The Lincoln Highway was launched in 1913 by a group of automobile executives who, much like railroad executives before them, wanted to connect the two coasts, according to National Park Service spokeswoman Kathleen Fitzgerald.

The result, which was finally concreted in the 1930s, was a patchwork of highways and local roads that prompted the construction of at least 1,400 garages, coffee shops, carport motels and deluxe hotels along the route.

One such hotel is the Oakland Hotel, which survives today in downtown Oakland at 270 13th St. as a center for senior citizens. Lincoln Highway motorists arriving at the hotel may have filled up, or fixed a flat, at the Duarte Garage, another historic landmark along the highway in Livermore.

The early route, before many Bay Area bridges were built, came through Livermore, Hayward and Oakland before motorists boarded a ferry to San Francisco. The highway ended at the Palace of Legion of Honor, which was based on its namesake in Paris and now houses an art museum. A later route crossed the Carquinez Bridge, which presently carries traffic on Interstate Highway 80 and is slated for destruction. The highway then wound through Berkeley before reaching Oakland.

The highway also prompted the naming of Lincoln Park, which contains one of the cement markers laid down for the highway by the U.S. Boy Scouts in 1928, according to park official Michael Crowe.

Park officials are holding a series of public meetings, including a March 12 gathering at Livermore's Duarte Garage, to determine exactly how the park could be managed and what buildings or stretches of road it may include. Park officials, in fact, will hold 14 meetings across the nation in the coming months to collect input prior to submitting their report to the U.S. Congress in the fall of 2004.

"We're still working on management alternatives,'' says Fitzgerald. "It is not feasible to manage 3,000 miles of highway, I think that's a given. Can you imagine having a ranger in Pennsylvania and someone saying they have a problem in Nevada?''

Options include making this park a series of heritage areas, much like a proposed project to commemorate the automobile industry around Detroit or the mining industry in Pennsylvania.

Another option, according to Fitzgerald, is that the park be managed by the Department of Transportation or, easiest of all, that management control be given to the Illinois-based Lincoln Highway Association.

Park officials will zero in on areas of particular interest in the Bay Area and nationwide, including patches of the original brick paving in Iowa and Nebraska and a coffee-pot shaped cafe in Pennsylvania.

Finding the route was a challenge for park interns who set out on a 10,000-mile odyssey last summer. "It varies from overgrown remnants of roads through woods and across farms to Interstate Highway 80,'' says park official Ruth Heikkinen. "It varies a lot.''

Instant Insights /

Unused Bay Area Land Eyed for National Park

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