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Five Storied Structures

An Island History Lesson Through the City's Buildings

This is the story of five Alameda landmarks—City Hall (1896), the Croll Building (1879), Masonic Temple (1891), Meyers House (1897) and First Presbyterian Church (1904). Two are in commercial districts, one is in the civic center, another is a house museum, and the last is a church. All have been designated city landmarks, and together they encapsulate the history of a community.

Alameda City Hall (1896)

    “This building is as square as a brick, plumb and level; the walls are strong and the floors safe; the roof is tight and the doors swing freely on their hinges. I turn over the keys and hope this edifice will only be used for legitimate purposes.”
    With these words, architect George Percy formally presented the newly completed Alameda City Hall to city officials during dedication ceremonies held on a February evening in 1896, about a year after construction began.
    The completion of City Hall at the corner of Santa Clara Avenue and Oak Street, a block west of Park Street, symbolized the coming of age of Alameda as a city, though the population was less than 15,000. It also marked the beginning of a governmental district as distinct from the downtown. Prior to that date, ever since the city’s incorporation in 1872, the municipality had transacted its business in leased quarters on Park Street. Now Alameda had its own splendid house of government, erected at a cost of nearly $60,000, a monument surpassing all other buildings in the city in terms of architectural grandeur.
    By 1903, the nascent civic center included a new Carnegie Library, directly across the street from City Hall, where the library had been housed since 1896. Churches and clubs contributed to the civic center’s role as a true center of the community. By 1910, the area between Oak and Walnut on Santa Clara and Central would be improved with the Twin Towers Methodist Church, Elks Club and Adelphian Club; by the 1920s, it would include the majestic new Alameda High School, Alameda Health Center and Alameda Veterans Memorial Building, along with a Christian Science church and a synagogue.
    The design of City Hall reflected the fashion for Romanesque Revival initiated in the United States by the Boston architect H. H. Richardson, and its composition was inspired by Richardson’s celebrated Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh, Pa., dating from the 1880s. Alameda City Hall’s massive three-story wings and its soaring central tower (removed in the 1930s for seismic safety) echoed the general format of Richardson’s much larger courthouse, as did the replicated arched motifs of the portico and second-floor windows.
    Like the Masonic Temple, Alameda City Hall was the product of a competition. The winning design came out of the office of Percy & Hamilton in San Francisco, one of California’s most respected architectural firms. The senior partner, George W. Percy, was an exponent of Richardson Romanesque and a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete (which occurs on the first floor of the City Hall). Richardson was a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, and Percy & Hamilton displayed an adherence to Beaux-Arts ideals of symmetry, balance and proportion, amply evident in the calm coherence of Alameda City Hall—an eclectic design, like the Masonic Temple, but of a far higher order of architectural achievement.
    In 1997, a century after it opened, Alameda City Hall was rededicated following a painstaking rehabilitation of the building by Ratcliff Architects, the same firm that had designed the 1978 red-brick Police Administration Building next door. For the first time in decades, the original council chambers were restored for public use, the lobby was returned to its original glory, and the outside thoroughly cleaned and repaired. The building looks pretty spiffy these days, though the question remains whether the tower will ever be rebuilt.

Croll Building (1879)

    Railroads and ferries transformed Alameda from a rural farming community into a suburban city centered around the main train station on Park Street. With the opening of the South Pacific Coast Railroad in 1878, the quiet West End byway of Webster Street quickly became the town’s second largest commercial district.
    Along with local commuters, passengers on the SPCRR included a motley crew of San Franciscans who came to play in a bevy of new bathing resorts in the West End, where the tracks skirted the shoreline west of Webster. Within a few years there were a half-dozen establishments with salt-water pools, groomed beaches, dance halls and chophouses, notably the Long Branch Baths, Terrace Baths, Cottage Baths, Green Arbor Baths and Sunny Cove.
    The railroad and resulting resort boom fueled Webster Street’s phenomenal growth in the late 1870s, when 20 buildings went up along the street. As land values soared, a handful of property owners struck it rich.
    One of those lucky few was Patrick Britt. A farmer whose shoreline property covered about seven acres at the foot of Webster Street, Britt was paid $21,000 for his land in the fall of 1878—a lot of money at a time when most workers earned less than $500 a year. The purchasers, from Oakland, spent another $70,000 building the Long Branch Baths on the site, but they soon lost their shirts as the boom receded to an echo. The South Pacific Coast Railroad bought the defunct resort and enlarged the grounds, reopening in 1885 as the renowned Neptune Gardens. Meanwhile, Patrick Britt had invested much of his windfall in West End real estate, including a parcel at the corner of Webster and Central, across the street from the Long Branch Baths. In the spring of 1879, Britt spent $6,000 on a three-story hotel, hoping to cash in further from the resort craze. Yet Britt’s Hotel declined in tandem with the resorts, and by the late 1880s, Britt was bankrupt.
    The hotel, renamed the Bella Vista, was purchased in 1891 by John G. Croll, who had moved his family from Oakland to manage the now-defunct Neptune Gardens. Refurbished and renamed the Encinal Hotel, with the family in residence upstairs, the building also housed a corner saloon called Croll’s.
    The Croll Building achieved a certain renown at the turn of the 20th century as the hangout of famous boxers of the day, including James Corbett and Jack Fitzsimmons, who boarded there (taking their meals from “Ma” Croll) while training across the street on the old resort grounds.
    Croll enlarged the building in 1908, adding a two-story wing to the north, on Webster Street. The business prospered after World War I, when Neptune Beach opened across the street on the site of the Neptune Gardens.
    Following Johnny Croll’s death in 1931, the business was operated by his sons John Jr. (“Doc”) and Ralph. The upstairs hotel, renamed the Pioneer, closed in the 1940s after a fire. Doc Croll died in the 1950s, and Ralph continued running the place until 1978, when he took a well-earned retirement. The new owners rehabilitated the place, adding commercial space and offices.
    A visit to this West End landmark provides a lesson in the art of “reading” buildings—deciphering how they have changed over time. First, there is the original 1879 building at the corner, with its rich façades and mansard roof. The beautifully preserved wood ornament—brackets, frieze, window hoods, blocky quoins at the corners (simulating stone masonry)—are hallmarks of Italianate, the reigning Victorian style of the 1870s.
    The mansard roof (actually the third story, with round-arched dormers) is extremely rare for Alameda. A building with a mansard is sometimes given the style label Second Empire, alluding to its popularity in Second Empire France in the mid-19th century.
The 1908 north wing is a textbook example of a seamless addition. Built nearly 30 years after the corner hotel, the addition is difficult to distinguish from the original building, lacking only the mansard. Recent changes include storefronts with new stained-glass windows. A popular restaurant, the New Zealander, continues to draw patrons to this West End landmark—the only architectural remnant of Alameda’s brief, boisterous heyday as a Victorian resort.

Masonic Temple (1891)

    If Webster Street was the liveliest of Alameda’s business districts, sober-minded Park Street was its undisputed commercial and civic center. When trains first began running down Railroad Avenue (now Lincoln Avenue) in 1864, the main station was built on Park Street, which became a magnet for commercial and residential development.
    The Gold Rush farming community in the East End was turned into an instant backwater known as “Old Alameda,” and many of its residents, as well as its few businesses, soon relocated to the vicinity of the train station (sometimes bringing their buildings with them).
    Park Street attained new heights of prosperity after the arrival of the South Pacific Coast Railroad. The new rail line crossed the street on Encinal Avenue, where a three-story brick hotel and station was built. Downtown Alameda assumed monumental form between the late 1870s and early 1890s as clusters of grand buildings rose on every corner south from Santa Clara Avenue to Encinal Avenue.
    The Masonic Temple, erected in 1890–91 at Park Street and Alameda Avenue, is the sole survivor of this group of monumental downtown buildings; all the others have been demolished or altered beyond recognition. In similar manner to the Croll Building on Webster Street, the Masonic Temple is the preeminent Victorian landmark on Park Street. But there the similarities end.
    Built at a cost of more than $25,000, the looming three-story structure exhibits an astonishingly rich palette of materials. The brick walls are trimmed with polished granite, carved and rusticated sandstone, slate roofing, floral frieze panels of terra cotta, pressed-metal cornice and pier finials, and locally rare cast-iron storefronts. The architectural terra cotta on the Masonic Temple building is the oldest in Alameda.
    The building was designed by an Oakland architect named Charles Mau, who won the commission in a competition. Typical of mainstream eclectic architects of his day, he concocted designs from whatever sources caught his fancy. The blocky massing, mansardic cornice and segmental arch windows of the Masonic Temple are Italianate in derivation, but the busy, textured façades, capped with finials, and the prominent gable and tower facing Park Street are clearly Queen Anne in spirit. There is also a nod to the Romanesque in the rusticated stone arch of the Alameda Avenue entry.
    At the time of the temple’s dedication, in February 1891, Alameda had a population of about 12,000—eight times as many people as in 1871, when Oak Grove Lodge, No. 215, Free & Accepted Masons, was organized in a rented hall on Park Street. Like other fraternal orders, the Masons played an important role in the community, providing a basis for charitable and civic activities as well as nurturing friendships, business dealings and political alliances.
    The lodge continued to grow, culminating in the construction of a new temple next door on Alameda Avenue in the 1920s, the current home of the lodge and the Alameda Museum. The old temple sat vacant for many years (though the ground-floor commercial spaces continued to be rented) and was finally sold in 1979. Today the old lodge rooms and dining rooms are rental apartments, and the redoubtable Java Rama Coffee House does business at the corner. Have yourself a latte, and check out the museum while you’re at it.

Meyers House (1897)

    One of the draftsmen who worked for Percy & Hamilton during the design of Alameda City Hall was an Alameda resident named Henry H. Meyers, an apprentice architect who was 28 when the building was dedicated. He went on to become one of the best-known Bay Area architects of his generation, in a career spanning five decades. Meyers personified the tradition of notable San Francisco architects (including Carl Werner and Andrew Hass) who lived in Alameda and left memorable imprints on their home city.
    Born in Alvarado (now Union City) and raised in Livermore, Henry Haight Meyers (1867–1943) was the oldest of nine children of Jacob Meyers, a carpenter and builder. Around 1890, Meyers moved to San Francisco to pursue his architectural education. He attended night classes and apprenticed in the office of Percy & Hamilton, where he eventually became head draftsman. In 1900, following the deaths of the partners, Meyers assumed control of the firm, soon taking on Clarence R. Ward as his own partner.
    Meyers & Ward played an important role in the reconstruction of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, designing skyscrapers, office buildings, retail stores, factories and warehouses for the devastated districts of the city. After the firm’s dissolution in 1910, Meyers worked on his own, including a 20-year stint as Alameda County’s official architect (a position he held alongside his private practice). Prior to his retirement in 1935, his county work included healthcare facilities, notably Oakland’s Highland Hospital, and 10 veterans’ memorial buildings in various municipalities.
    Meyers moved to Alameda in 1894, the year he married Bertha May, a childhood friend from Alvarado. They would spend the rest of their lives as residents of the city, where they raised their three daughters, Mildred, Edith and Jeanette. The sisters—who never married and always lived and vacationed together—were graduates of UC Berkeley. Mildred became an architect; Edith, a noted pediatric doctor. Jeanette never pursued a career, devoting her time instead to house and garden, including caring for the family’s bucolic retreat on Dry Creek Ranch (which the sisters would donate to the East Bay Regional Park District to stop a freeway through their land, creating today’s Dry Creek Regional Park in Union City). Over the course of his career, Henry H. Meyers designed more than a dozen buildings in Alameda, including private residences, commercial buildings, school additions, churches and two of his many county buildings—the Veterans Memorial Building, in the civic center, and the Posey Tube portal in the West End.
    Meyers’ first design in Alameda was the family home near Chestnut Street on Alameda Avenue, ensconced in the central part of the city where most new houses were erected between 1885 and 1910. Built by his father in 1897, the two-story residence was a gracious and understated essay in the fashionable, turn-of-the-century style known as Colonial Revival (a toned-down reaction against the excesses of Queen Anne), with an elegantly rounded front bay and a prominent porch with classical columns and balustrade. The natural-wood interior included an entry with varnished staircase, an oak-paneled dining room and large parlor. The grounds were enlarged over the years, resulting in one of the town’s loveliest gardens.
    The Meyers sisters bequeathed the family house and garden to the city for park purposes. The last living sister, Jeanette, who died in 1993, further specified that the house be converted into a museum under the guidance of George Gunn, curator of the Alameda Museum. Two ceremonies preceded the house museum’s public opening in 1998—a formal dedication in 1996, and a “100th Anniversary Celebration” in 1997.
    The Meyers House and Garden, 2021 Alameda Ave., is jointly operated by the Alameda Recreation and Parks Department, which maintains the grounds, and the Alameda Museum, which runs the museum. It is Alameda’s only house museum, a somewhat surprising state of affairs for a city so rich in historic houses, and is open to the public on the fourth Saturday of the month for a nominal fee.

First Presbyterian Church of Alameda (1904)

    Prominently sited at the corner of Santa Clara Avenue and Chestnut Street, where it is seen daily by a constant stream of passersby, the First Presbyterian Church of Alameda is one of the city’s most beautiful neoclassical buildings. A gleaming temple with a portico of fluted Corinthian columns, rows of superb art-glass windows, and pristine interior of freestanding columns, vaulted aisles and coffered ceiling, the church is truly an architectural treasure.
    Designed in 1903 by Henry H. Meyers, a member of the congregation who lived around the corner, this was the architect’s first monumental work in his home city. Having apprenticed with Percy & Hamilton, Meyers was well-versed in the Beaux-Arts principles of balanced and harmonious compositions derived from classical sources, abundantly evident in the eclectic Greco-Roman and Renaissance styling of the First Presbyterian Church.
    Founded in 1865 in the East End, the church erected its first sanctuary in 1869, at the corner of Central and Versailles avenues, when the town had fewer than 1,500 residents.  As the city’s population grew in the late 19th century, shifting west in tandem with the railroads, the church in “Old Alameda” became isolated.
    During the 20-year pastorate of the Rev. Frank S. Brush (1894–1914), the city’s population nearly doubled, to about 25,000, with most new growth occurring in the central section of Alameda. The existing site, located near the geographical center of the Island, was purchased in 1903, and the last service was held in the outmoded sanctuary in August of that year.
    The new structure, which incorporated wood recycled from the original sanctuary, was erected under the direction of A. J. Burgner, a contractor who served as a church elder. Completed in about seven months, the building was dedicated on Easter Sunday in 1904. As the congregation grew, new facilities were added, including an educational and office wing in the 1920s, replaced by the existing facility in the 1960s.
    Throughout the years, the original sanctuary had remained untouched. Under the guidance of Jack Buckley, First Presbyterian’s pastor since 1993, the church’s centennial committee oversaw a thorough refurbishing of the building while celebrating the congregation’s history in a series of events that culminated in the rededication of the immaculately restored structure on Easter Sunday 2004—a precise centenary indeed, and a marvelous gift to the community, making a fitting end to this tale of five landmarks.