A century ago this week, on March 16, 1925, construction began on UC Berkeley’s Hearst Gymnasium for Women, known today as the Hearst Memorial Gymnasium.
The project, financed by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, memorialized his mother, former UC Regent and benefactor Phoebe Apperson Hearst. The building was described as planned to benefit Cal women students by “deepening the richness of their lives” with extensive indoor recreational and physical education facilities, swimming pools, women’s lounges, classrooms and a locker room and shower space.
The construction team’s first job was to survey the land and build a construction office. The site was the location of California Field, which had served as the university’s main football stadium before its California Memorial Stadium was completed. When it was finished a couple years later, the gymnasium was one of the most beautiful and best equipped in the country. Today it languishes in disrepair.
Apparent arson: On March 17, 1925, an apparent arson fire severely damaged a home at 3236 King St. in southwest Berkeley. The house had been “purchased Saturday by a negro waiter on a Southern Pacific diner (the term then for a railroad dining car),” the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported.
“Fire started in the basement and worked its way up through a partition to the roof, causing damage estimated at more than $2,000,” according to the Gazette.
Painters and wallpaper hangers had been working on the vacant house, which had reportedly been bought by an individual named F.L. Lewis. The front of the house had been “smeared with red paint taken from the basement,” the Gazette reported.
An African American attorney, Oakland’s E.B. Gray, asked Berkeley police Chief August Vollmer for an investigation.
“He said he was convinced that the fire was set by persons hostile to negroes, although he felt sure the persons in the immediate neighborhood were not responsible,” according to the Gazette. “Gray said that last week a petition had been circulated in the neighborhood directed against Lewis but that several of the immediate neighbors had refused to sign it.”
Chief Vollmer had already started an investigation at the request of the Fire Chief, Sidney Rose, who said “he was firmly convinced the fire was started in a pile of rubbish in the basement.”
I looked up the King Street address. It’s a raised basement wooden house on a residential block of similar homes that online real estate websites say is worth about $1.6 million today and most recently sold in 2022.
A real estate listing presumably written around then, described it as a “classic 1912 Berkeley home, keenly renovated and developed for today’s lifestyle,” with a “spacious basement for DIY workshop, office, storage and expansion.”
Pioneers: An early Berkeley “pioneer” couple celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in their home at 947 University Ave. Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hadden were both German immigrants, having been “born within a few miles of each other in Hanover, Germany,” who had met as adults in San Francisco.
Mr. Hadden, age 79, “first came to Berkeley in 1868,” which was the year the state Legislature chartered the University of California. At the time the future Berkeley was mainly open land, an unbuilt campus site for the private College of California, and the small waterfront manufacturing community of Oceanview.
Hadden ran the Everding Starch Works in West Berkeley, then went mining in Montana and Alaska and in 1878 returned here, where he worked at the West Berkeley Planing Mill and later had a grocery business on University Avenue.
At the time of their anniversary, the couple had 32 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of them living in the Bay Area. From checking Google Maps, a small court of attached two-story residences appears to be on their home site today, just east of Eighth Street.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.