FoundSF

Historical Essay

by David D. Schmidt, 2026

An excerpt from the book, San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History, by David D. Schmidt (Backcountry Press, 2025).

Looking northwest into Richardson Bay from Angel Island, 2014.

Photo: Chris Carlsson

The wetlands and shallow waters of Marin’s Richardson Bay, home to dozens of species of shorebirds, were threatened by a development that would have filled in most of it in the 1950s. The inlet was owned by Dr. Warren Bostick, who planned to fill in 1.4 square miles to build "Reeds Port," a residential development with homes for up to 10,000 people. The plan involved bulldozing the hills of the adjacent Tiburon Peninsula to fill Richardson Bay, and bordering the development with a new expressway.

Dr. David Steinhardt, a homeowner on the inlet’s shoreline, was horrified by the plan, and took a first step toward blocking it by buying a tidal lot in 1955 for $3,000—at that time, about the cost of a new car. Realizing he couldn't buy up the whole 900 acres himself, he sought help from Caroline Livermore, a founder of the Marin Conservation League. They hoped to raise money to buy the entire 900 acres with the help of the national Audubon Society, and protect the area as a bird sanctuary. They met with local Audubon members, including Elizabeth Terwilliger, the pioneering Marin nature educator, and formed a new Audubon chapter.

By 1958, thanks to Audubon, Livermore, and the voters of Belvedere (on Richardson Bay), they had raised the $230,000 needed to buy out Bostick. Since then, the Richardson Bay Audubon Center and Sanctuary, including five onshore acres with a restored Victorian mansion, have been under long-term lease to the Audubon Society, and are open to the public.

San Francisco Chronicle writer Harold Gilliam was the first to recognize the environmental threat of filling throughout the Bay Area, and call for action to save the bay in his 1957 collection of historical and contemporary stories, San Francisco Bay:

Conceivably it would be feasible to drain or fill all of it not necessary to shipping; and if present trends continue, this is a distinct possibility. But it is not necessarily a desirable one. For most of the bay to be replaced by mile after mile of built-up suburbs would be to eliminate the area’s greatest natural advantage. The bay is . . . in effect a huge untrodden park, offering space, perspective, and beauty—items which are not usually visible on a balance sheet and which will become increasingly rare as California’s population increases to three or four times its present size. . . . such areas of natural space as still remain—and this includes the bay—should be jealously husbanded.

Gilliam, who would become California’s first environmental journalist, was swimming against the tide in 1957, at the height of the bay’s use as a dump for trash, sewage, and fill by the 30 cities surrounding it. And yet, as he pointed out, the bay was getting noticeably cleaner as a result of bayside cities building their first sewage treatment plants. Another threat to the bay described in Gilliam’s San Francisco Bay was the “Reber Plan,” the engineering fantasy project of amateur theater production promoter John Reber. He proposed two massive dams that would turn San Francisco and San Pablo Bays into fresh-water reservoirs (that would have been plagued by pollution from sewage and street runoff, and eliminated migratory fish—salmon, steelhead trout, sturgeon and striped bass). That proposal conflicted with the State’s California Water Project in the 1950s, which proposed a massive dam on the Feather River near Oroville and a canal to take that water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the southern San Joaquin Valley. California voters approved that project in 1960, ending Reber’s hopes for his plan.

Map of Richardson Bay, 2026.

Questions? Email the author: davidnaturesf@gmail.com

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Excerpted from David D. Schmidt's San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History. Available from Backcountry Press.