Image Courtesy Alameda Museum

This aerial image circa 1958 shows the landfill that created the lagoons, modern homes and apartments, and the South Shore shopping center. Note the former bay shoreline demarcated by the trees on the right.

Now that the Alameda Museum is back in business after being soaked by a burst boiler, you can visit the gift shop for some summer reading. Not lightweight novels, but insightful histories of the place where we live.

Among the must-have books on sale there is a modest-looking green volume with an oak tree pictured on the front. Alameda: A Geographical History was a thesis prepared by Imelda Merlin for her Master's Degree in geography from U.C. Berkeley. In 1977 the book version was published by Friends of the Alameda Free Library; it remains the best single volume to cover our history from prehistoric topography to the dawning affection for Victorian houses that began in the 1970s.

A portion of her introduction concentrates on the significance of landfill, "As a result of various filling projects, modern Alameda now comprises approximately two and a half times as great an area as in 1850" when the place was still a peninsula linked to Oakland. Government (now Coast Guard) Island was created from the detritus of dredging the Tidal Canal to create the island of Alameda, completed in 1902.

Another landfill project was underway when the Naval Air Station was developed right before World War II. In Merlin's final chapter, where she details the many changes wrought in Alameda geography, she wrote, "The city of Alameda is still rocking from the manifold effects of its largest and most controversial filling operation of all, that completed by the Utah Construction Company (UCC) in 1957."

Image courtesy of Gary Lenhart

Bathing by the sea around 1915 at the old Municipal Beach at the foot of Washington Park. The bungalow on the right is still there at Portola Avenue and Eighth Street.

According to Woody Minor's On The Bay: A History of the Encinal Yacht Club, "This juggernaut rumbled into Alameda in 1950." UCC purchased Alameda tidelands bordering the southern shoreline and Bay Farm Island. The company proposed "reclaiming" the property, a coy name for plumping it up with dredged material to create new land. The City Council accepted the proposal and also passed an ordinance giving UCC free access to "36 million cubic yards of fill material ... in return for low-priced land for schools, parks and other public uses," wrote Minor. Two vociferous groups quickly organized, the Civic League of Alameda to fight the proposed endeavor; and the Citizens Progress Committee to support it. They gathered signatures for a special election. In May 1955, the advocates of fill won 7,002 to 5,406. "The weeks leading up to the referendum were among the most contentious in the city's history," Minor went on, "with the community polarized between those who saw growth as necessary for 'progress' and those who felt that Alameda was fine the way it was."

To learn more, see "Bayshore Before the Coming of Southshore," next up in the Alameda Museum lecture series. Thursday, June 28 a talented pair of authors will "take you on a journey along Alameda's South Shore in the days when Johnny Weissmuller honed his skills on Surf Beach Park's high dive, the Morris twins boxed at Neptune Beach, and the Gold Coast was really on the coast," said Eric Kos. Both Kos and fellow speaker Dennis Evanosky are well suited to present this program of local history and architecture.

They create calendars with history themes and they originated and maintain the leading web site for Oakland history: oaklandhistory.com.

Their first book, East Bay Then & Now, has thirty-six pairs of vintage and modern-day photos of historical spots from Fremont to Richmond; it was published by Chrysalis Press. Their second, San Francisco in Photographs, was published by Random House, and a third, History Is All Around You: Oakland's Laurel District, will be out in August.

Kos is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design who has offered design expertise to more than ten publications in the East Bay. In 2001, he helped start Stellar Media Group, Inc., which publishes the Alameda Sun.

Dennis Evanosky is the Alameda Sun real estate editor and a Civil War buff who gave a lecture on the Mountain View Cemetery for the Museum in 2004.

Their lecture starts at 7 p.m. Admission is free for Museum members and $5 for others. The Museum, 2424 Alameda Ave. near Park Street, will be open at 6:30 p.m. For information about the lecture and Museum hours, call 523-5907.

Judith Lynch serves on the Historical Advisory Board and teaches at Washington School.