Archive for the ‘ Profiles’ Category

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L. Putnam

19 April 2013

24th Avenue at E. 20th Street

A nice escutcheon from this rarely seen maker.

Lucien Putnam (1829-1903) was born in Houlton, Maine, to one of that border town’s founding families. He is recorded in Reading, Massachusetts, in the 1850 census clerking for his uncle Franklin. He spent his young adulthood, from the mid-1850s to about 1870, in the forest of Minnesota Territory, where he married Elizabeth Wernes and rose to the Minneapolis middle class as a lumber dealer and radical church member. (Later in life he helped organize the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church.) The 1880 census found him in Albany, Oregon, with his wife and five children, where he was involved in an “agriculture factory” (probably a lumber mill).

Putnam was a registered Oakland voter in 1886 (“mechanic”) and appeared in the 1889 city directory as an “artificial stone mfr” at 1274 7th Street. The directory for 1903, the year of his death, had him at 817 17th Street as a contractor.

Putnam’s remaining stamps are few and scattered. It’s a safe assumption that even without dates, they probably date from the late 1800s.

Posted in  Profiles,  Undated marks, 1800s | 2 Comments »

Sidewalk maker: A. Maffei

12 March 2013

1927uu

2803 23rd Avenue

Agostino Maffei was born in San Genese, Italy in 1885 and emigrated to the US in 1902. He had an eighth-grade education and could barely sign his name; he told one census taker he could not write. As of the 1910 census he lived with his new bride Angelina (nee Ardisson; 1892-1985) in Jackson, Amador County, where he worked in a gold mine; by 1918 they lived in Alameda and he worked for an ice company. He’s listed in the 1920s and 1930s Alameda directories. The papers show she was very active at the time with the Alameda Review Women’s Benefit Association while he was a local stalwart in the Woodmen of the World and the Elks. They had no children. The names he went by in the papers went from Augustine to Augustus, then August, and finally Gus. Maffei died in 1978 and is interred in Chapel of the Chimes.

The sidewalks hint that Maffei had a history, presumably as a former partner with someone else. Maybe he was the loser partner and got to keep the stamp, with the partner’s name chiseled off, while the partner had a nice new one made. The business was at Maffei’s home, 818 Pacific Avenue until 1937, then 831 Lincoln Avenue. He retired some time before the 1950 census.

I don’t see many sidewalk contractors from Alameda in Oakland. This is the only Maffei mark I’ve found here, but they seem to be plentiful in Alameda. They all look like this one.

Posted in  Profiles, 1927 | 3 Comments »

M. Bua

22 June 2012

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.

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2011 – Andes

16 August 2011

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.

Posted in  Profiles, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Frank W. Kosich

18 November 2008

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.

Posted in  Profiles,  Undated marks | 1 Comment »

James H. Pedgrift

20 October 2008

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 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.

Posted in  Profiles | 4 Comments »

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