The Point Isabel History Project needs you!
The Point Isabel History Project invites the community to help fine-tune a history of Point Isabel in Richmond, California.
From July through September of 2025, the Point Isabel History Project is making a draft document available for public comments, corrections, and additions.
Point Isabel Regional Shoreline on San Francisco Bay is one of the most popular parks in East Bay Regional Park District.
The Point Isabel peninsula also has a long and complicated history. It is perhaps one of the most dramatically altered locations around the bay.
For thousands of years it was a small hill surrounded by marsh and water and was home to Ohlone people. Over the past 250 years, it has been part of a Spanish (and later Mexican) rancho; a 19th Century ferry stop; a dynamite factory; a gentlemen’s shooting club; and an illegal dump site for car batteries (resulting in a massive cleanup of lead and zinc in the mid-1980s). It dodged many other bullets along the way; at various times it was slated to become an international airport, harbor, or naval base.
About 15 years after the original Point Isabel was flattened for a sewage treatment plant and business park, the landfill began to be painstakingly reclaimed as something more natural. Today the open space and water access delight up to 1.5 million visitors a year, the Hoffman Marsh provides wildlife habitat and a stop for birds on the ancient Pacific Flyway migration path, and the Bay Trail offers visitors easy access to San Francisco Bay.
Point Isabel aerial view 1960s.
Photo courtesy of El Cerrito Historical Society
Draft in progress
Many events and people have been part of Point Isabel’s history. You are invited to be part of helping make this narrative reflect that.
A review draft will be available from July through September 2025. You can read it here online or download it as a PDF file. The final document will be published in 2026.
How you can participate
We're eager for your comments, corrections, photos, anecdotes, stories, and perspectives, and will incorporate as many as possible and may share them on this website.
We want to include everyone who participates in the Acknowledgments! Be sure to give us your name. (If you leave a phone message, speak slowly and clearly, spell your name, and leave a number where we can call you back if we need to.)
In early 2026 or before, a final document will be available to download free or print on-demand.
News & Events
April 10, 2025 — Come hear the history of Point Isabel. A sneak preview!
El Cerrito Historical Society is hosting a talk about the history of a shoreline area that is deeply tied to El Cerrito’s history.
For thousands of years, a low hill and natural shoreline, Point Isabel has been home to the Ohlone, a dock for Victor Castro’s El Cerrito rancho, a commercial ferry stop, a site for illegal prizefighting, a dynamite factory, a frog farm, a dump for toxic trash, and more.
The speaker will be Mary Barnsdale, an El Cerrito resident and longtime visitor to Point Isabel Regional Shoreline, who is writing an historical book on Point Isabel.
Thursday, April 10, 7 pm - 9 pm
Hana Gardens Senior Center
10870 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito (map)
Free. Light refreshments.
Remains of dumped Tepco pottery, which was produced in El Cerrito, can be seen along the shoreline of Point Isabel. Much of the peninsula has been created since the 1950s through industrial fill.
Photo by Dave Weinstein
The Point Isabel History Project is partially funded by a grant from East Bay Regional Park District’s Regional Parks Foundation.
Thank you, EBRPD!
Satellite image of current Point Isabel
An early 19th Century map of the original Point Isabel peninsula superimposed onto a late 20th Century map.
The bow tie shape (center) is a low, rocky hill that had jutted into San Francisco Bay for thousands of years. It was flattened in the late 1950s.
The white rectangle under and north of it is the USPS distribution center. The green wrapped around the USPS facility on two sides is Point Isabel Regional Shoreline.
Across Hoffman Channel is North Point Isabel. North Point Isabel is technically part of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park but is managed as one park, along with Point Isabel Regional Shoreline, by EBRPD.
Here are some specific pieces of the Point Isabel puzzle we’re looking for. Maybe you have them?
Photo of Isabel Castro, daughter of Don Victor Castro, for whom Point Isabel was named. (As a married woman she went by Belle O’Neill.)
Photos of the San Pablo Avenue Sportsman’s Club, which had a clubhouse and shooting range at Point Isabel in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Photos of people swimming at the little beaches at Point Isabel before the original hilly promontory was leveled in the late 1950s.
Point Isabel Dog Owners’ early newsletters (PIDO News and The PIDO Pointer)
GET IN TOUCH
From July through September 2025, you’ll be able to download the Point Isabel history draft document here!
How to reach us, give feedback, or share what you’ve got:
We can also pick up materials from you:
To arrange pickup of photos, documents, or items, or for an address to mail them to, email us or leave us a voicemail. Thank you!
Email: point.isabel.history@gmail.com
Voicemail: 510-982-1874
Photo of the Point Isabel peninsula in 1861 by Carleton Watkins, from roughly where the Richmond Annex neighborhood is today.
Courtesy of Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley
