A century ago, at the end of February 1925, the “Committee of Sixteen” appointed by the mayor of Berkeley completed its draft plan recommendations for the city’s future, according to the Berkeley Daily Gazette.
The Gazette report said “most cities — and Berkeley has hitherto been one of them — are wholly unprepared to meet the demands thrust upon them by a rapidly increasing population for enlarging police and fire protection, better traffic ways and transportation and more schools, parks, playgrounds and public buildings.”
Berkeley was “shamefully deficient” in public playgrounds and parks and “a civic center about which her future public buildings may be grouped … we must not only prepare for the future but atone for the past.”
At the rate Berkeley was growing in 1925, the plan estimated that in 10 years development would “absorb all residential lands now vacant, create housing congestion in the central portion of the city, enormously increase traffic difficulties and multiply demands for public services of all kinds, particularly in the direction of educational and recreational facilities.”
On the waterfront, “the city should purchase the land necessary for its sanitary fill, thus retaining the values resulting from its reclamation. This fill may later be converted into a landing field or serve some equally valuable civic purpose. … Development and ultimate use (of the tidelands) will have a profound effect for good or ill upon the city’s welfare.
“Berkeley should promptly engage a harbor engineer…to prepare a plan which will guide the development and use of this great potential asset.”
In another measure, the committee suggested a program to widen arterial streets to handle more traffic expected in the future, as well as streetcar lines. It noted that construction of apartment buildings could bring more traffic and “where the street is but 60 feet wide and carries streetcar tracks, as on College, Bancroft and north Grove streets, such a change creates an intolerable condition of traffic congestion.”
The committee urged that a solution would be for the city to allow apartment building construction on those streets only if the property owner agreed to build behind a front setback that would allow for future widening of the street. Berkeley, the report noted, owed $1 million in bonded debt with the financial capacity to support $10 million. Adjusting those amounts for inflation, the bond capacity of $10 million would be equal to about $180 million.
Creek car: Early on the morning of March 2, 1925, an automobile “crashed through the fence near the (UC Berkeley) Sather Gate, Telegraph Avenue and Allston Way and landed in the creek.” In that era the Telegraph Avenue business district ran all the way to Sather Gate, where it intersected Allston Way. The northern portion of Sproul Plaza now occupies that site.
Campus police found a man in the back seat. He claimed the driver had run off and that he was just a passenger had who hitched a ride in Oakland and fallen asleep in the seat and had no idea who the driver was. The police apparently didn’t believe him and arrested him.
Sinking street: A ground slip that had dropped Euclid Avenue north of what is now the Berkeley Rose Garden during rainstorms in February 1925 was still moving at the end of the month.
Portions of the street had by then subsided more than 8 feet and were still sinking. The Key System Transit Company had already dumped some 100 cubic yards of rock near the slide to keep its streetcar tracks from dropping. In that era streetcars crossed the ravine of Codornices Creek on a trestle in the area between today’s Codornices Park and today’s Rose Garden site.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.