Lots of history at Coyote Point

According to the Burlingame Historical Society, the grand opening of the amusement park was a four-day affair that started on July 1, 1922, and drew 17,000 fans who each paid a dime to pass through the gates. Crowds increased by the thousands and reached their attendance peak just three days later on July 4, 1922, when 100,000 people entered Pacific City.

One million people entered the park by the time it shut down temporarily in November 1922 to make additions for the next season scheduled to start in May 1923. By that time something had hit the fan: Due to rapid growth, the city of Burlingame neglected to provide adequate sewage disposal, allowing raw sewage to flow into the Bay.

“The undesirable odor of sewage cast a shadow over park attendance and, because of polluted water, the county health officials closed the beach for swimming,” the historical society said on its website. “At the end of the 1923 season, the lights went out at Pacific City.”

Long before Pacific City debuted, Coyote Point was a popular location for recreation, especially for bathing and picnicking. It still is today, with the added attraction of the CuriOdyssey environmental museum. There’s a plaque to remind visitors of Pacific Park’s brief tenure at Coyote Point where history abounds. The area was home to a World War II merchant marine academy as well as the forerunner of the College of San Mateo. It also was, literally, home to “Indian Joe,” the last of the indigenous people of San Mateo County.

Even if the beach stayed open, it is debatable how long Pacific City would have lasted. It faced strong competition from Neptune Beach in Alameda, and, in a few years, there would be Playland-at-the-Beach in San Francisco.

The late Bay Area news reporter and historian Jerry Flamm said Neptune Beach, which closed in 1939, was the real “Coney Island of the West.”

Flamm described Neptune Beach as 120-acre spread of “entertainment and recreation that has never been duplicated in the Bay Area.”

“Neptune boasted two swimming pools with filtered salt water pumped from the Bay, and the largest and gaudiest set of rides and concessions on the Pacific Coast,” Flamm wrote in “Good Life and Hard Times: San Francisco’s ’20s and ’30s.” He recounted that on weekends crowds of up to 30,000 were “funneled into Neptune Beach from ferryboats, electric trains, streetcars and buses, in private automobiles, and even on steam trains from Sacramento and other interior towns and cities.”

Pacific City, Neptune Beach and Playland are all gone, but for a taste of what it was like there’s still Santa Cruz and the Boardwalk.

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.