This weekend there are two events in Berkeley of historical interest, both of them on Sunday. One is in the morning, the other in the afternoon.
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House tour: From 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday afternoon, the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) will hold a house tour focused on the Northbrae neighborhood.
The tour, entitled “Rocks, Gardens, Houses and a Fountain in Northbrae,” features eight houses and gardens, including homes designed by Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck and will also focus on neighborhood features such as natural rock outcroppings and parks, gardens, rock walls and the Circle Fountain on Marin Avenue.
Tour tickets are available in advance on Eventbrite for $40 ($30 for BAHA members). Same-day tickets can also be purchased at the tour ticket booth, which will be at the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Amador Street. The tour will extend along several blocks from Live Oak Park to north of the Circle Fountain.
Much of the tour’s content derives from the research of UC Berkeley professor Margaretta Lovell and a group of her students and volunteers. This tour will differ from past BAHA tours in not having a reception and food area or sales of BAHA publications (disclosure: This author is a member of BAHA’s Board of Directors).
Berkeley barriers: At 11 a.m. Sunday a Berkeley gathering will commemorate 50 years since the creation of Berkeley’s traffic barrier diversion program in 1974.
A series of concrete bollards and diverters were installed throughout much of Berkeley’s flatlands in the mid-1970s. They block off intersections to vehicles in one or two directions to channel through traffic onto certain main streets and reduce traffic in residential neighborhoods and on smaller streets.
The program was hotly controversial at the time and even went to court, but the barrier program was finally implemented and has endured, supplemented in recent decades with traffic circles. Living in one of the neighborhoods with barriers, I can testify to how important the barriers have been in improving Berkeley streets.
The gathering, which is being organized by former city Councilmember Kate Harrison, will include some current councilmembers as well as a visit by Bruce Appleyard, a San Diego State University professor of city planning and urban design.
Appleyard’s father, Donald Appleyard, was a trailblazing UC Berkeley faculty member in the College of Environmental Design, advocating for better traffic and street design, and the author of the influential text “Livable Streets.” His son has updated and reissued the book as “Livable Streets 2.0.”
The gathering will be on Berkeley’s corner of Ashby Avenue and Fulton Street, along what was called the “Fulton Freeway” in the early 1970s because of the traffic on what was then a one-way street. Neighborhood protests on Fulton were a part of jump-starting Berkeley’s traffic-calming plan.
The Berkeley Gazette ran this photo on Sept. 20, 1924, of women standing outside the Evanston, Illinois, home of that year’s Republican vice presidential candidate Charles Dawes, holding a selection of signs with his party’s slogans for the election. (courtesy of the Berkeley Historical Society and Museum)
1924 election: The presidential election 100 years ago was heating up in September 1924. On the Republican side the nominees were Calvin Coolidge and Charles Dawes. The Democratic nominees were John Davis and Charles Bryan.
A strong third party candidate was the Progressive Party’s U.S. Sen. Robert La Follette, who would win his home state and about 16.6% of the popular vote. Coolidge would eventually win the election.
On Sept. 20, 1924, the Gazette, which strongly favored Republicans and demonized La Follette in editorials, ran a publicity photo of women standing outside the home of Dawes in Evanston, Illinois, holding a selection of signs with Republican slogans for the election.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.