John Reber: The Man Who Helped Save the Bay by Attempting to Destroy It

John Reber selling his plan to dam the bay, c. Nineteen Fifties.

Picture: courtesy Anika Erdmann, Flickr

In 1961 three exceptional girls—Kay Kerr, Sylvia McLaughlin, and Ester Gulick— began Save the Bay, a grassroots residents’ motion to protect and shield San Francisco Bay. It turned out to be one of the profitable efforts at environmental activism in American historical past. As College of California, Berkeley geography professor Richard Walker has noticed, the motion reworked the favored imaginative and prescient of the bay from a “place of manufacturing and circulation of products and other people… of no extra aesthetic or non secular import than at the moment’s freeways” to a “huge scenic, leisure, and ecological open area.” New public insurance policies ended bay fill, promoted the restoration of marshes and wetlands, and opened a whole lot of miles of bay shoreline to the general public. The bay grew to become “the visible centerpiece of the metropolis, a watery commons for the area, and a supply of pleasure to Bay Space residents.”(1)

But the dramatic achievements of the Save the Bay motion within the Nineteen Sixties wouldn’t have been attainable with out the defeat of the Reber Plan within the Nineteen Fifties. John Reber’s proposal to construct two big dams to remodel many of the San Francisco Bay into two freshwater lakes would have destroyed the estuary as we all know it. Had Reber’s dream come true, there would have been no bay to save lots of. The Reber Plan additionally grew to become an important and lasting symbolic inspiration for the motion to save lots of the bay. Though the historical past of the Save the Bay motion is properly documented, the rise and fall of the Reber Plan is much less well-known at the moment. Nearly fully forgotten is the non-public story of John Reber, a exceptional determine in Bay Space historical past who appeared to mix the ambition of Robert Moses, New York’s larger-than-life grasp planner, with the character and private frustrations of Willy Loman, the tragic hero of Arthur Miller’s Dying of a Salesman.(2)

When twenty-year-old John Reber got here to California from his native Ohio in 1907, he deliberate to grow to be a instructor. However he couldn’t resist the siren name of present enterprise and as a substitute grew to become an actor, director, and author. He wrote screenplays for Mack Sennet comedies. (Reber stated his methodology was to jot down tragedies after which “throw in a few custard pies” for laughs.) For twenty years, he made a great residing writing and directing performs and pageants in communities up and down California. Native service golf equipment such because the Elks often sponsored the productions, which featured townspeople within the solid. Reber estimated he staged greater than 300 performances in sixty cities and cities with native casts of 100 to five,000 individuals. This put him involved with “all the most effective individuals,” influential women and men who may later assist his bay plan. Senator and former Governor Hiram Johnson stated Reber knew extra individuals than anybody else in California. Reber believed his present enterprise expertise ready him to create his grand plan. “What’s grasp planning however stage managing an space?” he requested. In response to Reber, the implementation of the plan can be “the best pageant on earth.”(3)

Reber argued the bay was “a geographic mistake,” interfering with the environment friendly operation of the encompassing metropolis. Due to the bay, the transcontinental railroad led to Oakland as a substitute of its pure vacation spot, San Francisco. Reber initially favored an earthen causeway to deliver the rails immediately into town. However as he traveled round California and discovered of the extraordinary worth of freshwater to the state’s improvement, his plan grew to become much more bold. By 1929 his proposal included two massive earth-filled dams, one positioned simply south of the present Bay Bridge and the opposite on the approximate location of at the moment’s Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Whereas the tops of the buildings would function transportation corridors for rail and auto visitors, the dams would additionally block saltwater intrusion into each the north and south bays, creating two huge freshwater lakes. Beneath the Reber Plan, solely about 15 p.c of the current bay would have remained topic to ocean tides. Reber estimated the lakes would retailer about 10 million acre-feet of water, greater than twice the capability of Lake Shasta, California’s largest reservoir. The water would have been out there for residential and industrial use across the bay and for irrigation in regional agricultural areas such because the Santa Clara Valley.(4)

The Reber Plan additionally proposed huge quantities of latest bay fill, creating about 20,000 acres of extra dry land on what was as soon as wetlands and open water. The most important fill would have been off the Richmond, Berkeley, Albany, and Emeryville shoreline. The plan envisioned a twelve-mile freshwater channel via these new lands, linking the 2 lakes and permitting runoff from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers to flow into in each the north and south waterways. The plan included locks to permit transport to cross from salt water to freshwater. Reber added options as time went on: extra port amenities, an aqueduct to move water to the San Joaquin Valley, an airport, a regional transportation terminal, and a high-speed army freeway connecting the Bay Space to Los Angeles. As World Struggle II approached, Reber deliberate new army parts, together with naval bases on crammed land alongside the Marin County shoreline and safe hangars and gas storage amenities in caves created by the excavation of fill for building of the earthen dams. Later Reber promoted the proposed transportation corridors as evacuation routes within the occasion of atomic assault.5 Throughout its almost thirty years of design and debate, the Reber Plan was an natural doc, altering to replicate new circumstances and political realities. However the transportation hyperlinks and the freshwater lakes remained the important thing parts of John Reber’s grand imaginative and prescient.

Map exhibiting the Reber Plan, a post-World Struggle II proposal.

Because of Eric Fischer for making this picture, and plenty of extra, all in excessive decision, out there at his flickr account.

Reber belonged to a technology of People who had nice religion in huge public works. Starting with the development of the transcontinental railroad, an enterprise closely sponsored by the federal authorities, such tasks dramatically affected California’s financial and social improvement. As early because the Eighties, state engineers studied the idea of saltwater boundaries on San Francisco Bay, and within the early twentieth century, a barrier at Carquinez Strait was championed by Contra Costa County enterprise pursuits involved about excessive saltwater content material that interfered with industrial processes. Contra Costa industrialists finally shaped the Salt Water Barrier Affiliation to foyer state officers. However by the early Nineteen Thirties, state engineers had satisfied Contra Costa County that the answer to its drawback was not a saltwater barrier, however an enormous state water mission that included excessive upstream dams on the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, mixed with freshwater pumped from the delta.(6) In 1933, California voters authorized a bond difficulty to assist the proposal. When the Despair made it troublesome for the state to promote the bonds, Washington, D.C. took management of what grew to become the federal Central Valley Challenge.

Reber initially proposed his plan within the inauspicious yr of 1929. Not solely was 1929 the start of the Nice Despair, it coincided with the state engineers’ resolution to reject boundaries as an answer for Bay Space water issues. As well as, Reber’s plan surfaced as each San Francisco and the East Bay have been constructing public aqueducts to deliver Sierra Nevada water to Bay Space cities. Reber’s transportation proposals have been upstaged by building of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges. But in an age of nice public works tasks that routinely reworked pure programs, Reber’s plan continued to draw consideration and assist. In 1933, a distinguished member of the Elks Membership organized a gathering between Reber and former president Herbert Hoover, who had returned to Stanford College after being defeated for reelection by Franklin Roosevelt. A world-class engineer earlier than going into politics, Hoover proclaimed the Reber Plan “essentially the most full proposal for the bay.” Hoover’s endorsement gave the mission important credibility and publicity. In 1935, Reber retired from present enterprise to advertise the plan full-time. In 1940, he put a mannequin of the proposal on show on the world’s honest on Treasure Island, giving his grand scheme unparalleled public publicity. By 1940, then, the Reber Plan was properly launched. For the following twenty years it was a matter of intense dialogue and debate within the Bay Space, Sacramento, and even Washington, D.C.(7)

Reber devoted the final twenty-five years of his life to selling his dream. He had little curiosity in private wealth. Supported by financial savings and contributions from his entourage of “Reberites,” he and his spouse lived frugally in a modest San Francisco residence. He had virtually no employees assist, turning out an enormous quantity of correspondence and different paperwork on his residence typewriter. Reber was an unusually pleasant man, virtually all the time on a first-name foundation with supporters and opponents alike. He beloved public consideration and was prepared to speak to any viewers, from native backyard golf equipment, service teams, church gatherings, and chambers of commerce, to statewide conferences of enterprise, labor, and farm organizations. Over the course of greater than twenty years, he claimed to have given greater than a thousand speeches on behalf of the plan. He’d arrive at such occasions with a formidable array of maps and charts and would lace his shows with homespun humor. His appearances earlier than legislative committees have been usually excursions de pressure, with Reber the performer dominating the session.(8)

However for all his public relations expertise, John Reber desperately wanted technical credibility. Though he studied the handfuls of scholarly papers and reviews that appeared to fill each out there tabletop in his residence, Reber was a highschool graduate with no formal engineering coaching. His capability to realize the assist {of professional} engineers was essential to his success. Herbert Hoover was the primary however not the final of such supporters. Philip G. Bruton, a retired normal from the Military Corps of Engineers, grew to become one among Reber’s strongest advocates. In all probability crucial of Reber’s supporting engineers was Leon H. Nishkian. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Nishkian headed a distinguished San Francisco engineering agency that participated in most of the state’s most vital building tasks. Starting in 1940, he labored diligently and with out compensation on behalf of the Reber Plan. He ready engineering schematics and illustrations and got here up with a extremely favorable price/profit evaluation. Nishkian submitted written testimony to authorities businesses and lent his appreciable skilled popularity to the trigger. Due at the least partially to Nishkian’s affect, The California Engineer, a revered skilled journal, concluded that “competent engineers have examined the mission intently and really feel that it’s fully possible.” In response to Reber, Nishkian’s premature dying in 1947 was “the blow of blows.”(9)

San Francisco enterprise and political forces have been among the many highly effective pursuits that rallied behind the plan, believing it will have supplied elevated regional transportation entry to town’s downtown and, in concept at the least, a vast provide of freshwater. The central waterfront, the guts of town’s business port, would have remained open to salt water with easy accessibility to the Golden Gate, the one Bay Space port facility with this benefit beneath the Reber Plan. In 1942, town’s board of supervisors formally supported the plan, a place enthusiastically backed by Mayor Angelo Rossi. San Francisco’s legislative representatives, together with influential assemblyman Thomas Maloney, lobbied for the proposal in Sacramento. A lot of town’s press, significantly the San Francisco Chronicle, additionally supported the Reber Plan.(10)

However Oakland and many of the East Bay took a really totally different place. The Port of Oakland had grown steadily within the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties, however beneath the Reber Plan, Oakland’s harbor would have been remoted behind a dam. Oceangoing vessels would have had entry solely via locks positioned on the crammed land off the Berkeley waterfront. (A lot the identical was true for the ports of Richmond, Stockton, and Sacramento positioned behind the northern dam.) Irving Kahn, a distinguished Oakland retailer and president of town’s Downtown Property Affiliation, condemned the Reber Plan as “Hitler Techniques,” a plot by San Francisco to maintain Oakland in an inferior aggressive place “simply since you are larger than we’re.” Each the Oakland Metropolis Council and Alameda County Board of Supervisors opposed the plan. James McElroy, president of the Oakland port fee, argued the plan would destroy maritime exercise within the East Bay. “There isn’t a motive,” he stated, “for taking the bay and chopping it right into a pond.”(11)

California farmers have been among the many Reber Plan’s strongest supporters. The state’s Farm Bureau Federation backed the proposal, and its Bay Space associates, such because the Santa Clara County Farm Bureau, have been particularly enthusiastic. Santa Clara Valley fruit and vegetable growers, like many Bay Space and Central Valley farmers, anticipated to realize entry to low-cost irrigation water pumped from the brand new lakes. Certainly one of Reber’s most enthusiastic backers was John E. Pickett, editor of The California Farmer and The Pacific Rural Press, two San Francisco–primarily based publications with substantial agribusiness readership. The California Farmer grew to become “a rabid oracle of Reberism,” whereas the Rural Press referred to the plan as “the best mission ever conceived.” Pickett finally grew to become president of the San Francisco Bay Challenge, a nonprofit company established to supply John Reber with monetary and organizational assist. Nevertheless, agricultural backing was not unanimous. Many delta farmers feared that in intense winter storms the water backed up behind the northern dam would overwhelm delta levies and flood the area’s fields.(12)

Reber hoped that World Struggle II would improve assist for his proposal. He added important army infrastructure to the plan and argued that the brand new lakes would supply a safe water provide in case of assault. However Rear Admiral John W. Greenslade, commandant of the Twelfth Naval District, identified that the plan would put many of the Bay Space’s naval installations, together with the Alameda Naval Air Station and the Mare Island and Hunters Level Naval Shipyards, in freshwater lakes behind the dams. Ships must cross via locks, inflicting “delay and threat to each vessel together with hazard of a whole blockade.” Admiral Greenslade concluded the Reber Plan “has no benefit.”

Reber merely dismissed this, as he did just about each different criticism. “We’re not enthusiastic about individuals unable to know what we’re driving at,” he stated. “We don’t argue with people who find themselves towards us, as a result of we all know they are going to be with us finally.” With Greenslade, at the least, that turned out to be the case. After the admiral retired on the finish of the warfare, he had a unprecedented change of coronary heart and have become one among Reber’s most prestigious supporters. Nevertheless, this modified neither the Navy’s nor the Military’s official opposition to the.plan.(13)

The institution of a “Joint Military-Navy Board on Extra Crossing of San Francisco Bay” in 1946 gave the Reberites one other likelihood to realize army assist. Solely a decade outdated, the Bay Bridge already was experiencing visitors jams. Any new bridge or different trans-bay hyperlink required army approval. Reber provided his proposed south bay dam as an apparent reply. Designed to be 2,000 toes large, it might accommodate thirty-two lanes of auto visitors, along with each transcontinental and interurban rail strains. Reber and Nishkian referred to as for the board to approve at the least the southern portion of the Reber Plan as a part of the answer to the area’s transportation issues.

However after the warfare, the state of California turned towards the Reber Plan, as momentum turned towards a serious water mission within the Central Valley. State Engineer Edward Hyatt and chairman A.M. Barton of the State Board of Reclamation each testified towards the Reber/Nishkian proposal. Carl Schedler, a distinguished consulting engineer who had as soon as been the president of the Contra Costa County Salt Water Barrier Affiliation, additionally emerged as a formidable opponent. He challenged Nishkian’s optimistic monetary projections and argued the plan posed a risk to delta agriculture. Whereas the Military-Navy Board lastly concluded that extra bay crossings have been wanted, it went out of its solution to reject the Reber Plan. In response to the board, Reber’s proposal “would end in a dislocation of trade, is taken into account economically unfeasible, and additional is untenable from the standpoint of navigation and nationwide pursuits.”(14)

If opponents thought that this robust language would deter Reber and his supporters, they have been mistaken. In 1949 California Senator Sheridan Downey introduced a subcommittee of the US Senate Committee on Public Works to San Francisco to carry public hearings on Reber’s proposal. Downey was sympathetic to the plan, and supporters outnumbered opponents five-to-one on the record of witnesses. John Reber was the primary to testify, entertaining the room for greater than two hours in response to Downey’s pleasant questions. Emphasizing the significance of hydraulic planning, Reber claimed “there was just one man who might dwell with out water and that was W.C. Fields.” When a senator corrected one among Reber’s many biblical quotations, Reber replied, “I do the work and Mrs. Reber does the praying.” After making his ordinary robust pitch for the transportation and water parts of the plan, Reber mentioned the leisure features, promising shoreline parks and “the best fishing gap on the planet.” He admitted the plan may threaten the bay’s sturgeon fishery, however stated “if we are able to get on pleasant phrases with Stalin…we are able to get a couple of eggs from the Volga River and replenish our provide.”(15)

After Reber’s testimony, San Francisco Bay Challenge president John Pickett orchestrated the looks of dozens of extra supporting witnesses, together with San Francisco Recreation Division director Josephine Randall, who strongly counseled the plan’s leisure elements.(16) However opponents, although significantly outnumbered, additionally had their say. Glen Woodruff, an engineer representing Oakland, stated the plan would put his metropolis “at a really determined drawback competitively.” State Engineer Hyatt repeated his company’s opposition, and for the primary time was joined by representatives of the federal Bureau of Reclamation. Each state and federal witnesses argued that correct administration and growth of the Central Valley Challenge would safe California’s water future much better than the Reber Plan. Carl Schedler listed quite a lot of technical difficulties, amongst them the likelihood that there wouldn’t be sufficient freshwater to maintain the lakes full through the dry summer season months. If lake degree fell considerably under that of the remaining bay, operation of the locks would dump salt water again into the lakes. The Bureau of Reclamation feared that that the Central Valley Challenge can be required to divert water from farms and cities to maintain the lakes above the saltwater degree of the bay. In impact, the opponents argued the plan would create somewhat than alleviate a water scarcity. Nonetheless, the subcommittee concluded that the proposal had promise and deserved additional analysis. In 1950, Congress appropriated $2.5 million to assist a complete Military Corps of Engineers examine of the Reber Plan.(17)

The Bay Mannequin, now restored and open to the general public as a part of the Golden Gate Nationwide Recreation Space.

Picture Chris Carlsson

The Corps took 13 years to finish the examine, due partially to delays brought on by the Korean Struggle and different priorities. However the congressional appropriation was a victory for Reber and his supporters, and it attracted nationwide consideration. In November 1950, The Saturday Night Publish, the nation’s hottest weekly journal, featured an article on the plan, evaluating it in scope to Hoover Dam. The creator, Frank J. Taylor, stated that due to Reber’s advocacy, the proposal had gone from “a harebrained concept to a mission backed by a formidable array of engineering brains.” Taylor described “Previous Reber,” then sixty-two-years-old, as a compact, blue-eyed man in perpetual movement. He was “spry as a cricket,” “nimble as a goat,” “bouncing from workplace to workplace, to conferences, to public hearings,” all the time promoting his plan. The article closed with Reber’s prediction: “We might be pumping freshwater out of the bay in two years.”(18)

In lots of respects, the Saturday Night Publish article was the high-water mark for the Reber Plan. Over the following 5 years, numerous businesses and branches of state authorities issued research that have been uniformly essential of the proposal. In 1949, the Meeting Committee on Tidelands Reclamation and Growth commissioned John Savage, a well-regarded Denver engineer, to hold out the primary unbiased skilled examine of the plan. Savage’s findings, launched in 1951, have been devastating. He confirmed that there was not sufficient water to maintain the lakes full in the summertime and an excessive amount of water to keep away from delta flooding within the winter. He additionally discovered that the lakes would grow to be significantly polluted, significantly within the dry summer season months. Savage identified that the Reber Plan would destroy a number of bay industries, together with salt manufacturing and business fishing. He concluded that the plan was bodily attainable however “neither functionally nor economically possible.” Savage’s conclusions have been supported by the report of Cornelius Biemond, the water director of metropolitan Amsterdam, who was commissioned by the state legislature to review California’s hydraulic issues in 1953. Biemond estimated the true price of the Reber Plan was $1.4 billion, not the $250 million determine utilized by Reber. In 1955, a state board of consultants, composed of 5 skilled engineers, stated that whereas the Reber Plan “meant to foster industrial growth, it will really be most disruptive…. It might remodel an ideal pure harbor into a synthetic bottleneck.”(19)

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that John Reber took these setbacks “with a smile.” He replied at size to the essential reviews within the newspaper’s This World weekly journal. However as a substitute of immediately countering many of the technical factors contained within the reviews, Reber merely repeated the acquainted arguments that he had been making for greater than twenty years. In impact, he claimed that the technical criticisms couldn’t be legitimate as a result of the plan was endorsed by distinguished engineers such because the late Leon Nishkian. Reber concluded that his plan was “a should” if the Bay Space was to extend its regional inhabitants from the present three million to a projected twenty-one million within the twenty-first century. A Chronicle editorial argued that the state reviews shouldn’t be accepted because the final phrase, however the newspaper’s editors admitted the paperwork had an “spectacular air of finality.”(20)

In reality, the plan by no means recovered from the mixed affect of the state research. By the mid-Nineteen Fifties, Reber was sick, affected by extreme bronchial asthma. However he gamely carried on, sustaining his public optimism. After one hospital go to, he advised reporters, “I had a chat with the Lord. He advised me I’ve 5 extra years. And I’ m going to see the beginning of building on the Reber Plan.” However it was to not be. On 16 October 1960, John Reber died on the age of 73. The Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner lined his dying as a entrance web page story. Even the New York Occasions printed a considerable obituary.(21)

Over the past years of his life, Reber and his supporters pinned their remaining hopes on the much-delayed Military Corps of Engineers examine. If it discovered the Reber Plan fascinating and viable, they thought, the examine would greater than offset the damaging conclusions of the earlier state reviews. In 1957, the Corps constructed an enormous hydraulic bay mannequin on the Sausalito waterfront to review the proposal. It lined an acre and a half and was positioned in a big constructing that had as soon as been the warehouse of Marinship, a World Struggle II period shipyard. In 1960, researchers started working simulations of the Reber Plan on the mannequin. The outcomes confirmed a number of the most discouraging findings of the state research. The Corps of Engineers analysis report, printed in 1963, concluded that the plan was “infeasible by any body of reference.”(22) This was the ultimate nail within the coffin. The Reber Plan was useless, laid to relaxation three years after the passing of John Reber himself.

The Reber Plan was not killed by environmental opposition. It was defeated by the highly effective pursuits it threatened and consultants who believed it wouldn’t work. Neither the San Francisco–primarily based Sierra Membership nor some other mainline conservation group took a place on Reber’s proposal. When the Save the Bay marketing campaign started in 1961, Sierra Membership govt director David Brower stated his group had different priorities. Preservation of pristine wilderness was extra vital than saving a gritty waterway surrounded by a closely populated metropolitan area. The established conservation teams grew to become actively concerned solely after Save the Bay generated appreciable in style assist. In 1965, simply two years after the ultimate defeat of the Reber Plan, the California legislature handed the McAteer Petris Act, establishing the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Growth Fee (BCDC). The brand new company had authority to control land use alongside the bayshore and set up a plan to information future bay conservation and improvement coverage. 4 years later, Governor Ronald Reagan signed laws approving BCDC’s everlasting Bay Plan, a doc that included highly effective environmental protections for the estuary.(23)

The institution of BCDC and the approval of its bold plan have been main victories for the Save the Bay motion. That motion was in flip a mirrored image of the brand new environmental consciousness that was a part of the bigger means of social and cultural change within the sixties. Save the Bay, initially an effort to guard the estuary from additional land fill, developed right into a broad marketing campaign to protect and restore San Francisco Bay as a pure ecosystem. In contrast, the hassle to defeat the Reber Plan was a part of an argument over how greatest to make use of and exploit San Francisco Bay as a pure useful resource. If the Reber Plan had succeeded, there would have been no bay to protect. The engineers, enterprise leaders, army officers, bureaucrats, and politicians who opposed the Reber Plan made the next Save the Bay motion attainable. With out realizing it, they have been Act I within the play to save lots of the bay, an act that paved the best way for a cultural re-envisioning of the bay that was as dramatic in its personal phrases because the bodily transformation proposed by John Reber. Whereas Reber’s dream is lengthy useless, and the Reber Plan solely resurfaces every now and then as an emblem of what might need been, the desires and aspirations of the Save the Bay activists thrived and stay highly effective at the moment.

Saving the Bay from “the Future”!

From the bizarre insanity of the Reber Plan to dam each ends of the Bay into freshwater lakes within the Nineteen Fifties to the Save the Bay motion of the early Nineteen Sixties that helped create the Bay Conservation and Growth Fee, we’ve come a good distance in a half century. At present’s open shorelines, closed trash dumps, and returning wetlands honor and protect our best public useful resource. Historian Chuck Wollenberg and Steve Goldbeck from BCDC.

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Video: Shaping San Francisco Public Discuss March 28, 2018

Notes

1 Richard A. Walker, The Nation within the Metropolis: the Greening of the San Francisco Bay Space (Seattle: College of Washington Press, 2007), 110–111.

2 Matthew Morse Booker says the Reber Plan “might have been maybe the best calamity ever to befall the bay.” Down by the Bay: San Francisco’s Historical past Between the Tides (Berkeley: College of California Press, 2013), 219.

3 San Francisco Chronicle, 17 October 1960; San Francisco Examiner, 17 October 1960; Frank J. Taylor, “They Wish to Rebuild the Bay,” Saturday Night Publish, 18 November 1950, 32–33.

See Also

New Media M.A. Analysis Weblog | Media Research, College of Amsterdam

4John Reber, “San Francisco Bay Challenge—the Reber Plan,” Leon Nishkian Papers re: the Reber Plan, (hereafter cited as Nishkian Papers), field 2:2; David R. Lengthy, “Mistaken Id: Placing the John Reber Plan for the San Francisco Bay Space into Historic Context,” American Cities and Cities: Historic Perspective, Joseph F. Bishel, ed. (Pittsburgh: Dusquense College Press, 1992), 129–130; Philip J. Dreyfus, Our Higher Nature: Setting and the Making of San Francisco (Norman: College of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 152.

5 W. Turrentine Jackson and Alan M. Paterson, The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta: The Evolution and Implementation of Water Coverage (Davis: California Water Assets Heart, 1977), 63–65; Dreyfus, 155.

6 Alan M. Paterson, “The Nice Contemporary Water Panacea: Salt Water Barrier Proposals for San Francisco Bay,” Arizona and the West (Winter 1980), 308–314.

7 Catherine Means, “Reber’s Dam Folly,” California Dwelling Journal, San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner, 29 July 1984, 18; Paterson, 317; Dreyfus, 155.

8 Taylor, 33, 156; Jackson and Paterson, 65.

9 Dan Cameron, “The Reber Plan,” California Engineer (December 1947), 8–9, 26; Dreyfus, 157–158; Jackson and Paterson, 67; Nishkian to Roger Lapham, mayor of San Francisco, 25 October 1944; Nishkian to Honorable Earl Warren, 4 December 1946; Nishkian to R.S. Clelland, Appearing Regional Director US Bureau of Reclamation, 10 October 1945, Nishkian Papers, field 1:2.

10 Chronicle, 17 August 1946; Paterson, 317; Dreyfus, 155.

11 Chronicle, 25 April 1942; Oakland Tribune, 25 April 1942.

12 California Farmer, 5 April 1952; Pacific Rural Press, 27 September 1947; Jackson and Paterson, 65; Dreyfus, 156.

13 District Workers Headquarters twelfth Naval District to Board of Supervisors Metropolis and County of San Francisco, 1942, Nishkian Papers, field 1:2; Taylor, 158; Dreyfus, 156–157.

14 L.H. Nishkian, “Report on the Reber Plan and Bay Land Crossing to the Joint Military-Navy Board, “ 12–15 August 1946, Nishkian Papers, field 2:1; “Report of Joint Military-Navy Board on Extra Crossing of San Francisco Bay” (Presidio of San Francisco, 1947), 5–6, 57, 68–81.

15 Wants of the San Francisco Bay Space, California, Hearings Earlier than a Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Works, United State Senate, December 8–16, 1949 (hereafter cited as Hearings) (Washington: US Authorities Printing Workplace, 1950), 4–33; Taylor, 156.

16 Hearings, 42–106.

17 Hearings, 164–232, 240–255; C.W. Schedler, “Feedback on the Reber Plan Ready for Senator Downey on the Hearings of the Public Works Committee,” (San Francisco, 1949), 1–24.

18 Taylor, 32–34, 156–158.

19 California State Meeting, First Report of the Interim Truth-Discovering Committee on Tideland Reclamation and Growth in Northern California, Associated to Site visitors Drawback and Aid of Congestion on Transbay Crossings (Sacramento, 1949), 23–25, 27; John L. Savage, Report on Growth of the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco, 1951), 1–2, 24–78; Jackson and Paterson, 67–69.

20 Chronicle, 30 March 1955, 31 March 1955, 29 Could 1955.

21 Chronicle, 17 October 1960; Examiner, 17 October 1960; New York Occasions, 17 October 1960.

22 US Military Engineer District San Francisco, Complete Survey of San Francisco Bay and Tributaries Technical Report on Limitations, (San Francisco, 1963); Means, 19; Dreyfus, 163. On this period of laptop simulations, the Bay Mannequin is not used for analysis, however the Corps of Engineers nonetheless operates it for instructional functions with a sexy customer middle.

23 Mel Scott, The San Francisco Bay Space, a Metropolis in Perspective (Berkeley: College of California Press, 1985), 315–317; Walker, 113–116; Booker, 165. In 2007, BCDC briefly studied after which rejected the thought of a saltwater barrier on the Golden Gate to guard the bay from sea degree rise as a result of international warming. San Francisco Bay Conservation and Growth Fee, “Evaluation of a Tidal Barrier on the Golden Gate,” (San Francisco, 2007), 1–10.