A new proposal in Berkeley to daylight a portion of Strawberry Creek is the latest in a lineage of small interventions to bring buried portions of the urban watershed to the surface.
Matt Baume documents the history of "daylighting" projects in the Bay Area, beginning in Napa in the 1970s:
"In the 1970s, as part of the redevelopment of its downtown, the City of Napa stumbled upon a new way of thinking about the urban watershed: Instead of leaving the Napa River buried, engineers removed its cover, exposing it to daylight.
"In the 70s, there was the redevelopment," Barry Martin, Napa's Public Information Officer explained to Streetsblog. "and a number of buildings were taken down. The creek ran underneath some structures, so as they were designing this urban renewal project, [daylighting] was part of that.""
Thanks to Matthew Roth
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