Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone Via Getty Images Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Photo: OAKLAND TRIBUNE PHOTO/Digital First Media Via Getty Im Photo: Keystone/Getty Images Photo: Deanne Fitzmaurice, The Chronicle Photo: Deanne Fitzmaurice, The Chronicle Photo: Deanne Fitzmaurice, The Chronicle Photo: Underwood Archives/Getty Images Photo: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

In 1946, the Bay Bridge wasn't even 10 years old and already people were complaining about the traffic.

"The present facility is not adequate. It is already carrying more vehicles than many thought it would. And each year the volume of traffic increases," Marvin E. Lewis, San Francisco city supervisor and the head of a powerful planning group lobbying for a new crossing, said at the time.

"The physical limit is within sight. Congestion is preventing the full time saving the bridge should permit."

We're still waiting for that "full time saving."

Lewis and his fellow planners were tasked with presenting proposals for a bay crossing south of the current Bay Bridge to a joint board of Army and Navy engineers. During World War II and for several years after, the military exercised jurisdiction over San Francisco Bay navigation and infrastructure.

Most of those proposals involved building a steel girder bridge similar to the existing San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. But a few called for a "fill and tube" plan, a solution blissfully unconcerned with aesthetics or the environment.

The most ambitious was dreamed up by an actor/impresario turned master planner named John Reber. Reber, a high school graduate with no formal engineering training, enlisted San Francisco engineer L.H. Nishkian, one of the most distinguished and influential structural engineers in the country, to design the project.

Nishkian proposed building a causeway nearly four tenths of a mile wide stretching across the bay with 2,000-foot-long channels at either terminus. In effect, it was an elongated island, a massive earthen barrier turning the bay south of China Basin and Alameda into a big lake.

On the San Francisco end, a bridge would span the channel. On the Alameda side, tunnels would serve highway traffic and, just as importantly, allow rail traffic from the Southern Pacific mole. The story goes that Reber hated not being able to take a train all the way to San Francisco when traveling from the east. The last stop was Oakland.

Nishkian envisioned a 400-foot-wide highway of up to 36 lanes coursing through the middle of the causeway. On either side would be 160 feet dedicated to railroad right of way — four main lines and 70 miles of sidings, according to the Aug. 14, 1946, Chronicle.

A little more than 600 feet on each side would be reserved for industrial sites extending 1,600 feet along the causeway. Nishkian figured sales and leases of the rail frontage property would pay for nearly half of the project's estimated $100 million price tag.

Ship moorage was not overlooked. Piers would be added on both northern and southern shores.

The bridge on the west would have been as wide as it was long (2,000 feet) to accommodate those 36 lanes and the main railroad tracks, and allow room for future expansion. In the east, nine tunnels would worm their way under the channel — six tubes of four lanes each for vehicular traffic to Oakland, one four-lane highway tube to Alameda and two railway tubes.

Nishkian was so confident in his design that he dismissed all criticisms save one — that the plan would restrict ship movement in the bay. But the Chronicle reported that he responded to the naysayers with assurances that the bridge would be as high as the existing bridge and therefore would not obstruct navigation and tidal transit.

He also said the railroad grade would be minimal, making helper engines unnecessary for freight and passenger trains rolling into San Francisco.

From the air, or even the top of a tall building, the massive dam would have been quite a sight: docked ships, warehouses, derricks, stockyards and factories flanking a river of rail main lines and tributary sidings. And splitting it lengthwise would be a sprawling, multi-laned freeway wide enough to land a Pan Am airliner.

The Chronicle was completely sold on the vision, arguing in an Aug., 17, 1946, editorial that a causeway offered more bang for the buck than building another bridge.

"And let's not be sidetracked by the clamor that we'll never need 30 lanes of traffic across the bay," the editorial admonished. "That kind of reasoning can put us in the same kind of bight in 1956 we find ourselves in now."

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Nishkian died unexpectedly in 1947, before the Army and Navy could shoot down his design. He didn't get his land bridge, but he did have a San Francisco bridge named after him — the Levon Hagop Nishkian bascule bridge on Third Street over Isalis Creek.

With Nishkian gone, Reber lost much of his engineering credibility. He reportedly called the death of his respected colleague "the blow of blows," but soldiered on through the late 1940s and into the '50s, relying on his gregarious personality and show biz background to rally politicians, farmers, other engineers and community activists to his cause.

It's important to note that Nishkian's design was just one component of Reber's master plan, and one that wasn't exactly what he intended.

As BoomCalifornia writes, Reber considered the bay a "'geographical mistake,' interfering with the efficient operation of the surrounding metropolis." And he was just the man to fix it.

Since the early 1930s, Reber had been refining a grandiose bay-filling scheme, continually adding new features and altering existing ones as time passed. But the backbone of the plan never changed — build two giant earth-filled dams to turn most of the bay into a pair of freshwater lakes. One dike would lie in the general vicinity of Nishkian's causeway and the other roughly at the location of today's Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Both would carry rail lines and freeways.

Photo: Eric Fischer/Flickr

There would be no channels letting saltwater in. In fact, under the plan only about 15 percent of the bay would remain saltwater and subject to tides.

All that freshwater flowing from the Sierra into the Pacific Ocean would be captured, creating a drought-proof water supply second only to the Great Lakes, Reber told a U.S. Senate subcommittee at a hearing in San Francisco in December 1949.

The wetlands along the lakes' shoreline would be drained and bulldozed to make way for industry, resorts and a million homesites. Every city would have a bathing beach and fishermen would flock "to the biggest fishing hole in the world," he said at the hearing.

But that's not all. The freshwater lakes would change the weather — warm days would become cooler and cool days warmer, he told the senators.

That's right. John Reber not only intended to terraform bay geography to his liking, he also promised to change the climate.

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While the Army-Navy Board eventually concluded that additional bay crossings were needed, it strongly rejected the Reber Plan. Congress, however, threw Reber a lifeline. In 1950, it funded a comprehensive study of the project by the Army Corps of Engineers at a cost of $2.5 million. The Corps even built a giant model of the bay in Sausalito in order to evaluate the proposal. You can still see it there.

In the end, Reber's grand dams collapsed under a flood of concerns and challenges.

The Navy didn't want enormous earthen barriers mucking up ship traffic to Hunters Point, Mare Island and the Alameda Naval Air Station. Oakland rebelled against the prospect of having its growing harbor trapped behind a dike and a series of locks.

Nishkian's rosy economic forecasts were challenged by a Contra Costa engineer who was as distinguished as he. Amsterdam's water director was hired to look at Reber's $250 million estimate for the project and calculated it would actually cost $1.4 billion, or about $13.4 billion today.

A Denver engineer studied the plan and concluded that the lakes would overflow in late winter and spring, flooding the delta. In summer, water levels would fall dramatically, and the lakes would become severely polluted.

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Commercial fishing and the bay's salt production industry would most likely be doomed under the plan.

It took the Army Corps of Engineers 13 years to release its findings from the 1950 study, finally declaring it "infeasible by any frame of reference" in 1963. Reber never read those words; he had died three years earlier, his dream unrealized.

Photo: Courtesy Moulin Studios

As for Supervisor Lewis, he proved to be no prophet back in 1946 when he said that a new bridge would be built because "It must be done. There is a destiny that compels it."

But his unflagging advocacy for mass transit across the bay was not in vain. He became the driving force behind the creation of Bay Area Rapid Transit. A commemorative plaque honoring him hangs in the Embarcadero BART station.

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Read Mike Moffitt's latest stories and send him news tips at moffitt@sfgate.com.

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