Lake Merritt today has two halves, the lake itself and the channel connecting it to the Bay. Both halves are totally rebuilt, artificial landscapes. The fault line between them is the 12th Street bridge. The lake is mostly artificial water, and the channel is mostly artificial land.

They’re also very different as artificial public spaces. The lake is wide and green, lined with amenities and always full of people. The channel is close and funky, only half civilized. But there are days and views that glimmer with charm and possibility.

When the tide is coming in or going out, the water in the channel moves faster than any swimmer, and unlike the lake, you can go stand right next to it. There are trees and fields and parks. We’ve been modifying the channel for over a century, and we could do it again any time we want to enough. I made a leisurely visit to the channel last week to take the photos that follow.

To orient ourselves, here’s the current map of the channel, from the National Map Viewer.

The channel and lake used to be an integral thing, San Antonio Slough. Look at the entrance to the slough on the first good map of the area, published in 1857 by the federal Coast and Geodetic Survey.

^Source

It was a straight, wide sleeve of water rimmed by salt marsh. Except where the waterway was narrowest, it was just a few feet deep, and at low tide most of the slough was mudflats full of mussels. The recently built toll bridge at 12th Street was the only crossing. Soon competing railroads laid tracks across the slough on trestles along 7th Street and 1st Street. In 1869 a regulating dam was built at the 12th Street bridge as part of an expensive and ineffective sewage system completed in 1876, and that bisection created today’s lake and today’s channel.

Later in the 1800s the streetcar network added crossings at 8th Street and 3rd Street. Each addition restrained the natural water passage and cut the lake off from boaters on the Bay.

A park built on landfill along the lake’s outlet, to be named Peralta Park, was proposed around 1890. Private money was lining up, and the city owned much of the land already, but after a bond issue failed badly in 1892 little happened for a long time.

^{1897 USGS topo map}

By 1908, the newspapers had denigrated the wetlands for years as a marshy eyesore and “a place of reeking odors,” not least because of “its accumulation of cans, garbage and slime.” That was the year Oakland stopped dumping its garbage in the Bay like every other city. (Setting a better example, we dumped ours outside the Golden Gate.) And that year, Mayor Frank Mott directed bond money in an ambitious project to remake the slough. Its upper section, between 8th and 12th streets, would be landfilled with mud dredged from the lake and turned into a 30-acre garden spot the city would be proud of. The papers got excited about the “parking” of the new-made land.

Mayor Mott got it done in the space of one year. Local rock was brought in to construct riprap walls on the east side of the water and along the 8th Street crossing, and mud from the lake was dumped behind the walls to build up the ground by twenty feet. The rock came from a small city-owned pit on Whitmore Street, across the road from the big Bilger Quarry. Chain gangs from the city jail broke up the rock, and the streetcar company hauled it down Broadway to the 8th Street trestle. Some of that rock is eroding out along the trail there.

The mud dredged from the lake was jampacked with mussels. Oakland’s cocklepickers were miffed at the loss, but the city’s goal was a water body uniformly five feet deep, not a thriving habitat. The landfill also included city garbage and street sweepings, not unusual at the time and unthinkable today. It was topped with clean dirt from excavations including the foundations of City Hall and the first Capwell store next door, which was good.

As the filling and parking went on, both crossings were built up and renovated. The new 8th Street crossing was designed, said the Oakland Enquirer, “to give the impression of completely cutting off Lake Merritt from the estuary, thus adding to the ‘lakish’ appearance of the water park.” The landfilling pushed the water together on both sides, creating the narrow channel of today. The regulating dam was switched from 12th to 8th Street in 1926.

City leaders soon had a growing wish list for the new “made land.” One item was the Municipal Auditorium, built near 12th Street and dedicated in 1915. Other proposals—a rail station, a state armory, a natatorium and a “pleasure casino”—were never more than visions.

The new land on the east side was used as ballfields, then as playgrounds. Large events—food fairs, livestock shows—began there and continued into the 1930s. More filling took place in 1935, and the city archery range moved there from today’s Rose Garden. The city’s Central Trade School relocated there in 1938, eventually to become Laney College. Briefly in the early 1960s there was a temporary heliport there.

Most of the action was on the west side. There, from 10th Street to the Bay, the made land became an exposition center.

^{1930s street map}

Much of this land, from 8th Street to the Bay, was converted into the wartime Auditorium Village housing project from 1943 to 1948. This photo shows the state of the land at that time.

^{Oakland History Center photo}

Up by the lake, the land between the Auditorium and the channel, from 12th to 10th streets, became the site of Peralta Playland. A one-fourth scale railroad, The Acorn, began giving rides in 1950 on a quarter-mile track that included a short tunnel. Pony rides and a merry-go-round came in 1951, the Lil’ Belle miniature sternwheel riverboat was added in 1954, and a spaceship ride came in 1958. The whole thing ended in 1968.

Today this stretch of the channel is still called Peralta Park, and the site is slowly being rehabbed with native vegetation suited for the artificial land. Across the water is an old trash-strewn path, off limits, that’s worth fixing.

Just downstream from the Auditorium, a new (and exemplary) brutalist campus for Laney College was built in the late 1960s on the old exposition grounds while the previous campus on the east side was turned into ballfields. A slender steel footbridge linked the two halves of the campus, and the entire middle reach of the channel was remade. The 8th Street crossing was eliminated, making room to add a big (historically inappropriate) meander to the channel, and 7th Street was extended to connect, incongruously, with E. 8th Street. Airphotos from 1947 and 2025 make all these changes plain, plus that great upgrade of the 12th Street crossing in this century.

^{Key Route lines are indicated by colored tapes. Source}

^{Google Earth, January 2025 image}

A new tidal gate, still in use today, was built under 7th Street at the same time.

Today the campus land along the water is pleasant, but deserted whenever I visit. Concrete pads that once held metal sculptures now lie bare. The footbridge is getting decrepit. But I kinda like it how it is.

The stretch from 7th to (formerly) 3rd Street is also part of the Laney complex, with the district offices on one side and the huge parking lot, site of the big flea market, on the other. The waterway in between has nothing much going on. If you squint, it has the makings of a nice place.

On the downstream end there’s the freeway, the abandoned rail crossing just beyond, then a short barren stretch above the Embarcadero crossing.

This bit of the channel is a challenge to us all, a new eyesore of “cans, garbage and slime.” But at the channel’s mouth, the Estuary lies ready to reclaim the slough if we can figure out how.

The city broke San Antonio Slough when it created the lake by choking the channel. The lake has always had more water than the tides could oxygenate, and the channel can’t deliver enough water now either. The Lake Merritt Institute published a white paper a while ago detailing a sorry history of interventions, none of them aimed at the birds and fish: “Despite the Lake’s status as a state wildlife refuge, its health as a natural system was given scant attention except when fish kills occurred.” The paper also says how the channel could handle the tides better. There’s a lot of room for improvement if we can summon the will to take up the plan.

This entry was posted on 1 September 2025 at 7:59 am and is filed under Deep Oakland, Oakland streams and water. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.