Alameda Point — A Working Superfund Cleanup, an Aircraft Carrier Museum, and Breweries in Old Navy Hangars

What Actually Makes Alameda Point Different

Start with the fact most listing descriptions soften or skip entirely: every square foot of Alameda Point was, for roughly sixty years, an active U.S. Navy installation, and the process of turning it into a civilian neighborhood is a genuine environmental cleanup, not a marketing narrative. The Navy began building what would become Naval Air Station Alameda in 1936 on filled tidelands at the island's western tip, commissioned it November 1, 1940, and ran it through World War II, the Cold War, and decades afterward as a working naval aviation base and repair depot. The 1993 round of the federal Base Realignment and Closure process selected NAS Alameda for closure; the Naval Aviation Depot shut down September 30, 1996, and the base itself closed April 25, 1997. Decades of aircraft maintenance, fuel storage, and industrial operations left real, documented contamination behind -- solvents, pesticides, chromium and cyanide wastes, and PCBs in soil and groundwater at various points across the site, plus untreated industrial wastewater that was discharged directly into the Seaplane Lagoon and the Oakland Inner Harbor before 1974. The EPA added the site to the Superfund National Priorities List in 1999, and the Navy has spent more than $500 million on cleanup in the years since.

That cleanup is not finished, and this page states its actual status rather than a reassuring generality. Several Installation Restoration Program sites -- including Site 3 and most of Site 13 -- have completed active cleanup and been transferred to the City of Alameda; Sites 9, 19, 22, and 23 are also cleared and transferred; Sites 2 and 14 are transferred but remain under monitored natural attenuation, meaning the Navy continues tracking contaminant levels rather than actively treating them further; and the Navy has proposed no further action for Site 30. Other work has genuinely stalled: since 2019, a regulatory dispute between the Navy and California's Department of Public Health over the acceptable cleanup standard for radium-226 -- a radioactive contaminant tied to the base's historical use of radium-dial instruments and equipment -- has held up completion of remaining radiological work, including at Building 5, where the Navy reported finishing its final inspection and cleanup pass as of recent reporting, though the broader radium-226 standard dispute affecting other parts of the site had not been resolved as of this research pass. A 2013 deed restriction recorded in Alameda County's official records also imposes ongoing covenants on portions of Alameda Point property -- including limits on drilling or constructing new wells -- specifically to reduce the risk of exposure to residual contamination on parcels the Navy transferred with those conditions attached. A buyer should treat 'which specific parcel has fully clean status versus which still carries an active land-use covenant or ongoing monitoring' as a real, address-specific diligence question, not an assumption either way.

None of that history has stopped Alameda Point from becoming a genuinely distinctive place, and two of its real, present-day identities deserve equal weight alongside the cleanup story. The USS Hornet (CV-12), commissioned in 1943, served in the Pacific with Task Force 58 through major WWII battles including the Battle of the Philippine Sea, then went on to serve through the Cold War and the Vietnam era before being selected as the primary recovery ship for the Apollo 11 splashdown in July 1969 -- pulling Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins out of the Pacific -- and again for Apollo 12 later that same year. Decommissioned in 1970 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991, the Hornet is now permanently docked at Pier 3 (707 W Hornet Avenue) as the USS Hornet Sea, Air & Space Museum, open to the public since 1998. And along Monarch Street, a stretch of the base's WWII-era hangars -- locally nicknamed Spirits Alley -- now houses a genuinely unusual concentration of craft beverage producers: St. George Spirits and Hangar 1 Vodka distilling in converted Navy buildings, Building 43 Winery, Faction Brewing, and Almanac Beer Co., whose taproom has drawn crowds numbering in the thousands on peak summer days, among other tenants that have come and gone (Rock Wall Wine Company operated in Building 24 for fourteen years before closing in 2022, citing pandemic-era losses). This is adaptive reuse on a scale most military-base-conversion sites never manage, and it's a real, walkable part of what living at Alameda Point actually means.

The residential side of the story is genuinely in progress, not finished. Bayport, built out on transferred parcels along the site's eastern edge, is the most established new neighborhood, with its own elementary school (Ruby Bridges Elementary, opened 2006) and home prices that, per Redfin's early-2026 data, ran a median near $1.8 million, up sharply year over year in a small, thin sub-market. Adjacent to Alameda Point -- but built on a technically separate former Navy property, the Fleet and Industrial Supply Center Alameda Annex, not the air station itself -- Alameda Landing adds a 72-acre mixed-use retail and housing district anchored by a Target and a Safeway. Site A, the roughly 68-acre parcel closest to the Seaplane Lagoon and the ferry terminal, is where Alameda Point Partners' planned $1 billion, 800-unit mixed-use waterfront town center is actively under construction as of this research pass, after a real, reported lull in activity between roughly 2018 and 2025. A separate affordable and supportive housing project, RESHAP, is rebuilding and expanding the Alameda Point Collaborative's existing 121-unit supportive-housing community -- which has housed more than 500 formerly homeless residents, including roughly 160 children and youth, since 1999 -- into a planned 332-unit campus, with a Disposition and Development Agreement secured in 2023 and infrastructure work underway since 2024. Other parcels, including the Main Street Neighborhood North area, are not expected to see construction start before roughly 2030 per the city's own current housing-element planning. This is, in short, a place being built in real time, not a finished neighborhood -- and that has real, practical implications for what living here looks and sounds like this year versus five years from now, covered in more depth on this site's What Nobody Tells You and Year-Round Living pages.

Several things this research could not resolve to one clean figure, and does not invent here: a single, current, Alameda-Point-specific median home price that holds steady across its several distinct sub-neighborhoods (Bayport, Alameda Landing, and any resale activity at Site A each report differently, and general market trackers' Alameda Point-specific data was sparse and, in some cases, dated); a complete, parcel-by-parcel public list of exactly which Alameda Point addresses still carry an active environmental land-use covenant or ongoing groundwater monitoring obligation versus which have been fully released from Navy oversight; and a resolved timeline for the radium-226 cleanup-standard dispute that has affected some remaining Navy-held parcels since 2019. Confirm current figures and any specific parcel's environmental status directly with the City of Alameda's Base Reuse division, the Navy's BRAC Program Management Office, and a local buyer's agent before making a purchase or relocation decision.