Emeryville is a little over one square mile of urban flatlands and landfill, wedged between Berkeley, Oakland, and the San Francisco Bay in California. Maybe 10,000 or so people live there nowadays, but it was less than half that when I first saw the place in the late 1980’s. Within a year of that I was living and working in E’ville, and although I haven’t lived or worked there now for a long time, I’ve followed the place as it transformed itself from a small city with steelworks, assorted heavy industry, insidious pollution problems, gambling (one of the very few places in California where gambling was legal back then), and a big crime and corruption problem, into a thriving little hi-tech center with a bunch of busy malls, a couple of decent restaurants, and a lot of refurbished factories and warehouses.
Nowadays large parts of Emeryville are indistinguishable from, say, suburban Boston or Sydney, but back then Emeryville was the sort of industrial town that still had working railroad tracks running down the middle of city streets and into the factory sidings. If you wanted to walk from the east side (say Hollis Street) to the west side (what became The Marketplace) you just walked across the main Southern Pacific railroad tracks, sometimes having to step through a stopped freight train. There was no shiny Amtrak station; there were no malls, no Ikea; there was one hotel (the Holiday Inn out on the spit), and a Trader Vic’s. There were no chain restaurants — except for the busy Denny’s down by I-80. There were very few traffic lights that I can remember (there must be dozens of them now). The Town House on Doyle was a rough old sawdust-on-the-floor kinda place where the jukebox played Country unironically and the food was, well, at least edible (we had our monthly company meetings there over a few jugs of beer). The Bavarian Village on Powell served heavy “Bavarian” food and OK beer; it was definitely not a sushi place. Warehouses were (mostly) actually warehouses, but even then there was a thriving art and craft community in warehouses and industrial lofts throughout the city.
Emeryville was where I first fetched up when I moved to California. It seemed a long way from London, in every sense, and I started taking photos of the place almost immediately. These are just a handful of those photos from back then; I have a lot more that I haven’t scanned yet, and that I’ll get around to adding here some time. Plus I’ll probably (one day) do a “before and after” gallery for many of the images — virtually nothing shown here looks anything like this any more, if you can see it at all.
The Emeryville Warehouse Co., early 1990’s 
Beach Street, Emeryville / West Oakland, late 1980’s or early 1990’s. 
The Grove Valve and Regulator Co. Building, 65th Street, Emeryville, late 1990’s or early 2000’s. Now the Emerytech building, 
A close up view of the old Pigment Factory, Shellmound Street, Emeryville, early 1990’s. Now the site of the Bay Street Mall. 
The Pigment Factory, Shellmound Street, Emeryville, early 1990’s. Now the site of the Bay Street Mall. 
Roadside art, Frontage Road, Emeryville, late 1980’s or early 1990’s. You can see the old pigment factory in the back ground where the Bay Street Mall is now. 
A long-gone sign of the old Emeryville, Hollis Street at 66th, late 1980’s. 
A view of Emeryville Markets from the Powell Street footbridge, early 1990’s. 
Looking across the open field towards Barbary Coast Steel at what’s now the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Emeryville (1989?). 
Emeryville’s Barbary Coast Steel from Frontage Road, 1991. 
Emeryville’s Shellmound Street used to dead-end here at the Barbary Coast Steel plant (1991?). The site’s now a large Ikea store. 
Before the Amtrak Station, Emeryville 
Sunset, Temescal Creek, Emeryville, late 1980’s. 
Emeryville Wildlife, Beach Street, late 1980’s 
The Old Transformer Factory, Powell Street, after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake 
The Old Town Hall, Emeryville, Early 1990’s. 
Halleck Street, Emeryville, early 1990’s, looking towards what is now Ikea. Partially-dismantled Barbary Coast Steel works in background. 
Hubbard Street, Emeryville, early 1990’s, looking across the old Southern Pacific rail yard to what is now a large mall. 
Frontage Road, Emeryville, next to Interstate 80, some time late 1980’s 
Holden Street, Emeryville, early 1990’s
