Features

Fall Series of Historical Walking Tours Starts Saturday

By Steven Finacom Special to the Planet
Thursday September 18, 2008 - 09:30:00 AM
	Individual tours cost $8 for members of the Berkeley Historical Society; nonmembers pay $10. Members can also purchase a “season pass” to all the tours for $30. You can join BHS and sign up for the discounted tours at the same time.
            	For reservations call 848-0181 and leave your contact information, the dates of the tours you’d like to attend, and the number of tickets you would like for each tour. The tours tend to fill up, so it is important to have reservations. Once you’ve registered, you’ll be informed of the starting point for each tour you’re attending.
            	The Claremont, north hills, and Nut Hill walks traverse in hilly terrain and, in some cases, off street paths, and may not be suitable for those in wheelchairs.
Steven Finacom
Individual tours cost $8 for members of the Berkeley Historical Society; nonmembers pay $10. Members can also purchase a “season pass” to all the tours for $30. You can join BHS and sign up for the discounted tours at the same time. For reservations call 848-0181 and leave your contact information, the dates of the tours you’d like to attend, and the number of tickets you would like for each tour. The tours tend to fill up, so it is important to have reservations. Once you’ve registered, you’ll be informed of the starting point for each tour you’re attending. The Claremont, north hills, and Nut Hill walks traverse in hilly terrain and, in some cases, off street paths, and may not be suitable for those in wheelchairs.

Noted Berkeley neighborhoods, prominent parks and schools, and architectural masterpieces—both secular and spiritual—are all featured during the fall 2008 Berkeley Historical Walking Tour series, which begins Saturday, Sept. 27. 

The walks range from Berkeley’s Bay edge to the Kensington border. All are led by local, volunteer guides and take place on Saturday mornings during the fall, from 10 a.m. to noon. You can go on one tour or several. 

Berkeley’s “Nut Hill” neighborhood and Bernard Maybeck’s architecture will be a highlight of the first walk, Sept. 27, led by Robert Pennell, “long-time friend of the noted Bay Area architect’s family and resident of this unique North Berkeley neighborhood.” 

This excursion wanders through the hillside residential district north of the UC campus, observing not only Maybeck masterpieces including the architect’s own studio and home, but houses by other notable Berkeley designers. 

On Oct. 11, Paul Grunland, who moved to Berkeley as a child in the 1930s and is an expert on many local neighborhoods, will lead one of his redoubtable tours. This north hills “boundary walk” explores the border between Berkeley and adjacent Kensington that has also been the dividing line between Alameda and Contra Costa counties since 1853.  

The walk, on both city streets and off-street public pathways, will take in the upper reaches of Codornices Creek and pass the home of early Berkeley historian Louis Stein, who collected many of the Berkeley photos now in the collections of the Historical Society. 

Sandy Friedland, past president of the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association, guides a “Claremont Paths” walk on Oct. 25 through the romantic Claremont residential tract in southeast Berkeley. Developed just southwest of the Claremont Hotel by the Mason-McDuffie Company, starting in 1905, this was and is a quiet upper-class residential suburb.  

Its tranquil, winding streets contain some of Berkeley’s most beautiful and picturesque homes and residential settings, small parks, and Harwood Creek meandering through front yards. The walk will include stops at the historic Star Grocery on Claremont Boulevard and the nearby Craftsman Home, which sells Arts and Crafts furniture, art, and decorative objects. 

Daniel Coit Gilman, second president of the young University of California, emphasized in his 1872 inaugural address that, while the state institution was, unlike the private colleges of New England, secular and not an “ecclesiastical college,” he would welcome religious establishments serving the campus “on the slopes of Berkeley.”  

Gilman pointed to the wide array of religious beliefs among California’s settlers, ranging from missionary Roman Catholicism to “nearly all the various forms of Christian faith which … the churches of the Reformation have professed,” plus “many among us … who look for a Messiah yet to come,” as well as “the children of Confucius and the worshipers of the unknown gods.” 

On Nov. 6, author and architectural historian Susan Cerny leads a walk illuminating the first large concentration of religious establishments in Berkeley that came about as a result of Gilman’s encouragement and the spiritual affiliations of the early residents of the town of Berkeley. 

These were, and are, the churches of the South Campus, primarily established in the last quarter of the 19th century, and most still surviving as active institutions. The neighborhood features several notable church buildings and complexes, including Berkeley’s only National Landmark structure, the First Church of Christ, Scientist; an early landmark church in rustic brown shingle design; several towering edifices of the 1920s and ’30s; and tiny, often overlooked, sanctuaries. 

The tour will visit as many church interiors as possible; all are interesting, and some are quite strikingly different from their more familiar exteriors.  

It will also note remnants of the early residential Southside and conclude with refreshments at the landmark McCreary Greer house on Durant Avenue. 

Berkeley’s bay shore south of University Avenue once began not far south of University Avenue just west of the railroad tracks. There, on the beach near the foot of Dwight Way, on Aug. 27, 1933, a Berkeley policeman spotted three nude men “cavorting on the sands. They would dash along the beach, fling their arms in the abandon of the ‘chase,’ lightly toss a handful of sand in the air and then with a toss of their heads dash into the surf.” 

Such were the rustic delights of Berkeley’s shoreline in days gone by. But it was not long thereafter that civic leaders, given opportunity by the construction of the East Shore Highway, which enclosed a long area along the waterfront, including that former beach, secured Federal WPA funds to create a place for more formal outdoor activities. The result was what Mark Liolios calls “an elegant regional destination for aquatic recreation,” Aquatic Park. 

Liolios will lead a Nov. 22 tour of the Park, Berkeley’s largest. Today it accommodates peaceful lagoons, migrating shorebirds, water skiing and kayaking. Liolios is the head of Aquatic Park EGRET, a volunteer group dedicated to improving the park and uncovering its treasures, including the much-neglected model sailboat basin. 

On Dec. 13, the series will end with the traditional BHS “Bonus Tour,” available free to those, BHS members or not, who have paid for at least three other tours in the series.  

This season, the bonus tour explores Berkeley High School at the edge of downtown, including both its venerable old and its notable new buildings. 

Individual tours cost $8 for members of the Berkeley Historical Society; nonmembers pay $10. Members can also purchase a “season pass” to all the tours for $30. You can join BHS and sign up for the discounted tours at the same time. 

For reservations call 848-0181 and leave your contact information, the dates of the tours you’d like to attend, and the number of tickets you would like for each tour. The tours tend to fill up, so it is important to have reservations. Once you’ve registered, you’ll be informed of the starting point for each tour you’re attending. 

The Claremont, north hills, and Nut Hill walks traverse in hilly terrain and, in some cases, off street paths, and may not be suitable for those in wheelchairs.