Alameda County CA Archives History - Books .....Berkeley Today 1941
************************************************
Copyright.  All rights reserved.
http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm
http://www.usgwarchives.net/ca/cafiles.htm
************************************************

File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com February 16, 2007, 1:50 pm

Book Title: Berkeley The First Seventy-Five Years

Berkeley Today

STAND ON A JUMBLED MASS of rock that scars a grassy cliff in the Berkeley hills,
high above the level of the sea: across the blue carpet of the Bay, San
Francisco sprawls over its hills in geometric pattern. To the right, on the
Marin shore, wisps of mist like a half-lifted veil shroud the venerable head of
Tamalpais. Between the dark silhouettes of the two peninsulas the carpet of
water weaves through a narrow cleft under the Golden Gate Bridge, fragile as a
spider web in the distance.

  Dark props for the pageant of sea-borne commerce are Alcatraz and Angel
Islands, crouching on the water like drowsy marine monsters. Closer in lie Yerba
Buena Island, a rocky stanchion for the silver festoons of the Oakland-San
Francisco Bay Bridge, and man-made Treasure Island.

  From the water's edge across the wide flat plain that rims the near shore of
the Bay, up the rounded, dappled hills and over the ridges climbs the city of
Berkeley, splashed with color like a carelessly flung tapestry of buff, gold,
crimson, green, and gray. Tree-lined streets serpentine the canyons and outline
the contours of the hillsides. Houses face the Bay or peep between the foliage
and over one another's shoulders at the rising ranges.

  There is small resemblance in this city of modern homes and busy factories,
seat of the world's largest university, to the oak- and willow-dotted plain that
met the eyes of Pedro Fages, Father Juan Crespi, and their leather-jacketed
Spanish soldiers one hundred and sixty-nine years ago. It is far different, too,
from the sprawling ranch that fed the fat cattle of Don Jose Domingo Peralta in
the 1840's.

  Since 1860, when a little group of scholars dedicated the V-shaped mesa and
the canyon opposite the "great mouth of the Bay of San Francisco" as the site of
the College of California, the village, whose main nucleus was the campus, has
spread in widening circles.

  An early writer has said that Berkeley was "made into a compact town, much on
the principal used to turf the . . . sand dunes of . . . San Francisco!"
Originally it was two communities—Ocean View, whose work and interests lay west
of the "county road" and along the water front, and the Berkeley of the student
and his teacher, of which the university was the hub. Later, along the routes of
the steam trains from San Francisco and the "bobtail" horse cars from Oakland,
houses and stores grouped themselves in friendly proximity to the stations:
Lorin (South Berkeley), Dwight Way and Shattuck, Berkeley Station, Berryman's.
New residential subdivisions were opened, and the tracks moved out to meet them:
Northbrae, Thousand Oaks, Claremont. Neighborhood shopping centers grew up at
busy intersections: College Avenue and Ashby, Vine Street and Shattuck,
Sacramento and Ashby. These small villages merged with the passing of the years,
yet each clung to its own identity, showing the contrasting facets that are
still characteristic of the city.

  For decades upper Berkeley was a somnolent college town, where faculty and
student body pursued the academic life in a village of country roads and open
fields, and weekly practice for the church choir was the most exciting diversion
for undergraduates. But at the turn of the century the university began
expanding as if under forced growth into the tremendous modern educational plant
which it is today, equipped with libraries, laboratories, classroom buildings,
two large stadia for athletic events and separate men's and women's gymnasia to
serve the largest student body in the world. Now student lodgings—old, rambling,
ivy-covered houses or trim, stuccoed apartment buildings—cluster around the
campus. Sweatered youths and flat-heeled, bare-legged girls lounge on lawns or
hurry about their academic duties.

  North of the campus a rock with cylindrical holes in which Indian women
crushed acorns into meal is a silent reminder of a long-vanished aboriginal
population. Today red-tiled villas hug the terraced hillsides around it.
Residential tracts south and northwest of the university have been settled by
thousands of commuters who staff San Francisco offices. Easy transportation from
Berkeley's more urban neighbors, articulate pioneer realtors, who advertised the
healthfulness of the "eucalyptus . . . sometimes called fever trees" set out on
its hill slopes, and the natural beauty of the site, encouraged the town's
growth as a residential center. Families of wealth and leisure were attracted to
the sheltered city, and today their hillside homes and gardens, as modern as
America yet as Old World as Amalfi, give authenticity to their civic boast, "a
city of beautiful homes!" More modest cottages sweep across the sloping plain,
along streets bordered with flowering peach, plum, and cherry trees, toward the
Bay, where industrial plants fringe the water front.

  Famous for its homes and schools, Berkeley is not so widely appreciated as a
center of industrial production. But factories were attracted to West Berkeley
by the level land and good transportation, until in 1940 the city, seventh in
population in the State, was also seventh in the value of its manufactured
goods. Into its processing plants come the products of Pacific-bordering
lands—cocoanut oil, guano, spices—and from its machine shops and foundries,
marine engines, pumps and gears, delicate instruments and appliances of many
kinds are shipped to all parts of the world.

  City of learning, city of industry, city of homes—Berkeley is all three.
During the seventy-five years which have passed since its founders christened
this far-western namesake of George Berkeley, gentle Bishop of Cloyne, the three
Berkeleys grew up apart. Today they come together in a modern city which looks
back on its first three-quarters of a century as only the beginning of its story.


Additional Comments:
Extracted from:

BERKELEY
THE FIRST SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS

COMPILED BY WORKERS OF THE WRITERS' PROGRAM OF THE WORK PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION
IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA 

CO-SPONSORS: 
CITY OF BERKELEY  
BERKELEY FESTIVAL ASSOCIATION 

PUBLISHED BY THE GILLICK PRESS -BERKELEY- CALIFORNIA MCMXLI



File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ca/alameda/history/1941/berkeley/berkeley249gms.txt

This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/cafiles/

File size: 6.7 Kb