Charles Fleming - Secret Stairs: East Bay: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Berkeley and Oakland (Revised September 2020)

A WALKING GUIDE
TO THE
HISTORIC STAIRCASES
OF BERKELEY AND OAKLAND

Copyright 2011 by Charles Fleming
Updated September 2020

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part or in any form or format without the written permission of the publisher.

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ISBN-13 978-1-59580-063-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fleming, Charles.
Secret stairs: East Bay : a walking guide to the historic staircases of Berkeley and Oakland / by Charles Fleming.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59580-063-3

1. Berkeley (Calif.)Guidebooks. 2. Oakland (Calif.)Guidebooks.

3. StaircasesCaliforniaBerkeleyGuidebooks. 4. StaircasesCalifornia

OaklandGuidebooks. 5. Historic sitesCaliforniaBerkeleyGuidebooks.

6. Historic sitesCaliforniaOaklandGuidebooks. 7. WalkingCalifornia

BerkeleyGuidebooks. 8. WalkingCaliforniaOaklandGuidebooks.

9. Berkeley (Calif.)Buildings, structures, etc.Guidebooks. 10. Oakland

(Calif.)Buildings, structures, etc.Guidebooks. I. Title.

F869.B5F55 2011

917.946704dc22

2011012117

Cover and interior design and production by Future Studio
Cover illustration and maps by Bryan Duddles
Photographs by Rita Harowitz

T he hills that rise above the communities of Berkeley and Oakland were developed in the early years of the 20th century. Accelerated by the terrible San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, when many homeowners fled their city to rebuild their homes and lives in the East Bay, the population of Berkeley tripled between 1900 and 1910. In the first three months after the earthquake, 30 new factories went up in Berkeley, and as many as 200,000 San Franciscans decamped for Oakland, almost quadrupling that citys population rolls.

Berkeley and Oakland were already connected to San Francisco, and to each other, by a rudimentary street car line. Inaugurated in 1903, the Key System ran electric traction trolley cars from Berkeley through Claremont, Piedmont, and Oakland, then across the bayat first using a ferry, and later the lower half of the Bay Bridgeto San Franciscos Ferry Building. (The BerkeleyOakland loop was the head of the key, the bridge its shaft, and the ferry building its teeth.) After 1906, to meet new demand, civic planners and real estate developers began building homes off the flatlands and into the hills, and extending the trolley lines up the canyons to serve them.

And in order to get the citizens up and down the hills from their new homes to those street cars, the developers built staircases.

More than a hundred years later, the street cars are gone. People have overcome their fear of San Francisco earthquakes, and made that city a greater metropolis than ever. The populations of Berkeley and Oakland and their surrounding East Bay neighbors have stopped growing. But the staircases remain, like forgotten pathways into history.

This book is intended as a guide to those pathways and that history. It is part travel book, part local color, and part exercise. The staircases rise out of the busier flatlands into the quieter hills, often going places where cars and their drivers cant go. Used as hiking trails, they offer the walker an off-the-beaten-track journey into the back roads, backyard East Bay, through neighborhoods that even longtime residents may not have explored. Because these neighborhoods are removed and somewhat remote, they have not been altered as much as their flatland counterparts. The old homes remain, often maintained in their original condition. The hills are alive with hundred-year-old houses designed by well-known local architects like John Galen Howard, Henry Higby Gutterson, Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Leola Hall, and others.

CLAREMONT HOTEL, THE GRAND DAME OF THE EAST BAY HILLS.

The design of the walks in this book is inspired by the country pub walk books I first encountered in England and Ireland. Hyper-localized, set in little corners of County Kerry or West Kent, each slim volume contained a handful of hikes that began and ended with a drink or a meal at a quiet roadside inn, separated by a long perambulation through the woods and fields. For a foreign visitor, each one felt a little like a wild goose chase, or a snipe huntcross the stile, look for a kissing gate, mind the fingerpost, and enter the metalled tarmac path leading to the lychgate. Every outing was an exercise in exercise and vocabulary, and returning safe and on time to the starting point was a real triumph.

The walks here are designed similarly, but without the linguistic challenges. Each walk describes a circular loop, beginning and ending at a caf or public park, using the public stairways and walkways, linked together by lengths of public roadway, as its trails. Most take about an hour, though some are shorter or longer. Each is rated for difficultyfive for the most rigorous, one for the most casualand has a stair count indicating the number of actual staircase steps, and a distance figure indicating the total length of the walk. Each contains side notes identifying the architects who built the homes along the way, the developers who built the neighborhood, the famous event or personage connected to the names of the streets, and the marvels visible from the staircases. Thats because almost every walk in the book includes, by geographic necessity, massive views: The staircases all rise in the East Bay hills, which rise from the plains, which rise from the bay. (Indeed, the original name of the original settlement that became Berkeley was Ocean View.) From several points on several staircases on almost every walk in this book there are vistas of the San Francisco Bay, the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Port of Oakland, Alcatraz and Angel Island, Mount Tamalpais, Point Richmond, and more.