The City of San Francisco enjoys a much deserved reputation as being a city on the cutting edge. The Gay Pride movement achieved important milestones in the city’s history, there is a strong emphasis on the Arts, which is avidly supported by a large and well-educated population, and the renowned high quality of the cuisine is easily verified after a pleasurable few days of dining out on the town. Geographically speaking, the Bay Area is blessed by mostly mild weather, and expansive bodies of water that offer its residents many leisure activities, as well as vistas to enjoy as they sip their beverage of choice from the myriad of terraces, roof decks and sky-bars strategically dotted around the City.
Behind this overly paraphrased and idealized veneer of “the good life”, there exists a San Francisco Bay Area that is far more textured and heterogeneous than meets the eye, a world most easily seen from a low-speed, low-flying aircraft.
An hour in the sky reveals to the observer a past of industrial expansion and large scale infrastructure that is only superficially experienced by most of the locals on their morning commutes. Heavy industry maintains a prominent foothold in the region, a short drive away from the Bohemian pleasures of a city that lives very much within itself and its alluring distractions. The scale of nearby refineries, while notable when seen from a highway at 70 mph, is truly astounding from 2000 feet. The countless cylindrical fuel tanks, slender chimneys and intricate tubing feeding the belly of the petroleum transformation process are part of a carefully engineered machine that functions day in and day out to grease our modern economy.
The Bay Area is also home to one of the largest container ports in the Western United States, a major inter-modal container operation. According to the Port of Oakland website:
“The Port of Oakland loads and discharges more than 99 percent of the containerized goods moving through Northern California, the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan area. Oakland’s cargo volume makes it the fourth busiest container port in the United States, and ranks San Francisco Bay among the three principal Pacific Coast gateways for U.S. containerized cargoes, along with San Pedro Bay in southern California and Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. About 58.9 percent of Oakland’s trade is with Asia. Europe accounts for 10.3 percent, Australia/New Zealand and South Pacific Islands about 4.7 percent and other foreign economies about 8.8 percent. About 17.3 percent of Oakland’s trade is domestic (Hawaii and Guam) and military cargo. California’s three major containerports carry approximately 50 percent on the nation’s total container cargo volume.
While the imposing container cranes occupy the typical San Franciscan’s mental landscape (these are often erroneously cited as inspiration for George Lucas’ Walker machines in the Star Wars movies), the true extent of the Port of Oakland’s footprint on the Bay Area is not typically well understood by the general public. The support infrastructure, range of waterways and sheer volume of ship traffic are peripheral to public perception, and while visible at ground level, lives separately from the day-to-day fluctuations of the Metropolis in which it resides. This is often apparent in the curious juxtaposition of vast container staging platforms living side-by-side with civilian facilities, such as marinas or leafy residential areas – the coexistence is both acknowledged and ignored, and not frequently remarked upon.
Strategically positioned adjacent to a major highway to Los Angeles, in the geographical heart of the economically vibrant Silicon Valley/San Francisco corridor, San Francisco International Airport (or SFO) remains one of the few large scale infrastructure projects intrinsically understood by the public, in terms of its relative physical footprint. As a result, SFO enjoys a correspondingly more prominent place in the public’s spatial memory, compared to the aforementioned Port of Oakland and regional oil refineries. This is in direct correlation to greater general access to the airport, as well as the ability for passengers to see its full physical extent during takeoff and landing.
Similar to the public’s understanding of the physical presence of SFO, there too is a familiarity with the scope of the region’s large scale highway and bridge systems.
Given the expanse of the body of water that is the San Francisco Bay, the resulting bridges that link the various margins are both world-famous and heavily used on a daily basis by local commuters. The Golden Gate Bridge requires no introduction, given its historical stature. The same can be said of the Bay Bridge, much beloved by the region’s residents, and more prominently located in relation to San Francisco’s urban core.
The highway infrastructure around the Bay serves a regionally significant area, and is more varied that what is at first suggested by the aforementioned iconic bridges. There are literally dozens of smaller scale bridges, viaducts, overpasses and highway junctions that overlap the area’s undulating geography. This intricately woven web of roadways becomes particularly apparent at 2000 feet, doting the observer with a broader understanding of the interconnected nature of the communities around the Bay.
San Francisco does not acknowledge its industry-heavy, automobile-prominent, petroleum-thirsty side with much relish. It leaves the notoriety of the car-city to the other major Californian Metropolis down south, to the detriment of efforts to solve its own problems of congestion and smog. In the land of banned plastic shopping bags, Critical Mass bicycle movement, “locavores”, and one of the highest household recycling rates in the US, it is easy to gloss over the prominence of the Bay Area’s industrial legacy and associated environmental challenges.
At 2000 feet certain things are more apparent.
Text and photos by Eddy Joaquim / Magnesium Photos. Cross-posted at f-stopped
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