Well-known as a neighborhood Redlined in 1937, San Pablo Park had been established in 1906 by the Mason-McDuffie Company with a 13-acre greensward at its heart. By 1940 the area was dense with lots sold to immigrants from everywhere—many from Scandinavia but also from Italy, Greece, Portugal, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Russia, China, Japan, and, increasingly as the century progressed, African-American migrants from the deep South—on which they mostly planted bungalows. They worked in the factories, they worked for the railroad, they worked in the defense industries, and they established nurseries providing native and exotic plantings for the richly verdant Berkeley we see today.

Some used the equity in their homes to send one child to the University such as the Yamamoto family of truckers and gardeners whose son Shinji became a noted architect. Other remarkable individuals who emerged from the ethnically-diverse welcoming community around the Park include rhythm-and-blues musician Johnny Otis, WPA sculptor Sargent Johnson, Civil Rights activist Frances Albrier, and Walter A. Gordon who was successively football star for the University of California, football coach, Berkeley policeman, first Black graduate of Boalt Law School, and, in maturity, federal district judge, and Governor of the US Virgin Islands. The community gathered around the Park agitated cooperatively and successfully for diminishing the footprint of the Santa Fe railroad, for single-family home zoning, and for bollards to deflect traffic from their streets. This is a social context and built environment fabricated by many hands working as community for over a century that survives virtually intact today.

Margaretta M. Lovell is a cultural historian working at the intersection of history, art history, and material culture studies. Currently the Jay D. McEvoy Jr. Professor of American Art History at the University of California, Berkeley, she is researching the social and physical history of the built environment of Berkeley.