A century ago, the Berkeley Daily Gazette asked in a headline, “What is the price of decency?” This was over a full-page ad sponsored by J.F. Hink and Sons on Jan. 24, 1925. It wasn’t an advertisement for a moral campaign but rather was encouragement for locals to donate to the Berkeley Community Chest effort. An intense fundraising push was planned for the last week of January 1925.
“In its major activities, the chest is devoted to the conservation and development of youth,” the ad proclaimed. “This work is of vital concern to every man and woman in this community. Youth — as never before in our era — is under pressure, terrific unending pressure. New bulwarks must be thrown up to protect the rising generation from the lure of a peculiarly dangerous decade.”
The Community Chest was a unified fundraising drive that would distribute its money to what today we would call social service causes in Berkeley. They included health care organizations, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, various YMCAs and YWCAs, the Berkeley Day Nursery and the Berkeley Welfare Society. Organizations like the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls were also part of the campaign, as well as Jewish Relief and Newman Hall (the Roman Catholic center serving UC Berkeley students).
During 1924, campaign funds had helped operate recreation centers in Albany and Berkeley; serve 8,400 school lunches to schoolchildren from poor families; provide day care for children of working mothers; fund temporary housing and care for “one hundred and five orphaned court charges and abandoned children;” shelter 59 pregnant women (from the entirety of Alameda County); and provide aid to 549 financially struggling local families.
Beauty shop: On Jan. 23, 1925, the city’s Planning Commission grappled with whether home beauty parlors fit into residential or commercial classifications.
Mrs. N.J. Nielson, of 2543 Grove St. (today called Martin Luther King Jr. Way) near Parker Street, “presented a petition signed by nearly 50 women who are property owners” nearby, “asking that she be granted a reclassification of her residence from the residential to retail business to enable her to put in a basement beauty shop with a large window.
“Chief Building Inspector Stanley P. Koch said that he did not think that it was necessary for her to have a reclassification, as at present beauty parlors are to be found even in the most sacred precincts of single-family home exclusiveness.”
Commission member (and famed architect) Bernard Maybeck “said he was opposed to having a house disfigured with an ugly basement storefront even if the step is to be taken with an idea of improving feminine facial beauty.”
Koch countered that if beauty shops in homes weren’t commercial space, then the owner could put in the sort of window she wanted. Another Commission member warned the public that a retail classification would let the house be torn down and replaced with a conventional store. After discussion but before voting, the commission asked the city attorney to provide advice on how beauty parlors should be classified.
Traffic numbers: The Jan. 22, 1925, Gazette had a little summary of downtown traffic statistics. Each month, about 102,000 automobiles drove through the main corner of University and Shattuck avenues, 156,000 pedestrians crossed the streets at the same spot and 670,340 people rode by in streetcars and interurban trains.
Planners meet: The mayor’s committee on city planning held a meeting Jan. 21, 1925, and had a preliminary discussion on the future of Berkeley’s waterfront. One key element was whether Berkeley should pursue its own waterfront development for shipping and industry or attempt a joint project with Richmond and Oakland.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.