the older shipping depot for Don Antonio Peralta’s ranch and the farms of his peaceable neighbors.

Turn hillward and take Oak Street, then Fallon Street to the Oakland Museum of California. The whole walk so far, the last mile and a half, skirts the edge of the natural platform that made Oakland such an attractive site for developers. The sunken museum entrance on 10th Street is right on the line between this platform, made of windblown sand dunes that accumulated during the latest ice age, and old wetlands that have been filled in since 1850. The dunefield slopes up to the left and the filled land still lies low.

^{View down 10th Street past the museum on the left}

Enter the museum and walk through to the public garden, a good place to sit or use the museum’s bathrooms. Along the way, say hi to J. B. Blunk’s redwood sculpture “The Planet.”

In the garden, notice how the museum works with the natural slope.

Exit the far side and cross the busy 12th Street causeway to Lake Merritt. Here’s where to study the hills and perceive the level landforms around the lake that formed at different times in the latest ice age. (I’ve made an annotated panorama of just this view.) After that, walk up onto the dune platform, by crossing the lawn next to the Camron-Stanford House, and go left a block to 13th Street. From there to City Hall is about a mile passing by some major buildings old and new.

At City Hall, inspect the moat around the building, which is part of its base-isolation retrofit after the 1989 earthquake. This landmark piece of seismic engineering is in all the textbooks. (A similar system was recorded in action during the recent Taiwan earthquake; the video is on Xitter.)

The last mile winds through picturesque parts of old Oakland. One notable building is the Wilcox Block on Broadway at 9th Street, our oldest commercial structure. It survived the great earthquake of 1868, the year it was built, without significant damage, as well as 1906 and 1989.

The route ends in the middle of a tempting set of brewpubs that have made the old Warehouse District a beer fan’s destination. Which to choose is an exercise left for the reader.

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