Features

Berkeley City Club Celebrates 75th Anniversary By STEVEN FINACOM

Special to the Planet
Friday January 07, 2005

The Berkeley City Club, one of Berkeley’s great historic, architectural, and cultural edifices, opens its doors this month for a public event. 

The six-story “Little Castle” on Durant Avenue east of Ellsworth was designed by famed architect Julia Morgan. The Jan. 20, event falls on the anniversary of Morgan’s birthday and during the 75th year since the building itself opened. 

“This club building carries the ambitions and the desires of thousands of Berkeley women,” wrote Mrs. Olga Beebe of the Business and Professional Women’s Club when the structure opened in 1930. “It will afford them the opportunity of enlarged social contacts, recreation of all kinds, including play, work and study, at times and in the ways to suit the varying needs of its members.”  

Many Berkeley residents probably recognize the landmark building on the outside, but have never been inside. 

From entrance hall to indoor swimming pool, the extensive and ornate interior of the landmark Durant Avenue building will be on display during the Jan. 20 event.  

The building includes two floors of event spaces—from cozy lounges to a large auditorium—and four floors of guest rooms and suites. It features room after richly furnished room, grand halls, garden courts, and an indoor swimming pool with spectator gallery.  

A cloister borders a lushly planted courtyard, and there are several outdoor terraces. Original or period-appropriate furnishings ornament the building. 

Julia Morgan carefully blended Mediterranean, Romanesque, Moorish, Renaissance, and Gothic architectural features in the $500,000 structure. Elaborately tiled hallways, graceful staircases, groined cloisters, leaded windows, ornate fireplaces, and even the original Club china for the dining room all reflect her expert hand. 

“Four thousand women opened this place,” says Mary Breunig, event organizer and head of the Landmark Heritage Foundation, one of the event sponsors along with the City Club itself and the Alameda County Historical Society. “It’s such a wonderful story.” 

The event is $15 per person in advance ($25 at the door), and is open to any interested member of the public. 

“People can come, have fun, mingle, and maybe think about using the building at some point,” Breunig says. 

Participants can enjoy all or part of five hours of varied events and entertainment, refreshments including tea, hors d’oeuvres and birthday cake, and special tours of the building.  

Live music, an appearance by “Julia Morgan” herself, a silent auction, and a talk by the Historian of Hearst Castle at San Simeon are additional highlights. 

Attendees can also arrange separate reservations for dinner in the club’s formal dining room that evening (see box for reservation information). 

Although functional and grandly appointed, the building is in need of some six million dollars in mostly behind-the-scenes repairs and upgrades, not surprising for a facility that has been heavily used for 75 years. 

The co-sponsor of the event, the non-profit Landmark Heritage Foundation, was formed some years ago to raise funds to preserve the City Club building and educate the public about Julia Morgan. 

The foundation will have materials about the building and renovation efforts and plans on display at the event. 

The Berkeley City Club organization itself, with a smaller membership than in early days, is also looking for new members, both individual and businesses. (The club reorganized in 1963 to fully admit men, and dropped “Women’s” from the formal name.) 

Members pay monthly dues and have access to the dining room, indoor swimming pool, exercise room, discounted rental rates for event spaces, Club entertainment and social programs and—a major benefit in the congested South Campus area—parking in the adjacent lot the club owns on Durant Avenue.  

In earlier decades the club building accommodated many permanent residents. Today, most bedrooms and suites are rented for either long or short-term stays, often to visiting scholars at the university. The club is also a popular setting for weddings and parties. 

The Aurora Theatre, now relocated to Downtown Berkeley, staged plays in the club for years, and the Berkeley Chamber Performers hold their concerts there.  

The City Club dates back to the mid-1920s when local women’s organizations joined together to establish one place where their members could meet, socialize, and exercise.  

“Most of the clubs were meeting in hotel venues and homes,” says Breunig, and they welcomed the opportunity to have a large, central, building.  

A building fund was quickly raised and the club claimed nearly 4,500 local women as members at one point. 

The work of organizing, operating, and sustaining the club was done by the women themselves. 

“May I remind you that the Berkeley Women’s City Club was conceived and followed to completion in every detail, including the construction and furnishing of this magnificent clubhouse, by women and by women alone,” Fred Athearn, widower of the first president, Purle Evelyn Athearn, told the club in 1952. 

“No man had anything to do with it, except some spade work, at the direction of the women who laid the foundation of this truly great institution…” 

“Much water has passed under the bridge since women were content to ‘sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam’ and the old idea that women are incapable of bigger things has been washed away with the current of to-day”, wrote Monday Study Club President Olive T. Buck for the Club building opening. 

The names of the local women’s clubs that participated in the founding illustrate some of the interests and activities of Berkeley women—at least those women with some social means and leisure time—in that era.  

They included the College Women’s Club, Berkeley League of Women Voters, California Writers’ Club, Etude Club, Northbrae Women’s Club, Political Science Club, Berkeley Piano Club, Women’s Army and Navy Club, and the Business and Professional Women’s Club. 

Historian Phyllis Gale, an expert on early women’s organizations in Berkeley, has characterized these sort of clubs as a form of “shadow government” in an era when women were typically excluded from formal leadership in business, most professions, and politics. 

The members of local women’s clubs promoted causes, organized civic activities and, in the terminology of a later era, “networked” and “raised consciousness,” as well as exerted influence on their more conventionally powerful husbands.