Home & Garden Columns

The East Bay is a special place for so many reasons including architectural history. Now, I’m a technical guy (for a sensitive male) and the history that turns me on involves silly things like pipe threading and wire soldering. I love museums of mine shafts and light bulbs. I get no kick from champagne but a museum of science and industry makes my pulse race. In other words, I’m a geek. The one that all the girls moved away from at the junior high school dance and now, years later I can proudly come out of the closet, with my phaser held high and admit my affiliation with those who collect glass doorknobs and vacuum tube radios. 

So for me, architectural history is inextricably mingled with technical history and our local housing stock makes a marvelous display case for century-long evolution of the technical advances in building. To make this even more fun, the display case is neatly organized by community. Berkeley and Oakland begin with houses in the 1870s (and a very few that are earlier) and flow along to the north and south upward to the present as the rolling hills and bayside shoreline gothomorphed into its current urbanity. 

So let’s take a short technical trip from Old Oakland to 1960s Richmond and see how some elements of these houses evolved. 

It’s easy to see how foundations evolved from the oldest houses in Oakland and Berkeley to the modern ones we have today if we pick a handful of examples. Starting at an 1875 church in Berkeley we might find no foundation at all but instead a huge redwood mudsill. The mudsill is the bottom board of the house and is usually bolted to a concrete footing today but in our Oakland church and many early houses, it would have been a large wooden beam laid on its side made from old growth redwood. When I’ve seen these, they’re usually still in pretty good shape, owing to redwood’s high tannin content and its resultant pest resistance.  

Now let’s go to South Berkeley 1906. This house probably had a brick foundation and by today, these are mostly dissolving away. They’re also waiting for a 7.3 earthquake to finally turn them into a nice herringbone patio. 

By the time the 1920s houses of Berkeley were built, concrete foundations had become the common form, although these lacked reinforcing metal (rebar) and were quite small and laid in shallow trenches. Combined with poorly mixed concrete, these often fared poorly on the soft clay soils of Berkeley and many today are rocking and rolling like all good Boomers do. 

Albany, largely developed in the 1930s has almost exclusively concrete foundations and, again, most lack rebar. Nonetheless, these later concrete footings tend to be stronger since concrete mixing improved as the century matured. Bay-dredged sands gave way to mined sands from the Black Diamond mines of Mt. Diablo and concrete mixing became more science and less sport. 

By the time World War II arrived and Henry Kaiser’s shipyards in Richmond began producing a fleet, the hills of El Cerrito began to produce the humble and solid housing stock that would house a generation of G.I. and steelyard families (Many lived out their entire adult lives in these houses and a few are still there today). These foundations reflected the technical and engineering advancements that came with a war build-up. Concrete became prescriptive (mixed by formula) and these foundations are still hard as rock. They also began to use rebar and even employed this rebar to do what had, heretofore, not been done at all, connecting the foundation to the mudsill. Builders let short lengths of the rebar project up and out of the foundation. These stuck through the mudsill and were then hammered down to one side, holding the sill in place. Now this isn’t all that useful in a large quake but it shows the early glimmer of insight in these fabulous 1940s builders. By 1950 nearly all houses had some actual bolts doing the same thing. 

Sweeping north to Richmond, houses continue to advance through the ’50s into the ’60s and ’70s with foundations becoming still larger, deeper and wider at the base. During this time the inverted T shape become the standard form. We still do most foundations in the same manner today with just a little more rebar and a slightly stronger concrete. Nonetheless, foundations today are essentially the same as these ones with only a few exotic variations. Some hillside foundations built today are of a pier and gradebeam type that became popular in the 1960s and ’70s. 

Electrical systems advanced along the same stretch of shorefront with many Oakland and Berkeley houses having no electricity until the years following 1900. Many of these houses still have the plumbing for gas lighting running through the attics and walls. It’s still a thrill for me to come upon this in the attics of Victorians and other turn-of-the-century homes. Occasionally, I’ll even find a gas light still in use. Ooooo. Scary! 

As we move along to ’20s Berkeley houses and those ’30s Albany houses (thank you, Mr. MacGregor) the “knob and tube” wiring becomes more elaborate. Fuses move up from the crawlspace at the front of the house and into cabinets on the side where users are less likely to fry themselves while changing a fuse. The open knife switches (think Frankenstein) give way to fused disconnects. These early system have fuses on both “hots” and “neutrals” posing a serious threat to those trying test and repair these systems. By 1928, the “fused neutral” system gives way to hot-only fusing. We also move fuse panels out of wooden boxes (often lined with asbestos) and into metal enclosures. 

By the time we get to El Cerrito, we move from 120-volt to 240-volt systems that can accommodate more power and big users like ranges and A/C. Move along to Richmond and we find houses built with (good God!) breaker panels. 

Heating takes the same trip, as does plumbing and roofing. It’s pretty fun to see how faithfully the technology falls into line.  

As much as I enjoy the beauty of our old Berkeley houses, it’s always a relief to get the call to go inspect a 1942 El Cerrito, knowing that I’ll be getting a chance to inspect a modern house.  

Matt Cantor owns Cantor Inspections and lives in Berkeley. His column runs weekly. 

Copyright 2007 Matt Cantor