STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 409 



In the body of the city there is a salt water lake, connecting by tide- 

 gates with the harbor and bay. This lake, or water park, belongs to the 

 city. Its waters can be renewed with each ebb and How of the tide. The 

 main sewer of the city is flushed from it. When tide is low in the bay, 

 the high tide caught in the lake is turned in at the eastern end of this 

 main sewer and rushes through, discharging into the bay. Proceedings 

 are well under way for the beautifying of this lake or water park. The 

 improvement will include a boulevard around it, a distance of about three 

 miles. This boulevard will be 150 feet wide, will provide for footmen, 

 street cars, and a double driveway, and will also involve the dredging of 

 the lake to a uniform depth of about five feet. This, when completed, will 

 furnish at once as beautiful a land drive and as beautiful a water park as 

 can be found in this country. We have eight mid-town plazas now. The 

 streets here are already the best in California. But there is a determina- 

 tion in the community, now formulating into action, which, in lasting 

 works, will soon make man's contribution of permanent improvements 

 here worthy of addition to nature's unstinted gifts. 



The environments of this slope duplicate those of Athens, which is one 

 of the reasons why Oakland is designated the Athens of the Pacific. This 

 is not a fanciful, but a real resemblance. The hills about Athens and 

 also the Grecian archipelago are one with the hills and bays here. The 

 clouds, the temperature, the sky, the breeze, the landscape, the half 

 shadowed country, are substantially the counterpart of ancient Greece. 

 Whenever the Creator casts a kindly handful of sunbeams on old Greece, 

 he, next morning, casts gently another handful over the new Greece — this 

 Athenian slope. 



This slope is well watered and has an abundant rainfall every season. 

 Such a thing as drought or irrigation upon it was never dreamed of and 

 will never be necessary. So fertile is this soil from Berkeley down to the 

 county line that trees, flowers, and shrubs, planted and properly tended, 

 as for example about a new house, will at the end of the second or third 

 season make the spot look as if it had been occupied and cultivated ten 

 years. I have seen this actual result in almost numberless cases in and 

 about Oakland. The heliotrope grows outdoors in this city without so 

 much as the shelter of a newspaper or sheet throughout the winter, and 

 frequently attains a height of from eight to twelve feet. Geraniums thrive 

 side by side with the heliotrope, and often reach a height of from six to 

 ten feet. This slope is the paradise of flower and tree life as well as of 

 animal life and human existence. The average annual variation in tem- 

 perature at Oakland between summer and winter temperature — taking the 

 average temperature of the months including winter and those including 

 summer — is only 8°. Upon this inviting slope the most exacting and pains- 

 taking home-seekers, old Pacific Coast residents, who know the entire coast, 

 have been and are now locating their homes. The stranger, not knowing 

 the relative merits of different localities, may be satisfied with a better 

 country than his, though not the best; but the old resident (from Wash- 

 ington Territory, Oregon, Nevada, and California) knows that the garden 

 spot, the paradise of the Pacific Coast, is upon the slopes and in the val- 

 leys about the bay of San Francisco. 



