Features

Panoramic Hill Designated Federal Historic District By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday November 15, 2005

Berkeley’s newest addition to the National Register of Historic Places overlooks the first, a small laboratory in the attic of one of the smaller buildings on the UC Berkeley campus. 

With the addition of the Panoramic Hill neighborhood to the prestigious list on Oct. 21, the city now boasts 57 national landmarks. 

“We’re delighted,” said Janice Thomas, who owns one of the landmarked homes and helped organize the drive to win federal recognition. “It’s a great relief.” 

With a commanding view of the Bay Area and homes by legendary designers, the slope that rises between the main UC Berkeley campus and the Clark Kerr campus has attracted its share of luminaries. 

And it was, in part, changes now afoot at the university that that led Thomas and neighbor Fredrica Drotos to prepare the recognition proposal they submitted to the National Register of Historic Places, an agency of the National Parks Service. 

They and other Panoramic Hill residents have battled the proposed installation of permanent lighting at Memorial Stadium, the 80-year-old coliseum where the UC Berkeley Golden Bears play. 

Their efforts in 1999 stalled the installation of the lights, and the university has used portable lights instead. But that will end soon, university officials revealed last Thursday. 

UC Berkeley Athletic Director Sandy Barbour said plans for a massive retrofit of the stadium will include permanent nighttime lighting. 

“We have the opportunity to take advantage of technology that will minimize light spill” into adjoining neighborhoods, she said, adding that the lights will be relatively unobtrusive. 

“It will be a win-win for everyone,” Barbour declared. 

Neighbors have also been concerned that the university would use the stadium to host other events. The last such performance was a Paul McCartney concert to benefit the homeless held there in 1989, drawing angry protests from surrounding neighborhoods. 

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said Thursday that stadium would continue to host only their own events. 

The university’s Long-Range Development Plan for 2020—the same proposal that has sparked at three lawsuits—confirmed their fears. Volume IIIA of the plan listed potential historic resources that could be impacted by future development, declaring that none existed in their neighborhood. 

Thomas and Drotos prepared at 62-page application, which the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission endorsed on Jan. 10. The next step in the approval process came on Feb. 4, when the state Historic Resources Commission voted to endorse the proposal and forwarded it to the National Register. 

One day before the vote, Birgeneau gave extra urgency to their drive by announcing plans for a $120-plus million retrofit of Memorial Stadium and a $100-plus million expenditure to build a new academic building near the stadium—the same project unveiled last week.  

The final approval of National Register status for the district now means the university will have to consider impacts on the project under the provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act. 

However review under federal law is only mandated if any of the funds used in the projject are from federal appropriations, grants or loans, said Paul Lusignan, the National Register historian in charge of landmark designations in western states. 

“The federal funding has to be for the specific project, or for something directly related to the project, such as widening a road to give access to the project,” he said. 

 

Unique locale 

Along the narrow winding roads that thread their ways up the hillside, Nobel laureates and other noted academics have lived in stately homes designed by such architectural luminaries as Julia Morgan, John Hudson Thomas, Bernard Maybeck, Ernest Coxhead and William Wurster. 

Their spectacular views of the UC Berkeley campus are part of a panorama stretching from the Richmond/San Rafael bridge to the northeast and the Peninsula to the southwest. And just visible from many of the homes is the university’s Gilman Hall, where the attic houses the laboratory dubbed Room 307—declared Berkeley’s first national landmark on Oct. 15, 1966. 

It was in the confines of that room in February 1941, that physicists Arthur C. Wahl, Glenn T. Seaborg and Joseph W. Kennedy discovered plutonium. 

Panoramic Hill is Berkeley’s second national historic district. The other, the Berkeley Historic Civic Center District, was listed on Dec. 3, 1998, and encompasses the buildings bordering Civic Center Park. 

Federal law grants tax credits for the rehabilitation of historic landmarks in conformity with their historic character, and California’s Mills Act grants some property tax relief for the expenditures. Federal grant money may also be available for some rehabilitation projects, and the state has a historic building code that eases some requirements to ensure that the historic character of the structure can be preserved. 

 

 

 

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