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.
Broadway at 21st Street
Apparently this part of town had a steam heating system — a steam district heating system. It’s like central heating, but for a neighborhood.
Oakland’s district heating system was established in 1911 and shut down in 1980, according to a compilation by Dr. Morris Pierce of the University of Rochester. It was put up by the Oakland Gas Light & Heat Company and absorbed into PG&E in 1919. It may have used waste steam from the Great Western Power Company plant just a block away.
I don’t know what was near this intersection in 1911. A streetcar line running on 22nd Street might have had a generator that fed this steam system. On Telegraph Avenue, there was the First Baptist church at 22nd and the YMCA apartment building on 21st that could have used this service. The system might have served the Paramount Theater when it was built in the 1930s.
The American District Steam Company was founded in 1881 in Lockport, New York. It survives as Adsco Manufacturing LLC in Buffalo, near its birthplace.
Adeline and 53rd Streets
A beautiful impression with a hand-drawn date.
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.
595 Chetwood Street
Don’t know why I didn’t record this prominent mark before. I probably thought it was too decrepit. As I age, my standards have eased.
1299 Sunnyhills Road
“Nisalas” is an extraordinarily rare last name. This mark, the only one I’ve found, could date from the 1920s to the 1970s.
2726 Elmwood Avenue, Berkeley
My example from Oakland was broken when I found it twelve years ago. This one looks good to make the century mark.
