Concord is the largest city in Contra Costa County and gets discussed roughly a tenth as much as the smaller, wealthier towns south of it on the 680. It is also the city on this corridor with the most consequential history, by a considerable distance.
The town was called something else
The land was Rancho Monte del Diablo — "ranch of the mountain of the devil" — granted in 1834 to Salvio Pacheco. The mountain is right there; the grant is named for it.
In 1869 Salvio Pacheco II founded a town on that ground and called it Todos Santos. All Saints. The name lasted a while, then didn't, and the city incorporated as Concord on February 5, 1905.
But the original name survives in the one place that matters. Todos Santos Plaza is a full city block in the center of downtown — a real square, laid out when the town was still Todos Santos, still functioning as the civic living room. Farmers market, free summer concerts, restaurants on all four sides. Most American suburbs have a downtown that is a street. Concord has a plaza, because it was planned that way in the 1860s by people working from a Spanish model.
Port Chicago
On the evening of July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine on Suisun Bay, two ships being loaded with munitions exploded. 320 men were killed instantly. More than 390 were injured. It was the worst home-front disaster of the Second World War.
202 of the dead were Black sailors. That is roughly two-thirds, and it was not a coincidence — the Navy was segregated, and the dangerous work of hand-loading live ordnance was assigned almost entirely to Black enlisted men, under white officers, with no specialized training and, by multiple accounts, officers betting on which division could load fastest.
The following month, ordered back to the same work under the same conditions, about 258 Black sailors refused. 208 were convicted of disobeying orders. Fifty were charged with mutiny — a capital charge in wartime. They became known as the Port Chicago 50. All fifty were found guilty on October 24, 1944, and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor and dishonorable discharge. Most were paroled in January 1946.
The convictions stood for eighty years.
On July 17, 2024 — the eightieth anniversary, to the day — the Navy exonerated all 256 men convicted in those courts-martial. The Navy's own general counsel had found significant legal errors, including that the men were effectively denied meaningful counsel. Every dishonorable discharge was vacated.
Port Chicago is a direct part of why the American military desegregated. The men who refused to load those ships were among the first to force the issue, and it cost them their names for the rest of their lives. There is a National Memorial at the site.
The 12,800 acres
The Concord Naval Weapons Station takes up an enormous piece of the map north and east of town — 12,800 acres of it — and has spent roughly two decades waiting to become something else.
In May 2026 the city council unanimously approved a redevelopment agreement with the Navy to convert it: somewhere around 12,000 housing units, plus hundreds of acres of parkland. Whether that goes the way the plans say is another matter, but after twenty years of stalling it is finally moving. It is one of the largest infill development sites in California, and it will change what Concord is.
What else is here
The Toyota Pavilion — everyone still calls it the Concord Pavilion — opened in May 1975 and was designed by Frank Gehry, early in his career, before he was Frank Gehry. It's a 12,500-capacity amphitheater built into a hillside, and a lot of people in the East Bay saw their first concert there without ever registering whose building it was.
Dave Brubeck was born here in 1920 — one of the most successful jazz musicians of the century, out of a Contra Costa cattle ranch. And the Blue Devils, the drum and bugle corps, are based in Concord and have won more world championships than any other corps. If you've never watched competitive drum corps, the Blue Devils are the reason to start.
Mount Diablo and the geography
The mountain sits directly southeast and Concord effectively lives on its shoulder. The BART line terminates here, which makes the city the northern hinge of the entire 680 corridor, and the Iron Horse Trail starts in Concord before running about thirty miles south through Walnut Creek, Danville and San Ramon down to Pleasanton.
Where it stands now
About 125,000 people, making it one of the ten largest cities in the Bay Area, and considerably more diverse and more affordable than its neighbors — median home price around $800,000 in mid-2026, against $1.6 million in Pleasanton. That gap is most of the story of who lives where on this corridor.
Concord is the city that does the region's actual work and gets the least attention for it. The plaza is worth a Saturday morning regardless.
Rep the town: the Concord collection has our California bear flag design made for Concord on shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts, mugs and more. Down the valley: Walnut Creek, Danville and the whole Bay Area.