A century ago, on June 11, 1924, the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce endorsed an effort to create a civic center for Berkeley.
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The idea went back to 1915, when city planning consultant Werner Hegemann had proposed that the square block bordered by today’s Milvia and Center streets, Allston Way and Martin Luther King Jr. Way (then known as Grove Street) be acquired by the city as the centerpiece of a civic district.
In 1921 the City Council had put a bond issue on the ballot to acquire some of the land for a war memorial site, but the measure “lost by a narrow margin, largely owing to the lightness of the vote and the reluctance of some citizens to vote bonds for any purposes except schools.”
The Berkeley Daily Gazette reported in 1924 that the president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce said, “no time should be lost in securing this piece of ground for a park with the ultimate plan of surrounding it with public buildings.”
“He points out that an auditorium might be built on the Allston Way block now occupied in part by the old high school,” the Gazette reported. “Such an auditorium, he says, has already been proposed for the joint use of the high school and the city at large.”
The block acquisition would later be finished, but not until the late 1930s. The proposed auditorium would eventually be built as the Berkeley Community Theater, but for many years the Berkeley Unified School District has operated it essentially as a school auditorium, not a broader community resource.
In our own day, the city is looking for funds to renovate and restore the Veterans Memorial Building and the Maudelle Shirek Building (Berkeley’s old City Hall) for continued permanent use. So the issue of Berkeley having a permanent, fully functional civic center has been around for well more than a century and remains unresolved.
End of an era: A piece of local history came to an end last week with the permanent closure of Golden Gate Fields. Horse racing began there on Feb. 1, 1941, but it paused during World War II, when the property was used as a depot for landing ship transports.
The last races were held this past Sunday, and the property’s future is unresolved. Technically, most of Golden Gate Fields is in Albany, including the racetrack itself, but part of the larger property is south of the Albany border in Berkeley.
Race discussion: Last week I noted that in 1924 that a study of Berkeley’s race issues had begun. On June 11, 1924, the Gazette carried a note about a separate discussion among “members of the Berkeley Realty Board” on the topic.
“The race problem was discussed particularly in its reference to the growing colored population in the city,” the Gazette reported. “It was agreed that segregation appeared the only solution but decision was postponed until C.C. Emslie and Fred Peake, Berkeley’s delegates to the National Real Estate Association convention in Washington, D.C., return.”
Street widening: On June 13, 1924, Berkeley’s Planning Commission heard a proposal to require setbacks for development along Ashby Avenue and Grove Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Way, as mentioned above) to provide land for future widening of those thoroughfares.
This apparently never came to pass, since MLK Way north of Hearst Avenue remains a narrow, two-lane, street.
National news: On June 12, 1924, Republicans meeting in Cleveland on the first ballot renominated incumbent Calvin Coolidge as their presidential candidate.
That same day, an explosion in a gun turret of a battleship docked in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles killed 48 sailors and wounded about another dozen.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.