The authors advocate for an infill BART station in this area of the I-880 freeway and BART and Union Pacific/Amtrak tracks, which cut the East Oakland neighborhoods of Clinton and San Antonio off from the nearby waterfront and new Brooklyn Basin development.

The story of East Oakland is in no small part the story of a transportation hub at what is now 13th Avenue at East Eighth Street. At one time, horse-drawn streetcars cruised down the avenue, passing by clapboard stables, saloons and dry goods stores as they gently descended toward the wharf and the masts of sailing ships crowding the harbor. 

Nowadays, nothing of this Old West San Antonio remains. Instead, a small and bedraggled park sits at this intersection, overlooking an unapproachable wall of BART, Amtrak and Union Pacific railroad tracks, and eight lanes of grid-locked Interstate 880 traffic.

But a grassroots movement is growing to restore this area into a 21st century hub. That effort is centered around one essential idea — building a new infill BART and regional rail station.

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The former transportation hub in East Oakland has a fascinating and tragic history. In the first half of the 19th century, the East Bay’s first shipping wharf was established on Antonio Maria Peralta’s rancho, where a creek flowed down from the hills into the San Antonio estuary, at the foot of today’s 13th and 14th avenues. Facilitating the transport of cattle hides from grazing lands and lumber from redwood groves, the site became known as San Antonio Embarcadero.

This location marked the nexus of maritime traffic, long-distance steam railroads and horse-drawn urban transit. The activity stimulated rapid development in the surrounding area, formally incorporated as the township of Brooklyn in 1856 and now known as the Oakland neighborhoods of San Antonio and Clinton.

From 1875 to 1895, the growth and prosperity of the area built around San Antonio........

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