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Great Britain’s Queen Victoria – everyone’s favorite pear-shaped monarch and popularizer of “The Royal We” – gave her name to an era most commonly associated with prudishness, rampant imperialism and pretty buildings. 

And while Berkeley finds itself with a rather limited supply of prudishness (obviously) and rampant imperialism (short of a Starbuck’s on every corner), the city is sprinkled with lovely old Victorian buildings that, much as Delbert Grady told Jack Torrance in the movie The Shining, “have always been here.” 

While the common perception of Victorian buildings the city has grown around (or, all too often, over) is of gaudy gothic spires, arched doors and rounded castle-like towers, this is something of an overgeneralization. Between roughly 1850 and 1900, numerous styles of Victorian architecture sprouted up throughout the city, including the tiny, plain “pioneer” style cottages inhabited by many of the city’s first laborers.  

“In the Oceanview (West Berkeley) pioneer settlements, the houses belonged to people who worked relative to the bay or in factories. There are few large Victorians in Oceanview,” says Lesley Emmington of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association on the small New England-esque homes known as “Balloon Frames” because they looked as if a stiff wind would do them in. “The style in West Berkeley was many simple workers’ cottages.” 

While a cluster of pioneer Victorians can still be seen on Delaware Street between Fifth and Sixth streets, a grove of a very different sort of Victorians used to line Bancroft Way – and these, for better or for worse, are no more.  

Many of the city’s most prominent families – all with names such as LeConte or Hillegass now adorning street signs – lived in palatial Victorian homes starting at the present-day site of the International House on Piedmont Avenue and running almost clear down to Shattuck along the University’s Southern border. As the University expanded, these houses, and much of the affluent Southside residential community, were razed. 

While clusters of Victorians do (or did) exist, many more are peppered throughout Berkeley neighborhoods, now often looking somewhat out of place in the shade of large apartment buildings. The seemingly random distributions of these aging beauties are actually the physical ramifications of 150 years of Berkeley development. Some of the old Victorians now amidst densely packed neighborhoods began their lives as isolated farmhouses back in the days when Berkeley was mostly farms and orchards. As the farms began to give way to building expansion, a new class of Victorians popped up to house wealthy businessmen and their families, attracted to a suburb that advertised itself as “beautiful Berkeley, a city of homes and gardens and gracious living.” 

While large-scale farms were not a feature of this “gracious living,” most of the Victorian homes in this exclusive suburb sat on luxuriously large tracts of land, and featured exotic gardens, orchards, and perhaps a barn with livestock (runaway cows seem to have been more of a pressing concern than stray dogs for the Berkeley pound keepers of the Victorian era). 

While the Bay Area and East Bay in particular house a number of well-known Victorian houses, Berkeley’s small population during the Victorian era (a scant 12,000-odd souls in 1895) and the rampant expansion in the early-to-mid part of the 20th century mean the city never really had too many Victorians to start with, and most of them are long gone. 

Being that no building records exist prior to 1909 (permits were not required back then), landmarking the city’s remaining Victorians becomes a truly arduous task, requiring extensive research of assessor’s records, directories, maps and old newspapers. 

“The landmarking process is stacked in the favor of A. the owner of a building and; B. well-to-do people landmarking the buildings of the formerly well-to do,” says J. Michael Edwards who, along with his wife Pat, is attempting to landmark a 105-year-old Victorian in his neighborhood on 2418 California St. “While some development is obviously necessary and inevitable, you don’t want to take away the character of the neighborhood. That house gives the neighborhood its character.” 

The Edwards have spent months culling through city directories, tax assessment rolls and century-old issues of the Berkeley Gazette and Berkeley Daily Advocate to gather enough information about “The Hunter House,” to fill out a landmark application. The couple will make their case before the landmark commission on Monday. 

“It’s a labor of love,” says Pat Edwards. “We’ve lived with this building for 27 years. Everyone in the neighborhood loves this building. Everyone who walks past it loves this building.” 

The Edwardses argue that Berkeley’s West-Central “Flatlands” are historically unappreciated, and the Hunter House on its large plot of land is one of the few Victorian structures in the city that still appears much as it was intended to a century ago. 

“That house is a window to the past,” adds J. Michael Edwards, “and I intend to tell the commission on Monday that it’s a window that we shouldn’t intend to close.”