Another example of what a few people, with vision and pluck, can accomplish in this creation of a new state park along the shoreline in the Bay Area.
An excerpt.
Activists, officials christen Eastshore State Park
By M.S. Enkoji - Bee Staff WriterPublished 12:00 am PDT Thursday, October 5, 2006
Just after World War II, on the hills rising from the San Francisco Bay, Sylvia McLaughlin would look down from her Berkeley home and watch as heaps of garbage slowly filled in the watery expanse.
"That was a time when people considered their waterfronts dumping grounds," she said.
But as the bay's eastern shore seemed destined to close in on San Francisco, McLaughlin envisioned something different on the scrappy shoreline. She helped found one of several movements that galvanized the fight to rescue the waterfront, restore and preserve it.
On Wednesday, she got to take her bow.
Now 89, McLaughlin journeyed down to the grounds of those long-ago garbage dumps to join other activists and park managers as they christened one of the state's most distinctive parks: a nearly nine-mile ribbon of bayfront, mostly marshy wetlands, salvaged from industrial duties and blessed with world-class views.
Called Eastshore State Park, vast stretches -- 2,002 acres -- are tidelands, with only 260 acres of the park on terra firma, some of it made from packed garbage 12 feet deep.
The park runs from Richmond to the Bay Bridge, sandwiched in the narrow swath between Interstate 80 and the bay. Freeway drivers can catch a whizzing glance at the reedy growth and swooping sea gulls if they look west toward the city spires.
