In 1876 or so, a railroad company built a drawbridge over Coyote Slough in the wetlands in the South San Francisco Bay, near present-day Fremont. They hired a drawbridge tender, who must have invited his hunting buddies to help decrease the waterfowl threat. That, in turn, led to duck blinds, hunting clubs, saloons, hotels, and houses -- even an early movie or two was shot there. By the '20s, Drawbridge was a wild and lawless place with 90 buildings; by the '70s it was abandoned.
SFGate notes that Drawbridge is sinking into the bay, the victim or modernization, but it's been doing that since the '50s. By the time I walked there -- three miles north of Alviso marina along the railroad tracks -- in the early '80s, the buildings were mostly collapsed, due to decay and vandalism. There were still large objects scattered around -- iron bed frames, rusted pumps, cracked sinks. The last time I visited, ten years later, all that was gone, leaving wooden walkways across the mud from the railroad tracks that lead to precarious, floorless shacks.
Every few years, someone at a local paper rediscovers Drawbridge, the only ghost town in the Bay Area, and interest perks back up again. Researched the microfilm entries at the library many years ago, I found references to an early-1960s San Jose sheriff searching for a fugitive and discovering this unknown town. I viewed a documentary showing families still living there in the late '60s, with a memorable scene of a woman cooking in the kitchen in ankle-deep water, the occasional fish swimming through. The last resident left in 1979.
There's an extensive history on Drawbridge here, and an informative PDF here from US Fish & Wildlife. These are a couple pictures I took, when I was shooting slides.
