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September 17 is the 97th anniversary of the 1923 Berkeley Fire.

It’s quite possible you’ve never heard of it. And given the vast conflagrations in California of the past few years—even just the past few weeks—it may be easy to forget or diminish the significance of that long ago fire.

But the devastating experience of Berkeley in 1923 presaged what we are experiencing now. And it was also the first major “urban/wildlands interface” fire of the modern era in the United States.

Of course there had been earlier huge urban fires—including 1906 in San Francisco—as well as large rural fires that had burned forest and countryside and destroyed any small towns in their way. But 1923 in Berkeley appears to be the first instance where a fire began in California wild lands and then burned deep into one of the largest urban areas of the state.

What exactly happened in 1923?

Much the same thing that happened in the Oakland/Berkeley Hills Firestorm in 1991, in Santa Rosa in 2017 (the Tubbs Fire), in Redding in 2018 (the Carr Fire), in Paradise last year (the Camp Fire), and in Oregon and California’s Berry Creek / Oroville region (the Bear Fire) this month. A wild lands fire that became a runaway inferno in one direction when the wind strengthened. 

In 1923 a fire began in the late summer in grasslands or brush in Wildcat Canyon. Even with dry conditions, if wind had been absent, it might have just slowly burned through a handful of acres until crews and volunteers could respond from nearby cities and build firebreaks along the edges. 

However, the extremely dry day combined with blustery and warm offshore winds which picked up in the morning, funneling over the Hills from the east and down towards the Bay. 

Almost before anyone knew there was a big fire burning over the ridge line into North Berkeley, and throwing smoke and embers ahead of it. 

In that era, there was not much in the way of hillside settlement north of Berkeley, just rolling hills. And much of today’s north Berkeley itself had not yet been developed. But the steep-sloped district just north of the UC Berkeley campus was packed with hundreds of homes, many of them picturesque “Berkeley brownshingles”. 

The neighborhood population was a mix of bohemians who had gone there for the view, proximity to nature ,and eclectic neighbors, staid wealthy residents who had built large homes in Berkeley’s expanding “streetcar suburbs”, and UC students, staff, and faculty who wanted to live within easy walking distance of the campus. 

The blocks immediately around Euclid Avenue and Hearst Avenue were dense with fraternity and sorority and boarding houses. UC land acquisition and buildings had not yet crossed Hearst, and the era of “Holy Hill” independent religious seminaries and schools had not yet emerged. 

As the morning wore on that September 17, residents of the neighborhood suddenly found the air choked with smoke and burning brands descending on rooftops and vacant lots and setting spot fires ahead of the rapidly advancing main front. 

People had, in some cases, just minutes to evacuate. Most children and men were away at work or school in Berkeley’s lower elevations, but many women and UC students were at home. 

Some gathered up practical or cherished belongings before quickly evacuating, others fled their homes with nothing more than the proverbial “clothes on their backs”. Automobiles were not ubiquitous possessions in 1923, but many hill residents had them and used them to escape, while others with cars drove their “machines” into the threatened areas to help both friends and strangers hasten down the hilly streets. 

The official public safety response was, by necessity, limited. Berkeley had a well respected, but small, police force and a Fire Department that had proven itself in fighting structure fires but had nowhere near the men, means, or equipment to respond to a disaster spanning an entire district, and scores of blocks and hundreds of buildings burning at once. 

Those fire engines that got into the hills found that pressure was low at hydrants, and it was lowered even further as residents in lower elevation Berkeley neighborhoods pulled out their garden hoses to wet down their roofs. (Embers did land far out in the flatlands and started some fires, but none grew to a threatening size.) 

Some relief came in two forms. First, as the smoke plume towered over the Bay Area, fire engines and fighters were sent from Oakland and from San Francisco (via ferry boat). 

Second, on the UC Berkeley campus the bells of the Campanile were rung, classes dispersed, and many male students set out on their own, or were encouraged, to go into the fire area. In at least the lower elevations they searched homes for those who hadn’t yet evacuated, pulled belongings out of vacant houses to stack them on the street or nearby empty lots where they were less likely to be destroyed. They even fought the fire at individual buildings, climbing on roofs to put out shingle fires, and perhaps saved some structures. 

Photographs show, and aftermath accounts describe, both the UC campus and some parts of the burned area dotted with forlorn clusters of unburnt furnishings, including carpets, lamps, tables, sewing machines, and even pianos. 

(There were some tragi-comic experiences as well. Writer Hildegarde Hawthorne and her mother used the precious minutes they had before evacuating to carry a large can of fuel oil from their home to the lot next door in order to reduce combustibles in the house. When they returned to the fire area they found their house burned completely to the ground and all their possessions and family heirlooms destroyed—but the volatile can was standing intact in the field.) 

The fire continued to burn into the afternoon, reaching as far as the northeast corner of commercial downtown Berkeley, jumping Oxford Street at several points. It probably would have continued burning southwest unchecked. It might have also set fire to buildings on the UC Berkeley campus; near the northern campus edge several of the buildings in that era were wooden, not stone. 

But the wind died down, then changed to Berkeley’s standard sea breeze in the late afternoon. 

Before that point even a surplus of modern fire equipment and firefighters probably wouldn’t have mattered. But after the wind changed, while buildings still burned, they weren’t rapidly spreading flames and blowing embers to nearby structures. 

The fire edge was irregular, but the wind probably also saved many buildings along the edges since the flames were driven past downhill, rather than spreading equally in all directions. A house might burn completely, but it’s neighbor, to the northwest or southeast, survived. A triangle of buildings survived around the upper (eastern) end of Ridge Road and Hearst Avenue as the fire burned past, downhill and to the southwest. 

The 1923 fire also burned a much broader area than most maps show. The areas of damage officially mapped for 1923 concentrated on built up blocks, not undeveloped hillside, but accounts from the time make it clear that after the wind died down the fire continued to burn, as a slower moving grass and brush fire, over portions of Strawberry Canyon and south, threatening not only Berkeley’s Claremont district but even Orinda, over the hills. 

No one is known to have died in the 1923 Fire, perhaps due in part to the volunteer searchers and rescuers who swarmed the neighborhood, and the relatively short distances—by today’s standards—people had to evacuate. There were no extensive neighborhoods of homes high up in the hills, or standing along the ridge line on tortuously winding streets. 

However more than 600 buildings burned over an area of nearly 50 blocks, leaving a shocking, smoking, forest of chimneys charred trees, and soot blackened streets. A fire station, a school, and Berkeley’s Hillside Club succumbed, along with some student living groups. 

Twenty two years ago for the 75th anniversary of the Fire I took a look at UC administrative records, and was able to determine that the homes of about 10% of the students, and about 25% of the campus faculty and staff, burned in 1923. Particularly sad was the loss of home libraries, research materials, and unpublished manuscripts. In 1923, many professors did much of their research and writing at home so they lost not only their houses but much of their scholarship. 

Relief efforts were organized by the City and also by women students on the UC campus who quickly converted the new student union building into a refugee center. Male students, already organized for military training in the campus Cadet Corps, did guard duty in the burned area. Thousands came to see the ruins. 

In the aftermath, as is often the case, there was a cacophony of blame, grand but unfulfilled plans for reform, and imperatives to quickly rebuild and get back to normal. Some may have talked about rethinking Berkeley’s whole pattern of development, but they were countered by those who had lost their homes, had insurance, and wanted to rebuild as fast as they could. 

Few, if any, permanent and sweeping changes were made. 

Berkeley did ban shingle roofs, but that was overturned later by a campaign led by the wooden shingle industry. Efforts to widen streets and build direct evacuation roads came to naught. The City eventually built a new fire station in the hills, and a look-out on the ridge line to give early warning. 

Architecturally, the new neighborhood did not resemble the old. “Period Revival” architecture was coming into vogue and many of the new homes and apartment buildings constructed were stucco walled and tile roofed, in “Mediterranean” and “Spanish Revival” motifs. 

In some areas new housing was built more densely. Look at the blocks of Oxford and Walnut Streets north of Hearst Avenue as an example; they are lined by three story stucco apartment buildings built in the later 1920s on lots where wooden single family houses stood before the fire. 

Gradually, memory and worry faded. In the 1970s there were some wildfires fires that burned homes high in the hills, but nothing of the scale of 1923. 

But sixty-eight years after the great disaster, wildfire came again, with almost the same weather conditions and patterns. This time it started not northeast but southeast of Berkeley. The 1991 Firestorm burned southwest, like the 1923 Fire, destroying some homes on the edge of Berkeley but doing most of its damage in Oakland neighborhoods. Again, as in 1923, it burned uncontrolled until the wind died down. 

Another 29 years have passed since 1991 and today Berkeley now watches and worries as wildfires ring the Bay. They haven’t, as yet, come from our Hills but 1923 shows they have burned Berkeley before, and most likely will again.