Oakland Underfoot

Telegraph Avenue near Woolsey Street

Little exists on the web about this firm, which incorporated in Los Angeles in 1906. Its San Francisco office was advertised at 105 Sacramento Street in 1906, but naturally had to relocate after the earthquake, to 12th and Howard, then Beale and Mission. Its ads in the paper said “Metal hose, before and after the fire, and forever.” From 1909 until 1925 it was on the first block of Main Street, at the foot of Market Street, after which it vanished.

The newspapers in Seattle and Portland make no mention of the firm.

The flexible tubing here was probably a gas line.

I’ve only been to the neighborhood between the train station and the UC campus, but the sidewalks there are pretty bare. So this caught my eye, and 1938 is a year I haven’t seen before for a WPA stamp. Oakland has marks from 1939, 1940 and 1941 and that’s it.

371 13th Street

Philip Hinkle, of 116/118 Main Street in San Francisco, was an innovator in elevator design starting in the 1870s. His most important patent, issued in 1882, involved a counterweight arrangement that came to mean a lot of money in the 1890s when many competitors were found to have infringed it. However, Hinkle had sold the patent for a relative pittance years before, and the money went to the Overweight Counterbalance Elevator Company, a firm incorporated just to collect fines from infringers.

There’s no indication who built this particular elevator, but the Hinkle name clearly still had cachet.

This building was originally the Hotel St. George, built right after the 1906 earthquake.

I had a six-hour layover at Union Station the other week and put in a few miles north, over to the lake and back. These caught my eye along the way.

How could I resist a genuine CTA access cover? This was by the approach to a bridge, North Orleans and West Kinzie Streets.

These were a block or two east on Hubbard Street. They show that the practice of sidewalk stamping is alive and well.

And brass inserts have a long pedigree in Chicago, if you look at the link in the Other Cities list on my home page. I forget exactly where this is. Oakland doesn’t have these.

These decorate our streets in various places, unannounced. I think these are from Oakland, Emeryville and Berkeley, respectively. They’re used by surveyors.

The water company has one of these at nearly every property in town, covering the valves and meters for each lot it supplies. I’ve documented these three varieties, from three different manufacturers, that bear dates on them. Now I’m going to keep my eyes open in case there are more that’ve been lurking unnoticed. The dates, needless to say, reflect only the day they were manufactured, not the day they were deployed.

The oldest of the three, on the left, is significant because the sidewalk (at 160 Requa Road, Piedmont) also includes a J. H. Fitzmaurice II stamp, which I have firmly documented only from 1926 to 1941, so it establishes that the stamp was used into the late 1940s.

But here’s an example of the middle one with a date of 1934. (I’ve seen them as old as 1932.)

Perhaps Art Concrete Works made lids during two separate periods — the letters and layout aren’t the same, and the older one has the word “Patented” under the maker’s name.

There are several other versions of the EBMUD lid that have no dates.

1439 Alice Street

My concerted research turns up almost nothing about this firm. Originally in San Francisco at 166 Walsh Street, they built a plant on two acres of Deep East land at 98th Avenue and Russett Street, now known as San Leandro Street, in 1926. They were still in business as of 1936, according to the Oakland Tribune, even though they weren’t in the phone book after 1928. They made tanks for gasoline and motor oil.