Visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area commonly view the metropolitan area (the nation's fifth largest) as a single entity radiating north, south, and east from San Francisco. Overshadowed in the popular imagination by the glamorous world-class city by the Golden Gate, cities along the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, some of them powerful economic and intellectual engines in their own right, offer much for visiting geographers. Here one finds, among other attributes, the Bay Area's ranking seaport (and the third largest container port on the West Coast), the nation?s leading public university, a superb regional park system, and upscale residential enclaves of distinction and style. While Bay Bridge motorists must pay a $3 toll to reach San Francisco, the eastbound trip to Oakland is free--a price that's right for those wanting to explore the other side.

Habitable lowlands border the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. Spreading north and south from the Oakland-Berkeley complex, urbanization has blanketed the full fifty-mile length of the bay: from Richmond in the north, for over a century home to an enormous Standard Oil (now Chevron) refinery, south to Fremont, the East Bay's second most populous city, now widely viewed as a northern outlier of the Silicon Valley. The 8.5-mile shoreline between Richmond and Oakland, filled in a century ago for municipal garbage dumps, has been reborn as the 2,200-acre Eastshore State Park, the first parcel of which was recently dedicated.

Abutting Oakland just north of the Bay Bridge is Emeryville, a former industrial town now given to big-box retailing and high-tech and biotechnology firms. Off Oakland's south shore sits Alameda, an island city of 75,000 known for its well maintained Victorian houses. South of Oakland are the largely residential cities of San Leandro and Hayward, the latter the home of the California State University campus recently renamed East Bay to better reflect its primary service area.

Long shrouded by San Francisco's substantial shadow, Oakland, the East Bay's biggest city (400,000) has amenities that would make any American city its size envious: Lake Merritt, a 155-acre park-rimmed tidal basin adjoining the downtown (where one can ride on a gondola imported from Italy); a pedestrian-oriented waterfront with a thriving night-time restaurant and entertainment district centered in the Jack London Square area; spectacular redwood parklands lining the ridge lands above the city; a pulsating, ethnically complex Chinatown; franchises in three major league sports, at least one of which is playing every month of the year; and an architecturally distinctive museum devoted to the rich natural and human history of California.

Unlike San Francisco's unique location, a thumbnail on a thumb-like peninsula, Oakland spreads out over a large alluvial plain on the mainland side of the bay, a huge geographic advantage. Historically, Oakland was a natural warehouse, a storage depot, the end of the rail line. A railroad town since the arrival of the transcontinental in 1869, there is still no place in the city to fully escape the sound of the train whistle. Today most of those trains terminate at an enormous cargo container port, the first on the West Coast to have developed intermodal container shipping. Oakland's waterfront is dominated by gigantic gantry cranes that resemble Erector Set dinosaurs and prehistoric birds. The container cargo, most of it coming from Asia, feeds a substantial warehouse district adjacent to the waterfront.

The central business district, centered around Broadway and Twelfth Street (transfer point for underground Bay Area Rapid Transit trains), presents a handsome mixture of early twentieth to early twenty-first century architecture, including a classic "flatiron" at Telegraph and Broadway. A few blocks away is Preservation Park, a block of restored Victorian-era houses now used as office buildings. Embedded in the downtown is the commercial epicenter of Oakland's Asian community. Though called Chinatown, the label "Asiatown" is far more appropriate for the multi-block area whose crowded sidewalks are perpetually jammed with fresh produce and seafood. In Oakland, as in most American cities, residential prestige strongly correlates with elevation. Montclair, a leafy hillside district of meandering streets and architecturally distinctive homes, many with panoramic views, serves as the residential area of choice for Oakland's wealthier citizens, especially the "new money" elite.

Despite a dramatic downtown make-over in the past decade driven by Mayor Jerry Brown, a former two-term governor of California in the 1970s, Oakland, sometimes referred to as America's most integrated city, is still perceived as a tough town prone to violence. The Black Panther Party and Hell's Angels motorcycle club, violent antiestablishment organizations born in Oakland in the 1960s, helped shape that perception. Today it is reinforced by one of the nation?s highest per capita homicide rates, the byproduct of a pervasive drug culture and chronic underemployment.

A city with multiple personalities, Berkeley, once the only American city with its own foreign policy, is nested near the middle of the urbanized East Bay. The city's primary claim to fame has long been and continues to be the University of California's flagship campus (32,000 students), which covers more than 700 impressively landscaped acres as it climbs into the Berkeley Hills. Among the world's leading research universities, it has given rise to several prestigious research facilities and educational institutes that border the campus, at the center of which is the Campanile, the handsome 307-foot tall clock tower that provides sweeping views of the East Bay plain, the bay and beyond. Berkeley, where people of color comprise roughly half of the multiethnic and multiracial city of 100,000, is cut off by Interstate 80 from its shoreline with the exception of one cross street. East-west running University Avenue, a major retail business district, extends to the city's marina, site of the Berkeley Pier, a popular fishing spot where pedestrians can stroll two-thirds of a mile into the heart of San Francisco Bay.

Besides the university, whose omnipresence is nearly impossible to escape, Berkeley has a national reputation for its role as seedbed for the late twentieth century revolution in ingredient-driven cuisine. Here is where Alice Waters, a Cal alumna, ushered in a new era of food composition and preparation at her cottage restaurant Chez Panisse. Waters and those she trained essentially raised the bar in terms of what could be done with locally and regionally grown organic foods. Consequently, any restaurant of substance in this city is held to an abnormally high standard by a discerning clientele. Berkeley, for locals and visitors alike, is a dining destination.

The best way for AAG participants to gain a fuller appreciation for the variegated urban and cultural geography of the Bay Area is to make time for a trip to the East Bay. In addition to the Bay Bridge, it is easily accessible from downtown San Francisco via Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system trains.

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