Hayward

Hayward is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in California, between Oakland and Fremont at the foot of the East Bay hills. It grew up around a hotel that William Dutton Hayward, a shoemaker from Massachusetts, opened in 1852 on land of the Castro family.

Guillermo Castro owned the Rancho San Lorenzo, a Mexican land grant on which the town was later laid out. Hayward's hotel became a resort for travelers from San Francisco, and the village around it was incorporated in 1876. Orchards of cherries and apricots covered the valley floor, and canneries packed the fruit until the 1960s, when housing tracts replaced the farms. California State University, East Bay, opened in the late 1950s on the hills above the town, with a view across the bay to San Francisco.

Annabelle Candy Company, a family business in Hayward, makes the Rocky Road candy bar and the Abba-Zaba taffy bar with a peanut butter center. Shasta, the soft drink brand known for its many flavors, is bottled at a plant in the city.

The Hayward Japanese Gardens, opened in the early 1980s, were designed by Kimio Kimura in the traditional Japanese manner, with stone lanterns and a koi stream above San Lorenzo Creek. The Meek Mansion, a Second Empire house of the 1860s, belonged to William Meek, one of the early orchard growers of the area. Along the bay shore, the Hayward Shoreline Interpretive Center looks over salt marshes where herons and egrets feed. Garin Regional Park, in the hills to the east, keeps an old ranch with an apple orchard of heritage varieties.