Berkeley

The Peralta Rancho and the Squatters

The state guide found Berkeley on a wide plain that stretched gently upward to a low range of hills on the east shore of San Francisco Bay, with the buildings of the University of California at its upper edge.² The ground was originally part of the Rancho San Antonio, granted to the Peralta family in 1820 by the Spanish Governor de Sola, and the city lies mostly within the section that belonged to Domingo Peralta.^1,2 Cattle ranching was the primary economic activity of the region up to a drought in 1864.¹ American squatters had a false survey made that cut off 7,000 acres of redwood timber and all the waterfront, drove off Peralta cattle, and had Jose Domingo Peralta jailed for trying to eject them.² In 1853 American speculators bought title to what is now Berkeley for $82,000, and the same year the first American building, a roadhouse, went up near San Pablo Avenue and Delaware Street.²

Bishop Berkeley’s College Town

In 1853 Henry Durant opened the Contra Costa Academy in Oakland; under Samuel Hopkins Willey it became the College of California in 1860, and in 1869 the nucleus of the new university.² The trustees named the town for George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, the Irish philosopher who had crossed the Atlantic to found a school for the Indians, judging his ideals proper for a young college town.² A charter was granted in 1868, and by the time organization was complete a faculty of 10 was ready for 40 students.² When the new campus opened in 1873 most students commuted, and in 1874 Durant and Hiram Graves formed the Berkeley Railroad and Ferry Company.¹ In 1874 only a few houses stood south of the campus, and two years later the population was 948.² Berkeley was incorporated as a town in 1878, and the 3.84-mile Berkeley Branch Railroad ran from Oakland to central Berkeley.¹

Reservoir, Streetcars, and the 1906 Exodus

After 1884, when a large reservoir was built and water pipes were laid, the town grew rapidly.² The Oakland and Berkeley Rapid Transit Company began running in 1891, and by 1906 the streets were paved, the Santa Fe had built a station, and the Key Route ran 38-minute service to San Francisco.^2,3 In a film Otis M. Gove shot from a moving streetcar in north Berkeley in 1906, a pedestrian refuses to get off the tracks, and as the driver and conductor try to remove him an irate woman and a man come running to his aid.³ After the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 many refugees settled in Berkeley for good, and the 1939 guide puts the population at 23,378 in 1905 and 38,117 in 1907.² In 1909 the citizens adopted a new charter, and a City Hall designed by Bakewell and Brown, standing on the site of the Town Hall that burned in 1904, served from 1909 to 1977.^1,4 At its cornerstone-laying on June 27, 1908, University President Benjamin Ide Wheeler called the new building “our town-house.”⁴

The 1923 Fire, the Factory Waterfront, and the Shipyards

In September 1923 a fire that started in the hills and was fanned by a strong wind destroyed most of the city north of the campus, and afterward a deputy fire warden kept watch day and night from a tower in the hills.² In 1923 the city also adopted the council-manager form of government.² August Vollmer, a professor of police administration at the University of California, headed the police department and brought the city national notice, and his officers were known locally as “Ph.D. policemen” or “supercops.”² In 1939 the state guide counted 82,109 people and a factory district along the waterfront from Emeryville to Albany producing $50,000,000 worth of commodities a year, with an annual payroll of $5,000,000.² During the Great Depression the University kept many citizens employed, although working-class neighborhoods in West Berkeley suffered more.⁵ World War II brought a population boom to Berkeley, where wartime housing projects were built for military personnel and civilians moved in to work at local shipyards.⁵

Landmarks and the Old Rail Lines

The historic core of the campus, from Founders’ Rock to South Hall, Sather Gate and North Gate, is California Registered Historical Landmark No. 946, marked in 1985.⁶ Oscar Wenderoth designed the 1914 Main Post Office, where Suzanne Scheuer painted a mural of figures from California’s Spanish and pioneer periods in 1936-1937 for the Treasury Relief Art Project.⁷ On four city blocks downtown, the Berkeley High School Campus Historic District keeps William C. Hays’s Beaux Arts buildings of 1922 and three Art Deco buildings designed by Gutterson & Corlett in the 1930s.⁸ Local streetcars stopped running in 1948, and downtown declined until BART and its Downtown Berkeley Station reversed the downward development spiral.¹ The Santa Fe used a strip of land in Poets Corner from 1902 to 1979, and after the tracks were uprooted the city made it open space.⁹