Oakland Underfoot

Oakland has many old businesses that have left their mark on the pavement. This marker for Bay City Iron Works is at 475 4th Street, a building that houses Ion Cars today. But the marker says, “Since 1885.” Perhaps this was its first home.

If you look up the company’s name today, Google points you to an empty lot at 2897 Chapman Street, in Jingletown. But the company’s earlier home was near the docks, at the corner of 3rd and Washington Streets (221 Washington). See this family biography of Harry Melville Thornally, who used to work there, for photos and letterhead of the place. In The Iron Age issue of October 3, 1901, the firm is reported to be in the process of building it. Today the sign on the building says “Parker Electric Mfg. Co.” I’m not sure what this website has to do with it, but check it out.

Alameda County, the Eden of the Pacific; the Flower Garden of California (Oakland Tribune, 1898) says of the firm, “The enterprise is located at 521 to 525 Third Street. It turns out all kinds of agricultural work, general jobbing in machine work, threshers, machine engines with straw-burning boilers, and irrigating pumps of the M. B. Schutzell design.”

As you walk up Broadway past the old Saw Mill building, you might notice two bronze letters in the sidewalk spelling out the word “NO.” That’s because you’re looking at it backward. Things make sense at the building’s main entrance, where a large stone/concrete lion with a dozen layers of paint looms over the door and the word “LYON” is spelled out in metal.

With that in mind, you can set out downhill from the doorway and see the letters rightly as the second half of LYON.

Or go uphill instead to see their counterpart. I have to assume that both of these once had four letters.

The building began in 1916 as Lyon Moving & Storage. It was quite grand, in the old Oakland style. Today, there are 53,000 storage companies in America, most of them quite bland and not a single one, I’m sure, with its name on the sidewalk in bronze.

A few Oakland sidewalk marks include the distinctive oval stamp of the Cement Contractors Association of Alameda County. During my inventory I captured a few of them. I’m positive there are others, but I wasn’t documenting them. I’ll add more as I find them.

It’s possibly coincidental that both of the dated marks are from 1927. On the other hand, the late 1920s were the high-water mark in sidewalk contracting — I counted about 110 different workers and companies active in Oakland at that time. So that would have been the best time to establish the Cement Contractors Association of Alameda County.

I think that Herman Orth tailored his odd-shaped stamp to fit the association oval. I have examples from 1925, his earliest year, as well as 1926 and 1936. For all I know, he founded the association.

These are all over the place, but you stop noticing them because they make no sense. Several of these plaques surround the Emporium/Sears/Uber building.

From looking at the material for an online real-estate course, I gather that property owners post these notices to prevent people from encroaching upon their rights by asserting an “easement by prescription.” Shopping malls used to claim that notices like these allow them to prevent people from leafletting, for instance. That got overturned. It seems like overkill, and unenforceable, to treat a sidewalk the same way, but then I’m not a lawyer.

The examples I’ve seen are pretty old. Here’s one from an address on Claremont Avenue.

And this one’s in front of the Hutch, on Telegraph near 20th Street.

It looks like there wasn’t a third line of text. Maybe the lawyers said this wording was sufficient. Maybe it cost too much for a skilled laborer to hand-set individual brass letters spelling out the whole notice.

The people who left their marks on the sidewalks they made in Oakland were a mix of workers. Some were individuals, and some were small businesses by today’s standards. But unions were there, too, in contention and in cooperation. The American Brotherhood of Cement Workers was the first of these.

The ABCW’s stamp consisted of a pair of cement worker’s tools, crossed, inside a circle made of the words “Union Made” plus the union’s initials and the local number 19. I’ve photographed four examples in Oakland, all of them accompanying marks by the Oakland Paving Company. The one above, in Berkeley, is from 1913, the one below is from 1914, and this one is from 1913. The number 10 inside the symbol refers to the master finisher.

Lincoln Cushing knows more about Bay area labor history than I ever will. His site tells how the ABCW tangled with the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) in 1913. LIUNA prevailed upon the American Federation of Labor (the AFL in the AFL-CIO) to let it poach the ABCW’s members. After that, concrete workers were represented by LIUNA or by the Operative Plasterers’ and Cement Finishers’ International Association, which is now named the Operative Plasterers’ and Cement Masons’ International Association (OPCMIA). I’ve only seen the stamp of OPCFIA Local 594 on Oakland’s sidewalks. (Today OPCMIA’s Local 66 represents the central Bay area and doesn’t do sidewalks.)

Here are seven different Local 594 bugs. The number inside is that of the master finisher. They’re mainly from the 1940s.

I did find one other union stamp. It’s somewhere in the Sheffield Village neighborhood — I no longer have the address.

Anyone know more about this one?

I want to end with an apology for not being a better documenter of these. I usually tried to avoid photographing the union bug as I shot the maker’s stamp, so there are surely more of these out there. But I looked at all of my thousands of photos in preparing this post, and I think nearly all of the different union bugs in this city worked their way into my collection.