Why I love abandoned places and things:
I like to think about all the life that happened there. People worked, ate dinner, celebrated birthdays, were born and died, things were made and put to good use in these old derelict buildings. It seems such a shame to me that people walk by these places and only see decay, something to look away from and never stop to think about what it once was. There is also the relationship between nature and man that is on full display. How the earth reclaims for itself this space when humans are done with it. Anyway like a stray kitty on the side of the road, I will always stop and take a little time to notice and give a little love to these places. Below is an article about the history and future of the place from the San Francisco Chronicle.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/24/BAQQTGU6U.DTL
Developers, preservationists work together on prewar Richmond
site
Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, November 24, 2007
The white frames and glass panels of the tumbledown greenhouses can just be
glimpsed by drivers whizzing south through Richmond on Interstate 80. At street
level, wedged between the freeway and the BART tracks, more than three dozen old
greenhouses, the former Sakai, Oishi and Endo family nurseries, occupy 14 acres in a
corner of a down-at-the-heels residential neighborhood.
Now derelict, with windows shattered and paint peeling, the nurseries are a last
fragment of a centurylong chapter of Japanese American history in the East Bay, in
which dozens of immigrant families built flower-growing businesses in the early 20th
century. But the greenhouses, along with several houses, numerous packing sheds
and outbuildings, are about to be torn down to make way for new homes.
Historic preservationists and housing officials are hashing out a plan to repair and
maintain a few of the original structures. As they debate, the tough, persistent
rosebushes, gone wild over a decade of neglect, climb toward the glass ceilings,
putting out fragrant blossoms. Sparrows and juncos twitter in and out of the broken
panes, pecking seeds from the profusion of weeds.
The city of Richmond and two nonprofit housing developers, Eden Housing Inc. and
Community Housing Development Corp. of North Richmond, have been looking at
the property for the past few years. The city purchased it in 2006 with plans to build
close to 200 units of market-rate and affordable housing on the site, including
single-family homes, townhouses and apartments, both for sale and for rent.
"The governor's office is very clear - we need to build more affordable housing in
California," said Patrick Lynch, housing director for the Richmond Redevelopment
Agency. "Typically you don't have the opportunity because there are not large parcels
left. So when we saw the opportunity to acquire 14 acres of prime land, we went for
it."
The development is to include a community center, a children's tot lot, the
restoration of a stretch of Baxter Creek, and a footpath connecting the neighborhood
to a new greenway that will link to the El Cerrito del Norte BART Station and
shopping districts on San Pablo and Macdonald avenues. The property is considered
a brownfield because the soil is contaminated with lead, petroleum and pesticides,
including DDT, but Lynch, accustomed to coping with the pollution left behind by
heavy industry, said the cleanup will be straightforward.
The greenhouses are rooted in a century-old wave of immigration from recessionplagued
Japan to the West Coast. In the 1890s, brothers Kotoro Sakai and Seizo
Oishi arrived in the Bay Area. They bought land in Richmond in 1906, before there
was a freeway or BART or much besides farms. On it they built their first
greenhouses and began growing roses, carnations and snapdragons for the emerging
cut-flower market in San Francisco.
"Japanese immigrants came from agrarian stock, so they brought in their
agricultural techniques and some relatively new techniques for horticulture," said
Rosalyn Tonai, director of the National Japanese American Historical Society in San
Francisco. "There was a lot of backbreaking work, but they had a love of the soil and
cultivating plants."
The brothers sent for their wives and raised their children on their land, putting
them to work early in the greenhouses. Along with the Sakais and the Oishis,
Japanese immigrant families who started nurseries in the area included the Adachis,
Sugiharas, Mayedas and Hondas.
Other families started flower businesses in Alameda and San Mateo counties. A few
of those families, including the Shibatas and Okus, are still in business, though not
on their pre-WWII properties.
Overwhelmingly, though, cut flower cultivation has declined in the face of overseas
competition. The Shibata family's Mt. Eden Floral Co. still grows some roses in
California, but mostly imports flowers from Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico and
Thailand.
In the early part of the century, Japanese immigrants to the Bay Area faced virulent
anti-Asian bigotry from groups like the Asian Exclusion League, formed in 1905, and
expressed in stories in The Chronicle and other newspapers with headlines like "The
Yellow Peril - How Japanese Crowd out the White Race."
Then came the internment of Japanese Americans in militarized camps during
World War II. The Sakais were forced to leave California during the war and the
Oishis were incarcerated for several years, first at the Tanforan Assembly Center in
San Bruno, then at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. They left the nurseries in
the care of a local florist, who raised flowers for a bit but then found it easier to rent
lodgings on the property to the many African American families who migrated from
the South to work in Richmond's shipyards.
"He was getting rent to make payment on the taxes so we didn't have back taxes
when we came home," said Tom Oishi, 85, the youngest of the seven Oishi children,
who, with his brothers, took over the business after the war.
The Japanese workers the families hired to help them in the nurseries gave way over
time to new immigrants from Mexico and Laos, many of whom also came from
agrarian backgrounds and who also struggled to establish themselves in a new land.
Historians who assessed the significance of the property for the nonprofit housing
developers found that several structures appear to be eligible for the National
Register of Historic Places. The Craftsman-era bungalows, refrigerated packing
sheds, and rows of greenhouses with louvered windows operated by elaborate pulleys
and gears are not grand architecture, but they reflect the history of hardworking
immigrant families building lives under difficult circumstances, said one of the
report's authors, Donna Graves, who also directs a project documenting the history
of California's Japantowns.
"If you wipe away all traces of the past, you lose a way of connecting to all the steps
that have brought us here, and also the connections we can make to each other," said
Graves. "To be able to touch the place, move through the place, is very powerful. It's
hard to get the same emotional resonance from a book or a plaque."
The city and the housing developers have agreed to some form of historic
preservation. They have arranged for archival-quality photographs of the nurseries,
and they plan to create an interpretive exhibit about the site's history, either within
the development or in a more public location, such as along the greenway or as part
of the National Park Service museum about Richmond's history on the home front in
World War II.
Although most of the buildings will be demolished to make room for the housing
development, Lynch and others say they will try to preserve three structures - the
1921 Sakai residence, a water tower, and the first and smallest of the greenhouses - if
feasible, though they may want to move them out of the way of the new homes.
"The site does have an interesting history; what we're struggling with now is, what's
the best way to honor that? ... It has been somewhat contentious," said Katie Lamont,
a senior project developer with Eden Housing. "With the greenhouse, we're having a
hard time committing. ... We want to be sure that someone is the steward of it. I'd be
most comfortable if some community garden group would come forward and say,
'This is how you can do it and we can help.' "
Redevelopment staffer Natalia Lawrence was visibly excited by the project as she
walked through the site one recent day, talking about revitalizing the neighborhood
with high-quality homes built with environmentally sustainable methods and plenty
of trees and landscaping. She has asked developers to submit proposals to build the
single-family homes and hopes for a good response by the Dec. 19 deadline.
As Lawrence conjured a vision of the future, the echoes of the past were everywhere:
in the cylindrical wooden water tanks, the litter of old rubber boots, and, in one shed,
a small collection of mildewed school books, one inscribed in 1918 by Susie Sakai,
another in 1929 by her little sister, Ruby Sakai.
"The history is important," said Tonai, of the Japanese American Historical Society.
"I sit on a nonprofit affordable housing board, so I know the need for family housing,
but I think there's an opportunity there. ... It doesn't need to be an either/or issue."
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/24/BAQQTGU6U.DTL
This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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