Oakland Underfoot

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.