Richmond is a city in western Contra Costa County, California, United States. The city was incorporated on August 3, 1905, and has a city council.East Shore and Suburban Railway Chronology , El Cerrito Historical Society, June 2007. Retrieved August 15, 2007. Located in the San Francisco Bay Area's East Bay region, Richmond borders San Pablo, Albany, El Cerrito and Pinole in addition to the unincorporated communities of North Richmond, Hasford Heights, Kensington, El Sobrante, Bayview-Montalvin Manor, Tara Hills, and East Richmond Heights, and for a short distance San Francisco on Red Rock Island in the San Francisco Bay.
Richmond is one of two cities, the other being San Rafael, that sits on the shores of both San Francisco Bay and San Pablo Bay. Its population was 116,448 as of the 2020 United States census making it the second largest city in the United States named Richmond after Richmond, Virginia.
Etymology The name "Richmond" predates incorporation of the city by more than fifty years. Edmund Randolph, originally from Richmond, Virginia, represented the city of San Francisco when California's first legislature met in San Jose in December 1849, and he became state assemblyman from San Francisco. Out of fondness for his hometown, Randolph persuaded a federal surveying party, surveying and mapping the San Francisco Bay, to place the names "Point Richmond" and "Richmond" on their 1854 geodetic coastal map. The map was used at the terminal selected by the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railroad. By 1899 maps made by the railroad carried the name "Point Richmond Avenue", a county road that later became Barrett Avenue, a central street in Richmond. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad purchased the railroad making their terminus at Richmond. The first post office opened in 1900, and the city of Richmond incorporated in 1905.
History
The Ohlone were the first inhabitants of the Richmond area, settling an estimated 5,000 years ago. They spoke the Chochenyo language, and subsisted as hunter-gatherers and harvesters.Controlled burning as harvesting, Brown 1973:3,4,25; Levy 1978:491; Stanger, 1969:94; Bean and Lawton, 1973:11,30,39 (Lewis). Quotation, "A rough husbandry of the land", Brown 1973:4. Seafood, nuts and seeds, Levy 1978:491–492. Trapped small animals, Milliken, 1995:18. Food maintenance and natural resource management, Teixeira, 1997:2.
Origins The site that would eventually become the city of Richmond was part of the Rancho San Pablo land granted to Don Francisco María Castro, from which the nearby town of San Pablo inherited its name; the Point Richmond area was known originally as The Potrero and then renamed as Point Stevens in early charts of San Francisco Bay. Point Richmond was an island, but industrial development and deliberate fill connected it to the mainland by the early 1900s.
On July 4, 1900, the Santa Fe Railroad's western terminus was established at Point Richmond with ferry connections from Ferry Point in the Brickyard Cove area to San Francisco. The Santa Fe railroad also built a major rail yard next to Point Richmond. It constructed a tunnel through the Potrero San Pablo ridge to run track from the yard to a ferry landing from which freight cars could be transshipped to San Francisco. Where this track crosses the main street in Point Richmond, there remain two of the last operational wigwag grade crossing signals in the United States, and the only surviving examples of the "upside-down" type. The wigwag is a type of railroad crossing signal that was phased out in the 1970s and '80s across the country. There was controversy in 2005 when the State Transportation Authority ordered the BNSF railroad company to upgrade the railroad crossing signals. A compromise was achieved that included installing new modern crossing gates, red lights and bells while not removing, but simply shutting off, the historic ones and preserving their functionality for special events.
Standard Oil set up operations on land sold by Emily Tewksbury in 1901, including what is now the Chevron Richmond Refinery and tank farm, which Chevron still operates. There is a pier into San Francisco Bay south of Point Molate for oil tankers.
Early days The city of Richmond was incorporated in 1905. Until the enactment of prohibition in 1919, the city had the largest winery in the world; the small abandoned village of Winehaven remains fenced off along Western Drive in the Point Molate Area. Richmond was a small town at that time, with some industrial development centered on the waterfront based around the railroad and oil refineries.
The Pullman Company also established a major facility in Richmond in the early 20th century. The facility connected with both the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific and serviced their passenger coach equipment. The Pullman Company was a large employer of African American men, who worked mainly as porters on the Pullman cars. Many of them settled in the East Bay, from Richmond to Oakland, before World War II.
From 1917 and throughout the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was active in the city.
In 1930 the Ford Motor Company opened the Richmond Assembly Plant, which later moved to Milpitas in 1956. The old Ford plant in Richmond has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1988. In 2004 it was purchased by developer Eddie Orton, who converted it into an events center named Ford Point Building–The Craneway.
Wartime boomtown and shifting demographics At the onset of World War II, the four Richmond Shipyards were built along Richmond's waterfront, employing thousands of workers, many migrating to Richmond from other parts of the country after being recruited. These new workers generally lived in housing constructed specifically for the wartime boom, scattered throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including Richmond, Berkeley and Albany. Many of these new migrants were Black Americans from the South and to a lesser extent the Midwest who took jobs in heavy industry and transport as those industries expanded to meet the needs of the war economy, while increased numbers of women also joined the industrial workforce for the first time as large numbers of working-age men were drafted for the war effort. During the war, Richmond's population increased dramatically, rising from 23,000 in 1940 to 114,899 in 1942 and peaking at around 120,000 by 1945.
A specially built rail line, the Shipyard Railway, transported workers to the shipyards. Kaiser's Richmond shipyards built 747 Victory and Liberty ships for the war effort, more than any other site in the U.S. The shipyards broke many records, including the completion of a Liberty ship in just five days. On average the yards built a new ship in 30 days.
The medical system established for the shipyard workers at the Richmond Field Hospital eventually became today's Kaiser Permanente HMO. The hospital remained in operation until 1993, when it was replaced by the Richmond Medical Center hospital, which has since expanded to a multi-building campus.
Point Richmond was Richmond's original commercial hub, but a new downtown arose in the center of the city along Macdonald Avenue during the war. It was populated by department stores such as Kress, J.C. Penney, Sears, Macy's, and Woolworth's.
Post-war decline and rebound When the war ended the shipyard workers were no longer needed, and a decades-long population decline ensued. The census listed 99,545 residents in 1950. By 1960 much of the temporary housing built for the shipyard workers was torn down, and the population dropped to about 71,800.
Just before his April 1968 assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. had been working on plans for the Poor People's Campaign, including a multi-city tour of the U.S. with a stop in Richmond. His son, Martin Luther King III, completed the Poverty in America Tour in 2007, stopping in Richmond. Unrest in late June 1968, sparked by the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy, damaged businesses in downtown along Macdonald Avenue. Most notably, the Travalini Furniture Store was destroyed by fire, which was assumed to be the result of the violent protests, but according to Fraser Felter, who was a reporter for the Richmond Independent, police sources told him the fire was set to avoid a debt instead by destroying store records.
In the 1970s, the Hilltop area was developed in Richmond's northern suburbs, further depressing the downtown area as it drew retail clients and tenants away to the large indoor Hilltop Mall, which opened in 1976. The shopping mall, last named Hilltop Horizon, was opened under Taubman Centers, and has been sold since then to GM Pension Trust (1998), Simon Property Group (2007), Jones Lang LaSalle (2012), LBG Real Estate (2017), and Prologis (2021), who announced plans to close and demolish the building, reusing the land for a mixed-use development including residential, retail, and logistics facilities.
In the late 1990s the Richmond Parkway was built along Richmond's western industrial and northwestern parkland, connecting Interstates 80 and 580. Construction of the Parkway, which follows the alignment of SR 93 as proposed in 1958, started in 1990 and completed in 1996 at a cost of $193 million. However, Caltrans issued a letter in 1998 saying it would not take over responsibility for the road unless it was brought up to expressway standards; as it was cost-prohibitive to convert it, the road remains the responsibility of the city and county.
In 2006, the city celebrated its centennial. This coincided with the repaving and streetscaping project of Macdonald Avenue. The city's old rundown commercial district along Macdonald has been designated the city's "Main Street District" by the state of California. This has led to funding of improvements in the form of state grants.
Geography
Richmond is located at . According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and (comprising 42.71%) is water. The city sits on of waterfront, more than any other city in the Bay Area. The city borders San Francisco Bay to the southwest and San Pablo Bay to the northwest, and includes Brooks Island and the Brother Islands entirely, and half of Red Rock Island.
There are several cities and unincorporated communities surrounding or bordering Richmond. To the south is the city of Albany which is in Alameda County and the city of El Cerrito. The unincorporated communities of East Richmond Heights, Rollingwood, Hasford Heights, and El Sobrante lie to the east. North Richmond to the west and San Pablo to the east are almost entirely surrounded by Richmond's city limits. To the north, Richmond borders the city of Pinole and the unincorporated areas of Bayview, Montalvin Manor, Hilltop Green, Tara Hills. Richmond borders Alameda, San Francisco, and Marin counties in the Bay and Red Rock Island.
The city is within the 94801, 94803, 94804, 94805, and 94806 ZIP Codes.City of Richmond Geographic Information System Viewer . Retrieved August 1, 2007.
Climate Richmond, like the rest of the East Bay, has a Mediterranean climate. The climate is slightly warmer than the coastal areas of San Francisco, the Peninsula, and Marin County; it is however more temperate than areas further inland. The average highs range from and the lows range from year round.Average Weather for Richmond, California, Weather.com. Richmond usually enjoys an "Indian summer", and September is, on average, the warmest month. January is on average the coldest month.
The highest recorded temperature in Richmond was in September 1971 while the coldest was in December 1990.
The rainy season begins in late October and ends in April, with some showers in May. Most of the rain occurs during stronger storms which occur between November and March and drop of rain per month. January and February are the rainiest months.