Seeing how times fly by

AERIAL ARCHIVE CAPTURES VALLEY'S TRANSFORMATION

By Paul Rogers
Mercury News

Posted on Tue, Jan. 11, 2005

Most people have boxes of old black-and-white photographs showing how their families, friends and homes once looked in bygone eras.

Ben Hatfield does, too. But his collection is a little more ambitious: It features the entire Bay Area.

Hatfield, 60, of San Jose, owns more than 10,000 aerial photographs shot from 1947 to 1979 in hundreds of areas from San Francisco to Monterey. The collection, taken by his late father, former World War II aerial photographer Adrian Hatfield, features the Bay Area before Silicon Valley, when it was a place largely defined by small towns, orchards and two-lane roads.

Not just a quaint novelty capturing how Stanford University, downtown San Jose, San Francisco International Airport and other landmarks looked half a century ago, the photo collection today is gaining greater importance as biologists seek to restore thousands of acres of wetlands and former salt ponds around San Francisco Bay.

The photos offer a record of how much of the bay looked before sections were diked, filled and paved, and before some of the present-day salt ponds were built.

``Anything that shows how things existed before the salt ponds -- showing us what nature did -- is really useful,'' said Steve Ritchie, executive project manager of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project.

``Photographs that show progress over time, like where channels and sloughs were, or how the shoreline eroded or changed, can help us,'' he said.

Restoration effort

Ritchie is leading state and federal efforts to restore more than 15,000 acres of former salt evaporation ponds to tidal marsh for fish and wildlife. Cargill Salt sold the ponds -- which ring most of the bay's shoreline from Redwood City to Alviso to Hayward -- to the state and federal government two years ago for $100 million.

Hatfield began flying with his father when he was 10 years old, in 1954.

His father regularly rode in a Cessna 172, shooting images with huge Fairchild and Keystone aerial cameras. Clients included Jack Foster, who turned wetlands in San Mateo County into a community of 30,000 people when he built Foster City from 1958 to 1964. Adrian Hatfield, who died in 1995 at age 82, also worked for the state highway department when it was building Interstate 280 in the 1960s, and for Great America and Marine World before they constructed their projects. And lots of developers.

``We have photos of all the old subdivisions -- Eichler homes in Palo Alto, Oddstad homes in Redwood City, you name it,'' Ben Hatfield said.

The photos, most 20-by-24-inches, are in boxes on huge racks in his garage.

Sifting through them recently, Hatfield pulls out one of Mountain View, taken in the mid-1950s near Grant Road and El Camino Real. There are orchards around the city, interspersed with ranch homes and two-lane streets. ``This is the old Monte Vista Drive-In,'' he said. ``It's a bunch of townhouses now.''

Historians

Hatfield is a building contractor. After he hurt his back two years ago, he began to catalog the collection in earnest. He is working with Stanford University historians and has a poster of a 1947 aerial shot of the campus for sale in the bookstore. He says he would like to use the images in history books, or perhaps to create calendars or other items, with some of the money going to help the families of kids at Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.

From 1950 to 2000, driven by the rise of Silicon Valley and high levels of immigration, the Bay Area's population grew from 2.6 million to 6.8 million.

Hatfield remembers riding his horse around Cupertino, working as an apricot picker in Los Altos and hunting for ducks and pheasant along bayfront marshes. When he puts up his photos at libraries or talks to community groups, people are fascinated.

``Everybody loves it the way it used to look,'' he said. ``But you can't stop progress, I guess. You have to plan for the new people who come here. Change is going to happen anywhere. But it was a better place back then. You didn't have the overpopulation, the traffic.''

`Bygone days'

Environmentalists say his photos show not only sprawl, but also pollution that has been cleaned up.

David Lewis, executive director of Save the Bay, points to a photo on Hatfield's Web site of garbage burning at Cooley Landing, on wetlands near East Palo Alto. Open garbage burning was common until the 1950s when air pollution laws banned it. Lewis, who was born in Palo Alto in 1961, also notes photos of wetlands before Foster City.

``These pictures show bygone days -- both the undeveloped areas and open space that are now gone, but also the way we used to treat the land,'' Lewis said. ``They are great for context and history. As a Bay Area native, I'm just fascinated by this stuff.''

For more information about Hatfield's aerial photos, go to www.hatfieldaerialsurveys-archives.com .