Pacific Steppingstones: Alameda

CXLII

Pan American’s commercial airmail service across the Pacific was inaugurated from this ramshackle site on November 22, 1935. The first passengers were carried on October 21, 1936. The last flight took place in 1940

Before Pan American Airways could bridge the world’s largest ocean and link Asia to the Americas by air for the first time, it needed waypoints. The first of these waypoints lay along the shoreline of Alameda, California, on a run-down piece of property rented on the cheap from the U.S. Navy. Pan Am’s operations at the site began in 1935.  

The Navy had built an unprepossessing seaplane base along the Oakland Estuary, using the rusting hulks of decommissioned late 19^th Century destroyers mothballed at Alameda Island to create a man-made harbor. It was just broad enough for S-42s and M-130s to lift off from the water.

Belieing Pan American’s usual penchant for elegance, its Alameda Flying Boat Terminal was comprised of wooden barracks and whitewashed metal hangars that were perfectly adequate to the task of storing and servicing its aircraft and handling the airline’s sacks of airmail, not one of which had an easily-offended sense of aesthetics. 

Passengers were another matter, but they didn’t start flying from Alameda until October 1936 on what began as an underbooked once-a-week schedule. As transpacific passenger traffic began increasing, Pan Am began negotiating to develop a far more luxurious terminal at Treasure Island.  

After Pan Am left the Estuary site, the Navy established Naval Air Station Alameda in the area, and as N.A.S. Alameda expanded its runways in 1940, the Navy landfilled and buried the old Pan Am harborage. The Navy also created a lagoon and built larger hangars to service its wartime seaplanes. In 1945 the last of the hangars on the lagoon, Building 41, went up. Building 41 sports a mural and an historical marker celebrating the first Pan American transpacific flights, but no Pan Am Clipper ever lived there, even for a moment.