The Ghost Fountains of North Berkeley
A bit of Bay Area history about the civic art of North Berkeley's fountain(s).
This is a first in a series on interesting Bay Area history. I research stuff like this in my free time and believe others may be interested in this niche stuff too. Skip to the bottom for an update on my political commentary and publishing schedule.
“The Fountain at The Circle” is a well-known landmark of North Berkeley people pass by en-route to the hills or the popular Indian Rock Park. The plaque near the fountain explains that it’s the focal point of the Northbrae neighborhood. It’s a pretentious fountain and traffic circle designed by the architect of UC Berkeley’s campus, John Galen Howard, on behalf of a real estate developer who sought to convince the state to put the capitol in the city of Berkeley.
The developer of Northbrae was Duncan McDuffie, one of California’s most famous real estate developers who built “residence parks” in which single-family houses and mansions were integrated with lush trees and a park-like neighborhood. McDuffie’s most famous neighborhoods are Claremont in southeast Berkeley — styled with lantern tipped rock pillars and gates housing the East Bay’s elite — and Saint Francis Wood in San Francisco which just got added as a historic site of McDuffie’s creation to dodge a state housing law.
McDuffie was also one of the inventors of single-family zoning in the United States, who lobbied Berkeley and San Francisco to create zoning laws that would protect his and other elite neighborhoods from the blight of apartments and industry and all the poor people and people of color it brings along. But I went over much of that already.
Northbrae is a pretty and well designed streetcar suburb and the fountain at the Marin Circle is a Berkeley hallmark — but also a recreation. Most young people or people who moved to Berkeley after the 1990s don’t know that the fountain is actually a recreation of the original fountain that had been destroyed by a truck crashing into it after its breaks failed on Marin Avenue in the ‘50s. For decades after was just a fancy circle of terra cotta pottery and classical railings highlighting some shrubs until 1996.
Berkeley has a lot of die hard historians who research every inch of the city and neighbors pooled money in the 1990s to restore the grand roundabout of Northbrae and make the beloved fountain today identical to John Galen Howard’s original creation. And that’s where the story ends, as the Berkeley books go. Most people think of Northbrae as the affluent neighborhood with the one, singular fountain in a roundabout that drivers struggle to drive around without hitting someone. Never underestimate how much American drivers are defeated by ordinary roundabouts — they are remarkably terrible at The Circle.
But readers in the neighborhood forum were shocked to discover that another fountain existed in the neighborhood as evidenced by a smiling woman posing in front of one.
After a search using aerial photos they realized that the second, less fancy fountain was located — oddly enough — in the middle of a crosswalk at The Alameda and Monterey Avenue. What a dumb place to put a fountain, honestly. The fountain was destroyed around the time the fire station was built nearby since it’s pretty hard to drive a fire truck when a dead, dry fountain is in the middle of the crosswalk. But it was a fun search for the fountain and prompted an interesting question: are there more ghost fountains in North Berkeley we don’t know about?
Combing through old advertisements about Northbrae, readers noticed there was supposedly three fountains in Northbrae but couldn’t find the third. Well, over Thanksgiving break I got real bored and decided to hunt for the mysterious Northbrae fountians myself. And I’m pretty good at combing archives so I found them — not just three, but all four bygone fountains of North Berkeley.
Ghost Fountain #3 is the one that kinda stares everyone in the face. It was located at the corner of Colusa and Monterey Avenue on the western end of Northbrae. Today it’s an odd tringular street island that clearly served a purpose to any onlooker. It was created as a Key System and Southern Pacific streetcar end-of-the-line station. Bounded by two structures with fancy lanterns, a notably less fancy fountain somewhat resembling the lower lip of the pretentious one in the Marin Circle was nestled in-between.
Once the H-line Bay Bridge train which served the station was discontinued due to low ridership (single-family homes don’t bring a lot of riders, who would’ve thought) shortly before World War 2, the station at Monterey Avenue was used for transbay bus service. But with the popularity of automobiles and the construction of BART, transbay bus ridership to Northbrae declined tremendously. The City Council in anticipation of this decided to destroy the fountain and the station structure and replace it with . . . nothing. Well, technically a lawn and a tree by 1970. But if you walk along Monterey to Hopkins Street you can clearly tell based on the bus benches where the old Key train stops were.
Fountain #4 was a very hard fountain to find and it was also the fountain that the neighborhood searchers were pondering about but weren’t sure if it actually existed. McDuffie and the realtors hyped the hell out of this fountain — a lot more than the aformentioned two which barely were mentioned in ads. The developers were hyping the fancy transit stop “Northbrae Station” as lush with trees and a cute fountain as secondary, but were very clear that the fountian at the Marin Circle was the feature presentation of North Berkeley.
Supposedly ads suggested this fountain was located at the base of the Fountain Walk stairwell at Sutter Street right before the Northbrae Tunnel to Solano. It wasn’t finished when the subdivision opened so photographers weren’t taking photos like they did other parts of the district. If you walk to Terrace Walk now there’s a vague circular curb which leads to a wonderful streetcar shortcut pathway but in the old photos throughout the years there was never any fountain or structure of significance to be found.
I thought it was just a project that didn’t go through. Real estate developers are just trying to sell their properties as soon as possible and will hype up stuff until the point of sale. But I stumbled upon the fourth ghost fountain in the San Francisco Chronicle archives. It’s really hard to see as its a scan of a photograph from the early 1910s but indeed it’s the fourth ghost fountain of North Berkeley. The center picture in the gallery below.
It was located right at the base of Terrace Walk. It was surrounded by lush trees with a train station shelter to the transbay trains. But the reason its existence was in doubt and that archive photos of it are basically nonexistent (as far as I know) is because it was a boondoggle. Firstly, the fancy station was on the wrong side of the street. It was in the direction of Albany rather than San Francisco so use was low. Secondly, the City Council widened the street for automobiles just 15 years after its construction and the Planning Commission recommended the fountain and station shelter be scrapped. All that’s left now is a barren terrace to a convienent pedestrian pathway.
And that’s the history of North Berkeley’s four ghost fountains. A real estate developer going all in with John Galen Howard to impress not only home buyers but the government of California in a failed bid to bring the state capital to Berkeley. Which is also why all the streets are named after California counties. But like a lot of real estate schemes some things just don’t pan out.
I personally think public fountains and civic arts are great and wouldn’t mind building some more especially in non-ritzy neighborhoods too.
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I want to thank my subscribers for sticking with me. My publishing dates have been delayed a week due to my final exams. A lot of articles are written and being held up in the editing queue for publishing. The latter end of next week when my exams end will see a deluge of articles on the San Francisco election results, the University of California union strike, public transit woes and more!