Alviso

I've always wanted to visit the tiny town of Alviso, perched at the bottom tip of San Francisco Bay...because I grew up not too far from there, and it hovered for decades on the periphery of my consciousness as a geographically important yet demographically insignificant part of the Bay Area.   It used to be a dump, literally; at least, there used to be a huge dump there, and if anyone was talking about the place, they were usually talking about the dump.  It used to be smelly, and it often floods, so I wondered why anyone would want to live there.

Now, there's a 19-acre wildlife refuge and county park; people go duck hunting, and there are several miles of hiking trails, on levees that lead out through Alviso Slough and into the bay.  It's not exactly gorgeous, but in its emptiness and its air of seclusion, it's a good place to stroll or jog, or think about life, or watch a wide variety of shorebirds.  (It wouldn't be my first choice on a summer afternoon, however, as there's not a spot of shade.)  Yesterday we walked for about an hour and a half, the stillness of the scene around us punctuated from time to time by the roar of jets leaving San Jose Airport.   At one point we encountered a white heron, as tall as my very tall six-year-old; at about the same time we spotted six or seven white pelicans, taking up most of the space on an island the size of a large closet. Two trains went by--first a freight train, then an Amtrak passenger train which was (in keeping with the lonely atmosphere of our surroundings) nearly empty.

The town of Alviso has experienced more than its share of upheavals and transformations.  A major Bay Area port in the 1850s, the importance of the city faded quickly when the railroad system was created that linked San Jose and San Francisco, starting around 1864.  After his canning factory was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, Sai Yin Chew moved his canning operation from San Francisco to Alviso (an extremely dilapidated hulk of a building, with the words "Bayside Canning Company" proudly inscribed in old-fashioned lettering on its facade, still sits there near the waterfront, along with some colorful old Victorian houses and a few more modern dwellings.  For a while, that canning operation was the third-largest in the United States.  Alviso was a popular place for gambling and bootleg whiskey in the Depression, and became a popular boat-building center in the 1960s and 70s; it was a disaster site in the early 1980s when floods devastated the entire town.  In 1968, it was quietly incorporated into the city of San Jose--but it still looks and feels like a place apart.  The population is recorded at around 2,100 these days, although when we visited, we didn't see a single man or beast walking its streets--though we weren't there very long.

The wetlands areas are fighting to recover from the degradation caused by a century and a half of neglect and outright abuse; yet there are plenty of signs that it's now a functioning, if not thriving, ecosystem.  The county park was created a mere six years ago.  Maybe in another sixty, I wouldn't even recognize the place.