Russell Yee

Our beloved Lake Merritt is a tidal slough (or lagoon). A slough (rhymes with “two” and “view” in American English; but “cow” in British English) is a low-flow arm of a larger body of water. Lake Merritt is an arm of the Bay, with small creeks running into it but with most of its water movement coming from the daily tides. The homonym “slough” meaning “to shed” is pronounced “sluff“; there is also “slew,” which means to move violently sideways (“the plane slew unexpectedly”); or a lot of items of something (“what a slew of difficulties!”); or the past tense of “slay” (“he slew his foes”). Isn’t English fun?

I made this piece for the 2023 Autumn Lights Festival at the Gardens of Lake Merritt. Befitting the Festival’s location, I wanted to depict the shoreline of Lake Merritt as it appeared before Oakland grew as a city, and as it appears now. The “then” shoreline (depicted in green) is mostly taken from the 1857 U.S. Coast Survey map plat of “San Antonio Creek.”

For the present shoreline (depicted in blue, and set with the 2017 completion of the 2002 Measure DD projects around the Lake) I used a combination of the current Google Earth picture plus other current maps.

I also consulted the 1993 (rev. 2000) Creek and Watershed Maps set published by the Oakland Museum of California and available here.

I thought I could just size the 1857 map to overlay the current Google Earth photo, and that these would match the above Creek & Watershed map layers. Wrong! They don’t align, perhaps because of differing map projections and standards. But partly it’s an information issue. I was surprised by how much I had to interpret, decide on, and resolve when the maps simply didn’t agree on the past-vs.-current-shoreline. Probably most of this variation is due to the variable shorelines of sloughs, with areas of more-or-less permanent water, areas of regular tidal inundation, areas of wetlands, and areas of periodic flooding, with changing overlap between them. For the 1857 shoreline, I mostly followed the slough proper (permanent and tidal water) and excluded the wetlands (especially going way up present-day Harrison St., Lakeshore Ave. + Grand Ave., and Park Blvd.). But I included the southwesterly wetlands all the way to Fallon St., just because it’s so dramatic to see how far those wetlands extended. But if I had included all the other wetlands, the green shoreline would have been about 1/3 bigger, making the blue shoreline too small to depict well.

The hardest challenge technically was the Bird Islands, which are all artificial (history here and here). I decided to use separate, thinner EL wire on a separate plastic sheet to depict them. Here’s a deep Oakland trivia question for you: which of the five islands was the first to be created? I had to look at various historical maps to find out. Answer: the oldest one is the biggest, oval-shaped one, built in 1923; the others were built in the mid-1950s. (Other references, including the signage currently at the lake, say 1925 for some reason; I wonder if that largest island were built out in stages.)

I put various maps into a PowerPoint show and then projected it on a wall to trace the then & now shorelines onto a big piece of Costco product separation paper. It took a lot of fussing to decide on the exact scale and also the straight north & south orientation.

EL wire does not bend that well. What made this project possible was some old metal ingots I had from a decommissioned Linotype machine, which I used to hold down the EL wire (especially on sharp bends) while the glue set. Unfortunately, at this scale and using EL wire, there were many details (e.g., the present boat launch dock, the little bulb-outs along Lakeshore Ave.) I simply couldn’t depict. There was also a lot of soldering for the connections and, amazingly, I got them all correct the first time.

May you be inspired to learn more about Lake Merritt’s past and present, and to actively help take care of this, our jewel in the heart of Oakland. Here are links to some organizations you could consider supporting or joining:
Lake Merritt Institute
Rotary Nature Center
Oakland Audubon Society
Lake Merritt Breakfast Club (original sponsors of Fairyland and the Necklace of Lights)
The Gardens at Lake Merritt

Materials List and Sources:

• 3′ x 4′ clear acrylic sheet (Home Depot)
• 1/2″ x 1 1/2″ red oak molding (Home Depot)
• Stainless steel hardware, rope (Laurel Ace Hardware)
• EL wire (15′), inverters (www.CooLight.com)
• B-7000 glue, glow-in-the-dark vinyl sheets (Amazon.com)
• Misc. electrical connectors, junction box, velcro, plastic bird islands holder, laser overhead transparency sheets (stuff I had around the house)

Total cost: a bit under $300. If I ever do another such project I’ll probably look into various LED- or laser-drive fiber-optic options as an alternative to EL wire.