Welcome to Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association
“Preserving Two Berkeley Neighborhoods,” Brief Project Description August, 2023 M. M. Lovell
This is a public humanities project involving research on two very different neighborhoods in Berkeley, California, platted and developed by Mason McDuffie Co. in 1906, one in the flats and one in the hills. The intent is to give students the skills and the opportunity to engage with primary sources on the one hand and with the community on the other, write original research, and help draft Historic Districts nominations in 2024 for these two very different sites. Originating in a fall 2021 undergraduate seminar (taught again in fall 2022 and fall 2023) this project has resulted, to date, in two published student essays, two conference presentations, over 400 files on individual parcels, and the incorporation of 20 community volunteers (trained by one of the students as well as myself) as researchers.
The team has created micro-histories of hundreds of properties based on primary sources, and interviewed some current and former residents. Its first goal has been to teach students (and some community members) to be literate in “reading” streetscapes and understanding–in human, material, social, and financial terms—what we see, recognize, and value today, as well as what we can know about the past. The second goal is to establish the neighborhoods as Historic Districts. The study is based on census data, building permits, historical maps, legal documents, sidewalk surveys, oral histories as well as pertinent secondary sources.
I. The Past, Present, and Future of a Formerly Redlined Neighborhood in Berkeley This half of the project concerns the evolution of an historically non-white residential section of Berkeley, the result of generations of inventiveness inspired by a sense of community and consensus as well as by raw, sometimes hostile, economic and social forces. Looking at architecture and city planning, plantings and parks, immigration and jobs, banks and financing, the study investigates its character as a designed environment, and as a neighborhood that fostered the careers of such figures as politician William Byron Rumford who fought housing discrimination, Rhythm and Blues musician Johnny Otis, and WPA artist Sargent Johnson. It was also home to many Japanese whose properties were forfeit with Internment in 1942.
The San Pablo Park district was laid out in a grid on former grazing land by the Mason McDuffie Co. in 1906 as a middleclass neighborhood with a 13-acre park at its heart. No restrictive covenants or investment thresholds constrained the purchase of house lots or quality of buildings to be erected. Close to the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks (and the city’s industrial district) on the west, it was crossed by the Santa Fe Railroad right of way on the east, and was also serviced by light rail commuter lines. Known as an historically-Black neighborhood, it has actually always been ethnically mixed. The 40 x 100-foot house lots were bought by white, Black, and Asian migrants who came to California from Iowa, South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, and to this country from Scandinavia, Ireland, Germany, and Japan. The many different contractors the first-generation owners hired to build their homes were local builders clearly partial to the modest 1-story, 1000-square-foot, 5-room bungalows that quickly became the predominant building type. Seventy percent of these families were able to own their houses although they were often crowded, and often they took in boarders to help make the payments.
The Homeowners Loan Corporation Risk Map of 1937 shows that then, when the neighborhood was about 50% African-American and 8% Japanese, it was judged “Hazardous” for lenders. But residents did find financing. They used the equity in their homes to build churches and temples and to send their children to college, and they established a firm neighborhood identity of stability and even prosperity. In the 1940s, the Great Migration brought many new Black families from the South to Berkeley for high-paying jobs in the defense industries, and they too settled near the park.
In the 1960s, when the city was stabilizing zoning, the San Pablo Park neighbors, predominantly Black, petitioned and won single-family R1 zoning for the district, on a par with the all-white hills districts. They also successfully petitioned to obstruct through traffic with bollards, mini-circles, and deliberately to dead-end through streets so that their residential area would feel more like the suburbs. By 1970 the area was 90% African-American. Since that time, the percentage of Black families has decreased to, in 2020, 30% as Berkeley as a whole has lost Black families. Most properties now have ADUs, mostly with garage conversions, continuing the historical mix of owner, renter, boarder populations.
Currently this historically and significantly disadvantaged community is about to lose one of its most important engines of upward mobility and prosperity. The San Pablo Park neighborhood, in the current rebuild-with-rental-towers densification enthusiasm has flat land, deep lots, good freeway access, and cheaper cost than elsewhere in Berkeley. Discussing these issues and the potential for an Historic District involves undergraduates and community members in socially-engaged architectural history and in important public policy decisions.
II. The Past, Present, and Future of a Utopic Neighborhood of Nature Northbrae in the Berkeley foothills, also platted by Mason McDuffie Co. in 1906 on pastureland, is punctuated by massive outcroppings of rhyolite rock, one of which—set aside as Mortar Rock Park–bears the only viewable material evidence of millennia of Native American occupation, sociability, and labor left in the city. With roadways deliberately designed to be serviced by north-south rail lines following the contours of the land, transversed by walkways bringing residents on east-west stairway/pathways to this transportation network, this neighborhood was marketed to both blue-collar and white collar workers commuting to downtown Berkeley, the University of California by rail and to San Francisco by rail and ferry— a new and efficient infrastructure building on the partnership of private landowners and the Southern Pacific Railroad, both private parties, that had, a few decades earlier, collaborated to create a downtown at the gate of the university. Northbrae’s developers expanded this vision offering 40 acres to establish the state capital at a site they marked by an ornamental fountain at the junction of light rail lines, on top of a Southern Pacific railroad tunnel designed by John Galen Howard, better known as the architect of the central campus buildings. The crews of contract laborers engaged to build the tunnel and the fountain, we have learned through our research, came from Greece and India.
The developer built roadways and such infrastructure as water lines and sidewalks; they also planted phalanxes of street trees and installed massive rock cairns as road signs (also designed by Howard) and handsome drywall retaining walls built by crews of Italian stonemasons we are currently researching. Mason McDuffie Co. prescribed 20-foot setbacks and minimum cost but left the design of the individual homes to the purchasers of lots and the architects they engaged. Designers of homes in the study area include Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Walter Ratcliff, John Hudson Thomas and many others less well known. Most homes are two or even three stories although some bungalows punctuate the area. The first generation— those who bought lots and built—came from all over the US, Europe, and the British Isles, and they elected a wide variety of building vocabularies but all were wooden structures based on vernacular models. Norman tower houses, English cottages, half-timbered Tudor homes, Spanish Colonial farmhouses flank one another on tight minimal lots in no particular order, but together, they and their plantings comprise a surprisingly unified neighborhood character. None elect the formal Greco-Roman authority of the granite central campus buildings going up nearby. The majority, however, include Japanese maples in their front yards, perhaps residual from the Japanese nursery and landscape businesses that flourished in the San Pablo Park neighborhood, linking these two residential zones in the first half of the twentieth century. Deed restrictions initially excluded those of “Asiatic” or “African” descent from purchase or rentals until 1930 but not those of Hispanic descent. We are currently exploring and analyzing the countries of origin/parents’ birth in the first three generations of owners of the houses for which we have profiles.
Those who bought lots and built here or lived in the study zone before the mid twentieth century include Professor of Greek Isaac Flagg, tennis star Helen Willis Moody, Holocaust hero Aristides da Sousa Mendes, and Fred H. Tibbetts who engineered the water supply on which Northern California has depended for a century. Other owners included a plumber, a teamster, a pharmacist, teachers and a truck driver as well as engineers and professors. As in the San Pablo Park neighborhood, many took in lodgers. Most of these houses comprise about 2,000 square feet and more than half command a view of the Bay that even this slight elevation affords. The current threat to this neighborhood lies in those views. Recently, very wealthy individuals have purchased view homes and, under the umbrella of SB9, have sought to demolish them with the intention of erecting single-family McMansions of undistinguished character and more than twice the size. Creating a Historic District would help preserve the streetscapes that have been created, cared for, and valued for over a century.
Research is based on U. S. census records, property deeds, historical newspapers, and archival records only available at the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association such as Building Permits and Berkeley Block Books. Researchers have included U. C. Berkeley undergraduates and about 25 community members. Outcomes of this project include National Register nominations and an essay for Buildings and Landscapes, journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.