Recent work at Glen Echo Creek

Since March 2022 when I covered Glen Echo Creek in detail, the city and citizens have been making improvements. Like many Oakland streams, Glen Echo Creek is overgrown with invasive non-natives like broom and ivy plus other opportunistic plants, some of which are all right.

This post looks at Oak Glen Park, the creek’s longest segment of open water, marked with a red bracket in this watershed map. The stream runs between the two one-way lanes of Richmond Boulevard.

The lower end of the park was suffering a common natural problem — slumping banks that crumbled the roadway of Richmond Boulevard and threatened the culvert holding the creek itself. Repairs got priority funding and the work was done in 2025.

Now the road there is snug and firm. There shouldn’t really be paved roads so close to the stream, but that mistake was made a hundred years ago to create an attractive drive (hence the “Boulevard”), back when Oaklanders had automobiles for the first time and “pleasure drives” were a big thing.

The floodplain was so handy, and planners didn’t appreciate how much the streambed had changed since the Ohlone days. When the East Bay’s aboriginal caretakers were captured to staff the Spanish missions and Mexican ranches, the landscape was given over to herds of free-ranging cattle. By the time Americans came and built a city here, generations of trampling, extra erosion and vegetation changes had led to the steep-walled arroyos that hold our creeks today. American paving and development changed things again, and the streams are trying to cope.

Between the road and the creek there’s not much floodplain left, but the locals appreciate it. They’ve brought in informal improvements.

I wish this cute thing were still there; I haven’t found it during my last few visits.

Lately the Rotary Nature Center Friends have expanded their concerns from Lake Merritt up to this part of Glen Echo Creek, and they’ve added the energy of local schoolkids to the hard work of residents and a trickle of agency funding, as a recent Oaklandside piece reported: digging up stubborn English ivy, installing gravel pathways, and replanting native vegetation.

Given commitment and time, this place could become beautiful. Paved roads are guarding the park on all sides, so once the ivy is fully removed it won’t come back. The habitat will favor native birds and insects again. Imagine that!

This stone bench along the trail is a special touch, made with cobbles of local chert.

And up at the top end is this stone structure of the same material. To me it evokes an old-fashioned well and offers a gesture to the water underground.

It’s nice to see things moving. Check it out.