✨ Holistic Healing in Oakland, CA

Samuel Merritt was mayor from 1867 to 1869, and in 1868 he proposed and paid for a dam between the tidal estuary and the bay, which turned a shifting arm of San Francisco Bay into a stable lake in the middle of the city. In 1870 the state legislature made Lake Merritt a wildlife refuge, the first officially designated refuge in North America, which means the oldest protected wildlife ground on the continent is not remote wilderness but a lagoon surrounded by a downtown. The Necklace of Lights around it was first switched on in 1925 and carries 126 lampposts and about thirty-four hundred bulbs.