Oakland Underfoot

The turn of the last century was a busy time for two competing communication technologies, the telegraph and the telephone. Amazingly, our streets still bear witness to those days.

Telegraphy was the long-established, default technology in the 1870s. Newspapers, governments, banks and businesspeople of all kinds relied on telegraphy to transmit documents and other written communications, especially for long-distance messaging by teleprinter. By the 1860s, cities like San Francisco had networks of telegraphic call boxes for top-crust suits, who could press a button in their home or office to summon a messenger boy.

The Postal Telegraph Cable Company was a nationwide competitor to Western Union until the 1940s, kind of like Apple versus Microsoft. This PTCCo access cover is at Franklin and 7th streets.

The company was founded in 1887 as the Pacific Postal Telegraph Cable Company, in San Francisco. The “Pacific” was lopped off some time before 1908, when the business directory listed its Oakland headquarters at 1058 Broadway. It still had the name as of 1917, but eventually its name became Postal Telegraph Company. Western Union finally took it over during the World War II years (1943 or 1945 depending on the source), but telegraphs had already lost the competition with telephones.

Speaking of which, the first telephone network in the Bay area was launched in 1877 by a spinoff of Western Union. In 1880 it merged with a competitor to become the Pacific Bell Telephone Company, the ancestor of “Pac Bell.”

In 1883, a new company under the same management was set up to operate telephone networks everywhere in the West outside of San Francisco. At first named Sunset Telephone-Telegraph Company, it took the name Sunset Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1889. This ST&T Co. cover, with a unique scallop design, is at 6th and Franklin streets.

Undergrounding of telephone lines began in the 1890s, so I think that’s the earliest this cover could be. The 1898 directory listed Sunset at 572 12th Street, and in 1908 Sunset was at 1275 Franklin Street. It had merged the year before with the Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Company.

And who were they? They were Pacific Bell, reincorporated in 1890 as The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company and changed in 1900 to Pacific States T&T. This TPT&T Company cover is somewhere in the lower Uptown area.

Here’s another one I’m quite taken with.

Pacific was granted its Oakland franchise by the city in 1892, so presumably the cover dates from the 1890s.

Finally, there was the short-lived Home Telephone Company, which had subsidiaries serving local subscribers in cities across the country. There was an Oakland Home Telephone Co. and a Home Telephone Co. of Alameda County, here represented by a cover on 20th Street near Rashida Muhammad Street.

The firm was listed at 19th and Cypress Streets in the 1908 directory, while Oakland Home was at 67 Bacon Block. It was incorporated in 1905 (“one of several branch companies incorporated by the main concern”), and had its Oakland franchise granted in February 1906. Some time before 1911, the various Home Companies merged into Bay Cities Home Telephone Company. Pacific T&T absorbed it in 1912, taking over Home’s 50-year franchise.

Pacific T&T, like most other telephone companies, was really part of the Bell System. . .

. . . which itself was part of AT&T (originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company).

The wonderful Deco office tower of Pacific Tel and Tel, known for many years as the Pac Bell building, is a San Francisco landmark to this day.

It took more than a generation for Oakland to secure today’s electric power system under Pacific Gas & Electric Company. Last week I showed you some surviving utility-hole lids from PG&E’s largest competitor in Oakland, Great Western Power Company of California. Here are two more from a century ago.

Another utility firm from those early days was the Oakland Gas, Light & Heat Company.

The Oakland Wiki states that the company took this name in 1884, having previously used several variants of Oakland Gaslight. It’s listed by that name in the 1898 and 1910 business directories, with headquarters at 13th and Clay streets. Unfortunately I don’t have a precise recollection of where this lid is; roughly Jefferson and 18th streets. But I’ve seen several.

For a time, there was also the Berkeley Electric Lighting Company. I think that’s the firm behind this lid.

Originally the Berkeley Electric Light & Power Company, it was listed in the 1898 directory under the name Berkeley Electric Lighting Company at 2110 Center Street, Berkeley. In 1908 it was listed at 2225 Shattuck Avenue, but by then it was formally a branch of the Oakland Gas, Light & Heat Company. The odd shapes in this lid may represent the initials that got removed when the company changed its name. I’ve seen a couple of these.

Incidentally, since last week’s post I’ve found more Great Western Power Co. lids in Franklin Street as far down as 11th Street. It’s not always easy to check these things in the middle of the street!

When I first moved to Oakland, I knew this building on 20th Street near Telegraph Avenue as Navlet’s, part of a small chain of nurseries. (Today it’s a popular climbing gym.) Its huge smokestack, I figured, must be related to processing shredded bark and other ground covers. But it was originally the power plant that generated electricity for Oakland’s Great Western Power Company. Great Western merged with Pacific Gas & Electric in 1930, but its signs remain in our downtown streets.

The old Great Western power lines are PG&E property today, but PG&E didn’t replace the utility hole covers. I’ve photographed over a dozen of them all around the old power plant. This is what most of them look like.

The details matter. The predominant lid design features two holes, two notches in the rim, and a wide “mustache” above the letters “CO”.

Another configuration eliminates the notches, and all of the features look fatter.

There’s a third configuration with several differences, the most obvious being a small mustache. It’s more elegant overall, and I suspect that it came later.

The fourth design evokes the complete name, “Great Western Power Company of California,” that appears on the power plant itself. I’ve only seen two of these.

Elsewhere around town there are examples of this configuration seen on Ivanhoe Street.

At its peak, the Great Western network, under the leadership of Mortimer Fleishhacker, extended all the way across California. Starting in 1908, the company dammed the Feather River at Big Meadows to create Lake Almanor reservoir, given its name for Alice, Martha and Elanor — the three children of the company’s vice president, Oakland lawyer Guy Earl.

^{Lassen Peak and Lake Almanor, 22 September 2006}

More dams and turbines were built along the Feather River to generate electricity in a mighty “stairway of power.” The power lines ran from there all the way to Oakland.

The colorful origin story of Great Western in 1905, and the colorful story of how Great Western invaded PG&E’s market in the Santa Rosa region in 1912, are both well told on the Comstock House website.

In another remnant of the once-great firm, the Great Western Power Trail in El Cerrito runs where a substation once supplied electricity to the Hutchinson Quarry (presumably part of the Hutchinson construction empire that left its sidewalk stamps all over Oakland).

I’m thinking that these covers survive in other places outside Oakland.

These lids are tough old hombres that have stood up to generations of traffic, but they do have limited lives. Several on 20th Street, and another right in the middle of Grand and Broadway, look more like this.

Some day, PG&E will have to replace them with their own branded lids, which are also interesting and attractive. I hope someone at that gigantic company is a historian who, in collaboration with the city’s heritage community, will see to it that some of these old lids are preserved.