Emeryville is squeezed between Oakland and Berkeley along the Bay shore. Its much-modified shoreline, which once was mudflats and coastal marsh, has two peninsulas made of landfill. The one has those tall office buildings, the hotel, the marinas and the 1200-plus condos of the Watergate complex.

The other is a teeny stub, a miniature nature park, at the city’s northern border where Ashby Avenue meets the freeway. It’s tiny, but just as a small suiseki stone embodies the essence of a mountain, Point Emery encapsulates the same dramatic history and issues of artificial land as the bigger peninsula.

^{The pink area is artificial fill; the rest is alluvial sediment. (USGS MF-2342)}

Both peninsulas were born in a history-making struggle between two visions for the Bay shore. Briefly, in the mid-1960s the state passed a law to ban any more filling of the San Francisco Bay, after human alterations had wiped out nearly all of the natural shoreline. The law, which also created the San Francisco Bay Conservation Commission, culminated years of effort by the founding activists of Save the Bay.

At the same time the City of Emeryville had a master plan to fill in and develop most of its offshore territory, tripling its population.

^{Emeryville’s master plan to fill the Bay, complete with a future freeway. (City of Emeryville)}

With the state law poised to take effect in September 1965, the city rushed to approve its plan and began work a month earlier, frantically dumping truckloads of rubble and dirt onto an existing industrial waste dump and into the water. The stub on the north was meant to become a berm surrounding a large basin, which would be pumped dry and filled. (That’s how Oakland built its harbor system earlier in the century.) The work went on for three years while the city and the state fought in court. In one early skirmish, the city agreed to limit work to the southern peninsula and killed the northern one aborning. Later the state won outright, and today it’s in charge of the entire California coast.

For many years the northern nub was known as the Ashby Spit. A bit of sandy beach accumulated on its north side while the gentle Bay surf nibbled its edges. The city put some riprap on it in the 1990s, which helped protect it a little. The spit was never much to look at, but it was a great place for looking around. As the Bay Trail was pushed through and the shoreline rebuilt, the spit became a little city park called Point Emery, a handy spot for miscellaneous activities from launching watercraft to sharing doobies at sunset.

It doesn’t stand out as you approach from the south along the shoreline, not with the scenic backdrop on all sides.

At the point, the surroundings give the modest promontory an undeniable air of grandeur.

Even the shoreward view is full of interest. With so much to see all around, it’s understandable if you don’t look down too. But that’s what I always do.

Point Emery has rocks! They aren’t bedrock, although very recently they were. The riprap, identical to the stuff lining the shore in both directions, comes from right across the Bay at the active San Rafael Rock Quarry, a huge pit south of McNears Beach and China Camp State Park. It’s volcanic rock of the Franciscan Complex that’s been put through a tectonic wringer and injected with white veins of carbonate minerals. Brown stains come from the presence of pyrite, which forms occasional thin layers along with hydrothermal quartz, and the whole has a faint blue-greenish cast due to low-grade metamorphic minerals.

It harbors ground squirrels, who seem to know that humans sometimes feed them.

Given a little dirt, it also supports vegetation. Between the ground squirrels and the plants, this little gravel spit has its own terrestrial habitat. And of course it’s surrounded by Bay waters that support fish and birds of many kinds.

While most of the spit is armored with fresh riprap, emplaced in 2022, the south side still exposes some of the original fill.

And the spit’s upper surface sometimes exposes the same old concrete and construction rubble. It’s essentially clean, a miniature version of the Albany Bulb a few miles north. Today we recycle a lot of concrete, treating it like proper crushed aggregate and discarding less.

In the fall of 2025, Recreation Committee member Gail Donaldson visited the point; the committee minutes record that she told them, “There are people with their dogs and families. Always people parking, taking a breath, having lunch, and unfortunately throwing junk around there too.” When I visited recently it was tidy, with not much litter. It’s what passes for nature on artificial terrain, and it does nature’s job of delivering respite from our cooped-up indoor lives.

Today the waters around Point Emery are part of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, so the point probably couldn’t be extended without another great struggle. To continue expanding, the little city has grown upward instead. Emeryville will always be a small, hemmed-in place. But it works hard and grows ever more charming.

Some sources:

The Emeryville Peninsula: The vibrant neighborhood that nearly wasn’t
Emeryville history: The expanding city, 1960 to 1980s

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