Emeryville, California

Emeryville packs a remarkable amount of history into one square mile of Bay Area shoreline. Gold Rush settler Joseph Stickney Emery arrived during the Gold Rush, and the little industrial city that grew up around the railroad was incorporated in eighteen ninety-six and named for him. After the nineteen oh six San Francisco earthquake sent factories fleeing across the bay, Emeryville boomed into a dense industrial zone.

It also earned a second reputation: greyhound racing, poker rooms, slot machines, and speakeasies made Alameda County District Attorney Earl Warren, later Chief Justice of the United States, call it, and this is a direct quote, the rottenest city on the Pacific Coast. The factories are long gone, cleaned up after decades of contamination. Today the old industrial land is home to Pixar Animation Studios, whose campus sits partly on the footprint of a former baseball park.