Rosas Brothers Construction, our leading current provider of sidewalk repairs, has left marks all over this town in recent years. When contracts come up for bid in the East Bay they compete hard, then get the job done and done well.
Although they don’t have a website, their sidewalk stamps have their phone number, an effective marketing tool used by Oakland concrete contractors since the mid-1920s. When I called that number, I learned that Victor, Umberto and Luis Rosas are the brothers who started this Oakland-based general contracting business in 2002. The offices are still in a little old house on Coliseum Way by the freeway. Their earliest stamp I’ve seen in Oakland is from 2009.
They have used two different marks. The one above came first, then the one below appeared in 2010. It appears that each crew carries its own stamp, because there’s a lot of variety in the marks. Some stamps have a complete set of numbers in the date, while others have the final digit of the date drawn by hand.
One day in early 2014, I happened to walk past one of their work sites in the Laurel district, and there on the ground was one of their silicone rubber stamps.
So this mark prints the data “201—” and the concrete finisher writes the last digit. The stamp goes on after the fresh concrete has begun to set — a worker sprays the job to soften the surface, then pushes the stamp in.
Some of Oakland’s sidewalk makers left 40 years’ worth of dates. Rosas Brothers has a ways to go, but they’ve made a very good start.
Oakland Underfoot 
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