A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950

Marta Gutman is associate professor of architectural and urban history at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, and visiting professor of art history at the Graduate Center, City College of New York. She is a licensed architect.

A City for Children has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities through a Research Fellowship (FB-38618-03), the Research Foundation of the City University of New York through a PSC-CUNY 37 Research Grant, the University Seminars at Columbia University, and the dean’s office at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, the City College of the City University of New York.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to include in this book material from her essay The Physical Spaces of Childhood in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, edited by Paula S. Fass (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 249–65.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31128-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-15615-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226156156.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gutman, Marta, author.

A city for children : women, architecture, and the charitable landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 / Marta Gutman.

    pages : illustrations ; cm. — (Historical studies of urban America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-31128-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-15615-6 (e-book)

1. Women in charitable work—California—Oakland—History.   2. Child welfare—California—Oakland—History.   3. Urban renewal—California—Oakland—History.   4. Buildings—Remodeling for other use—California—Oakland—History.   5. Architecture—Conservation and restoration—California—Oakland—History.   6. Oakland (Calif.)—Buildings, structures, etc.—History.   I. Title.   II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.

HV99.025G88 2014

362.709794'6609041—dc23

2014010891

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

A City for Children

Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950

MARTA GUTMAN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF URBAN AMERICA

Edited by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, James R. Grossman, and Becky M. Nicolaides

Also in the series:

A WORLD MORE CONCRETE: REAL ESTATE AND THE REMAKING OF JIM CROW SOUTH FLORIDA by N. D. B. Connolly

URBAN APPETITES: FOOD AND CULTURE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK by Cindy R. Lobel

CRUCIBLES OF BLACK POWER: CHICAGO’S NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS FROM THE NEW DEAL TO HAROLD WASHINGTON by Jeffrey Helgeson

THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO: POLICING AND THE CREATION OF A COSMOPOLITAN LIBERAL POLITICS, 1950–1972 by Christopher Lowen Agee

HARLEM: THE UNMAKING OF A GHETTO by Camilo José Vergara

PLANNING THE HOME FRONT: BUILDING BOMBERS AND COMMUNITIES AT WILLOW RUN by Sarah Jo Peterson

PURGING THE POOREST: PUBLIC HOUSING AND THE DESIGN POLITICS OF TWICE-CLEARED COMMUNITIES by Lawrence J. Vale

BROWN IN THE WINDY CITY: MEXICANS AND PUERTO RICANS IN POSTWAR CHICAGO by Lilia Fernandez

BUILDING A MARKET: THE RISE OF THE HOME IMPROVEMENT INDUSTRY, 1914–1960 by Richard Harris

SEGREGATION: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF DIVIDED CITIES by Carl H. Nightingale

SUNDAYS AT SINAI: A JEWISH CONGREGATION IN CHICAGO by Tobias Brinkmann

IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT: LIFE IN THE NOCTURNAL CITY, 1820–1930 by Peter C. Baldwin

MISS CUTLER AND THE CASE OF THE RESURRECTED HORSE: SOCIAL WORK AND THE STORY OF POVERTY IN AMERICA, AUSTRALIA, AND BRITAIN by Mark Peel

THE TRANSATLANTIC COLLAPSE OF URBAN RENEWAL: POSTWAR URBANISM FROM NEW YORK TO BERLIN by Christopher Klemek

I’VE GOT TO MAKE MY LIVIN’: BLACK WOMEN’S SEX WORK IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY CHICAGO by Cynthia M. Blair

Additional series titles follow index

For Eugene, and all that we have built together

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

ONE. New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland

TWO. The Landscape of Charity in California: First Imprints in San Francisco

THREE. The Ladies Intervene: Repurposed and Purpose-Built in Temescal

FOUR. The West Oakland Home: The Noble Work for a Life Saving of Rebecca McWade

FIVE. The Saloon That Became a School: Free Kindergartens in Northern California

SIX. The Art and Craft of Settlement Work in Oakland Point

SEVEN. The Ground Must Belong to the City: Playgrounds and Recreation Centers in Oakland’s Neighborhoods

EIGHT. Orphaned in Oakland: Institutional Life during the Progressive Era

NINE. Childhood on the Color Line in West Oakland: Day Nurseries during the Interwar Years

Epilogue

Oral Histories and Interviews

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1. West Oakland Free Kindergarten, Oakland

1.2. San Antonio Creek, California, from a trigonometrical survey under the direction of A. D. Bache, United States Coastal Survey, 1857

1.3. Map of Oakland, recorded and surveyed by Jeremiah E. Whitcher, 1860

1.4. Steam train on Cedar Street, Oakland, 1880s

1.5. Oakland Long Wharf viewed from Goat Island in the San Francisco Bay, October 1886

1.6. Butler and Bowman, real estate advertisement for Eighth Street tract, Oakland, 1876

1.7. Albert Miller house, Oakland, undated photograph

1.8. Albert Miller house, first floor plan, sketched by Christian (C. O. G.) Miller in 1943

1.9. African American girl skipping rope near the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 1912

1.10. Railroad Exchange Hotel, Oakland, 1902

1.11. Davidson/Patterson cottages, Oakland, 1997

1.12. Davidson/Patterson cottage, first-floor plan, 1996

1.13. Jackson Street looking toward Lake Merritt, Oakland, 1890s

1.14. Charitable landscape for children, Oakland

1.15. House lifting, Oakland, 1901

1.16. Seventh Street, Oakland, 1896

2.1. The Hearth-Stone of the Poor—Waste Steam Not Wasted, 1876

2.2. Alms House, Blackwell’s Island, New York, As Seen Looking North-West, 1852

2.3. Orphan Asylum in Bloomingdale, New York, c. 1840

2.4. Robert Durkin, 1859

2.5. San Francisco Industrial School viewed from the San Jose Road, 1865

2.6. Protestant Orphan Asylum, San Francisco, 1870

2.7. Membership certificate for the Female Charitable Asylum, Newburyport, Massachusetts

2.8. Dormitory at the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, 1899

2.9. Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, San Francisco, opened in 1855

2.10. Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society Building, Franklin Street, from the West, San Francisco, 1870

3.1. Broadway looking south toward the harbor from Thirteenth Street, Oakland, 1873

3.2. The Chicago Fire—Ladies Distributing Clothes to the Sufferers of Both Sexes—From a Sketch by Joseph Becker, 1871

3.3. Mills Hall, Mills College, Oakland, 1870

3.4. Children’s Home (formerly George Beckwith’s house), Temescal, 1883.

3.5. Prayer Time in the Nursery, Five Points House of Industry, New York City, photograph by Jacob A. Riis, c. 1880

3.6. Children’s Home, reconstructed ground and upper floor plans, c. 1878

3.7. Children’s Home, reconstructed building section, c. 1878

3.8. Home for Aged Women in Temescal, 1898

3.9. California Architect and Building News, front cover, May 1883

3.10. Home for Aged Women, 1882

3.11. Home for Aged Women, first- and second-floor plans, 1882

3.12. Home for Aged Women, longitudinal and transverse sections, 1882

3.13. Ladies’ Relief Society, site plan, 1882

3.14. Children’s Home, 1898

3.15. Ladies’ Relief Society, site plan, 1911–12

4.1. Whittier State School, Whittier, California, 1890

4.2. Rebecca McWade, undated photograph

4.3. Rebecca McWade’s house, Oakland

4.4. West Oakland Home, site development history, 1883–1904

4.5. West Oakland Home, Oakland, 1891

4.6. Prescott Grammar School, Oakland, 1893

4.7. Cradle of Tragedy—Substitute for European Revolving Cradle, San Francisco Babies’ Aid, 1916

4.8. Little Laborers of New York—Work of the Children’s Aid Society, 1873

4.9. West Cottage at the Preston School of Industry, Ione, California, 1916

4.10. Boys and girls at the West Oakland Home, 1890s

5.1. Classroom at the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, c. 1895

5.2. Kate Douglas Wiggin (The Author in Her Kindergartening Days), undated photograph

5.3. Silver Street Free Kindergarten and Training School, San Francisco, c. 1880

5.4. View of Pine Street near the corner of Chase Street, Oakland, photograph by Wilson Ellis, 1934

5.5. West Oakland Free Kindergarten, context map, 1889

5.6. Davidson/Patterson saloon and rooming house, Oakland, 1997

5.7. Mint Saloon, Oakland, undated photograph

5.8. Directors of the Woman’s Congress Association of the Pacific Coast, San Francisco, photograph by Louis Thors, 1895

5.9. Classroom at the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, Oakland, c. 1894

6.1. Garment class, West Oakland Settlement, 1900

6.2. Almira Huntington’s house, Oakland, 1997

6.3. Hull House, Chicago, original mansion and addition, 1891

6.4. West Oakland Settlement and New Century Club, site development history, 1895–1910

6.5. View of the West Oakland Settlement, 1900

6.6. Elizabeth Watt and the Mizpah Sewing Class at the West Oakland Settlement, 1900

6.7. A Quiet Hour at the Working Girls’ Recreation Club, 1900

6.8. The Living-Room: Much in Little Space, 1881

6.9. Boys’ Club at the West Oakland Settlement, 1900

6.10. Boys’ Club at the West Oakland Settlement, 1900

6.11. Practice Class in the Oakland Cooking School, 1900

7.1. Playground at Tompkins Grammar School, Oakland, 1910

7.2. Mothers’ Charity Club, Oakland, undated photograph

7.3. Presenting the Extreme of International Adjustment, Vacation School at the Tompkins Grammar School, 1900

7.4. Our Pond, Oakland, Cal., 1884

7.5. Boys’ Club using the free library at the New Century Club, Oakland, 1902

7.6. The Cooking School of the New Century Club, 1902

7.7. The New Century Club’s Committee Room, 1902

7.8. Ebell Society, after 1906

7.9. Home of the New Century Club, after 1906

7.10. Gymnastics class at the New Century Club, 1910

7.11. New Century Club Recreation Center Playground, photograph by Wilson Ellis, 1934

7.12. Tompkins Grammar School and the Oakland social settlement, site plan, 1910

7.13. Women distributing pure milk in front of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, c. 1912

8.1. Little Girls at Dumbbell-Exercise, City Hospital and Orphanage (under the direction of the Grey Nuns of the Cross), Ogdensburg, New York, 1903

8.2. Amy Steinhardt, photograph by Arnold Genthe, c. 1905

8.3. West Oakland Home, Oakland, context map, 1910

8.4. Home Club and Smith Cottages, Oakland, undated photograph

8.5. Florence Cottage, Oakland, 1902

8.6. Cottage for Babies and Small Children, Oakland 1916

8.7. Playground for toddlers at the West Oakland Home, after 1904

8.8. West Oakland Home, Oakland, 1916

8.9. Matron and children at the West Oakland Home, Oakland, 1920s

8.10. Campers from the West Oakland Home at Crow’s Canyon, California, 1920s

8.11. Mary Crocker Cottage, Oakland, 1930

8.12. Oakland Technical High School, photograph by Harry Courtright, c. 1917

8.13. Oakland Technical High School seen from the air, undated photograph by Harry Courtright

8.14. Ladies’ Relief Society, Oakland, site plan, 1928

8.15. Mollie and Berta Lee Cooley outside the De Fremery Nursery, 1925

8.16. Lois and Belva Cooley outside the Children’s Home, 1926

8.17. Studio One Art Center, formerly the Children’s Home, Oakland, 2001

8.18. Children’s Home, reconstructed ground and second floor plans, 1930

8.19. Boys’ dining room at St. Joseph’s Orphanage, Nashua (New Hampshire State Charitable and Correctional Institutions), c. 1900

8.20. Girls’ dormitory at St. Joseph’s Orphanage, Nashua (New Hampshire State Charitable and Correctional Institutions), c. 1900

8.21. Cooley sisters and their father at Mosswood Park, Oakland, 1929

8.22. Cooley sisters in front of the De Fremery Nursery, 1932

9.1. Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, Oakland, 2001

9.2. Day nursery at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893

9.3. St. Vincent’s Day Home, Oakland, 1996

9.4. Children gathered on the front lawn of St. Vincent’s Day Home, 1922

9.5. Easter Sunday at Beth Eden Baptist Church, Oakland, c. 1901

9.6. Ku Klux Klan marching in the Independence Day parade, Richmond, California, 1924

9.7. Fanny Wall and Lucinda B. Tilghman, undated photographs

9.8. Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, Oakland, undated photograph

9.9. Birthday party at the Fannie Wall Children’s Home, 1940s

9.10. Mary C. Jackson Netherland at her house, Oakland, 1940s

9.11. St. Vincent’s Day Home and Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Oakland, site plan, 1951

9.12. Linden Street (Colored) Branch of the YWCA, Oakland, undated photograph

9.13. Board of directors of the Fannie Wall Home, undated photograph

9.14. Ceremony at the Fannie Wall Children’s Home, 1948

9.15. St. Vincent’s Day Home after slum clearance, 1960s

9.16. St. Vincent’s Day Home, Oakland, site plan, 1972

9.17. Addition to St. Vincent’s Day Home, 1995

E.1. Wrecker Uses Sherman Tank to Blitz Old Homes, 1960

E.2. US Post Office sorting facility, Oakland, 1997

E.3. Arthur Patterson, 1995

E.4. Campbell Village, Oakland, in construction, 1940

E.5. Campbell Village, Oakland, with a racially integrated playground in 1941

E.6. Former central headquarters of the Black Panther Party, Oakland, 2012

E.7. Studio One Art Center, Oakland, photograph by Alan H. Woo, 2012

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It’s possible to look over West Oakland from the elevated platform of the Bay Area’s commuter train and grasp, all too easily, the devastation wreaked by the state on an impoverished community. From this perspective, West Oakland is a textbook example of the failure of postwar urban planning in the United States; a place where the size, singularity of purpose, and design of freeways, rapid transit, public housing, vast parking lots, and a mammoth mail sorting facility overwhelm the physical remains of an older, smaller-scale, heterogeneous city. Missing is a sense of the vitality of the remaining older residential fabric and of public buildings and spaces, including the charitable landscape built by women for children.

With so many sites cleared, this largely erased landscape became apparent to me through a series of fortuitous and not so fortuitous events. After the Cypress Freeway collapsed in West Oakland during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the California State Department of Transportation formed a study team to document the area as part of the replacement project. I was invited to join the group, and while working under the auspices of the Anthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State University, I learned that women repurposed buildings to make public architecture for children in Oakland. This method of making urban institutions, which I had learned about in architecture practice in New York City, tied into my abiding interest in investigating how in different historical circumstances men, women, and children harness opportunities in the built environment to make better lives for themselves and their fellow citizens.

This book, many years in the making, is the result. It has benefited from and been sustained by generous colleagues, friends, and institutions. I am deeply grateful to Linda Gordon, Abigail A. Van Slyck, Carla Yanni, and an anonymous scholar for reading the manuscript in its entirety and challenging me to write a better book. Amy Ogata shared her expert knowledge of the Arts and Crafts movement, and Ellen Handy did the same for nineteenth-century photographic prints. Dell Upton watched over this project from the beginning, helping me frame questions, and inspiring me with his own exemplary scholarship. Mary Ryan patiently taught me to analyze gender at work in the landscape, for which I am most grateful, as I am for our ongoing spirited conversations about women’s public culture, localism, municipalism, and reform. As Paul Rabinow and the late Allan Pred tutored me in social theory, they helped me to think about architecture history in new and creative ways. Paul Groth took me on my first trip to West Oakland, one that, with this project, changed my understanding of American urban history. Paul also read an earlier draft of the revised manuscript and offered comments that sharpened the thinking and the writing.

For reading portions of the manuscript in various stages of its preparation, my thanks to Zeynep Çelik, Ning de Coninck-Smith, Paula S. Fass, Barrie Thorne, Greg Hise, Sally McMurry, Annmarie Adams, Daniel Bluestone, Alice Friedman, Eric Sandweiss, Carl Abbott, Max Page, Daphne Spain, Janice Reiff, Scott Henderson, and especially Camille Hall, Elaine Jackson-Retondo, Jim Buckley, and Bill Littmann. A research fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities made it possible to start revising the book manuscript (and my thanks to Dick Walker for welcoming me to the California Studies Center at the University of California, Berkeley, while I did so).

Over the years, this project has profited from conversations with many other people including the late Robert Gutman, the late William Jordy, the late Roger Montgomery, Richard Longstreth, Hilary Ballon, Dolores Hayden, Kenneth T. Jackson, Lisa Keller, Alison Isenberg, David Sloane, Catherine Zipf, Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Michael Sorkin, Carol Willis, Peggy Deamer, Andrew Dolkart, Marci Reaven, Zeynep Kezer, Jyoti Hoshagrahar, Diane Harris, Swati Chattopadhyay, Rebecca Ginsberg, Diane Shaw, and Greg Castillo. Thanks for comments and counsel that enriched my work immeasurably—and also to Louis P. Nelson, Cynthia G. Falk, Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, and Catherine Bishir for inspiring me to become a better writer, through our shared work on Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. Betty Marvin, Jim Buckley, Gray Brechin, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Donald Hausler, Michael Knight, Donna Graves, Robert O. Self, and Donna Murch generously shared documents and insights about the history of Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area. Adrian and Mary Praetzellis included me in the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, and others on the team graciously shared materials—most importantly, Aicha Woods, Karana Hattersley-Drayton, and Elaine-Maryse Solari.

My understanding of children and childhood in the charitable landscape began to unfold through lively conversations with Paula S. Fass during my fellowship at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities (when it was directed by Randolph Starn and Christina Gillis). This understanding took off during my subsequent fellowship at the Berkeley Center for Working Families, where Ning de Coninck-Smith joined the discussions, which were led by Barrie Thorne and Arlie Hochschild; Paula Fass, Peter Stearns, and John Gillis pitched in too. Thanks to these exchanges, collaboration with Ning on Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, and the hard work of like-minded historians, we know more than we did about the history of children’s spaces in modern society. It’s been a pleasure to work with Abby Van Slyck, Amy Ogata, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Anna Davin, Anne-Marie Châtelet, Roy Kozlovsky, Annmarie Adams, Cathy Burke, Marie Warsh, Simon Sleight, and others to make this happen.

This project, to write children into the history of architecture, has also been helped by presentations at conferences and symposia—and the smart comments offered by my colleagues. Especially helpful have been A New Social Order, the interdisciplinary symposium at the Sackler Art Museum held in conjunction with the exhibit Classified Documents: The Social Museum of Harvard University, 1903–1931 at Harvard University (2007); Home, School, Play, Work: The Visual and Textual Worlds of Children, sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the Cotsen’s Children’s Library, Princeton University (2008–9); and Urban Childhoods, the interdisciplinary conference at the New York Institute of Technology (2009). Thanks, respectively, to Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamuniere, to Georgia Barnhill and Andrea Immel, and to Nicholas Bloom for inviting my participation. Early in my research, Zeynep Çelik and Tony Schuman invited me to present to the City Seminar at Columbia University, where I continue to profit from the stimulating intellectual exchange. Joan Ockman and Mary McLeod did the same at the Buell Dissertation Colloquium, also at Columbia University.

Librarians, archivists, and other historians offered invaluable assistance. Betty Marvin opened the research files of the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey; all historians should be so fortunate to have access to such accurate, thorough materials, and to work with such a dedicated and generous historian. At the Oakland History Room of the Oakland Public Library, William Sturm, Kathleen DiGiovanni, Steven Lavoie, and Dorothy Lazard patiently answered requests for materials and then some, turning up new documents and images. I could not have completed this book without their help. Shannon McQueen, Kim Anderson, and Rick Moss helped find images at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO), and Donald Bastion, former director of the Richmond Museum of History, shared newspaper clippings describing the infamous Ku Klux Klan parade of July 1924. Susan Snyder, at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, started to help me at the beginning of my research, and it has been my great pleasure to work with her through completion of the book. I am also grateful to Jackie Pennie at the American Antiquarian Society; Mary Morganti at the California Historical Society; Kathleen A. Correia at the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento; Anne Clary at the Chapin Hall Center for Children; Angela Hoover at the Chicago History Museum; Brian Quigly at the Earth Sciences Library at University of California, Berkeley; Isabella Donadio at the Harvard University Art Museums; Nilda Rivera at the Museum of the City of New York; Eleanor Gillers at the New-York Historical Society; Nathan Kerr at the Oakland Museum of California; Melinda McCrary at the Richmond Museum of History; Patricia L. Keats at the Society of California Pioneers; Raquel Chavez and Michele Welsing at the Southern California Library, Los Angeles; Valerie Harris at the Special Collections, University of Illinois, Chicago; and Alan Woo, for his stunning photograph of Studio One.

One of the great joys of this research has been to meet people in the Bay Area, so many of them women, who have had firsthand experiences with the charitable landscape. I especially want to thank Sister Corinne Marie Mohrmann, executive director of the St. Vincent’s Day Home, for taking time from her busy schedule to share knowledge of the day home, for allowing me to visit the home, and for granting permission to use material in this book. Sister Michaela O’Connor shared her experiences working at the day home and helped me connect with the Mother House of the Sisters of the Holy Family in Fremont, California, where I spent hours in the archive—and had my first hands-on experience with Froebel blocks! When Maryanne McKale directed the Lincoln Child Center, she gave generously of her time and knowledge, discussed the intricacies of licensing, and allowed me to visit the center and peruse its archives, where I discovered the marvelous scrapbooks that women put together to record the center’s history. Christine Stoner-Mertz, chief executive officer of the LCC since 2006, has also helped me in countless ways, most recently by welcoming me to Lincoln’s new facility in West Oakland. I am grateful for permission to publish material (and to Ronit Tulloch for following up on my inquiries). It was a great pleasure and honor to be invited to share what I had learned about Lincoln with women who continue to work and volunteer at this important charity for children in the Bay Area.

Thanks are also due to the people who welcomed me to buildings once owned by the Ladies’ Relief Society—at the Park Day School (formerly the Babies’ Nursery), Tom Little, Flo Hodes, and Laurie Grossman; at the former Matilda Brown Home (now owned by Park Day), Lois O’Connell, Ella Raiford, and Rosa West; at the Studio One Art Center (formerly the Children’s Home), Johnette Jones-Morton, Sandy Strehlou, Betsy Yost, Chris Noll, and especially Jeff Norman, who generously shared his knowledge of Studio One. It’s been a great pleasure to work with Jeff over the years, contributing to the effort to list Studio One on the National Register, convincing the Oakland City Council to float the bond issue that made the restoration possible, and ensuring that the archive of the Ladies’ Home Society was donated to the Bancroft Library.

Then, there are all who talked about their childhoods with me. I am deeply indebted to Di Starr for introducing me to Mollie Fisher and Belva Heer, who made it possible to integrate children’s voices and experiences into this book. I thank Mollie and especially Belva, who traveled to Oakland to visit Studio One in spite of a painful terminal illness. Sally Gorham, Roberta White McBride, Robert White, and Sara McCullen-Krueger also discussed childhood in various institutions. I thank them for answering all my questions and wish that I could have answered all of theirs, including the most burning one: Why did their placement in an orphanage happen in the first place? Arthur Patterson spent many hours helping me to dissect the architectural history of the New Century Club and to understand his life as an African American boy in West Oakland and the challenges faced by his mother, Annie Patterson.

A project that began in the Bay Area was finished on the East Coast, amid new and supportive colleagues. My special thanks to George Ranalli, dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, for welcoming me to the City College of New York, supporting my research, and generously underwriting the illustration program. A full sabbatical leave gave me needed time for revisions, and I thank both the dean and Lisa Staiano-Coico, president of City College, for all that they have done to sustain a vibrant research culture at CCNY. At the architecture school Camille Hall and her predecessor, Stephanie Smith, worked with me to manage the arduous task of collecting permissions from a daunting number of archives and libraries. Stopping by Camille’s office to chat about history writing always makes my day. Michael Miller, Erica Torres, and Jacqueline Aguilar helped in countless ways. Judy Connorton and Ching-Jung Chen, librarians extraordinaire, cheered me on, along with Nilda Sanchez and Todd Pickens. Aja Garzon and Junko Fujimoto accomplished wonders, making beautiful scans of old photographs at the SSA Visual Resources Library.

I am also grateful to the University Seminars at Columbia University and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York for their support of the illustration program. Many thanks to Mireille Moga and Sheila Moss for all their hard work on illustrations, to Mireille and Alexandra Kruger for collating permissions, and to George Caranza, key worder extraordinaire. Special thanks to Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Gene Sparling, and Christian Dauer for assistance with drawings early on, and to Rebecca Ginsberg, Tamsen Anderson, and especially Karen McNeill for research in Berkeley.

Earlier versions of some chapters in this book were published as working papers by the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project and the Berkeley Center for Working Families, and as articles in the Pacific Historical Review and People, Power, and Places, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, VIII, edited by Sally McMurray and Annmarie Adams. I also gratefully acknowledge permission to include in this book material from my essay The Physical Spaces of Childhood in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, edited by Paula S. Fass.

I owe a special debt to Alison Isenberg, who brought my work to the attention of Robert Devens at the University of Chicago Press. I thank Robert and the editors of Historical Studies of Urban America, especially Becky Nicolaides, for their unstinting support of this book. Robert’s expert editing made me a better writer; his patience and unflagging good humor made it a pleasure to work with him. After Robert moved on, Tim Mennel cheerfully stepped in to guide the book into and through production, ably assisted by Russell Damien. Renaldo Migaldi copyedited the book with care, diligence, and precision; Laura Bevier prepared the index; and Jeana Ganskop helped with proofreading.

Finally, my thanks take me to debts of a more personal nature. On the East Coast, all of the extended Gutman clan—especially Judith Mara Gutman, Nell Gutman, Halley Gutman McWilliam, and Lily Gutman McWilliam—bolstered spirits and celebrated successes. On the West Coast, Virginia and Gerald Sparling have been model parents-in-law: Ginny helped me understand, through her personal example, the rich history of women’s volunteerism in our country. Sadly, she passed away before I could hand her a copy of this finished book. From near and far, Frances Campani, Wendy Lamb, Jeri Zempel, Amy Stein, and so many other friends cheered me on, offering support in countless ways. I hope they can see themselves and their insights in the following pages (and thanks especially to Zeynep, Mary, Hilary, Paula, and Abby for the nudges to get this book done).

As I worked on this book, Gene Sparling and I raised our children, Isaac and Nina. Our experiences, as parents with a growing family and with our circle of friends in the Bay Area, opened me to new understandings of children and childhood as we watched our kids on the playground, brought them to school, and arranged child care, music lessons, and summer camps. I thank all for the lessons learned, especially Jenny Holland, Madeline Prager, Lincoln Spector, Malcolm Waugh, Abby Ginzberg, Diane Douglas, Darryl Dickerhoff, Elaine Jackson-Retondo, Pete Retondo, Chris Celata, Jay Marx, and our now grown children. I also thank Nina, Isaac, and Gene for moving across the United States twice—for taking the trip from New York to Berkeley and back again to New York. Since I set aside practicing architecture for writing its history, Gene has sustained me in every possible manner, putting up with dry runs of conference papers, crafting drawings at midnight, reading countless drafts, insisting on precision in conceptualization, demanding elegance in language, and, most importantly, offering unflagging companionship and love. This book is a better one for his care and attention.

From my earliest childhood, my parents, the late Herbert G. Gutman and Judith Mara Gutman, shared their love of reading and research with me, as they taught me to think historically and to admire ordinary people, record their stories, and appreciate their places. They insisted that I examine power and culture in all walks of life, and that I bring a passion for social justice to scholarship. My debt to them is deep and abiding. A piece of this book belongs to each of them, as it does to Nina, Isaac, and Gene.

ONE

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland

Let’s start early on an August morning in 1888, as Elizabeth Betts readied herself for work. The kindergarten teacher, a graduate of the California Kindergarten Training School in San Francisco, lived and worked in the urbanizing flatlands in the western part of Oakland, California. In the early 1940s a former resident, evidently without sympathy for African Americans arriving during the Great Migration, recalled that only earlier in the city’s history had West Oakland contained many of the city’s best citizens.¹ To those men and women who, like Betts, were white, Protestant, and economically privileged in the late nineteenth century, the regular urban fabric spoke of successful city building; a success needed to cement their imperial ambition in the American West and to secure a good childhood for their children. In Betts’s residential neighborhood, narrow wooden sidewalks separated gravel-covered streets from neatly fenced front yards, and the occasional empty lot, filled with tall grasses, yellowed from the long dry spell of a California summer.

I like to think that as the morning fog started to clear, Betts stepped out the front door, saw the foothills of the San Leandro Mountains shimmering in the distance, and perhaps imagined the fecund terrain beyond in the great Central Valley. She waved goodbye to her parents—William, a wealthy English immigrant who owned a carriage spring company in San Francisco, and Sarah, active in the Congregational Church—as she walked across the sidewalk and stepped into the waiting carriage. Even in this seemingly bucolic setting, railroad schedules and factory whistles outlined the rhythm of the day. At nine o’clock sharp, Miss Lizzie expected thirty boys and girls at the West Oakland Free Kindergarten (figure 1.1). Two years earlier she had set up the charity school for working-class children in Oakland Point, a neighborhood that was also in West Oakland but closer to the heart of the industrial machine than the capacious home of the Betts family on Myrtle Street. From the many properties for rent, Betts selected a sunny room inside an inexpensive building on Peralta Street, close to the Southern Pacific’s sprawling railroad yards. Her decision to repurpose this place, remembered to have been the former premises of a liquor-saloon, rendered explicit her intent to educate and to socialize children in need.² She didn’t look for an elaborate house and in a location where she would be surrounded by her friends, an admirer wrote subsequently in the Sunday Call Magazine. No, not she. Instead she went into the quarters of the poorest of Oakland’s poor.³

Figure 1.1. The West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 341 (757) Peralta Street, Oakland, 1895. By the time this photograph was taken, Winnie McFarland had replaced Elizabeth Betts as head teacher; she may be the woman seated in the midst of more than forty children. Edna Jones and Maud Cheek, standing at the left, are assistants. Two doors open into the schoolroom, which previously had been used as a saloon. Since Oakland’s street addresses changed in 1910, both the contemporary and the historic numbers are indicated (the latter in parentheses). Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

The author of the Call article, Madge Moore, may have exaggerated the poverty of Oakland Point in the late 1880s, but she nonetheless underscored with her backward glance this important point. Differences between the single-use neighborhood, where Betts lived, and the mixed-use neighborhood, where she worked, prompted women of her social class to venture to unfamiliar urban places to change the circumstances of workingclass childhood. The West Oakland Free Kindergarten was one result. It belonged to the charitable landscape for children—the physical network of buildings and spaces that women put together in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to improve cities for kids. In the gendered, mixed economy of social welfare that prevailed historically across the United States, state, county, and municipal governments counted on women to care for children in need, and women were more than eager to oblige. Although the precise configuration of responsibility varied from state to state, women relied on the same instrument to structure public-private partnerships. They organized voluntary associations, the element of civil society that Americans from all walks of life used in the nineteenth century to extend state power—in this case, to protect children.⁴

The investments in childhood helped to make the American city a place for hope about the future, rather than only for despair about poverty, pollution, disease, crime, corruption, and injustice in the present.⁵ Charitable institutions for children, often housed in repurposed buildings and run by female volunteers, played a key role in addressing the social ills brought about by industrialization and urbanization, bringing order to the urban landscape, and creating reserves of public places freed from speculative development. However, not all problems were resolved. As America urbanized, the charitable landscape rendered public the architectural decisions of women and the social needs of children; it also inscribed physical reminders of the failures that had demanded its creation. Since children did not benefit equally from adult largesse, the physical spaces made for them in the charitable landscape served to ingrain inequalities and prejudices as well as to endow them with a special, idealized world. The process of giving and getting, the presence of many kinds of buildings, and the unpredictable relationships between people and places made the charitable landscape one of many intersecting cultural landscapes that gave an incomplete, tenuous, fragile, and imperfect order to nineteenth-century American cities.

California was no exception. Americans held dear to the romantic sense of the West as a special region, even after Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed, the feature that he alleged defined the region.⁶ In California more than elsewhere, the natural beauty, astonishing landforms, and abundant plant and animal species stunned newcomers.⁷ Especially for children, they praised the advantages of a temperate climate and ready access to nature—the sense that this was a new Eden. Nevertheless Americans, hungry for land and greedy for gold, introduced a market economy and class structure to this place: they seized the province of Alta California in 1846 during the Mexican-American War, executed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which delivered the territory to the United States, and wrote a constitution during the Gold Rush, in anticipation that the territory would be admitted to the Union.

The victors had promised to respect Mexican civil law, which had banned slavery since 1823, but the status of slavery in this new territory of the United States erupted during the 1848 presidential election. Opponents to slavery’s advance formed the Free Soil Party, while Whigs and Democrats, the nation’s main political parties, waffled on whether to restrict slavery in California—the explosive issue that had at least in part inspired the Mexican-American War. Even though the proslavery Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, a war hero and slave owner from Louisiana, won the election, Free Soil sentiment took hold on the Pacific Coast. The conveners of the constitutional convention in Monterey voted to ban slavery in 1849, and California was admitted—as a free state, in 1850.⁸ In the face of ensuing bitter contests over land and water rights, huge capitalist enterprises based on the extraction of natural resources spread across the hinterland, railroads linked them to markets, and city builders began to make California urban. By the 1870s, California ranked among the ten most urbanized states in the nation.⁹ By then, women had put in place components of the charitable landscape for children. Their concern was the crises that damaged childhood during industrialization, urbanization, and migration even in a small city like Oakland.

During the heady years of the Gold Rush, Horace Carpentier and two other Yankee land speculators set out to plat this new city, eight miles across the bay from the booming town of San Francisco. They staked adjacent claims on the flatlands of the contra costa (other shore), north of an estuary that assured a sheltered harbor (figure 1.2). Most of the stately oak trees that gave the town its name were cleared, milled, and used to build on the 480-acre site. The town sat within the El Rancho de San Antonio, 44,800 acres of land that had once been home to the Miwok people. In 1820 the Spanish crown had given this huge parcel to Luís María Peralta in thanks for military service to the colony. Peralta and his sons retained ownership after Mexico won independence from Spain in the following year, but their claim to this property came to naught. Like other wealthy Californios, the family could not control its vast holdings in the face of the Anglo invasion.¹⁰ The commission in 1850 of a plat on the land stolen from this family, state approval in 1852 of the charter based on the illegal plat, and another action endorse the claim that the city was conceived in iniquity and nurtured on corruption.¹¹ In 1868, Carpentier bribed Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington, the directors of the transcontinental railroad, to terminate that railroad in Oakland. The deal they struck delivered to these men, the Big Four, all riparian rights, including those to the harbor.¹²

Figure 1.2. San Antonio Creek, California, from a trigonometrical survey made under the direction of A. D. Bache, United States Coastal Survey, 1857. This view, a detail of a much larger drawing, shows the new city of Oakland in relationship to the bay, the estuary, and the Oakland hills. Visible downtown is the street grid, delineated by Julius Kellersberger in 1850 but not yet fully platted on the flatlands. Broadway is the central street, with San Pablo Avenue and Telegraph Avenue branching to the northwest. At the site of the small dock in Oakland Point, jutting into the bay, the Pacific Railroad built two huge piers, the Long Wharf and the Oakland Mole. Californios lost control of virtually all the land depicted on this map, which they had earlier seized themselves from the Miwok and other Indian tribes. Courtesy of the NARA CG&S Collection, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Historic Coast & Geodetic Survey Image ID cgs05168.

The Big Four won control of a city with a prosaic plan (figure 1.3). Julius Kellersberger, the surveyor, delivered the expected and nothing more to Carpentier and his partners—an even grid of streets, rectangular city blocks divided into narrow building lots, four public squares, and one main street, Broadway, that linked the harbor to Telegraph Avenue and San Pablo Avenue. To the west, the skew of Market Street, off the Kellersberger plat, set the orientation for streets that would over time fill the area known as West of Market.¹³

Figure 1.3. Map of Oakland, recorded and surveyed by Jeremiah E. Whitcher, 1860. The 480-acre Kellersberger plat is shown in full, with Market Street skewed off the downtown street grid. West of Market, Eighth Street is the principal east-west street, and Adeline Street runs north and south, platted at the behest of James and Virginie de Fremery, adjacent to their estate and named after their daughter. Women in this family were active in Oakland charities. The Pullman Palace Car Company designated Adeline Street the eastern edge of settlement for black porters in its employ. The extent of the wetlands separating Oakland Point from downtown is clear, as is the rural character of settlement, even though speculators had started to assemble building lots. The buildings illustrated in the map border include the College of California (located on the double lot labeled college block), precursor of the public university in Berkeley. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Three years after the delineation of the plat, the city opened its first public school (a one-room schoolhouse) and an educator set up a private academy (three kids enrolled in an institution that would become the nucleus of the University of California).¹⁴ The modest buildings indicated a remarkable change about to burst forth—one that would transform cities and alter childhood. Kids have always lived, played, learned, and worked in urban spaces. However, the provision of places purposefully made for children is an invention of the modern world. As a new understanding of childhood began to emerge in early modern Europe, privileged classes embraced a sentimental ideal that emphasized a child’s innocence.¹⁵ The sentimental construction of childhood intersected with other revolutionary social changes—the separation of home and work, the modern concept of public and private life, the rise of consumer society—and a new belief that was a product of the Enlightenment. Positing an active relationship between buildings and people, it asserted that because material culture affects human beings, it should shape their behavior.¹⁶

Places and objects started to change as adults used them to ensure that children had a good childhood—one that was protected, happy, and playful. They also counted on all sorts of stuff to protect children from adult sexual desire, to display kids as valuable objects, and to insulate themselves from childish behavior and activities. In houses, middle- and upper-class parents expected children to play in nurseries and to sleep first in separate bedrooms and then in separate beds. Orphanages, schools, kindergartens, day care centers, hospitals, reform schools, and special prisons were built, followed by playgrounds, summer camps, museums, and libraries. Even if the metaphor of islands is sometimes used to describe this differentiation, children’s places were not isolated from adult hopes and fears for childhood. Adults used physical spaces and material culture to set out and put in place their goals for childhood.¹⁷

Taken together, changing ideals and changing places worked to define and prolong childhood as a time of dependency. The condition of dependence, tied to powerlessness, submission, bodily inferiority or weakness, one historian has argued, set parameters for childhood in Western culture before it was described in terms of a specific biological age.¹⁸ As middle-class children became treasured for their emotional role in family life rather than for the market value of their wage labor, a broad consensus developed that kids should learn and play in settings made with those purposes in mind. This process, called the sacralization of childhood by Viviana A. Zelizer, galvanized reformers.¹⁹ They asserted the right of all kids to childhood as Americans struggled to reconcile demands for protection, charity, and dependence with the dearly held belief that liberty, rights, and independence go hand in hand in a democracy. These reformers refused to countenance resistance to the top-down call for protection even when it trounced on treasured prerogatives. One of those prerogatives was parental autonomy. In a patriarchal household, fathers, not a charity or the state, determined the course of childhood.²⁰

A photograph of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten gives some sense of the situation in the mid-1890s (see figure 1.1). Now the building is gone, cleared in the 1920s to make way for a public playground. Since this structure, like so many others, has been lost, it’s necessary to use historic photographs to grasp the architectural character of the charitable landscape and to assess its effects on children.²¹ In this example the actual institution building process, the alteration of a saloon into a kindergarten, underscored the breadth of Betts’s message. Her goal was not only to improve childhood, but also to reform the working class family.

Forty clean, neatly dressed children inhabited a place that had been made on purpose for them: the backyard of a school. Extraordinarily (remember that the US Supreme Court was about to declare that separate was equal), the charity was racially integrated. If the photograph portrayed these children as individuals by virtue of their demeanor and dress, they also belonged to an age-graded group, the kindergarten class. Supervised by three teachers and gathered to learn through play, these kids were protected from danger, disease, crime, immorality, and other contagions that kindergartners (as teachers and promoters of kindergartens were called) and other child savers believed were legion among the immigrants who lived in a neighborhood like Oakland Point.²² Reformers may have appreciated that working-class parents loved their children, but they could not grasp the manner in which these parents invested in childhood. Skilled railroad workers allowed their kids to attend the free kindergarten and gave them toys and pets to play with—and dolls and a dog are shown in the photo, an indicator that the right to play had emerged as a powerful site of identity formation by the 1890s.²³ A parent with fewer resources to call upon—for example, a mother who worked in a cannery—may have struggled to do the same as she tried to strike a balance between competing areas of work, play, and education (and contested definitions of their value, too).²⁴

The relationships depicted in figure 1.1 invite consideration of how the power produced through them shaped modern childhood. A useful concept is governmentality—offered by Michel Foucault to explain how we act in concert with others, and directed by Nikolas Rose toward children and families.²⁵ The boundary between private and public life dissolved in the nineteenth century as the problems of children were construed to be social issues, subject to conditioning by the family, state, market, and civil society. Citizenship no longer inhabited one sphere, the political sector, in Rose’s terms. That means the photo in figure 1.1 depicts a society on the cusp of change, as the social was invented, to borrow a concept from Jacques Donzelot. The human being, in this case the child, was not conditioned solely as a moral subject, an individual shaped by religious creed; nor was the child’s body conditioned only by a normalizing gaze, directed by state authority. The child was becoming a social subject of solidarity, with citizenship rights that depended on adult protection and a childhood that needed spaces purposefully made for a young person.²⁶

All that said, any avowal of success in the conditioning of any childhood should be taken with a grain of salt. Regardless of its purpose or origin, an official record, like the photograph of a kindergarten class in figure 1.1, doesn’t give a full picture of a child’s experience in an institution, to say nothing of a child’s point of view. As the anthropologist James C. Scott insists, condition is not by necessity consciousness; people invent mechanisms (he calls them hidden transcripts) to contest power and authority.²⁷ Social historians also argue that a child’s attendance at a charity didn’t mean acceptance. Patrons of philanthropies balanced self-interest with altruism and desire for social control with freedom and individualism; and parents, especially single mothers, demanded help from charities to protect children and themselves from abuse.²⁸

A woman like Betts also carried more than one vision for childhood to a charity like the free kindergarten. Kindergartners put in place programs to Americanize immigrants and ready boys and girls for gender-, class-, and race-specific futures in modern society. Even though the social construction of the economically worthless child was in place for middle-class children by the mid-1880s, the situation remained open for working-class children. In Oakland Point, more often than not, the family economy prevailed in households, where children lived, worked, and played in the shadow of the Southern Pacific railroad.

In the Shadow of the Railroad

The railroad and its enormous yard in Oakland Point, filled with buildings, machines, and equipment, were the biggest things in town. The railroad monopoly also invested in several sets of parallel iron tracks. One, for freight trains, ran through the marshy wetlands that separated Oakland Point from downtown; another, for passenger trains, ran on Seventh Street, also known as Railroad Avenue; and a third set traveled north along the bay. The outcome could be deadly, as was so often the case for children. Ungated tracks ran down the middle of Railroad Avenue, and since trains barreled along at fifty miles an hour, noise, smoke, and danger were inescapable (figure 1.4).²⁹ The trains headed at first to Long Wharf, made eleven thousand feet long to handle freight and passenger traffic, and then also to the Oakland Mole, another enormous dock (figure 1.5). For a modest fare, steamboats carried people and goods from these docks to San Francisco, the biggest city in the West and the hub of the regional economy.³⁰

Immediately, the new infrastructure spawned visions of the wealth to be won from land speculation on the east side of the bay. Soon after the first transcontinental cars rolled into town, a resident declared, The foundation of an immense city has been laid.³¹ That dream failed to bear full fruit, but the link to the railroad did trigger growth in Oakland. A town of about 1,500 in 1860 became one of 10,500 in 1870 and of more than 100,000 after the turn of the century. The locomotive is a great centralizer, journalist Henry George insisted. It kills little towns and builds up great cities.³² Even if Oakland was not quite a great city, the press to urbanize altered its landscape on the Pacific Coast. The antidemocratic results were clear to George when he rode through the Oakland hills shortly after the Pacific Railroad arrived. Like a flash, he wrote, it came upon me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth.³³

Figure 1.4. Steam train on Cedar Street, crossing Seventh Street, Oakland, 1880s. This dramatic photograph depicts a common event in the gritty, mixed-use neighborhood near the railroad yards: a steam train belching a great cloud of smoke as it barrels along ungated tracks. The two-story hotel was known as Centennial House in 1881, and train smoke was a fact of life for patrons whether they were sitting on the porch or in the hotel’s saloon. In the background, four boys appear to be running alongside the train. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Skyrocketing property values did give untold advantage to a few, fulfilling George’s prophecy and spreading railroad antagonism in the state. Plenty of land and the prospect of a shorter commute to San Francisco motivated middle- and upper-class families to live west of Market Street—odor, smoke, noise, and danger to children notwithstanding. The city should not become a smut-mill to San Francisco millionaires, one irate taxpayer declared, but rather a city of homes for the middle class.³⁴ The latter outcome prevailed, and this immediate gain was obvious to many, including H. H. Bancroft, an early chronicler of California history. He noted Oakland’s extraordinary growth as a residence suburb for San Francisco.³⁵ Speculators built substantial dwellings on large lots, and Eighth Street won accolades as a grand boulevard lined with poplar trees and handsome homes (figure 1.6).³⁶ The wealthy banker Albert Miller (born Mueller) commissioned an architect to design a grand home on the corner of Fourteenth and Union Streets (figures 1.7 and 1.8). Miller’s mansion may have been larger than most in the neighborhood, but it contained the specialized rooms and outdoor spaces that he and his neighbors, the de Fremery and Cole families, counted on to define a good childhood.

Ostentatious display of wealth did not set the norm for construction south of Seventh Street. Small operators and heavy builders, as Betty Marvin has shown, continued to build in Oakland after the railroad arrived, targeting as consumers old-timers and newcomers who continued to come west.³⁷ Membership in the self-defined pioneer generation may have been used to build status, but the groups on both sides of this divide were part of the movement of men, women, and children who, with their possessions, their things, transformed world culture, starting in early modern Europe. The white population of California increased by 88 percent between 1860 and 1870, with Irish, German, and old-stock Americans predominating.³⁸ Despite linguistic differences, cultural antagonisms, and the invidious appeal of nativism, these new Americans shared experiences—of deprivation, persecution, and migration—that engendered the hope for a better future grounded in homeownership. Many white wageworkers succeeded. On Peralta Street, Americans of Irish heritage who owned homes near the kindergarten in the 1880s included Ellen Kenney, Cordelia Fike, and Nicholas Doran, the sexton at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church. Another homeowner was John Prairo, a blacksmith born in Portugal.³⁹

Figure 1.5. Oakland Long Wharf viewed from Goat Island in the San Francisco Bay, October 1886. Shaded by at least one of the great oak trees that gave Oakland its name, Goat Island offered an excellent prospect for viewing the 11,000-foot-long railroad pier projecting into the bay and the shoreline of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. Although the island offered a refuge from city life, a perfect place to sail to for a weekend picnic, a military outpost had been built on it in the 1870s. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History