East Oakland
Once a highly industrialized
and unionized area, with hundreds of middle management and blue collar jobs,
......how it has changed.
It was home to several large cannery operations, such as Fruitvale cannery..now
a lot filled with automobiles, Continental Can, now partioned into
smaller business cubicles, Dole pineapple..now a container storage yard,
Del-Monte cannery....where marichino cherrys, peaches and tomatoes were
once processed and canned by the ton, with hundreds of workers, both seansonal and regular hourly workers...now a strip mall,
a animal pound facility, a storage outlet and a small factory , these
cannerys provided both year around work for some employees, such as machinists, tool and die makers,
machine operators, fork lift operators, managers, accountants, cafeteria workers, truck drivers, and seasonal income for
others, who would come in from all over the bay area to join the work force
when the products (cherrys, tomatoes, peaches,etc.)were ready to be processed.
Alongside
the cannerys were the can manufacturing plants, such as American Can ..now
a strip mall, on Alameda Avenue, glass and bottling manufacturers,
such as Brockway glass..now a fenced in lot full of old automobiles and trucks along
San Leandro Blvd, Owens
Illinois on
Alameda and Fruitvale Avenue (in operation still), also paper and
cardboard box plants were scattered thruout the area. There
were both large and small scrap metal yards doing business in steel, iron,
brass, copper, aluminum and old batteries, such as the Learner Scrap Company,
both yard one and two, there were metal plating shops doing there
work in chromium, nickel, gold and silver.
On
the corner of High Street and Alameda Avenue there was a small oil/solvent
reclaimer/recycling plant, tire retreaders and vulcanizers, such as
the Firestone store on 36th and Foothill Blvd., Vulcan Foundry, now
home to the Vulcan Cafe,
chemical manufacturers, such as Clorox on High Street, American Mineral
Spirits, Chevron oil/thinners/solvents, Union 76, General Electric
built transformers and filled them with PCB coolant ,
there was a large drydock company called Moore Dry Docks, a battery manufacturing
plant along Bancroft Avenue (Prestolite), Calo dog food..now a hotel, processed
there materials on Embarcadero Ave., fishing boats would leave every morning
off nearby piers.
Montgomery Wards Torn down in 2001 (news) now a vacant lot, school, ran a
store the size of a small city, it had a garden supply, home
furnishings, clothing, resturant, and even a television show was broadcast
from the store..live.....!
The
store had rail service by the old Western Pacific Railroad
that went right inside the
ground floor, now the W.P. railroad name is all but forgotten, except
for a few rail buffs and railroaders, some of whom are working for
the corporation that bought the Western Pacific lines, the Union Pacific,
who just within the last decade removed the main line rail and sidings
that once served the Montgomery Wards building.
There was a Ford tractor outlet near 5th Avenue, an
automobile plant
at Stonehurst that
produced General Motors automobiles and trucks,..now Eastmont Computer Training
center and an Oakand police sub-station, there were hundreds of warehouses,
freight stations, freight forwarders, and many passenger depots.
Safeway
grocery store chain had it's headquarters here, it's now gone to the suburbs.
Thousands
of railroad spurs, sidings, runarounds, and team tracks were spider
webbed thruout this area, serving the needs of both the little shipper the
larger factories and plants and the worker, who before the system was
destroyed
could catch a "red train"
to work.
Many
of these sites were on the EPA toxic site list , such as the battery
manufacturing plant
along Bancroft Avenue, that was made into a park (later found to have toxic amounts of lead residue in the soil), and
Standard
Iron and Metals off
of 69th Avenue, after a recent check of the EPA site, it seems like all but AMCO Chemicals on 3rd street, may have been deleted off the list.
A few VERY Toxic industrial sites in Oakland
March 2000.....
nbsp;
Granny
Goose ..closing
down after 54 years.
Just Desserts.
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