Berkeley went to the polls on May 5, 1925, to decide several issues, including bonds for new parks, a direct tax for the library, whether to build a new Hillside School and which City Council and school board members to elect.
The results were mixed. Councilmember Thomas Caldecott won the most votes, nearly 10,000 out of about 12,500 ballots cast, with John M. Atthowe, Walter Mork and Fred C. Kroeber securing the other seats. School director Lester Hink, who had been forced into a special election by a recall petition after a school finance scandal, was able to retain his seat on the school board, to which Mrs. Vera Bright also won a full-term seat.
The “Municipal League” candidates generally prevailed in the low-turnout election, with only about one third of Berkeley’s registered electorate voting. The advisory measure on expanding the central library passed, empowering the City Council to pursue that project.
In the contest to approve bonds, the measure to buy land for new parks and playgrounds narrowly failed to win a majority, as did the measure for park improvements. The proposition to fund storm sewers did much better, winning a majority, but still fell short of the two-thirds vote needed.
The Berkeley Daily Gazette reported that “the three municipal bond propositions were snowed under at the polls … despite a strenuous campaign by a well organized committee.”
“It was West Berkeley and South Berkeley which registered the biggest vote against parks and playgrounds, aided by several of the Claremont precincts,” according to the Gazette story. “Such a protest coming from the southerly and westerly sections where it was proposed to install most of the parks and playgrounds and where the people feel keenly the need of them would seem to indicate conclusively that local taxpayers are for a ‘pay-as-you-go policy.’ ”
D.E. Wiseman, who chaired the campaign committee for the park bonds, gave a lengthy statement to the paper which included this: “Every man, woman and child in Berkeley would add years of life and great measures of health and happiness if they even went so far as to acquire a potion of every 10th block and equip them with tennis courts for the grown-ups and swings, etc. for the children.
“Berkeley will someday have an adequate park and playground system. We will pay more for it then than if we had bought today.”
Charles Keeler, who had also spearheaded the campaign, said, “We need a well informed public on matters of finance and of city building, and we must carry on with the idea that Berkeley cannot ultimately fail to secure those necessities of a modern city which are universally recognized as making for sound city development.”
They were right. If Berkeley voters had approved those bond measures in 1925, the city would have been able to buy large areas of undeveloped land for future parks and playgrounds. There would be an expansive four-block square park today between Shattuck Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way (called Grove Street until 1983) bordered by Carleton and Ward streets to the respective north and south.
A block square park would have been built in the Le Conte neighborhood to the east at Oregon and Telegraph; other new and expanded parks would have been created in North and West Berkeley; and the civic center with its central park would have come into being at least 15 years earlier.
Instead, population growth continued rapidly in the 1920s and potential park land was developed. It would not be until the late 1950s that the city would once again begin a sustained attempt to develop new parks, at much greater cost.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.