A century ago, fire threats to the UC Berkeley campus were highlighted by UC President William Wallace Campbell in a statement issued Feb. 8, 1924, and reported by the Berkeley Daily Gazette.
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“A majority of the applied science departments are housed in wooden, or sheet metal, structures,” Campbell said.
This posed a major danger to research collections and records, particularly since the buildings were clustered near California Field, the old wooden football stadium that stood where Hearst Gymnasium is today.
“Scientific instruction and research at the university would never recover from the loss of materials brought about by an extensive fire in this area,” Campbell said.
Research collections belonging to 18 of the 48 academic departments on the campus were kept in those buildings. The statement noted that several small fires had been in wooden campus buildings in recent months, most of them extinguished by the Berkeley Fire Department.
This announcement was most likely a prelude to a sustained UC campaign to get funding for new science buildings. It would come to fruition in the mid-1920s with the passage of a major bond issue for the university.
By the beginning of the 1930s, most of the life sciences departments would move into the massive new Life Sciences Building, constructed of concrete and regarded as fireproof.
New headquarters: “The largest Ford sales and service building in Alameda County” opened Feb. 8, 1924, at 2620 Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley between Carleton and Parker streets. The building housed the Nelson N. Scotchler Co., which sold Ford automobiles.
Berkeley architect James Plachek designed the building, which contained 25,000 square feet given over to car service, a parts department and showrooms for Ford and Lincoln car and truck sales.
In 1924 this building would have had a major effect on expanding and solidifying the South Shattuck commercial district’s identity as Berkeley’s “auto row.” Part of the building still survives, but four floors of modernist housing are now perched atop what’s left of the century-old structure.
Hike postponed: On President George Washington’s birthday in 1921, Berkeley’s James Alby Hill, of 1435 Henry St., had begun a walk across the continental United States, starting with a dip” in the Pacific Ocean by San Francisco’s Cliff House.
In the subsequent three years he’d walked some 5,000 miles, but in early 1924 poor health forced him to give it up temporarily and return to Berkeley. His route had meandered through 26 states as well as parts of Canada and Mexico, where he collected signatures of local officials and governors. He told reporters that when he recovered he’d take a train back to Ohio and continue his walk.
In memoriam: In closing this column, I want to note the Jan. 14 death of James Kantor, 95, one of Berkeley’s finest institutional historians. Jim was an emeritus archivist for the University of California.
For decades he worked in the Bancroft Library, carefully and patiently assembling, cataloguing and preserving UC and Berkeley campus records, from official files of the Office of the President to flyers collected on Sproul Plaza. Jim was of small physical stature but a powerful presence. He always had an anecdote, trenchant observation or joke to share and was one of those people I never tired of running into.
One of his primary legacies will be the immense, precise and thoughtful assistance he gave to hundreds of researchers who came to the Bancroft Library to study people, issues and topics associated with the university. Others may earn prominent names for their historical writing, but it’s people like Jim who make their research possible.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.