A Study in Contrasts: Seaport Boulevard

February 27, 2005

The biggest surprise of Seaport Boulevard is the beauty of the salt ponds right around Cargill's Redwood City plant. Instead of the scaly, scummy evaporators a little further south by the Dumbarton Bridge, the ponds here make perfect mirrors that transform a rather down-at-heel neighborhood into tableaus of quiet perfection in all kinds of weather.

The absence of birds and the respectful distance of the vegetation from water's edge are a sure sign of the high salt content in the ponds, but it's not any less beautiful and peaceful for being unnatural.

Cargill has been taking about 300,000 tons of salt out of the Redwood City crystallizer beds every year. Most of the time, the weather does the work. A few employees monitor and adjust salinity to make sure the salt doesn't crystallize too fast—a matter of opening a sluice or starting a pump. For the better part of the year, the ponds lie deserted and the waters undisturbed.

State and federal agencies have bought most of Cargill's holdings with the intention to restore the original salt marsh. Work has already started near Bayfront Park in Menlo Park and at Alviso. The ponds near Seaport are still in the company's hands, but operations may be winding down here as well. The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project's map showing the disposition of the ponds suggests that they too will be transformed, as Cargill is retaining them for unspecified "other purposes."

Aside
The ponds are all dedicated to different stages in the salt
production lifecycle:

Evaporators are used at the beginning, to increase the salinity
of the bay water, which is then pumped to the crystallizers. Salt crystals are taken out at that
point, and the remaining liquid,
called bittern, is transferred to
bittern ponds for storage.

Bittern is not commercially viable
and it is so salty as to be
poisonous, which means that it
can't be released without
treatment.

At the levee that marks the boundary between salt ponds and marsh, a placard was posted in 2002, noting that a certain Mark Sanders, on behalf of West Point Marina, requested a permit to build a 480-slip marina, restaurants, and stores "in a pond formerly used as a bittern pond (Pond 10)." The permit must have been granted, because now the pond has been churned up and a line of large yellow excavators stands at attention—ready to dig out those slips, it would appear.

Cargill's shipping dock on the harborside of Seaport Boulevard, north of the marina, gives the clearest indication of change in the offing. There used to be two conveyors waiting to crank and heave into life at harvest time, in the fall. One of them has vanished, and in its place is nothing but evidence of recent and perhaps still on-going construction. The larger one that still remains looks like a dinosaur skeleton, an accidental survivor from a different age, beautiful in its complexity and a little mysterious at the same time.

Recycling Mecca
Seaport Boulevard is named very literally: Redwood City has the only deepwater port in the South Bay, and the harbor has been in operation for some 150 years. Nevertheless, it is obviously not a hub of international shipping, attracting a range of businesses at the lower end of the status ladder. They clearly have found a place that is both within easy reach of transportation and doesn't require any apology for dust or noise.

Among their number is a range of construction and other industrial recycling operations:

• Granite Rock recycles concrete, asphalt, and rock (with "uncompromising honesty and integrity") and is related to Pavex Recycling Services, which offers "portable crushing services."
• Harbor Sand and Gravel (a subsidiary of RMC Pacific, which has an office right down the road and is big sister to Harbor Ready-Mix) takes asphalt, baserock, brick, concrete, landscaping, rock, soil, and sand.
• SRDC accepts concrete, concrete with rebar, asphalt, asphalt and dirt mix, bricks (broken), ceramic tiles, cinder blocks, clay roofing tiles, and rock
• SIMS Scrap Metal shreds as many as 200,000 cars per year and ships the resulting product to Asia
• Seaport Refining and Environmental specializes in waste water treatment, including "hydrocarbon contaminated liquids and waters with other trace contaminants."
• Romic Environmental Technologies (which has its headquarters a few miles south) recycles solvents with such fanciful names as N-Methyl Pyrrolidone, methylene chloride, and Perfluorohexane, but they prefer to keep mum about the exact nature of the activities at any of their locations—and there certainly are no walk-in services.

CLUI's Land Use database suggests there is also an industrial fuel recycling plant, but whoever is doing it isn't advertising. Romic perhaps?

On weekdays, the place is full of activity and noise, with machinery in various locations billowing clouds of steam at regular intervals. On the weekends, though, the yards have an eerie, post-apocaplyptic feel, They'd make a suitable location for a very pessimistic science-fiction movie. Mad Max scenery in grey instead of tan. And of course, this is our future, but it is not at all grim: we'd see much more of this kind of thing in the optimistic scenario.

Aside
Dirt meaning soil (as opposed to
filth) is an Americanism, I believe.
It refers to something that is not
dirty in itself, but when it gets
on you, you are dirty.

In that way, it is parallel to the
word soil, which also shifts
meaning in its double duty as a
verb. Interestingly, something that
is "soiled," in the vast majority of
cases, has had no contact with
soil at all.

Dirt
SRDC's signs say they accept dirt, but not contaminated dirt. Seaport Refining's website says they take contaminated but not hazardous waste. Obviously, there is a hierarchy of dirt a private citizen doesn't ordinarily have to consider. From an individual perspective, the difference between contaminated and hazardous is academic.

Not only is there such a thing as clean dirt, but there is also (conversely) a category of discards that hasn't quite reached the status of garbage yet. As long as something sits around in your garage or attic, it's your stuff, yes? Perhaps you no longer use it, but it's not garbage. It's the trip to the dump or recycling yard that makes it into garbage. Up to that point, it might still go into the yard sale and become a treasured possession for someone else. Your cousin might come and have an urgent need for it. It's a pretty straightforward distinction.

At Seaport Boulevard the difference is not nearly so clear: much of what sits around the yards and premises of these various businesses has a most convincing mien of garbage. It has lost its treasured possession potential. Nevertheless, it might not make that trip to the dump for decades.

But there are also lots of other discards that look like they are still serving some kind of useful purpose, first and foremost among them the railroad remains. There are tracks all along Seaport Boulevard and into many of the yards. They clearly haven't been used in a very long time and there are places where the tracks end abruptly at the boundary of a particular property to continue again on the other side. Cars and engines are sitting everywhere on the tracks, in use for office space or break rooms perhaps. Altogether, they make a peculiar but rather charming outdoor railway museum.

Dot.com Ghost Town
At the very end of Seaport Boulevard lies a vast office complex, originally built by Excite-@Home. It was completed at just about the time the company went bust and may well have contributed to its demise. For several years it stood almost completely empty, as the time-to-market frenzy has abated and office space in the Valley is no longer at a premium.

The campus, polished to a high gloss, now stands as a monument to the empire-building aspirations of the dot.com industry, a kind of Ozymandias of the modern age, its windows blank and it parking lots dotted with stray cars.

Marijke Rijsberman

More Information
The Fate of Cargill Holdings (PDF)
South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project
CLUI's Land Use Database

Cargill's own take:
History of Cargill Salt
Cargill Virtual Tour
The Bay's Edge (Nov 1996) (PDF)
The Bay's Edge (June 1997) (PDF)