Seventy-five years ago in mid-August 1943 the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported that the federal government was going ahead with plans to construct “Berkeley’s first public war housing project, designed to provide shelter for in-migrant (sic) defense and Richmond shipyard workers and their families”.
The several hundred apartment units were planned for construction on the University of California’s agricultural Gill Tract at the border between Berkeley and Albany west of San Pablo Avenue and 25 adjacent acres. Official Berkeley objected to the project. Mayor Fitch Robertson said that the land had been zoned by the Berkeley Planning Commission for industrial, not residential, uses. But another reason was also clearly apparent.
“Personally, I believe that public housing projects, especially those to provide shelter for shipyard workers, should be concentrated in the Richmond area,” Robertson said Aug. 19 of that year.
The Federal Public Housing Authority was going ahead with the project nonetheless, and the mayor said, “Berkeley will have to smile, grin and take it.” The next day (Aug. 20), however, the City Council voted 6-1 to send a letter of protest to the federal government. Councilman Redmond Staats Jr. said he would prefer private builders construct housing scattered through the city close to transportation. “Public housing is placed in one section, overcrowding schools and swamping police and fire facilities.”
The director of the federal agency had written to the city, saying, “I recognize, but do not share, your fears of the temporary housing in this particular location becoming, let us say, semipermanent. In order to lend greater assurances of the speedy demolition of these buildings after the emergency, we are contemplating leasing the land rather than purchasing it and will agree with the owners to remove the buildings within a very short time after the emergency is declared over.”
The plan was to start construction within two months. What happened to the housing? It was indeed built and survived the war. I believe the city of Berkeley continued to lobby to have it demolished, but stopped after the the University of California began to use the units for student family rentals, responding to the influx of students arriving on the G.I. Bill with new, young, families. Today’s Albany Village housing is on the site of the war housing, the current buildings having been built later.
New ship: A 125-foot-long shark “knifed through the Berkeley waterfront and San Francisco Bay at 20 knots,” the Gazette reported in an exclusive Aug. 20, 1943, article. Well, it wasn’t really a shark, just a new ship design painted to look like a shark. The vessel, designed by Hal B. Hayes, a “Berkeley-Richmond concrete contractor and inventor,” was made of concrete and, without the shark markings, resembled a gigantic cigar.
The concrete was flexible, and Hayes contended that a 400-foot-long cargo ship with considerable stability could be built with just a tenth of the steel required for conventional cargo vessels. The test vessel, dubbed the “Lektron” was boarded by a single Gazette reporter for its maiden voyage. He described a smooth ride with no “pitch or roll” despite making “hairpin turns.”
What happened to this vision of concrete cargo ships? I don’t know. An Internet search shows that in summer of 1943 the federal government had commissioned a number of concrete ships that were built in Philadelphia and later used as “blockships” — sunken breakwaters — during the D-day landings. And at the same time some concrete cargo carriers without engines were built on San Francisco Bay. But I haven’t yet discovered the fate of the Lektron project.
Steven Finacom is a Bay Area native and community historian in Berkeley.