History
In the mid-19th century, two private wharfs were built along the Berkeley waterfront. One was located at the foot of Addison Street one block south of University Avenue and served the Standard Soap Company, a major regional soap-making factory. The other, the Jacobs and Heywood Wharf, was located several blocks north of University Avenue at the foot of Delaware Street, used as a general freight transshipment point.
In 1909, the City built a municipal wharf at the foot of University Avenue. This pier was intended for a commuter ferry which never materialized, and the pier was instead used mainly for freight. Starting in 1926, the Golden Gate Ferry Company, a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific railroad, began construction of the Berkeley Pier. It was also built out from the foot of University Avenue about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) into the Bay (measured from the original shoreline). On June 16, 1927, auto ferry service began between the Berkeley Pier and the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco, a pier shared with the Sausalito ferry. Between 1926 and 1937, it served as an integral part of the Lincoln Highway (the first road across America), and then subsequently US Highway 40. A two lane road ran the entire length to a ferry dock at the end of the pier. The ferry line shut down in 1939 approximately two years after the Bay Bridge opened. The portion of the pier closest to shore was converted to recreational use, mainly fishing. The remaining portion of the pier was left to decay, and is still visible, but inaccessible due to a barrier, and about a 50 foot gap for the passage of small boats, at the end of the current pier. In 2007, proposals were considered to start a new ferry service using a terminal near the pier.
Read more about this topic: Berkeley Pier
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)