1444 13th Avenue
Michele “Michael” Bua (1878-19??) was “a prominent member of the Italian colony” who immigrated in 1896 and was naturalized in 1902. He started as a cement contractor in 1908. He lived at 1607 Grove Street (now Martin Luther King Jr Way). The newspapers last mention him in 1922, but I have a hand-drawn mark I interpret as 1935. He teamed up as Bua & Roberts in the early 1920s, in the Bacon Building.
59th Street at Genoa Street
There are a bunch of these in the area. It looks like Andes Construction Co. is really in the business of fixing old sewer lines, but they do the concrete afterward too. They’re in Oakland in a funky part of the Melrose neighborhood, doing well by all appearances.
850 6th Avenue
This appears to be the only example in all of Oakland. The partnership appears in the papers from 1892 to 1894, so this must date from that period, probably 1894. The following year John Albert Marshall, a San Francisco contractor, moved to Berkeley and began his rise to wealth and prominence. More about him on his profile page.
Harvey Y. Goff (1871-1895), an aspiring architect who had worked as a drafter for the Charles Mau and Clinton Day firms, enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1894 but died the next year at age 24. He was born in Kansas.
61 Alvarado Road, Berkeley
John Albert Marshall II (1900-1976) was the son of J. A. Marshall the Berkeley concrete contractor and homebuilder. He graduated from UC Berkeley, studied architecture at California College of the Arts and started out early as a contractor, being listed as such at age 22 while he was living in the family home at 18 Tanglewood Road. His architectural career was brief, though.
He was listed as an architect in the 1925 directory, but his father died that year and left everything to his mother, so he was quickly on his own. He prospered as a Berkeley homebuilder in the 1920s, and by 1928 was living in the hills above Piedmont with his new wife Julia (Dodge) after an elaborate society wedding. They divorced the following year. He also helped finance the Latham Square building and Fox Theater among other Oakland landmarks.
The 1930 census recorded him living in the penthouse of 2605 Haste Street, the “Casa Bonita,” which he built in 1928. Soon he quit the building business and went in a new direction, moving to Nevada to own and run the Pyramid Lake Dude Ranch. He came back to the Bay area in 1940, when he bought the Castlewood Country Club in Pleasanton and ran it as the Rancho Hacienda dude ranch with his second wife, Emily, until 1952. He spent his remaining days at Villa del Sol, his large residence on a hill overlooking Pleasanton.
As far as I know, Marshall didn’t leave this mark anywhere in Oakland, but I thought it was in Oakland when I posted this, and I’m keeping it. The house was built in 1926.
473 Crescent Street
This little street, isolated by the construction of I-580, has several old sidewalk stamps.
J. A. Feeley appears to have been active in carpenters and joiners union affairs in Stockton in the teens and early 1920s before showing up in the Oakland papers around 1925 as an official in the Building Trades Council of Alameda County and the business agent of the Plasterers and Cement Workers union. In 1927 he relocated to southern California where “he had associated himself with a large material supply firm.” Another person by that name later lived in Chico as “a retired hardware and nursery man” in the 1930s. That person’s son used the last name McFeeley. However, my search of Oakland and San Francisco directories comes up blank.
Feeley also spelled his name “Feely,” I suppose when he was in a hurry.
Ridgeway Avenue and Howe Street
Why are so many concrete contractors named Frank?
Born and raised in Richmond, Frank William Kosich (1917-1979) was the son of an Austrian immigrant from Semic, Yugoslavia. He married Kathryn Bettencourt (1921-2007) of El Cerrito in 1940, and they had two children. Their lives were covered in detail by the Richmond Independent, which noted that they lived at 835 31st Street before moving to El Cerrito in 1970, and that he joined the Richmond street department in 1949, became president of the All-Slav Club in 1953, and bid on city paving jobs between 1954 and 1973.
His stamp is rare in Oakland and never dated, but presumably abundant in the upper East Bay.
James Henry Pedgrift (1877-1948) was born in England and came from Surrey to the U.S. in 1883, arriving with his mother and siblings in Los Angeles around 1890. He landed in San Francisco in 1902 as an independent contractor and was active in Oakland through the 1930s. He married Ina Belle Ormsby in 1903; they had three kids. His offices were downtown at 565 16th Street and he was always closely involved with the city government as a contractor and an industry figure. From 1910 through the 1920s he was a big wheel in the Builders’ Exchange of Alameda County along with J. H. Fitzmaurice. In 1924 he sidelined as an appraiser for Prudential Insurance.
He clearly had energy and a gift for business politicking, but for the last four years of his life he was an invalid. The Pedgrift firm was active as of 1947 but seems not to have survived him. He’s buried at Mountain View, in the Ormsby plot. His last address was 518 Apgar Street.
This mark is on 41st Street at Broadway, the old Anderson Carpet building, and the firm probably did the interior concrete too. The Julia Morgan building at 40th Street and Piedmont Avenue also has one. Few of them have dates, and those are all scrawled by hand. They range from 1930 to 1940.
