Push Back, or Have We Lost Enough?
by RCPC Board
This is the second article in a series focusing on RCPC history.
When the Grove-Shafter freeway opened in 1970, Rockridge neighbors began to organize to restore and revitalize the neighborhood they saw as “devastated” by six long years of construction disruption. What was it that pushed Rockridge neighbors to organize and formulate new plans for the neighborhood in the early ’70s? For that, we must examine how the freeway came to Rockridge and go back in time more than a few decades to see what was lost.
Historian William Rorabaugh, in his book Berkeley at War, describes a Berkeley radically different from the Berkeley we know today. Conservative and professional elites ran the city. As an example, Berkeley voters rejected every single bond measure aimed at funding schools except one between 1924 and 1959, and it wasn’t until the mid-’60s that the combined effects of school desegregation, campus unrest, and rising radicalization caused them to move out and iberals to begin moving in.
Those Berkeley conservatives had political clout on the state level. While they were very pleased when Ashby Avenue was designated a part of the State highway system in 1935, they did not welcome California Department of Transportation plans to build a freeway from the Caldecott Tunnel to the Bay, incorporating Ashby Avenue, to accommodate the growing Contra Costa commuter traffic to San Francisco. Berkeley’s conservative elites were well-organized, and pushed back on those early plans, forcing relocation of the freeway to the working-class neighborhoods of the North Oakland, Temescal, and West Oakland flatlands. Ashby Avenue is still a designated part of the State highway system, now numbered CA-13.
Before the Grove-Shafter Freeway was built, most people knew the neighborhood as the Chimes District, a name popularized by the opening of a very fancy movie theater in 1917 that featured a full set of chimes. It stood about where the Market Hall is today. By the 1920s, College Avenue was known as the Chimes district, and many businesses carried the name. By the 1950s and 60s, people thought the name came from the fact that the area was so quiet that the carillon bells at UC Berkeley’s Sather Tower could be heard chiming the hour and playing the noon concert.
The neighborhood boasted a robust commercial district that over time featured multiple groceries, two movie theaters, two bowling alleys, a skating rink, two car dealerships, three gas stations, florists, children’s and adult’s clothing stores, bakeries, French
laundries, dry cleaners, pharmacies, churches, banks, a community hall and later, eating establishments.
On the upper floors of most buildings were commuter-oriented apartments, and two buildings had doctors and dentists upstairs (look up at Harwood and College to see the architectural evidence), plus one of the first elevators in a commercial building in Oakland. The merchants association sponsored an annual weekend Arts & Crafts Fair.
One of the finest features, one enjoyed by generations of children and adults alike, was a beautiful creek running through Temescal Canyon that functioned as a large neighborhood park. Temescal Creek ran almost fully open from the dam at Lake Temescal to below College Avenue on Oak Grove. It was an important influence on and a frequent subject of a group of Plein-air painters, who in 1917, became known as The Society of Six. As William Gerdts wrote in his book American Impressionism, “The Oakland Six may constitute the most important modernist development that occurred in this country during the 1920s.” Their use of color, the land, and light had a great influence on postwar Northern California modern painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. The creek now runs almost totally in culverts under the freeway in Rockridge, with a few open sections on Miles above the firehouse.
Six years of freeway and BART construction brought a new reality. Key shops and services were razed, including the Bank of America. Thousands of neighbors were displaced as hundreds of dwelling units were taken by eminent domain. The business district was bisected and left with multiple empty lots, previously used for freeway construction yards.
Only roughly 50 percent of the original businesses were still open, and many storefronts were boarded up. Prominent spots that were vacant included the corners at Harwood and College (currently the Golden Squirrel building) and Chabot and College (Beer Baron), as well as the lot that the Market Hall now occupies. The empty lot at Harwood became the focal point for the neighborhood pushback.
The next article will trace the origins of community organizing in Rockridge.
