Kingsland Avenue, within the Maxwell Park neighborhood, is a straightforward uphill stroll that gives the mild thrill of following a pure characteristic within the terrain. It curves up a small valley that was as soon as grassland with a large view, occupied by a seasonal stream. The terrain makes for a most charming association of houses and vistas, ending with a variety of the excessive hills.
Kingsland Avenue begins off at Trask Road within the Fairfax district close to its complicated intersection with Foothill Boulevard and fifty fifth Avenue. (Trask Road might owe its identify to California’s first state geologist John B. Trask, who turned extra distinguished in his later years.) The valley makes its presence recognized early as its partitions begin to rise in opposition to the excessive hills.
The irregular avenue easement permits for median options right here and farther up. It’s not all single-family houses, both.
The valley stands out at Maxwell Avenue, working up the appropriate. The stream, what there’s of it, runs in a culvert to the left of Maxwell, within the again yards between it and Kingsland on the left.
The excessive Oakland Hills are barely seen right here, however a bit of farther up the views open to the west. The picture doesn’t fairly present it however the West Bay hills are beginning to emerge from the timber.
A metropolis stroll isn’t all about distant views. Most of the yards have character . . . and personalities.
I took these images a 12 months in the past; I hope the chickens are nonetheless there.
As Kingsland climbs out the higher finish of its valley, it crosses Birdsall Avenue, which occupies its personal little valley with a pleasant view to the south.
Each streets proceed previous this intersection and excessive of Maxwell Park Hill. Birdsall ends at a pedestrian bridge over I-580 to the south finish of the Laurel district, a pleasant possibility. However Kingsland finds its personal saddle within the crest, the place a distant place, the serpentine lands of the Crestmont neighborhood, rises into view.
And there it’s.
It’s all downhill from right here, to a curtail on the freeway. You must flip proper there as a substitute to succeed in MacArthur Boulevard close to Mills School. In contrast to many instances, the freeway didn’t erase an extension of Kingsland; that’s all there was.
And now we’ll look a bit of deeper at this valley. However first, the hill. Maxwell Park, as I consider it, is lobe 6 of the Fan as proven under on the geologic map. That is historic gravel, as soon as buried a number of hundred meters deep, that was uplifted by a tectonic encounter maybe one million years in the past. Lobe 7, the Mills School lobe, is the little bean-shaped hill to its east. (Click on any of those maps to enlarge them.)
Kingsland Avenue runs up by the “Qpaf” image that signifies the Fan. Birdsall Avenue is the curving avenue to its east.
Right here’s how the native watersheds are defined by the county. The shaded lidar floor beneath the map makes them straightforward to see. Kingsland and Birdsall valleys each present strains of water; Kingsland’s is even labeled Kingsland Department. They usually all feed the Peralta Creek watershed. The Sausal Creek and Lion Creek watersheds lie on both facet.
It’s vital to think about what the map reveals and what it means. Many of the city drainages in our a part of the East Bay are culverted, and on this space specifically they’ve been closely modified. Solely the blue bits are the place streams run by grime open to the air; every thing else is both an underground culvert (brown) or a brand new synthetic channel (purple). Most of the brown branches merely acquire runoff and don’t signify the presence of a pure stream in any respect.
The 1889 Vandercook map reveals that of their pure state, the streams round right here was once fairly totally different.
The world containing the Kingsland and Birdsall valleys, the Chittenden tract (concerned within the Chittenden-Simson compromise of 1886), has no creeks proven. I assume they have been seasonal and never thought of price noting. What’s intriguing is that to the east the place the county watershed map reveals solely Lion Creek, on the far proper edge, working by the grounds of Mills School as we speak, the 1889 map reveals it joined there by two tributaries. (On the time Lion Creek was often called East Creek.)
The extra goal US Geological Survey map from 1897 reveals East Creek joined by a single tributary that flowed west, not east, of the Mills School lobe of the Fan.
I interpret this to imply that early landowners redirected and consolidated these tributaries into one creek, historically referred to as Seminary Creek, which joined Lion Creek nicely south of the Mills campus. The work will need to have been straightforward as a result of the terrain at Mills is flat; certainly I feel earthquakes and motion on the very close by Hayward fault often made these streams shift and swap their beds even earlier than the Individuals confirmed up.
The 1897 map additionally reveals intermittent streams within the Birdsall valley and the 54th Avenue valley, however not in Kingsland valley. It will need to have been a judgment name by the mappers given the marginal nature of those little streams. No matter: all of them are culverted, cryptic creeks as we speak. And the county map reveals that what it calls Seminary Creek is fully synthetic, a Frankencreek.
The panorama had its personal concepts earlier than our earth-moving civilization imposed this scheme upon it. As a geologist, I wish to communicate for the panorama right here and say that the water in these streams belongs to Lion Creek. Then again, all of it belongs to the Bay and that’s the place it finally ends up.
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