Oakland Underfoot

22 Sheridan Road

Seward T. Johnson (1865-1937) was a native Ohioan. His family-owned firm, founded in 1903 in San Francisco, still does business from headquarters in Fresno, focusing on big industrial burners. This residential oil burner must have been installed in the mid-twentieth century for a house that was lost in the 1991 Hills Fire.

Mountain View Cemetery

The dark glass disks on top of this family vault are the lighting technology, common in the days before electricity, known as vault lights. I’ve documented vault lights before in their usual setting: Oakland sidewalks, here and here and here.

Free-standing family vaults tend to use stained-glass windows for illumination, but there’s a row of old vaults that are dug into the hillside where that’s not practical.

Shields, Harper is a regional firm specializing in fuel-related hardware that was founded in 1917, apparently in San Francisco, and is now headquartered in Martinez. Their first Oakland outpost, in the 1930s, was a plant at 1212 Jackson Street (the site of the Alcopark structure) and offices at 361 17th Street. But I remember their small shop at the corner of Broadway and 51st Street, where they moved in 1948 and stayed into this century. It had an opaque frontage, with glass brick windows, and having no idea of what they did I fancied that angels had a secret CIA-type agency there.