A Landscape History of El Granada

Stroll around the neighborhoods of El Granada today, and you’ll find traces of a distant past when in the early 1900s the Ocean Shore Railway and its depots, land used for grazing and growing artichokes and Brussel sprouts, bungalows along tree-lined streets, and hotels, restaurants and a bathhouse shaped the landscape.

The curving streets with cement sidewalks and curbs and plazas with Monterey pines and cypresses and eucalyptus trees in the center of wide avenues also remain as quiet reminders of the town’s original landscape, designed by famed landscape architect Daniel H. Burnham, who strived to give each home site and street a view within an ocean front setting, promising commuters and vacationers alike a beach resort life.

Hidden within these winding streets and tree-covered hillsides are historic artifacts that have weathered the test of time despite new development and a larger population in the area. Highway One itself is a legacy of the railroad that once came through here but by 1920, unable to compete with automobiles and to keep trains running along the sliding cliffs of Montara Mountain, stopped operating.

Or take El Granada’s freight yards, for example, which were once located on the El Granada Elementary's school grounds. Residents currently living in this neighborhood occasionally dig up old railroad spikes in their yards, souvenirs of a time when these lots were considered to be on the wrong side of the track.

On the north end of town, Avenue Granada preserves the official name of the town Granada, after the Spanish city, before the town’s first postmaster changed it to El Granada in 1909. And the scar left on the face of the granite hillside behind Quarry Park is a reminder of a time when rock and sand were culled from the canyon’s walls to construct Highway One and the Half Moon Bay Airport (formerly a World War II airport).

Landscapes in every town are in constant transition and are an accumulation of past landscapes, giving new meaning to life today. “Knowing how the Coastside got to look as it does today helps us determine how the Coastside should look tomorrow,” wrote geographer and naturalist Barbara VanderWerf, a San Francisco and San Mateo County resident for over 25 years, in her book “Granada, A Synonym for Paradise: The Ocean Shore Railroad Years.”

Taking inspiration from VanderWerf’s book, the five photographs featured with this article (click on View Gallery) show cultural and environmental resources that still exist in El Granada’s current landscape, telling a story of how the land, people and time came together to make a place that more than 6,000 Coastsiders call home today.

El Granada is where people on the Coast can live within the folds of history, where remnants of historic trails, roads, buildings, trees, and houses — valued so many generations ago — still remain, shaping the current landscape and giving character and soul to the town's neighborhoods.