Oakland Underfoot

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.

Grass Valley is a small tourist-and-commuter town in the Sierra foothills with a long history of gold mining. There are more sidewalk stamps to be found here; these are just the two I noticed while strolling on Main Street.

Webster Street at 3rd Street

Now this is a puzzle: What is a San Francisco Water Department gate-pot doing over here in Oakland? And how have I missed this after walking over this intersection hundreds of times?

I was in Phoenix in 2019 and saw some sidewalk stamps, and though I wasn’t documenting them this one really caught my eye. Oakland has WPA marks from 1939, 1940 and 1941 but not 1936.

I spent two nights in this central coast county seat and spotted a few sidewalk stamps. These are arranged roughly old to new.

Morganti is attested in a newspaper piece in 1909, a pair of brothers. Presumably one of them used this stamp later than that.

It’s odd, and probably a coincidence, that Oakland’s Frank “Borax” Smith was named Francis Marion Smith.

The next three are WPA work, from the Depression years.

A worthy destination for sidewalk freaks.