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Berkeley Observed 

Looking back, seeing ahead 

The area just north of the university campus is mostly residential and was initially subdivided in the 1880s by a man named Daley, who called his subdivision Daley’s Scenic Park.  

Daley laid out the streets in a regular grid pattern.  

The steeper hilly area north of Cedar Street was developed after the introduction of the electric streetcar line along Euclid Avenue in 1903 and the streets were graded along the contours of the hills.  

Cedar Street, the northern boundary of Daley’s Scenic Park, and Eunice Street, at the north edge of Codornices Canyon, were graded in the late 19th century and are the last streets, except for Marin Avenue, that were cut straight up the hillside. 

During the first quarter of the 20th century houses, schools, churches and clubhouses in this area were predominantly built in a rustic natural style advocated by the neighborhood Hillside Club.  

The club’s activities included a campaign to retain the natural beauty of the hills by promoting “artistic homes that appear to have grown out of the hillside and to be part of it.”  

The unique quality of this neighborhood was described by The San Francisco Chronicle in 1904: “Wander if you will on the Berkeley slopes north of the University of California campus to have your faith in human kind renewed.  

Wander up Ridge Road until you come to the shingle and clinker brick houses set in the midst of gardens, a lesson in peaceful, harmonious, artistic and natural living, an architectural picture rarely attained, (where) 90 percent of the houses are built in brown shingle.”  

By 1920 the hills north of the university were covered with homes built in this distinctive architectural idiom.  

The essence of what Berkeley signifies in the history of American residential architecture was developed and fully expressed in this small neighborhood between 1892 and 1923.  

But tragedy struck on the hot, dry, windy afternoon of Sept. 17, 1923 when a raging wildfire swept through this neighborhood.  

The fire started in Wildcat Canyon and swept over the hills. The number of buildings destroyed was somewhere between 500 and 600; reports vary.  

Like the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire, the 1923 Berkeley fire changed an entire neighborhood; where brown shingle houses once stood, stucco-sided buildings with tile roofs now stand. Walking up Virginia Street from Euclid Avenue, the edges of the fire line can still be easily determined: brown shingle houses are pre-fire and stucco-sided ones are post fire.  

Susan Cerny authors this column in conjunction with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association