Landfill Sandwich: Cooley Landing

January 17, 2005

Getting to Cooley Landing is an education in sociodynamics, since you have to drive through East Palo Alto's backyard. There's a congeries of scrap and salvage yards, cars piled 5 and 6 layers high, a waste tire facility, a chemical manufacturing plant, a Romic waste management facility, an air of lassitude and resignation mingled with the dust, and a veritable forest of high voltage wires and pylons associated with a PG&E substation.

Cooley Landing has a variegated history. It is situated on the location of what was once, in the mid-19th century, a wharf in the town of Ravenswood, which was created in hopes of becoming a trans-bay ferry terminal. After a few years, the site was abandoned and acquired by the Cooley for whom it is named. The actual landing was built in 1932, by which time the landing had become a garbage dump. In the 1960s, the place passed into private hands again and became the home of the Palo Alto Boat Works. It has belonged to the Peninsula Open Space Trust since 1998. Now Audubon California has an eye on it.

In the meantime, Cooley Landing is inaccessible, marked with "private property" and "no tresspassing" signs, although not quite so many of them as there were a few years ago. You can spy some dilapidated buildings and a few rusted-out cars among the weeds and bushes. An antiquated dredge is moldering in the lee of the landing, only just visible from the Ravenswood marsh.

The whole landing is landfill, with rough construction rubble peeking out at the edges like the filling in a sandwich. Miscellaneous leftovers lie about near the entrance. Rubble notwithstanding, this must be an amazing place to be, out in the bay and all by yourself.

Aside
A salt evaporator is an artificial
pond in which salt water is
allowed to evaporate, so as to increase the salt concentration,
in preparation for harvesting.

Ravenswood Marsh
The marsh just north of the landing was once a salt evaporator. It was restored a few years back and is now the Ravenswood Wildlife Refuge. Particularly in the summer, the marsh looks lovely at high tide, all fresh green, waving reeds and grasses, cool-looking water, and an occasional spot of orange dodder. The birds are plentiful and the humans almost completely absent.

More Information

Public Use of Cooley Landing
Cooley Landing Photo Album
Bay Area Wetland Project Tracker