Note: I’ve written here before about Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula. It’s a beautiful drive along an unusually natural and undeveloped section of land. This afternoon I went down a bit of a “rabbit hole” exploring more about the history of how the route the roadway takes was decided. Turns out it’s quite a story. One that’s unlikely to have happened were it being decided in today’s political climate.
Drive north on I-280 past Woodside and the view still startles: a multi-lane interstate running the rim of the San Andreas rift, and west of it an almost unbroken sweep of water, oak, chaparral, and ridge. No subdivisions. No office parks. No golf-course mansions stepping down to the lake. The land above Crystal Springs, and the country around Filoli, looks as if the postwar Peninsula never happened.
It almost did. The emptiness is not an accident of topography. It is the residue of a late-1960s bargain in which local activists pulled the U.S. Department of the Interior into a state highway fight, San Francisco traded development rights on its watershed for a relocated freeway, and federal money became the lever that shoved Interstate 280 east onto the ridge and away from the reservoir. A highway argument became, without much fanfare, a federal conservation instrument.
The landscape that water made
Crystal Springs is two lakes in one rift valley. Spring Valley Water Company dammed Laguna Grande in 1877 to make Upper Crystal Springs, then built Herman Schussler’s great concrete dam on San Mateo Creek in 1888 to make the lower lake. The company assembled the surrounding hills by purchase and condemnation, creating a private water empire that later became San Francisco’s Peninsula Watershed — today about 23,000 acres owned by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
William Bowers Bourn II, Spring Valley’s president, built Filoli on 654 acres at the south end of the upper reservoir between 1915 and 1917. The house sits where Laguna Creek still runs toward the lake. Filoli is now a National Trust historic site, open to the public since 1975 — but it did not survive on its own. It survived because the land around it survived, locked down by the same 1969 bargain that kept the freeway off the shoreline. Filoli is the furnished room inside a much larger settlement; its story only makes sense next to the highway’s.
By the 1960s those hills were the last big unbuilt piece of the mid-Peninsula. County zoning contemplated residential development across the watershed. Green Foothills later summarized the threat in one line: you don’t see 23,000 homes near Crystal Springs because a settlement over the routing of Highway 280 locked the land down.
The road, the activists, and the price of federal asphalt
Interstate 280 entered the federal system in 1955 as the Peninsula leg of a Bay Area loop. State engineers spent the late 1950s arguing over alignments. Route A hugged the cities along El Camino. Route B swung west onto Skyline and Cañada Road, then through the foothills behind Stanford. The California Highway Commission adopted pieces of a hybrid in 1957–60. What mattered for Crystal Springs was the local geometry: early plans put the freeway much closer to the lakes, along the shoreline corridor that today is Skyline, Sawyer Camp, and Cañada Road.
A ranger on Sawyer Camp Trail still tells visitors the blunt version. When Highway 280 was being laid out, officials discussed building it closer to the reservoirs and wiping out that road. People fought to keep the trail.
The fight was not only about a pretty view. A freeway on the water would have cut the watershed, invited development to its edge, and treated San Francisco’s drinking-water lands as leftover right-of-way. Sierra Club activist Sidney Liebes Jr. spent 1964–77 assembling the paper trail: letters, maps, clippings, and notes on the Junipero Serra Freeway through Crystal Springs — and, in the same boxes, the conversion of Filoli to public access. The San Mateo County Historical Association still holds that archive. Committee for Green Foothills, founded in 1962, worked the county and the cities. The coalition was local, persistent, and unusually good at finding a federal hook.
That hook was the U.S. Department of the Interior. Interstate highways were paid for largely with federal dollars. Interior did not build roads, but it did hold the scenic and recreational interest in landscapes of national consequence, and it could make those interests a condition of federal participation. The result, in 1969, was a four-party settlement among San Francisco, the Department of the Interior, San Mateo County, and Caltrans.
Nobody in the published record is named as the person who first said grant Interior an easement. That idea almost certainly surfaced inside those four-party talks — San Francisco’s water department and city attorney, Interior, the Division of Highways, San Mateo County — sometime in the late 1960s. What is clear is that the negotiators were not improvising. They had a brand-new federal tool built for exactly this kind of fight.
Lady Bird Johnson’s 1965 Highway Beautification Act did more than ban billboards. Title III let the Bureau of Public Roads hand states extra federal money — up to 3 percent of their federal-aid highway funds, originally without a state match — to buy scenic easements along Interstates: less-than-fee interests meant to restore, preserve, and enhance the view. It was the first time Washington treated a viewshed as a reimbursable highway cost. Sacramento answered within a year. The 1966 California Scenic Areas Act let the Department of Public Works acquire fee or any lesser estate next to Interstates whenever federal money would cover it, and by 1967 a state survey had already flagged thousands of Interstate-adjacent acres as candidates. Crystal Springs frontage on I-280 was close to the platonic case: a landscape people already loved, no visual intrusions yet to remove, and a public ready to fight for it.
By 1967–69, an easement was not a poetic gesture. It was a line item in federal highway finance — and it let the four parties solve four problems at once, without San Francisco selling an acre of its watershed or Caltrans condemning land inside a city.
San Francisco granted Interior two easements over nearly all of the Peninsula Watershed:
- a scenic easement of about 19,000 acres on the lands west of Crystal Springs and San Andreas Reservoirs
- a scenic and recreation easement of about 4,000 acres on the lands near I-280
The city’s own later planning documents are explicit about the trade. The easements were granted “in order to obtain a change in the route (and resulting increased federal share of costs) of I-280 to a less environmentally damaging location further east of Crystal Springs Reservoir.” Put the other way around: move the freeway to the ridge, lock the watershed against development, and the federal government would pay a larger share of a cleaner alignment. Stay on the shoreline and the federal money got harder.
In 1980 Congress transferred administration of the easements to the National Park Service as part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The western scenic easement still does not, by its own terms, open the far hills to the public. It does something more durable. It forbids the kind of use that would have turned the view from 280 into another Hillsborough.
Until the mid-Peninsula gap closed, drivers actually used Cañada Road as the detour between the finished pieces of 280 at Highway 92 and Woodside. The last seven miles — Raymundo Drive in Woodside to the Doran Memorial Bridge over San Mateo Creek — closed the gap and finished the freeway. The road became known as the “world’s most beautiful freeway.” The beauty depended on what was not built beside it.
What you still don’t see
The settlement did not end every scheme. It changed the default. Three golf courses, tennis courts, and an equestrian center were drawn onto the southern watershed near Woodside as a “recreational plan.” Bob Lurie and the Giants looked at land near 280 and Highway 92 for a ballpark. Edgewood, just east of the freeway, was at various times proposed for 2,200 homes, a state college, a federal solar lab, and a golf course. Sand Hill Road was once imagined as the Willow Freeway, climbing over Skyline to the coast. None of that is there.
The western slopes above the reservoirs remain closed in the way a watershed is closed — fenced, signed, managed first as a waterworks. Sawyer Camp and the growing Crystal Springs Regional Trail run the east shore, which is why the lake can be visited without being surrounded. The west side is the part of the deal you see from the car and almost never enter.
The view is the monument
People call I-280 beautiful because the engineers curved it along the fault and left the water in the frame. That is only half the story. The state wanted a freeway. The water city wanted its lakes uncut. County and club activists wanted the hills unbuilt. Interior wanted a scenic interest it could enforce. The compromise put the interstate on the ridge, wrote two easements across 23,000 acres, and raised the federal share enough to make the cleaner route pencil out.
So the land west of 280 above Crystal Springs is empty for a reason that is both more bureaucratic and more interesting than “it’s a watershed.” It is a watershed that was about to be a subdivision corridor until a highway argument became a federal conservation instrument. Filoli is the furnished room at the south end of that same instrument.
Next time the road lifts over the Doran Bridge and the lower lake appears, the undeveloped west shore is not leftover countryside. It is the part of Interstate 280 that was never poured.
Sources
- San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Peninsula Watershed Management Plan EIR (section on the 1969 Interior scenic easements)
- Green Foothills, “What You Don’t See” (2017)
- SFGate, “Golfers Vying for a Piece of Crystal Springs” (June 13, 1995), on the 1969 route-for-easement exchange
- San Mateo County Historical Association, Sidney Liebes Jr. Crystal Springs Watershed Archive (1964–1977)
- California Highways (cahighways.org), Route 280 history; Interstate 280 (California) Wikipedia
- Punch Magazine, “A Deep Dive Into Crystal Springs,” on the near-loss of Sawyer Camp Trail
- Filoli / National Trust histories of the Bourn estate and Spring Valley Water Company