Sidewalk maker: C. Rapella

8 August 2026

69 Sylvan Way, Piedmont

Carlo Rapella (1896-1967) was born in Morbengo, Italy, an ancient mountain town by the Swiss border, and emigrated to America in 1920. He shows up in Albany, where he spent the rest of his life, as of 1925 when he married Rena Zucca (1907-1991). They had two sons. In the 1930 census he identified as a cement worker; as of the 1940s he was working for Nat Lena but later went on his own.

Carlo’s son James (1927-2008) was recorded as working for his father in 1954. The other son, Albert (1937-?), took over the family firm of C. Rapella and Sons, which was incorporated in 1962, and did business locally for many years (one stamp in Oakland looks recent). The firm appears to be moribund.

Rapella’s stamp is scarce in Oakland, but presumably much more common farther north. I have found dated examples from 1956 and 1957.

As I find more dates outside Oakland, I’ll document them here.

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1933 – Lovisone

29 July 2026

867 Warfield Avenue

Unlike my other strike from the same year and month, this one puts the year first instead of the month. Go figure.

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1929 – Geo. D. Prentice

19 July 2026

303 Magnolia Avenue, Piedmont

This stamp never looked clear enough until yesterday. It dates from the same year the house was built.

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Zayo

7 July 2026

Castro Street at 2nd Street

Zayo quietly provides backbone high-speed fiber networks to the world.

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1937 – Riechel & Bredhoff

8 May 2026

2567 Parker Street, Berkeley

This is the rarer low-arch version of the Riechel & Bredhoff stamp.

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1913 – A. Soda

6 May 2026

1182 Ocean Street

The date has a different configuration than the other 1913 mark from this area.

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Out of town: Memphis, Tennessee

15 April 2026

Memphis is full of sidewalk stamps. I gathered these marks around the old downtown over the course of a few days without hardly trying. Zellner‘s was just the first, on Main Street. They’re still in business a century later.

Ben M. Hogan was a general contractor in Little Rock and Memphis from the early 1930s to his death in 1964.

H. F. Vann’s company served the Memphis area from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. They were Vann & Sons until 1960, then Vann for a year, then Vann & Son.

Tri-State Construction Co. was incorporated in 1918 and lasted at least until 1951. It’s a generic name that’s hard to trace.

Milton Israel Angel appears in the papers as a builder from 1955 to 1980. He was prominent in Memphis’s Jewish community. His obituary has details of an interesting life.

I haven’t looked into this firm, which has a hard-to-search name.

You’ll note that “Laid By” is the norm in Memphis, whereas “laid by” marks are scarce and old in Oakland, chiefly around Fruitvale.

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