Skyline/Grizzly Peak Boulevard – Berkeley CA and Oakland CA

Description

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) built Skyline Boulevard along the crest of the Berkeley-Oakland Hills in 1935-36. It employed around 1500 men daily and cost $131,000. 

The work described in photographs in the National Archives as “realignment, cleaning [land]slides, drainage structures and surfacing” amounted to a complete make-over of a dirt road built by a short-lived timber company owned by Oakland developer Frank Havens, 1910-13. 

Skyline was meant to link up the parks of the original East Bay Regional Parks system  created in the 1930s: Tilden, Sibley and Redwood (plus Temescal lower in the hills). It began from Tilden Park, but that portion has been renamed Grizzly Peak Boulevard by the City of Berkeley, as it connects with a city street of the same name.  Grizzly Peak continues south of Tilden to join up with the present Skyline Boulevard in Oakland near Sibley Volcanic Preserve.

The Oakland portion of Skyline Boulevard begins at old Tunnel Road, mounts to the ridge of the hills, then passes along Sibley Park and Joaquin Miller Park (City of Oakland) and thence to the Redwood Canyon Road. The portion beyond that point down to Chabot Reservoir was apparently completed after World War II.  

Both the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) did extensive improvements in all the original regional parks.