Letters to the Editor for November 28, 2025

To the Editor:

This article stunned me—Today’s Alameda Treasure – 1724 Santa Clara Avenue, the Greenleaf House, Part 1.

I am descended from the Greenleafs, who are famously a family of pharmacists (apothecaries) and silversmiths. I need to do the actual math (genealogy work) to see how distantly, but if he was from Connecticut, he is very likely a descendant of Elizabeth Gookin Greenleaf, who is my ninth great grandmother. She appears as a character in my novel Silence, and it is likely through one of her offspring that David Sr. (so many David Greenleafs!) of Alameda is descended. I will report back when I have a minute. Thanks for this article – I love knowing a part of my heritage might also be a part of Alameda’s.

Julia Park Tracey
Grass Valley, CA

To the Editor:

We might ask ourselves what services we expect, or at least want, from our local government when we elect the members of our City Council. Well, I for one would like the City to provide protection from harms that fall within their purview. Protection against crime and hazards such as fire, and environmental disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and conflagrations.

There is probably not be much the City can do to prevent the occurrence of the environmental ones, but I believe that their danger can be mitigated through proper disaster planning, which, in my opinion, would be to optimize our ability to get out of harm’s way by ensuring that we have well thought-out and marked routes for evacuating from our neighborhoods and from the city itself.

If you have any doubts about the importance of being able to safely evacuate in the face of disaster, just ask the residents of Paradise, California and Lahaina, Hawaii what they think about this concept.

Unfortunately, it appears that here in Alameda, our government has not only ignored this, in my opinion as a lifelong resident, but they have been and are continuing to take actions that can serve only to put us at more risk. In this regard I am referring to the ongoing narrowing of potential evacuation routes.

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Gibbons Neighborhood Traffic Calming Approved, Decision Delayed on Turn Restriction Today’s Alameda Treasure – 1724 Santa Clara Avenue, the Greenleaf House, Part 1 Alameda 2023 in Review – Part 4 Letters to the Editor

Look at Park Street, which was narrowed without any apparent consideration for its critical function as a major evacuation route. The same lack of consideration was apparent when the decision was made to turn Grand Street into an obstacle course. And now they would do the same for Fernside Boulevard and its intersection with High Street, both of which have historically been recognized as critical elements of our system of streets that we could depend on to be our routes to safety in times of disaster.

I would argue that narrowing the traffic lanes on Fernside, closing Gibbons, or just throttling traffic on it, impeding the flow of traffic by constructing concrete barriers and “bulb-outs,” and prohibiting through traffic from transiting arbitrarily chosen streets that have been euphemistically designated as “slow streets” constitute impediments to our ability to safely and efficiently evacuate our city should a major environmental disaster occur. And let’s not overlook the traffic-obstructing potential of the barriers, again euphemistically, referred to as “greenways.”

For what it’s worth, I honestly believe that our City government has been shirking its duty to optimize our ability to get out of harm’s way in the face of environmental disasters, and we, the residents of Alameda, should be requiring that these factors be given serious consideration whenever our elected and appointed officials consider authorizing and promoting projects that have the potential for putting us in harm’s way.

Jay Garfinkle
Alameda