Berkeley, California

January 29, 2025

I spent January 2025 in San Francisco, and went to the East Bay about a dozen times. I have a few colleagues at Cal, my wonderful girlfriend went there, and the campus looms large in America’s cultural memory. The town holds separate interest historically and towards contemporary culture and politics. This post is a sketch of the history of Berkeley, with some notes of deeper interest at the end.Some books which were particularly helpful or interesting: Wollenberg, Berkeley: A City In History, Margolin, Ohlone Way, ed. McCardle, Exactly Opposite the Golden Gate, and a few hours in Pegasus Books on Shattuck Avenue.

Berkeley’s history as an English-speaking community goes back 160 years, two modern American lifetimes. Before that, it was a corner of the domain of a Spanish settler, and before that it was Ohlone land, maintained and cultivated and lived off by a native nation. Humans arrived perhaps five thousand years ago, and the geography would have been much the same. The first outsiders didn’t settle in the East Bay until 1797 — and immediately, it was called contra costa, as if lesser and peripheral to the real action on the ocean.

Luis Peralta, a native to northern Mexico who served in the Spanish and then Mexican militaries, was granted a 48,000 acre grant from San Leandro in the south to El Cerrito in the north in 1820. His family would be the legal owners of this swath of the East Bay for half a century. Their eventual dispossession was both political and financial. When California was transferred from Spain to Mexico and later to the US, the Peralta grants were confirmed. But the US government had established strong protections for squatters, which were exploited during the gold rush. The scale of the gold rush, which I hadn’t thought of since middle school history, shocked me: San Francisco had a population of 600 in early 1848, and 25,000 by the end of 1849. The Peraltas began a decades-long battle against squatters — and while they won the right to evict all squatters in 1877, they had by then sold almost the entire land grant to fund the legal battle. By the time the Peralta case was resolved by the Supreme Court, the university had already bought land in Berkeley and begun to move in — along with many others.

Early American Berkeley was split into the east, hilled, university side, and the west, coastal, industrial Ocean View.The Ocean View name does not survive, being stolen by a neighborhood in SF and replaced by West Berkeley. Early industry was mostly sawyards and milling. But this early town was largely disconnected, and there was not yet a “Bay Area”. From Ocean View, there was only briefly a ferry to San Francisco in the 1850s, and Oakland, which was booming from its establishment as the western terminus of the transcontinental railway, was also too far for commuting. So it was the university which compiled the assorted communities into a city.

Founded as the College of California in Oakland in 1853, what becomes Cal was intended to be a non-denominational Christian liberal arts college, modeled after the elite private New England colleges. In 1860, the trustees bought a tract of farmland in the hills above Ocean View for a new campus.The site where the deed was signed is at Founder’s Rock at the northeast corner of campus. I imagine the view from there down to the Bay and through the Golden Gate would have been idyllic. Now, the electrical engineering department is in the way. They also began developing a neighboring community, which they named after Bishop George Berkeley, drawn by a line from the British philosopher’s poems: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.”

Despite the land around newly-christened Berkeley, the College of California continued to exist in Oakland, and could barely afford its bills there. A deal with the state legislature in 1867 transformed the College into the University of today: through the federal Land Grant College Act, funds were made available for a trade: the Berkeley land, owned by the College of California, in exchange for the state maintaining the college as the liberal arts wing of the new University of California. The state would get an instant university and could continue corses in Oakland while the new campus was built.

In the last decades of the 19th century, Berkeley was not yet a city but two communities separated by miles of fields and marshland.Eyeballing maps in the Berkeley Public Library, as late as 1885, everything between Shattuck and modern-day San Pablo Avenue was empty land, save for a row of homes on Delaware Street. There was, of course, conflict between the scholars and the workers, familiar to any university town. Encouraged by improved transportation infrastructure and increasing land prices, the two towns merged into one. The earthquake of 1906 also accelerated the build, although the East Bay was only minorly affected — increased housing demand from San Franciscan refugees spurred a doubling of domiciles before 1915.

Even if the city was mostly unscathed by the earthquake of 1906, a fire in 1923 destroyed 600 buildings. Only San Francisco fire trucks arriving by ferry saved the downtown. Modern Berkeley was made by this fire, and the results can be seen in the contrast between the wood and the stucco buildings north of campus. The number of building permits grew from 2,182 in 1922 to 4,293 in 1925.The lessons didn’t stick: the 1991 East Bay fire (worse in Oakland) was far more destructive, and found the community just as unprepared. The building boom lasted through the Second World War, but Berkeley’s distance from Oakland and San Francisco protected it relative to other towns. The Berkeley of WWII strongly resembles the Berkeley of today, for better or worse.

The 1923 fire presaged other changes: in 1926, a ferry opened to San Francisco, the first direct connection in fifty years. And in 1929, the federal government allocated funds for the Bay Bridge, which opened in 1936. Soon after, WWII arrived, which changed the social face of Berkeley again, and began the defense period — when dollars, policy, and politics, and their economic and cultural descendents, dominated the city. This lasted from the magnificent shipping and armaments boom of the 1940s to the dismantlement of those institutions at the close of the cold war. Industrial West Berkeley didn’t fall behind the university: they sold blood plasma and Heinz ketchup and Colgate toothpaste and steel to the military; no less important was the housing available to host the surging shipbuilding workforce.

In 1944, the Bay Area was the largest shipyard in history, and no yard has matched it since. “Moore Drydock on the Oakland Estuary, for example, grew from about 600 employees in 1939 to 35,000 in 1944. The government also created brand new instant shipyards, including Henry J. Kaiser’s massive industrial complex in Richmond. In 1940 the Kaiser Richmond yards did not exist; by 1943 they employed 100,000 workers more people than had worked in the entire American ship building industry in 1939.”Wollenberg. As across America, this expansion came while millions of men were in the armed forces, and the face of the labor force changed as a result. There was no shipbuilding in Berkeley proper, but the existing transit connections to Oakland and Richmond led to an increase of population — more than enough to offset the Cal students heading off to war. Even this was not enough to cope with the boom: “since the shipyard is operated 24 hours a day, on 38 hour shifts, one person could sleep in the shared bed while another worked.”ibid.

As the war changed Berkeley, Berkeley changed the war. The atomic bomb was fundamentally a Berkeleyan invention. In 1928, Oppenheimer and Lawrence arrived at Berkeley, and their presence attracted other promising physicists. The federal government paid for Lawrence’s Berkeley lab early on in the Manhattan project, and it was there that the uranium-235 in Little Boy was produced. Plutonium was first discovered and described in the same lab in 1941 by Lawrence’s recruits, including Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan. Berkeley’s atomic history lasted well past the war: Professor Edward Teller founded another laboratory in Livermore (now Lawrence Livermore National Lab) in the 1950s to develop the H-bomb, despite Oppenheimer’s opposition. These three Berkeley locations (the Lawrence lab on the hills above campus, Los Alamos founded by Oppenheimer and managed by the university, and Lawrence Livermore) remain home to America’s nuclear research laboratories. They remained in university hands for decades; both Lawrence labs still are, although Los Alamos was divested to an independent LLC in 2006. But until that year, every warhead in the United States nuclear arsenal was designed at a facility founded and run by Cal.

Those were simpler times. The political and cultural complexities of the red scare, the free speech movement, and the Vietnam war are much more central to the American cultural image of Berkeley than nuclear warheads. The city of Berkeley is identified more with the drama of the sixties than any other period. Dozens of Cal staff resigned rather than sign an anti-communist loyalty oath; Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment; the Black Panthers held their first meetings around the campus; the university founded the first Ethnic Studies department; all that Vietnam war stuff.

The story of radical Berkeley is harder to tell, and has been told many times. I am more interested in the long term arc of the town losing to gown over the past century and a half. But has Berkeley the city become more like Berkeley the university, or has the whole world become more like the university? Industry has fled everywhere in America since the 1970s, and it is the decline of industry that has made West Berkeley more like East Berkeley. If anything, the presence of the university had encouraged unions and strengthened labor activists to protect workers in the west of the city. But while there were school-district strikes in the 70s and public employees fought and won collective-bargaining rights later, when I look for recent labor disputes, the most prominent are campaigns by TAs and graduate students to win collective bargaining rights.

Some notes:

People’s Park, a few blocks south of the Cal campus, was the site of famous battles between police and protestors in 1969, 1971, and 1991. Efforts to build housing, sports facilities, and university gardens were stopped each time they were proposed over the past fifty years. I walked past People’s Park on a free afternoon, and it seems like the university is not taking chances this time:

This wall goes entirely around the block; I’ve seen US embassies in Africa with less fortification. UC Berkeley is building a new dorm on the site.

Berkeley’s city master plan, until 1965, called for filling and developing an additional seven square miles of San Francisco Bay. This was halted by the state legislature, under a campaign led by the Save San Fransisco Bay Association. This wasn’t infeasible; something like 200 square miles of the Bay had been filled in or diked off in the previous century, and Singapore today is a quarter larger than it was at independence. And this would have been a big gain for Berkeley; the area of UC Berkeley’s campus is under two square miles. I’m disappointed this didn’t happen in the 1960s, but I don’t blame SF’s land use problems on the lack of landfill!

Relatedly, books and writing about the recent history of Berkeley note at least four flipflops since the 1980s on rent control. In the mid 80s, Berkeley had the toughest rent control in the country; various city and state legislation has changed this back and forth since. I don’t know where the balance is now (I assume towards rent control); it’s interesting that there has been such change and uncertainty.

I was struck by the integration and multiculturalism of Berkeley. My wonderful girlfriend has also taken me around MarinWhere she went to high school. which is much more clearly segregated, as is San Francisco itself. Berkeley is both smaller and has had its neighborhoods mixed more thoroughly during early settlement and WWII. This came up in conversations around education: When talking about race and education, Bay residents talked about achievement gaps within Berkeley High, rather than the gaps between heavily black and heavily white schools in Marin or Oakland.

I am puzzled by the tension between the university’s well-earned radical reputation and its ties to military research and production. This was inspired by a recent trip to Bristol, UK, which is also a radical city (they have a Green MP!), and 4% of the world’s arms are made there. See Gavin Leech’s notes on that city here. Is this a general phenomenon? Do protestors trivially follow weapons manufacture? Is this all a function of education? Does anyone have other examples/counterexamples?