In the salt marshes between Fremont and Alviso, a cluster of wooden cabins sinks slowly into the mud on Station Island. They are what's left of Drawbridge, often called the last ghost town in the Bay Area, KQED reported.
A railroad town
In the 1870s, the South Pacific Coast Railroad laid tracks across the South Bay marshes to carry San Franciscans to Santa Cruz. To cross Coyote Creek and Warm Springs Slough, it built swing bridges, finished in 1876. "Drawbridge is a misnomer," Ceal Craig of the San Francisco Bay Wildlife Society told KQED. "The town should be called Swing Bridge."
The first bridge tender, George Mundershietz, was alone on the island at first. Then duck hunters started getting off the train early to hunt the marshes, and hunting cabins began popping up. A town grew from there.
Heyday in the 1920s
By the 1920s Drawbridge had about 80 or 90 houses, many on stilts, and five trains stopped there a day, KQED said. On weekends the population rose to about 600. Around 1900 the Sprung Hotel opened and served duck dinners. There was no police, mayor or city council, and the town had a reputation for gambling.
Why it emptied
Sewage and industrial waste from growing South Bay cities fouled the creeks. Salt ponds replaced much of the marsh, and the birds left. By the 1950s, groundwater pumping for growing South Bay cities dried up the town's wells and the land began to sink, The island joined the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge in 1972, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The last resident, Charles Luce, left in 1979.
How to see it
You cannot walk to Drawbridge. It's illegal to set foot in the town. The only way to see it is from a train passing through, KQED said, which shows the roughly two dozen structures still standing, many covered in graffiti and falling apart.