Hella Town

Oakland's History of Development and Disruption

Mitchell Schwarzer

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520381131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Hella Town reveals the profound impact of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland's built environment. Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city's postwar struggles. Toward the turn of the millennium, as immigration from Latin America and East Asia increased, Oakland became one of the most diverse cities in the country. The city still grapples with the consequences of uneven class- and race-based development-amid-disruption. How do past decisions about where to locate highways or public transit, urban renewal districts or civic venues, parks or shopping centers, influence how Oaklanders live today? A history of Oakland's buildings and landscapes, its booms and its busts, provides insight into its current conditions: an influx of new residents and businesses, skyrocketing housing costs, and a lingering chasm between the haves and have-nots.

Part I

1

Streetcar Stratification

In 1919, the Fred T. Wood Company advertised lots for a promising 126-home subdivision, Lakeshore Terrace, nestled in the foothills just above Lake Merritt and a couple of miles from downtown. Like all of Oakland, the land had undergone fateful changes over the prior century. The Spanish Empire had granted much of what we now know as Oakland to Luis Peralta, who later passed his 45,000-acre Rancho San Antonio on to his sons. After the annexation of Alta California, then a part of Mexico, to the United States in 1847, the Peralta family lost most of their holdings to Anglo-Americans. Toward century’s end, Lewis Leonard Bradbury, who made his wealth in Mexican gold mining and California real estate, purchased the tract that came to be called Lakeshore Terrace; maintaining homes in Oakland and Southern California, Bradbury erected the famous Bradbury Building in Los Angeles, which opened a few months after his death in 1892.

Amid a building boom that coincided with America’s entry into the First World War, Bradbury’s oak-studded grasslands were ripe for development. Fred T. Wood was a California native who had arrived in Oakland in 1904 to work in real estate. He modeled his subdivision on an earlier, nearby effort, Lakewood Park. In a brochure, we read that the latter’s property values had doubled and tripled since development began there four years earlier. Logically, Lakeshore Terrace would attain similar success as a subdivision of choice for higher-income residents: “Lakeshore Terrace is in the heart of the head-of-the-lake district, an established residence section of the highest type.” The brochure extolls the fact that the south-facing slopes are protected from north winds, affording maximum sunshine and the warmest climate, as well as perfect drainage, and that the approach on Lakeshore Avenue, a broad boulevard of easy grade, is shaded by plane trees. Since Wood purchased the land at half its assessed value, he claimed to have added improvements of the finest kind: streets endowed with cement gutters, curbs, sidewalks, sewers, water mains, and gas and electric conduits. To top it off, we are informed that a streetcar runs from Lakeshore Terrace to downtown, and a Key Route interurban, whisking one to San Francisco in 40 minutes, is practically at the subdivision’s doorstep.

Figure 2.Lakewood Park tract. The intersection of Rosal and Balfour Avenues, across Lakeshore Avenue and alongside the upcoming Lakeshore Terrace, 1918. Photo courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

Lakeshore Terrace was part of the greatest groundswell of residential construction in Oakland’s history. During the first third of the twentieth century, the country estates of Oakland’s lower hills and farms of its flatlands were recast into houses and businesses by real estate entrepreneurs like Fred T. Wood. The engines behind this transformation were streetcars running on steel rails and powered electrically by overhead wires. Streetcar service freed people to reside farther from the city center in neighborhoods of their choice—to an extent.¹ The new subdivisions would be highly stratified along class and racial lines. Affluent whites had the lion’s share of the new dwelling opportunities, while poorer whites and people of color were limited to older buildings and districts. Upper-middle-class subdivisions were designed and advertised differently than working-class subdivisions. They were located farther from industry, set apart through pastoral aesthetic traits, and linked to office jobs in downtown Oakland or San Francisco. Legal barriers fortified their exclusivity. Lakeshore Terrace came with “full building and race restrictions.” Only people of Caucasian descent were allowed to purchase homes here and in most upscale Oakland neighborhoods.

Streetcars unglued the diverse functions of Oakland’s downtown. The electrified transit system allowed residents and businesses to relocate to more favorable and spacious locales. While homes rose up in the foothills and remote flatlands, industries followed the waterfront corridors north and south of downtown and shopping strips spread along the streetcar lines radiating out to these new areas. Downtown transformed into a largely commercial entity. Office buildings, department stores, hotels, and movie palaces were the new components of a dense zone of business operations and consumer attractions. For a time, downtown’s increased density and vibrancy produced the impression of a unified city. But hotels and department stores too catered to stratified markets.

Long before comprehensive planning and zoning regulations came into effect in the 1930s, distinct functional and social sections characterized streetcar Oakland: an industrial waterfront; a sea of houses across the flatlands and lower hills, divided according to class and racial lines; along the transit lines penetrating each of these zones, commercial strips; an unprecedented, intense urbanity downtown amid the streetcar system’s crossing points. This stratified cityscape would persist and even intensify after 1945. Other transportation improvements (e.g., automobiles, free-ways, BART), coupled with other, racially based discriminatory practices (e.g., redlining, urban redevelopment, white migration to the suburbs), continued to divide the town into zones marked by function, class, and race.

ELECTRIC TRACTION

In the years after its founding in 1852, Oakland slowly grew into a village on an estuary of San Francisco Bay. In 1860, more than a decade after the Gold Rush began, only 1,543 people resided there. Then, in 1869, the town became the Pacific terminus of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, an almost 2,000-mile line connecting California to the eastern rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa. Rail met sail at Oakland Point, the foot of 7th Street in West Oakland, from where passengers completed their train journey to San Francisco on transbay ferries. Industries, which we will discuss in the next chapter, gravitated to the West Oakland rail yards and shipping wharves, and Oakland soon passed Stockton and Sacramento to become California’s second-largest city after San Francisco—counting 34,555 residents by 1880. Growth centers succeeded one another; first downtown, then West Oakland, and later other parts of the city. Villages developed on stops of the Central (and later Southern) Pacific railway: Clinton, Fruitvale, Melrose, Fitchburg, Elmhurst—what would later be called East Oakland.² Yet aside from Clinton, they were for many years too small to be called either industrial towns or commuter suburbs.³

If steam railroads propelled long-distance travel and trade as well as commuter suburbs, the iron horses were impractical for intra-city commutes, and hence intensive city building. Streets could hardly bear the weight of trains, whose engines produced noise, smoke, and sparks that were both a nuisance and threat to nearby structures. The time it took speeding trains to come to a full stop so people could disembark resulted in stations spaced at least one to two miles apart. The train corridor was best situated in a separate right-of-way. Other means of transportation would be needed for city-making.

Through the early 1890s, most travel within Oakland was either by foot, on horseback, or in horse-drawn vehicles. Among the latter, most prominent were omnibuses, a version of stagecoaches, later converted to trams running along iron or steel rails and allowing for faster speeds and smoother rides. The horse-trams traveled four to five miles per hour, a little faster than walking. Nonetheless, they pushed out the boundaries of the walking city. Eighteen miles of lines of horse-car lines were built from downtown to West Oakland and Clinton.

San Francisco pioneered and made extensive use of steam-powered cable cars, a mechanized advance over horse-drawn omnibuses. Aside from a couple of brief experiments in 1889 and 1890, though, cable car technology, practical only for straight runs, was too inflexible and expensive for the flatter terrain being developed at lower densities in Oakland. Instead, electric streetcars (also called trolleys) would push Oakland’s next phase of urban transportation. A couple of decades into the harnessing of electricity, Frank Sprague, a naval officer, had linked electric traction motors on individual streetcars to overhead wires that sucked power from electric generating stations.⁴ His system debuted in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. The streetcars glided at an average speed of 10 miles per hour and could reach 15 miles per hour, three times faster than horse-drawn trams.⁵ Using the motor as a brake, they could easily decelerate. They were fine at climbing and descending hills, an important advantage over the horse-car.⁶

Electric traction streetcars took America by storm. In 1890, two years after Sprague’s initial run, 154 electric street railway systems operated on 1,263 miles of track, more than half equipped by his firm. By 1902, 22,000 miles of electrified streetcars accommodated more passengers than steam railroads.⁷ From 1890 to 1920, annual trolley ridership in the nation grew from 2 billion to 15.5 billion.⁸ A 1902 editorial in the weekly New York magazine, The Independent, didn’t hold back: “We are entering the trolley age. We shall speedily develop the trolley system to reach every section of our hill and valley homes. These systems will spider-web the counties and the States and bring the whole country into a network of intercommunication.”⁹ In Streetcar Suburbs, Sam Bass Warner highlighted the horse-car and electric streetcar’s impact on urban geography in Boston. Between 1870 and 1900, as Warner tells us, streetcars produced a new kind of fragmented city, one split between the old center and radiating rings of industrial and commercial subcenters and residential suburbs.¹⁰ Once their transit was electrified, cities began to sprawl up to 10 miles in every direction.¹¹

Oakland was no exception. The city’s first streetcar line began operations on Grove Street in 1889. A year later, the Oakland Consolidated Railway debuted and, by 1894, there were 98 miles of electric railway.¹² Around a dozen separate transit companies sprang up, all of them private, and many duplicating lines: Oakland Railroad Company; Oakland and Berkeley Rapid Transit Company; San Pablo Line; Oakland, Brooklyn, and Fruitvale Railway. Still, the costs of laying track and wires, building power stations, and assembling rolling stock encouraged centralized administration, and one of the town’s leading businessmen figured out the advantages that would accrue to economies of scale.

Francis Marion Smith—known as Borax Smith—began to buy up companies and consolidate lines. By 1902, the miner turned business mogul had unified Oakland’s streetcars into the 75.4-mile system of the Oakland Transit Consolidated. His story embodies Oakland’s streetcar-driven development. Born in Wisconsin, Smith moved west to prospect for minerals and, by 1881, when he settled in Oakland, had amassed a fortune from borax mining. Smith set about using his newfound wealth for building projects. In 1891, he erected a mansion for himself on 53 acres along Park Boulevard between E. 22nd and E. 28th Streets, a gaggle of gables, turrets, and chimneys in the Queen Anne style. Two years later, he expanded his Pacific Coast Borax Company refinery in Alameda, hiring Ernest Ransome to construct the first reinforced concrete building in the United States.¹³ Ransome, an English-born engineer, had earlier patented a crucial, twisted spiral rod to prevent steel reinforcements from losing their grip as concrete hardened.¹⁴

In 1895, Smith branched out, forming The Realty Syndicate (TRS) with Frank C. Havens. Soon one of country’s largest real estate operations, through the early teens TRS came to control 13,000 acres in the lower and upper hills from Berkeley to East Oakland. Originally from New York, Havens had arrived in California with ambitions as far and wide as Smith’s. In 1902, he had a mansion built in Piedmont, soon to be a separate and almost entirely residential city encircled by Oakland. Between 1910 and 1914, his Mahogany Eucalyptus and Land Company planted millions of blue gum trees along the high ridge of the East Bay, envisioning the creation of a 14-mile stretch of eucalyptus tree farms.¹⁵ As it turned out, gum trees under two and a half feet in diameter were useless for timber. After only two years, they were abandoned to grow into fire hazards. Havens likely used “Mahogany” in the company name because he had fantasized that the valuable ...