A big change coming to downtown Berkeley was announced a century ago. Local real estate agent Roy O. Long, a prominent businessman and development proponent, announced that he would build a $1.25 million complex of commercial buildings at the southeast corner of Shattuck Avenue and Addison Street, the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported.
The complex was to include “four modern stores and office buildings,” the Gazette reported. “Three of the structures will be two stories in height, and all will have foundations to carry several other stories when there is a demand for offices to warrant the extra height.”
The development was made possible by the decisions of the State Railroad Commission to let the city open a short stretch of Addison Street south of the site and by the Southern Pacific Railroad to sell the land to Long for $350,000. Constructed in 1926, those buildings still stand today and are designated as city landmarks.
Game traffic: Cal played the University of Washington in Berkeley on Nov. 14, 1925, and “several thousand motor cars passed in and out of Berkeley” with just one accident reported. A car driven by a 15-year-old Oakland boy hit another car near Hillegass Avenue and Webster Street, and the driver and his 14-year-old passenger were injured.
“Police estimated that there were more machines (cars) at Saturday’s game than at the California-Stanford game last year,” the Gazette reported. “It was after dark before the motor parades through the western section of the city were over.”
Free speech: UC Berkeley — which would not become the “home of the Free Speech Movement” for nearly another 40 years — had a controversy over student publications on Nov. 16, 1925, as the campus administration moved to “suppress” the next issue of The Occident, a campus literary magazine, “when it was discovered a certain article would reflect discredit upon the university.”
The student editor of the magazine said that “We have uniformly been opposed to military training, to the censorship of student opinion and to the conversion of the university into an enlarged success school.
“Our campaign against student Babbittry has been so successful that it has aroused the university authorities who take this occasion to suppress the only publication on the California campus which has refused to conform to the glibly manufactured student product.”
“Babbittry” referred to the self-satisfied title character in the 1922 Sinclair Lewis novel “Babbitt.”
Pomology exhibit: “Featuring fruits from all parts of California and displays sent from agricultural colleges throughout the United States, the Sixth Annual Fruit Show of the University of California opened this morning in Higard Hall,” the Gazette reported Nov. 16, 1925.
“More than 130 varieties of apples, pears, persimmons, medlars (sic) and pomegranates are being shown in the department of pomology (the study of fruit and its cultivation),” the Gazette reported. “The more rare subtropical fruits from the state are to be placed on exhibition tomorrow.”
“One of the most important tasks of the College of Agriculture now is to devise and develop new outlets for fruit products”, a UC faculty member said. These included “such unusual things as pear wheat flakes, a new breakfast food, fig coffee and fig nut cereal … .”
Open house: Berkeley residents were invited in November 1925 to an open house to see the new modern telephone exchange at 2116 Bancroft Way.
“The recently completed $450,000 telephone building” housed the newly introduced “AShberry” (sic) exchange. Berkeley by that time had three phone exchanges, “BErkeley,” “THornhill” and “AShberry.”
In that era, phone numbers were preceded by letters for easy recall. Example, if your number was 271-2345, it would often be given as “AShberry 1-2345” with A and S corresponding to 2 and 7 on the rotary dial.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.