Oakland's Ghosts

An urban historical look at the architecture in Oakland, CA.

[brandongetty]

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

(rhetorical question about List of Sources) You tellin' me all that knowledge is from Mark Wilson? How about confessing to all the primary research you've done? And the OHR and OCHS? OCHS does appreciate the "permanent collection" citation. Great job!

Very perceptive rhetorical question betmarv. The list of sources is precisely the reason I had not linked you to this website earlier. I am going to work much more on the list of sources and the rest of this thing in 2015! Also, thanks!

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

942 42nd Street

Year: 1921

Owner: Leroy, Eugene

Architect: A.W. Smith

A.W. Smith(1864-1933) was a prolific East Bay architect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He grew up in Oakland and attended Oakland High School while working as a carpenter with his father. While he is not as well-known as a Julia Morgan or Bernard Maybeck, Smith designed 400 structures in Oakland alone and helped to define the region's architectural style. 

This Neoclassic Rowhouse situated on a lush lot in the Longfellow neighborhood near the Emeryville border is a strange design for the year it was built. Architectural tastes at the time were leaning heavily towards the California Bungalow style, but Smith looks back here, near the end of his career, to the style he was known for over a decade earlier.

Eugene Leroy was a switch man for the Oakland Terminal Railroad Company that operated the A, B, and C lines of the Key System.

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

Black Panther Central Headquarters

1046-48 Peralta Street

Owner: Richard Woelffel

Architect: John Ziegenbein

Year: 1876

This italianate home is in the Oakland Point district, more commonly known as The Lower Bottoms, in West Oakland. The earliest known owner of the property is Richard Woelffel. Woelffel was a bookkeeper for Van Winkle & Davenport, an iron, steel, and hardware manufacturer located on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.

Almost one hundred years after the home was built, it was bought by the Black Panther Party. It served as the Central Headquarters of the party for around three years starting in 1970. You can get a sense of the seriousness of the establishment from this description of the security system by former Black Panther newspaper employee Billy X Jennings:

If I were to give you a short tour, it would go like this. We had a small fence around the front yard of the office that looked like all the others on the block. Once you opened the gate and walked those 18 ft to the front door, you would be greeted by me or whoever was on security, asked whom you wanted to see or the nature of your business. The front door was heavily fortified with steel plates and painted over in black so not to be noticed. Once inside, you would be asked to be seated until the person you wanted came out. Most likely it would be in the Day room which was right by the front door. The Day room was the security outpost and the person on security sat in the Day room and watched the front of the house. From the Day room windows, you could look up and down Peralta St. for a few blocks, as well as seeing down 12th Street. The person on security was armed. I liked to pack a concealed 9mm, which had 15 shots in case of an attack by police or, after 1971, former members who sided with Eldridge after the split. The next office down the hall was the O.D.'s office. All phone calls from the over 40 offices of the BPP came through there as well as all calls for the Central HQ's. A phone was in this office as well as in the Day Room, so if you called the BPP from anywhere in the world I or whoever was on duty would answer the phone, 'Central Headquarters of the Black Panther Party, may I help you.'

The small fence has since been replaced with a taller one and the house is now green with white trim instead of the completely white facade in this photo.

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

982 18th Street Owner: Andrew Young Year: 1876-77 The original owner of this Italianate style home in West Oakland's Oak Center neighborhood was Andrew Young. Young had a restaurant in San Francisco called "The Arcade" with his business partner Macauley. At the time, this neighborhood in West Oakland was an ideal suburban location for commuters to San Francisco because of its proximity to the transbay ferries. Recently, there has been an influx of new residents to this and other southern areas of West Oakland because of its proximity to the last BART stop out of Oakland before going under the water and into the city. Later on, from 1907-1943, the home was owned and lived in by Hermann Sadler. Sadler is listed as a salesman and rancher at different times in his life. He also managed the Hawthorne Dwellings, an apartment complex located at 1406 Euclid Ave in Berkeley. Hermann moved to Oakland soon after the earthquake in 1906 from his home on Van Ness Ave in San Francisco, that was likely destroyed. Sadler was involved in a catastrophic car crash in 1910. While driving with his mother, another man, and Florence Pardee, daughter of Dr. George C. Pardee the former governor of California and owner of the famous Pardee Mansion in Oakland, in a hilly area around Marin County's Corte Madera he lost control of the vehicle and they went over an embankment. All four of the passengers were pinned under the vehicle and Miss Pardee was pronounced dead on the scene. To add to the scandal, Sadler's mother alluded to a secret engagement between the two, that Hermann denied when interviewed for an article in the San Francisco Call. The accident, according to Mrs. Sadler, could have been avoided if only she had urged Miss Pardee to sit in the front seat next to Hermann. Allegedly, Pardee ditracted the driver while on a particularly curvy road. Hermann claimed to have been traveling very slowly, "between six and eight miles an hour."

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

Phoenix Lofts 737 2nd St Owner: William Russell Year: 1901 Phoenix Iron Works was founded in 1901 by William Russell. They started out making engine parts and cast-iron bases for skyscrapers in San Francisco. In 1906, William was watching San Francisco burn, days after the earthquake, from the roof of his foundry at the edge of the bay when he fell through a hole in the roof. He died soon after. His son, Samuel Russell, then took over the business, at the age of eighteen, and expanded its influence in the Bay Area. When Samuel died in 1966, his son, aptly named Weldon, took over the family business. He remains the owner of Pheonix Iron Works to this day. In the late sixties, the final hurrah of America's manufacturing base, Phoenix employed 125 people. Since then, the workforce has whittled down as the times required. In 1968, Russell had to move his foundry from the giant plot his grandfather built up(pictured), that once occupied four city blocks, to a site in West Oakland by way of an eminent domain claim. He was then evicted from that property and now has a small office building near the 5th Avenue Marina. Like many of the former factories and warehouses in the Jack London Square neighborhood, the original foundry was converted into condominiums. You can see the outline of the original building painted on the wall. The Phoenix Lofts, and others like it, are representative of the loss in Oakland and nationally of middle-class blue-collar jobs. This void left an employment gap that continues to effect Oakland in innumerable ways.

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

4195 Shafter Ave

Owner: William J. Anderfuren

Builder: Carl C. Lassen

Year: 1912

This Neoclassic Rowhouse was built by Lassen for speculation. It was soon bought up by Anderfuren, who moved there with his family from a residence at 666 51st st(destroyed during the construction of Hwy 24). Anderfuren was the manager of pattern making companies under many different names starting in San Francisco and moving over to Oakland after his San Francisco workshop was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Pattern making is the design and manufacture of sheet metal for things such as ship and airplane building. Empire Pattern Works, one of his companies with partner Chester Brown, was located a 363 3rd st in what is now Jack London Square and specialized in airplane patterns.

William J. and his wife Anna came from England to San Francisco in the 1880s. In 1886 William, a technical minded fellow, filed a patent for an improvement on portable house design. This idea evidently never caught on as his career began and ended in pattern making. His San Francisco workshop of the late 1880s was at 110 Beale st in what is now the center of the tech industry. The Anderfuren's San Francisco residence a the time was 320 Bartlett st, which still stands. William died in 1938 and his wife Anna followed in the early 40s.

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

1235 East 15th St Owner: William Bamford Year: 1860-69 Dr. William Bamford(1820-1881) was a prominent physician. After practicing in many cities around Northern California he finally settled in the town of Brooklyn just east of Oakland. Soon after he built his home, Brooklyn voters approved annexation of their city to Oakland(1872). Bamford is best known for being the personal physician, at least for a short time, to Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson while Stevenson went ill during a trip to the Bay Area. Stevenson was laid up in the Tubbs Hotel, a giant structure(destroyed by fire in 1893) only a few blocks away from Dr. Bamford in Brooklyn. The current owners(pictured in vehicle), who have lived there for more than twenty years, had no idea about the age of their residence, and justifiably so. This rare example of an unaltered Gothic-Revival cottage is more reminiscent, to an untrained eye, of a WWII tract home than a 150-year-old piece of architectural history.

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

463 44th St

Builder: R.J. Pavert

Year: 1907

463,465, and 467 44th Street were developed by R.F. Pavert. Pavert worked in real estate and developed the three houses to be sold in the developing Temescal district, which was recently annexed to Oakland(1897). It is unknown who the first owners of the house were after Pavert. It was the residence of Katherine Kelly, a UCB student, for a time in the 1910s, but the primary owner was the Cappello family.

Antonio and Angelina Cappello came to California from the Veneto region of Italy, think Venice suburbs. The Veneto region experienced an economic downturn around the turn of the twentieth century and many Venetians emigrated. The Cappello's settled in Oakland's Little Italy in Temescal. Soon after they arrived their son Henry was born. Antonio Cappello was a boilermaker, cement worker and laborer. At one point he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

Their son, Henry Cappello, studied economics at UC Berkeley and then joined the Navy and served on the USS Tunney in the pacific during WWII. After twenty years in the service he retired and spent the rest of his working life as a civil atorney. Henry died in 2010 at age 90 in Naples, Florida.

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

4214 West St

Owner and Builder: Jeremiah Cronin

Year: 1908

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

1920 Market St.

Owner: John Worthington

Year: 1907

[oaklandsghosts-blog]

604 East 17th St.

Owner: Asa White

Year: 1878

Asa White owned a local lumber company. The property is bordered by one of the most well-preserved cast iron railings in the city.

Source: Wilson

Asa White sold the property in 1922 and retired to a ranch in Los Gatos. The interior of the house was divided up in 1944 for officers' housing during WWII. The White Brothers Lumber Company is still in operation today, 130 years after its founding, under the ownership of the fourth generation of White's.