Industry builds the city: the suburbanization of manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940

Journal of Historical Geography, 27, 1 (2001) 36–57

doi: 10.1006/jhge.2000.0268, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Industry builds the city: the suburbanization ofmanufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area,1850–1940

Richard Walker

The San Francisco Bay Area demonstrates how industrial dispersal had created thesprawling form of the American metropolis. Neither change in transport modes norresidential suburbanization is principally responsible for shaping the outward spiral ofurbanization. Manufacturing began its outward march from the outset of the city’sindustrialization, establishing peripheral nodes of employment and working class res-idence within San Francisco, then beyond the city limits in South San Francisco andespecially the East Bay. The main cause of decentralization has been industrial shifts;the outbreak of new activities in new places, normally in the form of industrial districtsat various spatial scales. A second cause has been the orchestration of development bybusiness leaders through property ownership and political manoeuvring guided by ageneral vision of metropolitan expansion, whether in co-operation or competition withone another. 2001 Academic Press

Introduction

The San Francisco Bay Area provides a clear example of industrial dispersal creatingthe sprawling form of the American metropolis. Manufacturing began its outwardmarch from the outset of the city’s industrialization, establishing peripheral nodes ofemployment within San Francisco then far beyond the city limits. The natural expanseof San Francisco Bay helped to shape industrial location and the distancing of someactivities from the urban core; so did the great earthquake of 1906. But the landscapeof metropolitan industry was very much a creature of economic and political forces,which were quite adept at reshaping nature to their ends if need be. The primary causeof decentralization has been industrial shifts, or the outbreak of new activities in newplaces; these have normally taken the form of industrial districts at various spatialscales.[1] Another major force has been the orchestration of development by businessleaders through property ownership and political manoeuvring guided by a generalvision of metropolitan expansion, whether in cooperation or competition with oneanother. Contrary to prevailing ideas about the Bay Area’s growth, there was not asingle industrial core up to World War II, residential suburbanization was not theprimary force shaping the outward spiral, and transportation improvements were notthe underlying cause of decentralization.[2] The evidence highlights these points withina chronological and geographical narrative of Bay Area urban expansion from 1850

360305–7488/01/010036+22 $35.00 2001 Academic Press

37INDUSTRY BUILDS THE CITY

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Figure 1. Bay Area manufacturing (employment, value and establishments) by county, 1860–1940.

to 1940. It begins with San Francisco, then moves south to the Peninsula, then east toOakland and north to Contra Costa. The main turning points are the burst ofindustrialization after the Civil War and the reconfiguration of industry around theturn of the century; the 1880s and World War I are also significant moments of growth.A third watershed—the rise of Silicon Valley around World War II—is not treated.

Gold rush city to industrial hub

The gold rush of 1848–1855 made San Francisco an ‘instant city’, propelling it intothe first rank of urban places in the United States, with 50 000 people by 1855 and150 000 by 1870. Mining was the main business of California and the West, and SanFrancisco served as the principal mercantile and financial centre for the region. Forhalf a century, it had no major rivals closer than Chicago. The city’s merchants, bankers,bonanza kings and railroad titans became lords of all they surveyed, reigning over anempire stretching from Alaska to Mexico.[3] In the Gold Rush era, most industrialactivity sprang up in outlying parts of the Bay Area, which was knitted together by anetwork of ferries and produce boats. Most of this was direct resource extraction andprocessing, such as quicksilver (mercury) mines, timber cutting and milling, leather,glue, and soap from cattle ranching, and explosive manufacture.[4] The percentage ofregional manufacturing outside San Francisco in the 1850s would not be reached againuntil World War I (Figure 1). In the 1860s, agriculture began to develop rapidly and

38 RICHARD WALKER

wheatfields filled the valleys around the Bay, feeding flour mills at Santa Rosa, SanJose, Vallejo and Oakland. Meanwhile, Napa and Sonoma began sprouting wineries.[5]

In the dominant view, San Francisco was a commercial rather than an industrialcity, because the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing was lower thaneastern cities of its size. Manufacturing, it is argued, was limited by the scale of demand,scarcity of labour, and lack of fuel, and was too dependent on natural resources andthe local market.[6] Percentages are misleading, however, because San Francisco’smercantile empire was so much larger than any other comparable city except Chicago.San Francisco’s industrialization was not stunted. Industrial activity began to quickenin the 1860s and grew explosively in output, employment and number of firms up tothe depression of 1893. In 1880, manufacturing occupied a third of the city’s workforce,accounted for two-thirds of statewide employment and value-added, and exceeded theoutput of all other western cities combined. In 1890, resource processing provided abroad base for industrialization in sectors such as food, led by sugar, canning, lumberand wood products, metals, leather, clothing, textiles, shoes and cigars. Also localindustry diversified, creating hundreds of intermediate and final products sold through-out the United States and abroad.[7]

Despite some disadvantages such as high fuel costs, San Francisco’s industrializationbenefited from favourable supplies of capital and labour. On the one hand, industrywas force-fed by locally accumulated capital; every big investor had fingers in a dozenpies. On the other hand, scarcity of labour was offset by rapid immigration migration,the end of placer mining, and completion of the transcontinental railroad. Chineseworkers, in particular, provided cheap labour for low-wage sectors such as shoes andcigars. More significant, however, was the systematic application of skilled labour,which San Francisco had in abundance. California’s combination of talent and economicopportunity, especially for white men, set loose a flurry of entrepreneurial activity andtechnical innovation. Clear evidence of this existed in the number of new firms in thecity and the welter of innovative products, from blue jeans to hydraulic nozzles. Moneyand creativity unloosed the genie of growth, allowing industrialization despite highwages. With over 350 000 residents by 1900, the city held one-fifth of the populace ofthe entire West Coast and had climbed to become the seventh largest city in thecountry.[8]

The industrial landscape of San Francisco, 1870–90

Within San Francisco’s expansive city limits, industry spread out rapidly after the CivilWar. This was not a decentralization from the small beginnings of manufacturingaround Yerba Buena cove in the 1850s, but a regional centralization toward SanFrancisco due to the explosive growth of industry in the city. There arose, in one greatwave of investment, a sweeping crescent of industry running along the bay waterfrontfrom North Beach to Hunter’s Point. Most notable was the jump to the South ofMarket area, which became the main industrial zone of the city. This split the city intwo ever after: an industrial and working class southside and a residential and bourgeoisnorthside. Equally striking was the immediacy of subdistrict specialization. Historicalgeographers have shown the early distillation of the residential, financial and retaildistricts of San Francisco in this era, but little has been said of the industrial patternof the time (Figure 2).[9]

A central cluster of consumer goods manufacturers arose in the downtown areanorth of Market. There were abundant brewers and distillers; over 200 cigar makers


North Beach INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTSOF SAN FRANCISCO

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Metals andmachining4

Luxurygoods3

Figure 2. Schematic map of industrial zones of San Francisco, c. 1880–1900.

flourished around Chinatown; toward the waterfront were clothing merchant-manu-facturers, such as Levi Strauss, and boot, shoe and harness makers; and women’s andchildren’s clothes were made along Market Street itself. This pattern was not a legacyof an older, smaller city of the antebellum era, but chiefly a product of the movementof thousands of Chinese men from railroad work and mining back to San Franciscoafter 1869. To the west toward Union Square in the retail district, specialist clothiers,jewellers and silversmiths, and makers of luxury goods such as pianos and billiardtables could be found. Vying for central space was a flourishing printing and publishingindustry, with over one hundred small printers, Bancroft’s book emporium, andnewspapers and magazines galore.[10]

A machinery and metal-working district on the flanks of Rincon Hill, mostlymanufacturing capital goods, anchored the South of Market industrial zone. Machineshops such as Union Iron Works built up San Francisco’s first great industry, miningequipment, with its variety of drills, rock-crushers, steam engines, hoists, derricks,pumps, and nozzles. This mining equipment was used throughout the west and exported

40 RICHARD WALKER

around the world. Most machine shops went on to make engines and machinery forflour mills, fruit presses, sugar mills, sawmills, ships and factories of every kind as theCalifornia economy broadened. A large number of foundries and metal-workingestablishments, making lead shot, stoves, pipe, locks and safes, bolts and boilers alsooperated. Vehicle makers built wagons, carriages and buckboards, then went on to themanufacture of railcars, cablecars, streetcars and trucks. Southwest of Rincon Hill, amilling and woodworking district formed along the north side of Mission Creek, nearthe Southern Pacific terminal. Lumber was shipped to San Francisco to be distributed,milled into finished construction material, and made into furniture, boxes, barrels, andships. A lumber wharf attracted saw and planing mills, box factories and cooperages,and a couple blocks north a cluster of furniture makers could be found. Other companiesoperating in the vicinity made related products such as matches, bedsteads, paper bagsand hemp rope. Food processing, including canning, sugar refining, coffee roasting andspice milling, formed a third prominent industry cluster in the South of Market. Theoperations of Claus Spreckels’ (California) Sugar, Folger Coffee, and F. Cutting Foodswere distributed throughout the whole South of Market district.[11]

The growth of industry in the South of Market turned it into the principal area ofworking class housing in the city up to the earthquake of 1906, and the densestresidential district of the time piled up below Market Street, from the waterfront backseveral blocks. Workers could easily walk to workshops and factories. About eightyper cent of San Francisco’s labourers lived within half a mile of their jobs. Most ofthese lived in hotels or boarding houses, while horsedrawn streetcars, then cablecars,opened up the ‘suburban’ Mission District (west of Potrero Hill) to better-paid, skilledworkers. A few factories joined the march to the Mission. Meanwhile, the rich whohad settled on Rincon Hill were driven out by the changing character of the area inthe 1870s, fleeing by cable car to the redoubts of Nob Hill and farther west, along VanNess Avenue and Pacific Heights. Others who had sought suburban refuge abandonedthe Mission District once it became declasse.[12]

Three outlying districts developed from the 1870s at Potrero Point, Islais Creek andNorth Beach. An aerial view of the city from the early 1880s already shows smokingfactories ringing the city (Figure 3). The city’s principal cluster of heavy industry tookshape on Potrero Point, two and half miles south of downtown across Mission Bay.The region’s first substantial iron and steel producer, Pacific Rolling Mills, went up in1868 after gaining a grant of tidewater lands from the state. Union Iron Works relocatedits shipyards on Potrero Point in 1878. They were joined by other shipyards and ironworks, a varnish works, a cordage factory, and Spreckels’ new sugar refinery, the largestfactory on the West Coast. Arctic Oil Works was a major installation at a time whenSan Francisco was the biggest whaling port in the world. Butchertown was establishedfarther south, at Islais Creek, in the 1880s. Wholesale butchers and packers, led byHenry Miller, convinced the state to cede waterfront lands for a Butcher’s Preservation(a primitive industrial park). The district eventually included twenty-three wholesalebutchers, five tanneries, a wool pullery, two fertilizer plants, two packing houses andtallow plants—many owned by the vertically integrated Miller & Lux, the largestagribusiness enterprise of the nineteenth century. Lastly, a mixed industrial district grewup in North Beach, including the Bay Sugar refinery at the foot of Telegraph Hill, awire works, rock crushing operations, a pork packing plant, Pioneer Woolen Mills(later Ghiradelli chocolate), and Selby’s lead and silver smelter.[13]

Development on Potrero Point opened up a new working class neighbourhood onPotrero Hill to house many of the thousands of workers employed at the waterfrontfactories. Butchertown workers could live on Potrero Hill to the north, in Bayview to


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the south, or inland toward the Mission district and Bernal Heights, with the poorerones occupying nearby hotels or rented rooms. Together, these extensions of theindustrial corridor helped to propel the outward tide of working class residences. By1900, workers homes were spilling as far south as the Excelsior and Portola districtssouth of the Islais Creek valley. Many of the same capitalists investing in landdevelopment in these areas, such as the Crocker family, were also backing industrialconcerns. Telegraph Hill and North Beach became a working class area, heavily Italianin character.[14]

Last gasp of the West Bay: South city and the decline of San Francisco

A telling case of local decentralization was South San Francisco, ten miles south ofdowntown and across the line in San Mateo Country (Figure 4). South City exemplifiesthe force of industrial restructuring, property ownership, and political manoeuvring onindustrial suburbanization. The area was for many years the property of Charles Luxand used as a staging area for cattle going to slaughter. After Lux died in 1887, hisheirs and Henry Miller made a deal with Joseph Swift of Chicago, fronting for theBeef Trust, and Swift’s Western Meat Company factory went up in 1894. Western Meatrepresented the success of the Chicago packers in revolutionizing beef slaughter andpacking; using mass production methods and unskilled labour, they could underpricelocal butchers. But the latter were still effective in convincing San Franciscans thatindustrial meat was tainted. Swift had to orchestrate the entry of the new methodscarefully, seeking a local partner in Miller & Lux and a strategic location just outsidethe city limits. Victory did not go to Swift until the 1906 earthquake levelled Butchertown.Soon, several other packers and a new Union Stockyards came to South City. Ironically,Miller & Lux could not compete with the Chicago boys, and went into decline.[15]

Other factories were attracted to South City’s emergent industrial district from 1890to 1910, including the largest paint factory and steel mill on the west coast and anotherhalf a dozen iron and steel plants supplying regional shipyards, builders and metalshops. Housing again followed the outward march of manufacturing, and the valleySouth of Mount San Bruno quickly filled up with the little homes of the working class,who could neither commute from San Francisco nor afford homes in the elite cities ofSan Mateo county. South San Francisco remains resolutely proletarian to the present.Politically, South City stayed safely under the wing of the large corporations throughthe mediation of a pro-industrial petite bourgeoisie. Of the first four mayors of thetown after it incorporated in 1908, two had worked for Western Meat, one for SouthernPacific, and one as a realtor.[16]

Industrialization might have continued down the Peninsula, but it ran into the borderguards of the wealthy. San Mateo county had long been the rural redoubt of SanFrancisco’s biggest capitalists, such as Darius Mills, Billy Ralston, and William Sharon,and the children of the barons, led by Francis Newlands and William Crocker, hadjust opened an exclusive residential enclave at Burlingame (Hillsborough) in the 1890s.Fearing for their sylvan landscapes, the grandees blocked a planned ASARCO copper-smelting plant in 1908 and closed off further expansion of South City. This forcedindustry to take the path of least resistance over to the East Bay. San Mateo’sindustrialization fell back before and after the First World War. Only the modest nodesat Redwood City and South San Francisco remained (Figure 4).[17]

Meanwhile, San Francisco fell from its perch atop the western states after the turnof the century. This shows up most dramatically in its loss of commercial dominance,


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but also in industrial stagnation from 1890 to 1910 (Figure 1). The First World Warbrought salvation, more than doubling manufacturing employment, but the city neverrecovered its primacy of place; Los Angeles overtook it as the largest urban centre inthe west. All the same, the Bay Area as a whole performed better than most historiansacknowledge. From 1869 to 1935, it outgrew Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore, raneven with New York and Pittsburgh, and only lost ground to cities such as Detroit andCleveland. Bay shipping remained atop the West as late as 1938, second only to NewYork in value (Los Angeles was sixth)—even though San Francisco’s tonnage fell belowone half of the Bay Area’s tonnage by 1920.[18]

San Francisco’s woes are often blamed on the earthquake and fire of 1906. Peopleand businesses fled in droves. Yet a closer look shows that San Francisco manufacturingwas slow to rebound from the downturn of the 1890s (Figure 1), and factories beganto relocate to new industrial suburbs around the same time. Powder works, shipyards,paint factories, and smelting had moved out by 1890. Canning, sugar, meatpacking,steel, lumber and machining were well dispersed by 1900. Oil refining, steel, automobiles,and chemicals—key industries of the early twentieth century—grew up almost entirelyoutside the city. The East Bay was the principal beneficiary of this metropolitanexpansion.

Another explanation for the tilt away from San Francisco is high wages and labourorganization. The militancy of the city’s workers from 1901 to 1918 is legendary. Thereis some evidence that this induced capital to flee: Columbia Steel, for example, locatedin Contra Costa county in part because, “labor conditions there would be less disturbedthan in San Francisco.” The reduction of Chinese labour—curtailed by the ExclusionAct of 1882—may lie behind the precipitous decline of cigar making, boots and shoes,textiles and apparel in San Francisco by 1900. Yet wage rates alone do not set theterms for capitalist development, and high average wages never choked off nineteenth-century San Francisco or twentieth-century Los Angeles’ fabulous growth; on thecontrary, high wages helped stimulate mass immigration, consumption, and attractionof skilled labour conducive to innovation—all contributing to growth.[19]

The obverse of militant labour is the theory of the weak bourgeoisie. San Francisco’scapitalists were notoriously schismatic, as in the long feud between the Spreckels andDeYoungs, and they lost electoral control of the city to the Union Labour Party from1901 to 1911. All the same, James Phelan and his circle of Progressives were instrumentalin reforming the city charter and redesigning the city at the turn of the century.Following that, the earthquake forced businessmen to put aside differences, as did thestruggle against organized labour. The major business associations merged under theChamber of Commerce, elected merchant James Rolph Mayor in 1911, and establisheda think-tank that generated another city Charter Reform. Business engaged labour inrepeated battles, finally winning in 1921. Nonetheless, San Francisco’s leaders em-phasized city beautification and world’s fairs more than the nuts and bolts of industrialplanning (a 1906 Chamber proposal for an Islais Creek industrial park came to nothing),and some ground was lost to better-organized rivals in Los Angeles and Oakland.[20]

All the same, the relative strength of labour and capital is insufficient to explaingeographic change in a dynamic economy, without reference to the forces of technicaland organizational change unleashed by industrialization. Fast-growing sectors canerupt in quite unexpected venues, while stagnant sectors and established centres ofindustry fade away. The industrial base of California has shifted repeatedly from erato era, recasting urban geography along the way. San Francisco embodied the eruptivestage in the mining era, the golden age of publishing, and early food processing.Thereafter, industries in which San Francisco had been a leader, such as mining


machinery, men’s clothing, beer and liquor, and leather, declined in significance in thestate’s economy. In 1919, the city remained prominent in printing and publishing, coffeeand spices, chocolate, cigars, bags and ship repair—none of them leading industries.Its presence in furniture, meat packing, women’s clothing, and machining, while stillnoteworthy, was fading, and lumber, sugar and canning had virtually disappeared. Itsonly important new acquisition, a Ford Model T factory, opened in 1913 and closedin 1931.[21] In this period, the Islais Creek valley filled in with industry and working-class housing expanded west to the Ingleside and Westlake districts along the city’ssouthern border.

Oakland triumphant: the industrialization of Alameda County

By 1900, the forward wave of regional growth had shifted to Oakland and the centralEast Bay—which surpassed the city in manufacturing employees and value of outputby 1910—creating the greater Bay Area metropolis of the twentieth century (Figures1, 4). Oakland had been a modest satellite of San Francisco in the nineteenth century.Before the Civil War it was simply one of several outlying nodes around the Bay; by1869 there were sixteen factories, including sawmills, tanneries, slaughterhouses, dairies,a jute mill, a boot and shoe factory, flour mills, drydocks and a brewery. After theCivil War, it developed as an extension of the diversified manufacturing complex acrossthe bay, with few distinctive sectors of its own. The turning point was the arrival ofthe Central Pacific in 1869, after which Oakland’s population climbed from 10 500 to35 000 in a decade (making it the second city in the west for a generation). Althoughthe rail terminus was in fact in San Francisco (trains were ferried across the bay), therailyards were a major employer in West Oakland. The city housed many planing mills,potteries, carriage works, breweries, and tanneries. The 1880s brought in another 30establishments. California Cotton was the largest cloth mill in the West, Josiah Luskthe biggest cannery, Pacific Coast Borax the largest producer of cleaning products, andLowell Manufacturing the biggest carriage works.[22]

The rail lines along the waterfront established the principal axis for the East Bayindustrial belt. The major manufacturing node was at the base of the original city grid,but a second cluster appeared two miles east across Lake Merritt in the Brooklyndistrict and a third in West Oakland; a fourth was already forming two and a halfmiles from downtown at the future Emeryville and up Temescal Creek in NorthOakland. Machining and woodworking were a fixture of the central district. Thedefining activity of West Oakland was the railyards, but beyond them lay space-extensivefunctions such as lumber yards, shipyards, stockyards, tanneries, and slaughterhouses.Some of the largest factories such as Judson and Lowell moved northwest to proto-Emeryville. In North Oakland the principal site was the Lusk cannery with 400 acresof fruit and vegetable gardens. In East Oakland out to Fruit Vale, site of Cal Cotton’smill, were shoe makers, saw and planing mills, a flour mill and tanneries. Industry wasmore centralized at this time than it would be later.

The initial locus of housing was the 1850 grid. As West Oakland blossomed as aworking-class district after 1869, the rich were displaced to the northeast beyond LakeMerritt—a pattern that has held ever since. The rapid development of West Oaklandgave the city a lopsided appearance for decades. There were splotches of worker housingat the outlying nodes of (proto) Emeryville, West Berkeley and Temescal (provided byJ. Lusk). Workers commuted by foot from the ‘flatlands’ lying east of the industrialbelt or rode the streetcars fanning out from downtown and West Oakland in a manner

46 RICHARD WALKER

still clearly visible in the diagonals overlaying the regular street grids. To the east, thelittle communities of Brooklyn Township retained their distinct identities long afterincorporation (1872), each with its own employment base, street grid, retail commerceand ethnic flavour. For example, Fruit Vale, where Jack London grew up, looked (andstill looks) like any eastern mill village with an ethnic, Catholic working class.

The bay made Oakland a twin city rather than a suburb, but it was not yet a strongantipode to San Francisco. While most manufacturing companies were locally owned,giving the city a potentially independent economic base, the town’s leading burghers,Horace Carpentier and Samuel Merritt, were master land speculators rather thanindustrialists. The local bourgeoisie gave away the waterfront not once but twice toprivate owners (themselves!), who turned it over to the Central (Southern) Pacific. Ittook the city 50 years to regain control of its harbour. A few stirrings of independencecould be found, such as the bold proposal for a cross-bay bridge as early as 1863, butSan Francisco capitalists felt little threat and were happy to join in Oakland’s growthby investing in such things as a cable car system, paint factory, and real estatepromotions.[23]

The sea-change came after the depression of the mid-1890s. Oakland and the EastBay began its meteoric ascent, becoming an early metropolitan ‘edge city’. Oaklandwas one of the three fastest growing cities in the United States from 1900 to 1930,jumping from 67 000 to 284 000, and development spilled over into neighboring townssuch as Berkeley, Emeryville, and San Leandro. The earthquake of 1906 doubledAlameda county’s population and industry overnight, and there was another treblingof employment during the boom of the First World War. Output continued to rise inthe 1920s, although employment slipped. Oakland was no longer an outlier of themetropolitan core, but a distinctive industrial arena coming into full bloom (Figure 5).Breakthroughs in transportation were important, of course: repossession of the water-front from the Southern Pacific allowed the city to develop its own port facilities, andthe arrival of the Santa Fe and Western Pacific lowered freight rates. Even in thetwentieth century, the East Bay grew on water and rails, not trucks. But transportationwas less significant than the restructuring of industry: the geographic shift to Oaklandwas driven above all by major re-orientations in sectoral composition and businessorganization in the region. The port and rail system grew to serve industry, not theother way around.[24]

First among Oakland and Alameda county’s peacetime industries after 1900 wasfood processing, chiefly canning. The East Bay became the principal node in the BayArea’s largest industry from 1890 to 1940 and the nation’s largest canning centre.California packers and canners introduced the first name brands in food, standardizationof produce, and mass advertising in foodstuffs (the Del Monte brand was dreamt upin Oakland). They set up the world’s most advanced marketing and contracting system,tied to the new supermarket chains (such as Oakland’s Safeway), and they innovatednew methods and products, such as the canned olive (invented in Oakland). A majorrestructuring of canning took place as Alameda county surpassed San Francisco. In1899, a dozen companies merged into the California Fruit Canners Association,headquartered in Oakland; more mergers and the entry of branch plants led to markedconcentration in the industry. A host of suppliers provided cans, jars, crates and cartonsto store and ship produce, as well as a stream of innovative machinery, such as pitters,peelers, and steamers. Many other food products were manufactured in the East Bay,including cereal, meat, and bread. Closely related, were a dozen soap and cosmeticsmanufacturers. These factories were distributed along the length of the East Bayindustrial belt and well into the outlying farming areas of southern Alameda county.[25]


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48 RICHARD WALKER

Oakland’s second leading sector was metal working and machinery, which continueda long tradition in the Bay Area—but in a new era of steel alloys and high-speedcutting. Machine shops and foundries proliferated, clustering around downtown andalong the estuary–rail corridor. Oakland companies such as Union Machine Works,Bay City Iron and Vulcan Foundry made machines for packaging, road grading, clotheswashing, canning, and chemicals, as well as boilers, engines, turbines and cast parts,some of which were unprecedented products. Upstream from metalworking was steelproduction, which finally developed as a significant industry in California in thetwentieth century. The East Bay steel district, focused on Emeryville, was one of threethat grew up around the Bay Area at the same time, along with South San Franciscoand Pittsburg.[26]

The metal trades extended in several new directions. For a brief time, the Oaklandestuary developed into an exceptional shipbuilding district based on companies trans-ferring operations from San Francisco and on wartime orders. Wooden shipbuildingmigrated first to the estuary in the 1890s, later joined by Moore, Scott and Bethlehem(moving most of Union Iron Works’ former operations). During the peak years of theWorld War, a dozen shipbuilders employed 40 000 men putting out 18 per cent ofUnited States production and several companies supplied marine engines. The shiftfrom San Francisco to Oakland appeared to be tied to technical and product changes,such as steel construction, the Dreadnought class of battleships, and oil tankers.[27]

The automobile age swept into Oakland from Detroit in the ‘teens’. Chevrolet wasfirst, in 1916, followed by Durant, Star and Willys-Overland. Another pioneer wasCoast Tire and Rubber in 1919, which was rapidly joined by a variety of tyre and partsmakers. Many of these were local companies, as were some specialty assemblers likeFageol (buses) and Benjamin Holt (Caterpillar tractors). The auto age filled in the vastexpanse of East Oakland, after Chevy jumped out to empty fields at Foothill and 70thAvenue (Figure 6).[28] The city became host to over 50 assembly and component plantsin the interwar period.

The new electrical machinery industry entered Oakland and Emeryville in the 1910swith an influx of branch plants from General Electric, Westinghouse, Western Electric,and Victor, as well as some local operations such as Marchand and Magnavox. Thesefactories manufactured lamps, motors, calculators, loudspeakers and phonographs.Aircraft were a promising East Bay industry in the biplane era; some 35 factoriessupplied airplane parts in World War I, including a United Airlines plant and StandardGas Engine in Oakland and Jacuzzi and Hall-Scott Motors in Berkeley. For a time thenew Oakland airport, completed in 1926 at the eastern edge of the city, was the premierairfield on the Pacific Coast.

The new wave of industrialization stretched the metropolitan area of Alameda countydramatically north and east. Hand in hand with industry growth came extensiveresidential development and land speculation. As the westside and Emeryville built uptheir industrial base, the rest of the north county up through Berkeley and Albanyfilled in, creating a sea of small homes of the working class. During its period of rapidgrowth from 1900 to 1930, the East Bay developed one of the most extensive streetcarsystems in the country. The persistence of foot traffic makes it easy to connect thenorthward growth of the flatlands to the suburbanization of industry, but trolleys andgood wages allowed considerable lateral mobility; so workers’ homes filled in thenorth–south core, hard against upper class redoubts in the foothills. East Oakland—largely vacant until World War I despite annexation in 1909—filled in rapidly duringthe 1920s. The Chevy plant was seven and a half miles from downtown, at the very


Figure 6. Aerial photo of East Oakland Chevrolet plant, c. 1918. Reproduced with the permissionof The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.

edge of the built-up area. Subsequently, tracts such as Melrose Highlands, built by theRealty Syndicate, were developed expressly for workers at the new auto factories.[29]

By the turn of the century, Oakland was generating powerful burghers willing tobattle with San Francisco over water supplies, port expansion, and industrial growth.A Greater Oakland movement got underway in 1896 to push for civic improvementsand the Chamber of Commerce campaigned tirelessly to attract investors. FrancisMarion Smith was Oakland’s first great booster capitalist, who put together the KeySystem of trolleys and built his Realty Syndicate into one of the biggest residentialdevelopers in the country (13 000 acres in 1900, almost 100 tracts complete by 1911).George Pardee, Mayor from 1893 to 1895, went on to be Governor of California, whileJoseph Knowland became a powerful voice for local interests while serving six termsin Congress. The iconic figure of the New Oakland was non-partisan Mayor Mott(1905–1915), who brought several civic improvement plans to fruition—including askyscraper City Hall that turned its backside to San Francisco. Mott aggressivelyannexed all of East Oakland while it was still open land, and tried to forcibly addBerkeley. Oakland’s burghers distinguished themselves by labour repression, as whenMayor Pardee and Councilman Mott handed out pickhandles to vigilantes confrontingCoxie’s Army of the poor in 1893. By the 1920s Joseph Knowland, who bought thecity’s main newspaper, became Oakland’s power-broker and the leading force in thestate Republican party, promoting Earl Warren to District Attorney and then Governor.

50 RICHARD WALKER

Henry Kaiser and Walter Bechtel built up their construction empires out of Oaklandin the 1920s and 1930s, partly on the strength of local projects such as the AlamedaTube, the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge. Kaiser became a figure of nationalimportance in the Democratic Party by allying with Franklin Roosevelt, and led theSix Companies in building Boulder Dam.[30]

A striking example of political initiative to steer industrial location was the creationof Emeryville in 1896. At a stroke, an emerging suburban node of Oakland became anindependent city devoted wholly to industry—one of the first such entities in the UnitedStates. By 1935, Emeryville was home to over 100 manufacturing plants. The townexcluded all but a few working-class residents and operated as a tax haven and friendlygovernment to industry. The manager of Judson steel, Walter Christie, served as Mayorfor the first 40 years of the town’s existence, and was succeeded by Al LaCoste, aButchertown packing boss, who ruled for the next three decades.[31]

To be sure, San Francisco’s business leaders were alert to the challenge to theirhegemony over a burgeoning metropolis. Hoping to follow the lead of New York’smetropolitan consolidation and Los Angeles’ aggressive annexations, James Phelanand his allies put together a Greater San Francisco Association. While politicalunification of the region was never achieved (it was defeated in a statewide vote in1912 with the opposition led by Oakland), the regional business class on both sides ofthe bay had become acutely aware of the economic unity of the metropolitan area. Inthe teens, Oakland’s leaders supported the Hetch Hetchy water plan, the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, and regional unification by bridge, interurban rail and state highways.Attempts to formalize a co-operative relation under a Regional Plan Association startedby Phelan in the 1920s also came to nothing, but in the Depression era regional businessleaders were able to pull together on such key infrastructural projects as the trans-baybridges.[32] All the same, San Francisco capitalists, undaunted by shifting industrialgeography or political opposition, kept investing in an expansive metropolitan fringe.In Oakland, they were backers or owners of such firms as Parr Terminal, Moore-Scottships, and Hunt Brothers canners. They invested in the East Bay’s streetcar, rail, gasand electric infrastructure. Industrial rivalries made little difference to financiers andrealtors, who could play both sides of the table and hedge their bets. James Moffittwas a director of Oakland Bank of Savings, Bank of Italy opened branches there, andColdwell, Cornwall and Banker joined the rush in the 1920s. Moffitt and several otherleading San Francisco businessmen made their homes in Oakland’s posh suburb,Piedmont.

The Contra Costa shore

A northeast Bay industrial belt appeared from the 1870s to the 1920s in Contra Costacounty, along the banks of the Sacramento River. By 1906 some 40 factories hadopened along the river’s south shore. The county could claim more than half a dozenof the largest factories of their kind in the country in the early twentieth century, suchas C&H sugar, Standard Oil of California, Redwood Manufacturers and Herculespowder. Within the Bay Area, Contra Costa specialized in giant resource-intensiveplants, processing explosives, chemicals, oil, sugar, cement, lumber, silver, lead andsteel. From 1900 to 1940, Contra Costa was the second county in the state in value ofindustrial output. By 1920 its various docks carried over half the tonnage on the Bay,principally in petroleum.[33]

Contra Costa developed a peculiarly punctiform urban-industrial landscape up to World


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52 RICHARD WALKER

War II, owing to the nature of its industries (Figure 7). Many factories employed hundredsof workers, but they were high throughput operations and generated less total employmentthan the workshops of Oakland and San Francisco (Figure 1). Hence, the county’spopulation was only a modest 32 000 in 1910, rising to 99 000 by 1940—in sharp contrastto the rampant urbanization in Alameda county. Worker villages and small towns werethe rule. The most extreme form of this occurred at the several powder works, whichfavoured Chinese men living in bunkhouses because of frequent explosions. But companyhousing could be found at such sites as Hercules, Rodeo, and Cowell. Crockett, the thirdlargest settlement in the county, housed mostly sugar workers. Only Richmond, at thewestern end of the industrial belt, became a small city, counting 80 factories and 23 000people by 1940. Pittsburg was the one other sizeable town.[34]

The first manufacturers to come to Contra Costa in a big way were powder anddynamite works serving the mining industry. Atlas Powder and California Power Worksmoved out from San Francisco circa 1880, and were soon joined by half a dozen others.Chemical plants followed, as demand for sulphuric acid, chlorine and ammonia fertilizersincreased with advances in chemistry and industrial agriculture. Peyton Chemical wasfirst, in 1898, followed by Stauffer Chemical in Stege (Richmond) and others. The mostimportant feature of the river district was a band of oil refineries that made the BayArea one of the chief refining centres in the United States. Oil came by pipeline, shipand tank-car from the San Joaquin and Ventura fields. The first big refinery was UnionOil in 1896; Standard Oil followed with the world’s largest refinery at Richmond, andfour others came in soon thereafter.[35]

Another industrial pioneer was foodstuffs. The wheat era gave birth to amazingPort Costa, a rump town fronted by miles of docks for transhipment from rail toship; the biggest warehouses went up circa 1880. The first cannery to open was FEBooth in 1875. The great California fish packing industry (famous from Monterey’sCannery Row) began along the Sacramento river; four such plants existed by theearly 1880s and 17 still survived in 1940. A whaling station and rendering plantoperated for many years at Point San Pablo (Richmond). California & Hawaiian(C&H) built an immense sugar mill at Carquinez Straits at the turn of the century,while the crenellated fortress of Winehaven, built by the California Wine Associationat Point Molate (Richmond), was the biggest winery in the world before Prohibitionclosed it down.[36]

Metals were another mainstay of Contra Costa industry. Selby’s lead smelter andshot works (later ASARCO) moved from San Francisco in 1884, adding gold and silversmelting and a cartridge factory later. Copper smelting was first tried in 1864, but themost impressive operation came in the twentieth century with Mountain Copper(Mococo) at Bulls Head Point (Martinez). Steel came to the county in 1908 whenColumbia Steel (later US Steel) chose a site upriver at Pittsburg. Also significant in theContra Costa industrial complex were wood, paper and building materials. Buildingmaterials went through a major restructuring around the turn of the century, with theintroduction of Portland cement, better quality sawmills in the forests, and large-scaleuse of asbestos. These featured in the Contra Costa shift: the Redwood ManufacturingCompany’s lumber yards, Cowell’s cement plant, Johns Manville’s asbestos works, andCalifornia paper and cardboard mill.

San Francisco capitalists dominated the development of Contra Costa county,which was more an industrial colony than Oakland. Almost all the county’s majorfactories were dreamed up and financed from the city, including Selby, Great WesternElectro-Chemical, and Redwood Manufacturing Company. San Francisco financiersorchestrated the rail, water, oil and electricity networks that fed the new industrial


district, including the crucial link to the Santa Fe that broke the Southern Pacific’srail monopoly. The county’s largest city, Richmond, was almost entirely a creatureof San Francisco designs: Standard Oil of California was city based, plant managerWilliam Rheem organized the local trolley line to tie Richmond to the rest of theEast Bay, H. C. Cutting put together the company that developed the inner harbour,and Fred Parr came in to build the outer harbour terminals and negotiated Ford’smove across the bay. Other Richmond enterprises, such as Stauffer, Winehaven, andAtlas, were funded by San Francisco investors. Several upriver towns were foundedby city capitalists: Port Costa was the brainchild of merchant Isaac Friedlander,Pittsburg was engineered by Columbia Steel, and Crockett grew up under the aegisof C&H Sugar. The city’s business leaders had a clear regional perspective andstrategy for industrial decentralization. There was little fractiousness from ContraCosta—unlike little Vallejo which helped sink the Bay Area’s bid to be the homeport for the Navy’s Pacific Fleet.[37]

Conclusion

Industrialization deeply shaped San Francisco’s urban geography, and industry helpedlead the outward march of the metropolis. This can be seen in the expansion within thecity of San Francisco, down the Peninsula, over to Oakland and to Contra Costa. Infact, the tendency for industry to seek spacious quarters at the fringe was so marked fromthe outset that it makes no sense to speak of an “old industrial core” that later suburbanized.Rather, suburban extension appears to be the normal mode of urban growth. The reasonsfor new eruptions of industrial activity at the urban fringe were several. Land prices andspeculative gains were one, as in the founding of Richmond around the new rail terminus.Better infrastructure was another, as improved rail access or harbour facilities opened up,as they did in Oakland. Less militant labour beyond the reach of the powerful SanFrancisco unions was a third, as in Contra Costa. Spatial politics entered with a vengeancein cases such as the Chicago meatpackers avoiding the city’s butchers or the formationof Emeryville. Finally, spatial expansion has been closely associated with opening up ofnew industrial sectors and restructuring of old—the geography of the metropolis has beenconstituted along with its productive base.

Of course, multiple and contingent forces are always at work to configure parts ofthe urban complex differently. South City ended up a stunted growth node, ContraCosta a string of industrial colonies, and Oakland a ferociously independent competitorto San Francisco. These particulars matter a great deal for the microgeography of theBay Area, but the metropolis was bound to expand as long as its economy grew. Localbusiness and politics played their part in this drama, whether by closing off the Peninsulaor catapulting Oakland to the forefront, but capital flowed throughout the region as awhole. San Francisco investors had a metropolitan vision from early on, and theyplanted the seeds for much, if not most, of the development around the bay. As theeditor of the Chamber of Commerce Journal wrote in 1912, “in San Francisco are mademost of the great plans for state development”, and he went on to quote H. C. Cutting,developer of Richmond’s inner harbour, who said: “This growth means as much toSan Francisco as though it took place within her own city limits, for financially it isall one. We grow together.”[38]

Department of GeographyUniversity of CaliforniaBerkeleyCA 94720USA

54 RICHARD WALKER

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kevin Carew and, belatedly, to David Landau for research assistance, andto Gray Brechin, Jim Buckley, Paul Groth and Paul Rhode for advice and counsel.

Notes[1] See the lead article in this issue by R. Walker and R. Lewis, Beyond the crabgrass frontier,

Journal of Historical Geography 27 (2001), doi:10.1006/jhge.2000.0268[2] For the traditional view, see J. Vance, Geography and Urban Evolution in the San Francisco

Bay Area (Berkeley 1964) 50–1; P. Groves, The intrametropolitan location of manufacturingin the San Francisco Bay area (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley1969) 28–9.

[3] C. McWilliams, California: The Great Exception (New York 1949); G. Barth, Instant Cities:Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York 1975); L. Doti and L.Schweikart, Banking in the American West: From the Gold Rush to Deregulation (Norman1991); G. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley 1998).

[4] On early manufacturing, see J. Hittell, The Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast(San Francisco 1882); A. Hynding, From Frontier to Suburb: The Story of the San MateoPeninsula (Belmont 1981); M. Koch, Santa Cruz County: Parade of the Past (Santa Cruz1973); W. Winslow (Ed.), The Making of Silicon Valley: A One Hundred Year Renaissance(Palo Alto 1995).

[5] On the wheat era, see R. Paul, The wheat trade between California and the United Kingdom,Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (1973) 391–412. On wine, see J. Hutchinson, NorthernCalifornia from Haraszthy to the beginnings of prohibition, in D. Muscatine, M. Amerineand B. Thompson (Eds), The Book of California Wine (Berkeley 1984) 30–48.

[6] M. Gordon, Employment Expansion and Population Growth (Berkeley 1954); J. Guinn,History of the State of California and Biographical Record of Oakland and Environs (LosAngeles 1907); Vance, op.cit.

[7] San Francisco’s manufacturing workforce and output doubled in the 1870s, peaked as aproportion of all workers in 1880, and ranked ninth in the United States that year. W. Isseland R. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932 (Berkeley 1986) 25, 54; R. Elgie, The development ofSan Francisco manufacturing, 1848–1880 (unpublished MA Thesis, University of California,Berkeley 1966); N. Shumsky, Tar Flat and Nob Hill: a social history of industrial SanFrancisco during the 1870s (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley1972) 22–4; R. Walker, Another round of globalization in San Francisco, Urban Geography17 (1996) 60–94.

[8] On investment see R. Trusk, Sources of capital of early California manufacturers, 1850–1880(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois 1960); Issel and Cherny, op.cit., Brechin,op.cit. On the stimulus of labour migration, see Elgie, op.cit. On the skewed occupationalstructure toward professions and craft skills, see Issel and Cherny, op.cit. 54–5. Wages,incomes and value added per worker were all higher in California and the West thanelsewhere in the United States. Average firm size was lower. For evidence of innovation,see Hittell, op.cit.; Brechin, op.cit.; J. Johnson, Early engineering center in California,California Historical Quarterly 29 (1950) 193–209.

[9] The following portrait is drawn from Hittell, op.cit.; F. Hackett (Ed.), The Industries of SanFrancisco (San Franciso 1884). Also see Anonymous, The Bay of San Francisco: TheMetropolis of the Pacific Coast and its Suburban Cities (Chicago 1892); Trusk, op.cit.; Elgie,op.cit.; Shumsky, op.cit.; Issel and Cherny, op.cit. On the city’s shifting business district seeM. Bowden, The dynamics of city growth: an historical geography of the San Francisco centraldistrict, 1850–1931 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley 1967).There is a striking separation of company offices and salesrooms from manufacturing asearly as the 1870s.

[10] For the location of businesses see San Francisco Post Company, Business Map (San Francisco1880). On the conflict between Chinese and Anglo labour see A. Saxton, The IndispensableEnemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley 1971). On publishing,see J. Bruce, Gaudy Century: The Story of San Francisco’s Hundred Years of Robust Journalism(New York 1948). Figures on printers, G. Bowser, A Business Directory of the City andCounty of San Francisco (San Francisco 1885).


[11] On machining and mining, see J. Blum, The early San Francisco iron industry (unpublishedmanuscript, 1997); Vance, op.cit.; Brechin, op.cit. Mission Bay was filled and the wooddistrict fully in place by 1884; see also N. Olmsted, Vanished Waters: A History of SanFrancisco’s Mission Bay (San Francisco 1986).

[12] On residential patterns, their linkage to industrial expansion, and bourgeois manoeuvring,see Shumsky, op.cit. 138–9; Issel and Cherny, op.cit.; A. Shumate, Rincon Hill and SouthPark: San Francisco’s Early Fashionable Neighborhood (Sausalito 1988); P. Groth, LivingDowntown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley 1994); R. Walker,Landscape and city life: four ecologies of residence in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ecumene2 (1995) 33–64.

[13] On Potrero Point, see Olmsted, op. cit.; P. Groth, Making the system work: engineeringcultural change in 20th century factory complexes (unpublished Paper for the AmericanStudies Association meetings, New York 1988); J. Kemble, San Francisco Bay: A PictorialMaritime History (Cambridge 1957) 10. Butchertown’s history has not been told.

[14] Olmsted, op. cit. 47; Shumsky, op. cit. 138–9; Groth, Making the system work. On landspeculation by major San Francisco capitalists, see Brechin, op. cit.

[15] L. Kauffman, South San Francisco: A History (self-published 1976); J. Blum, South SanFrancisco: the making of an industrial city, California History 63 (1984) 115–33; D. Igler,Industrial cowboys: nature, private property and the regional expansion of Miller & Lux,1850–1920 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley 1997).

[16] E. Burns, The process of suburban residential development: the San Francisco peninsula1860–1970 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley 1975); Walker,Landscape and city life; Kauffman, op. cit.; Hynding, op. cit. Kauffman and Hynding aredescendents of South City leaders.

[17] Hynding, op. cit.; Blum, op. cit. Although the Peninsula was chiefly a commuter zone forSan Francisco, an electronics industry grew up there early in the century. It developed outof high-voltage transmission and long-distance communications, and the vacuum tubeinvented in Palo Alto by Lee DeForest. D. Hanson, The New Alchemists: Silicon Valley andthe Microelectronics Revolution (Boston 1982); T. Sturgeon, The origins of Silicon Valley:the development of the electronics industry in the San Francisco Bay Area (unpublished MAthesis, University of California, Berkeley 1992).

[18] A few local historians have been aware of this. See, for example, M. Scott, The San FranciscoBay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective (Berkeley 1959) 136; Issel and Cherny, op. cit. 50.Employment rank improved from 17th to 16th and value-added rank from 15th to 10th,1869–1935. From 1900 to 1920, population grew 87 per cent, employment by 163 per centand value added by 617 per cent (five-county figures). R. Calkins and W. Hoadley, AnEconomic and Industrial Survey of the San Francisco Bay Area (Sacramento 1941) 170.Industrial employment in the Bay Area fell from 1904 to 1909 and grew little up to 1914,although output continued to expand; however, the Census defined the metropolitan areato exclude much of Contra Costa. U. S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of theUnited States, State Compendium—California (Washington, DC 1924). Los Angeles outgrewthe Bay Area in population and employment in 1880–1910 and 1920–40. On San Francisco’sdeclining commercial dominance over the west see E. Pomeroy The Pacific Slope (New York1965). On its continuing financial hegemony see Doti and Schweikert, op. cit. Figures onshipping, Calkins and Hoadley, op. cit. 156–8.

[19] McWilliams, op. cit.; M. Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades andUnion Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana 1987). Quote from Joseph Grant, San Franciscocapitalist, in Issel and Cherny, op. cit. 51. On the Chinese see Anonymous, op. cit.; Saxton,op. cit. Many Chinese migrated to southern California in the 1880s and 1890s to escapepersecution, no doubt helping Los Angeles’s manufacturing growth. On the virtuous circleof high wages, see Gordon, op. cit.

[20] McWilliams, op. cit.; Issel and Cherny, op. cit.; Brechin, op. cit.; Kahn, Imperial SanFrancisco: Politics and Planning in an American City, 1897–1906 (Lincoln 1979); W. Issel,idem, Citizens outside the government: business and urban policy in San Francisco and LosAngeles, 1890–1932, Pacific Historical Review 57 (1988) 117–45; Issel, Business power andpolitical culture in San Francisco, 1900–1940, Journal of Urban History 16 (1989) 52–77;Issel, idem, New Deal and wartime origins of postwar urban economic policy: the SanFrancisco case, in R. Lotchin (Ed), The Way We Were: The Golden State in the SecondGreat War (Urbana, 2000).

56 RICHARD WALKER

[21] On geographical industrialization see M. Storper and R. Walker, The Capitalist Imperative:Territory, Technology and Industrial Growth (New York 1989). For an overview of changein California industry, see Gordon, op. cit. Buyouts were not a cause of decline, as oftenthought; see A. Trice, California manufacturing branches of national firms, 1899–1948: theirplace in the economic development of the state (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley 1955). On industrial conditions in San Francisco after World War I,see U.S. Bureau of the Census, op. cit. 158–9; San Francisco Chamber of Commerce,Directory of Manufactures of San Francisco, California (San Francisco 1920, 1922); Chamberof Commerce, San Francisco Economic Survey (San Francisco 1937–40).

[22] The chief source on industrial Oakland, including locations, is E. Hinkel and W. McCann(Eds), Oakland, 1852–1938 (Oakland 1939) chapter 12. Also see the Illustrated DirectoryCompany, The Illustrated Directory of Oakland, California (Oakland 1896); Anonymous,Greater Oakland, 1911 (Oakland 1911); Oakland Central National Bank, Oakland, California:The City of Diversified Industry (Oakland 1920); Oakland Tribune, Year Book (Oakland1926, 1927); R. Cleland and O. Hardy, March of Industry (Los Angeles 1929); OaklandChamber of Commerce, Industrial Facts about Oakland and Alameda County, California(Oakland 1931); Emeryville Industries Association, Emeryville: Facts and Figures (Emeryville1935).

[23] Carpentier owned the waterfront from 1852 to 1868, then ceded it to the Oakland WaterfrontCompany, held by himself, his brother and Samuel Merritt, as well as Leland Stanford andother San Francisco barons. J. Dykstra, A History of the physical development of the cityof Oakland: the formative years, 1850–1930 (unpublished MA thesis, University of California,Berkeley 1967); B. Bagwell, Oakland: Story of a City (Novato 1982).

[24] Calkins and Hoadley, op. cit. 217, 156, 212. Hinkel and McCann, op. cit. call Oakland “theGlasgow of the US, the Marseilles of the Pacific and the Detroit of the West,” boosteristterms promoted by local business leaders in the preceding years. Published figures can bemisleading because much of East Bay industry was in unincorporated areas or because ofexaggeration by Chamber of Commerce type sources.

[25] U. S. Bureau of Census, Census of Manufactures (1914) I, 179. There were seventeen CalPakcanneries in the south county alone. Oakland Chamber of Commerce, op. cit. 22. On BayArea canning see J. Cardellino, Industrial location: a case study of the California fruit andvegetable canning industry, 1860 to 1984 (unpublished MA thesis, University of California,Berkeley 1984); W. Braznell, California’s Finest: The History of Del Monte Corporation andthe Del Monte Brand (San Francisco 1982); Hackett, op. cit.; Hinkel and McCann, op. cit.;Calkins and Hoadley, op. cit.

[26] Hinkel and McCann, op. cit.; Emeryville Industries Association, op. cit. Overall, California’ssteel and machinery industries made spectacular advances in the 1910s, due in part to low-cost energy and Federal wartime spending. Gordon, op. cit. 56.

[27] Hinkel and McCann, op. cit.[28] Hinkel and McCann, op. cit.; Oakland Tribune, Year Book 1926 53, 181; H. Christman,

Development of the Pacific coast automotive industry, Western Machinery World (January1929) 13–19.

[29] On the residential expansion of Oakland see Dykstra, op. cit.; Bagwell, op. cit. On local realestate cycles see L. Maverick, Cycles in real estate activity, Journal of Land and Public UtilityEconomics 8 (1932) 191–9. The Realty Syndicate was responsible for about half of modernOakland, especially along the foothills, where middle-class riders used the trolleys to commutefrom homes in the elite districts such as Claremont, Elmwood, Piedmont and Trestle Glen.See also Walker, Landscape and city life.

[30] Vance, op. cit. emphasizes Oakland’s independence. On the port see Bagwell, op. cit.; Dykstra,op. cit. On labour and Oakland politics see C. Rhomberg, Social movements in a fragmentedsociety: ethnic, class and racial mobilization in Oakland, California 1920–1970 (unpublishedPh.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley 1997). Oakland’s Chamber of Commercecould brag in 1931 that the city was 90 per cent Open Shop. Oakland Chamber of CommerceIndustrial Bureau, op. cit. 11. On Knowland and Kaiser see E. Cray, Chief Justice: The Lifeand Times of Earl Warren (New York 1997); M. Foster, Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in theModern American West (Austin 1989).

[31] Emeryville Industries Association, op. cit. This pamphlet has a full list of factories. Emery-ville’s political history has not been adequately told.

[32] On metropolitan consolidation see M. Scott, op.cit. 134; Anonymous, The Bay Basin and


Greater San Francisco, Merchants’ Association Review (December 1907); Anonymous,Greater San Francisco Edition, San Francisco Chronicle (December 22, 1907). Scott em-phasizes the failure to unify the region and its costs; for a contending view see R. Lotchin,The Darwinian city: the politics of urbanization in San Francisco between the World Wars,Pacific Historical Review 48 (1979) 357–81.

[33] For a comprehensive history of local industry see M. Purcell, History of Contra CostaCounty (Berkeley 1940) chaps. 24, 25; J. Whitnah, The Story of Contra Costa County,California (Martinez 1936); G. Emanuels, California’s Contra Costa County (Fresno 1986);and promotional pamphlets from 1887, 1903, 1909, and 1915 held in the Bancroft Library,e.g., Board of Supervisors, Contra Costa County: Leading County of the West in Manufacturing(Martinez 1915). Figures on output from Census of Manufacturers, various years; forshipping figures see Calkins and Hoadley, op. cit. 158.

[34] Figures from Purcell, op. cit.; Emanuels, op. cit. Company towns were segregated by raceand ethnicity, as at Tormey/Selby, Valona/Crockett, or Hercules. On Richmond see J.Whitnah, A History of Richmond, California (Richmond 1944); E. Davis, CommercialEncyclopedia of the Pacific Southwest (Berkeley 1910–15).

[35] Oil and electricity fuelled Contra Costa’s industrialization. The first oil pipeline, fromBakersfield, arrived in 1903. Meanwhile, thanks to the water resources of the Sierra, use ofelectricity in California manufacturing outran the rest of the United States by six times in1904, triple in 1909 and double in 1919. Gordon, op. cit. 99. On electrification, see J.Williams, Electricity and the Making of Modern California (Akron 1997).

[36] On fish canning see A. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the CaliforniaFisheries, 1850–1980 (New York 1986).

[37] Investors from Issel and Cherny, op. cit. chap. 2. There were few upstart capitalists inContra Costa’s history. Oakland’s burghers were also involved in Richmond’s founding anddevelopment. On Vallejo versus San Francisco see R. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961:From Warfare to Welfare (New York 1992).

[38] Quoted by Scott, op. cit. 137 and Issel and Cherny, op. cit. 42. For more such upliftingrhetoric on regional unity in the 1930s see ibid., 50.

Documents

Industry builds the city: the suburbanization of manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940