The area now known as Baylands was once part of San Francisco Bay. It was a nutrient-rich ecosystem of marshes and tidal mud flats fed by streams that flowed from San Bruno Mountain into open Bay waters.
The advent of the railroad in the early 1900s, combined with the 1906 earthquake, began a process of filling the Bay that eventually moved the shoreline as much as three quarters of a mile eastward. That’s how Brisbane born.
Over the past century, Baylands has been a regional railway and freight hub, a municipal landfill and a site for materials recycling – all uses that ignored the important ecological character of the land and left Brisbane with an underutilized and partially contaminated 700-acre blight.
Baylands was annexed into the City of Brisbane in 1962 shortly after the City’s incorporation in 1961. Universal Paragon Corporation purchased the property in 1989.