Before long, Mundershietz was hosting friends in his cabin, and then, for 50 cents a night, adventurous strangers. His was the first address in Drawbridge, named with a sign in 1887. To keep the channels open to shipping, they installed two drawbridges and hired George Mundershietz to elevate them. Their line would span two sloughs on either side of Station Island. Beyond the hum of a metropolis unimaginable in the town's heyday, the only sounds are the chitterings of marsh wrens, the occasional clack of an Amtrak train and, high overhead, the call of a red-and-yellow Southwest Airlines jet.ĭrawbridge got its start when a couple of lesser-known robber barons decided to compete with Leland Stanford's Central Pacific Railroad by connecting Newark, in the East Bay, to Santa Cruz, on the coast. In another, the flooring is pristine, glossy: water tiled with sky.Īt its peak in the 1920s, Drawbridge - on Station Island in the marsh of the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge - boasted more than 90 buildings on stilts, at least one with a grand piano. In one cabin, an old bed rests squarely on cracked mud. In the evening light, the chaparral ridge above Fremont - a Silicon Valley city of some 200,000 people a few miles away - glows orange through pane-less windows just a foot above the ground. At the southeast edge of San Francisco Bay lies a town on the threshold of disappearing.
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