Berkeley, a Look Back: Officials consider building height limits in 1926

“Although towering buildings may advertise to the world the wealth and industry of a city, they also present health and safety menaces and are not conducive to the ‘City Beautiful’ idea, according to members of the City Planning Commission” the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported a century ago on Feb. 20, 1926.

The commission was discussing a limit on building height in Berkeley.

“Whether permits should be granted for any more 12-story buildings was discussed, and it seemed to be the general consensus of opinion that 10-story structures are large enough at least for the present,” the paper continued.

A height limitation ordinance was considered likely to go before the City Council in about two weeks.

Auto ferry: A “throng” of Berkeley people attended the state Railroad Commission hearing on Feb. 18, 1926, to urge the commission to reconsider its decision to prohibit a Berkeley auto ferry to San Francisco from the base of University Avenue. No immediate decision was forthcoming.

Industrial zone: A small note in the Feb. 17, 1926, Gazette foreshadowed one of the big zoning controversies of early-20th-century Berkeley.

The Planning Commission was going to consider the creation of a zone west of San Pablo Avenue “set aside strictly for manufacturing.” This spoke to the avid desire of many Berkeley business owners and civic promoters who saw dollar signs in the potential for large factory investment near the waterfront.

One of the problems with this plan, though, was that West Berkeley was also populated by hundreds of homes and thousands of residents, many of them working-class and immigrant. The article noted that “West Berkeley homeowners, of course, will be taken fully into consideration,” but that bland assurance would not mollify people facing long-term displacement from their homes and the loss of entire neighborhoods.

Lights out: The city of Berkeley was planning to “do away with the last of Berkeley’s gas (street) lights,” the Gazette reported Feb. 23, 1926. Apparently there were eight of these remaining on Allston Way between Shattuck Avenue and today’s Martin Luther King Jr. Way (formerly Grove Street until 1983).

Chinese studies: UC Berkeley’s teaching and research staff was almost entirely White in the early 1920s, but there were exceptions. On Feb. 17, 1926, the Gazette noted that Dr. Nu Wing Mah was teaching about “problems of China and the Far East” in Cal’s political science department and was “probably the only Chinese in the United States to hold a similar position.”

Having started teaching at UC Berkeley in 1922, he told a reporter “the aim of these courses is to give an understanding of the facts and not the theories that underlie the differences in the Oriental and Occidental attitudes. I find American students intensely interested in these problems.”

Mah had earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois and a masters and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California.

Veterans hall: On Feb. 17, 1926, the United Veterans Council decided to send representatives to Alameda County’s Board of Supervisors to assure them that Berkeley was ready to find a city site for a veterans memorial.

Local deaths: Mrs. Elizabeth Brewster Scribner, who had served as a nurse in the Civil War, died Feb. 17, 1926, in her daughter’s home at 2818 Shasta Road in Berkeley.

On Feb. 23, 1926, Mrs. Alan E. Hemme, “the first white child born of white parents in San Francisco and the first white baby baptized in the Mission Dolores passed away at the home of her daughter … 1118 Colusa Avenue.” Mrs. Hemme’s parents were English and French, and the paper described them as among the Bay Area’s “most prominent of the pioneers.”

Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.