Berkeley, a Look Back: Furniture dealers exhibition wows 1923 crowds
A century ago, Berkeleyeans were avidly visiting the Berkeley Furniture Dealers Exhibition. With many new homes, and even new neighborhoods, in Berkeley in 1923, businesses that sold home furnishings wanting to showcase their wares is not surprising.
The method chosen in Berkeley in December 1923 was novel. The exhibition featured “eight modern homes completely furnished, open day and night (Sundays included)” with the “Public Invited, Admission Free,” a special advertising section proclaimed in the Nov. 30, 1923, Berkeley Daily Gazette.
“The purpose of this exhibit is to inform the people of Berkeley how easily (sic) it is to make their homes more beautiful and attractive,” according the advertising section. “You are urged to come and see how YOUR home may be rendered more artistic, home-like and comfortable by the help of your Berkeley merchants.”
The event ran Dec. 1-17, 1923, and the houses were “in the heart of Northbrae’s most beautiful residential section, near Monterey Station.” The houses had been built by the Roy O. Long real estate development company and were designed by William Bartages. The newspaper section said the exhibition would be “the largest of its kind ever held in the West.”
In addition to the exhibit, exhibition attendees could win prizes that included a floor lamp with silk shade, a “mahogany Martha Washington sewing table” or a “solid mahogany tea wagon” by getting a free entry ticket at the event.
School children were also invited to write essays “on the typical Berkeley home,” with prizes ranging from $5 to $20 in gold. More than 5,000 people showed up for the first Sunday of the exhibit to marvel at the houses complete with pots and pans in their kitchens and new automobiles in their garages.
Thanksgiving thoughts: Below is a portion of a poem by Ada H. Davies in her “Holiday Offerings in the Berkeley Shops” special section of the Nov. 29, 1923, Gazette.
“Each year at the Thankgiving season, when turkeys and brown pumpkin pies are the talk of the town and big dinners draw closer the love-woven ties …
’Tis the feast of dear home, in our homeland, hard-won by brave spirits, and bold, from Nature’s wild forces, that granted, no quarter from hunger and cold, and the grim, lurking savage’s warlust … .”
That last sentence, casting native people as “lurking savages” in what was their ancestral home is rightly disturbing from today’s perspective. For all its warm associations, from its beginnings Thanksgiving also marked the rise and advance of European colonists in North America at great cost to the continent’s native peoples.
I don’t know if descendants of any of the Bay Area’s original indigenous people were living in Berkeley in 1923. If so, they may well have had a different perspective on the rapid development of the landscape a century ago.
Big storm: On the night of Nov. 30-Dec. 1, 1923, a major early-winter storm blew through the Bay Area, with winds reaching nearly 50 miles an hour in Berkeley.
“Considerable excitement but little damage” occurred in Berkeley, but out on San Francisco Bay several ships and barges were torn from their moorings and some ran aground. One was a freighter nearly arrived from Hawaii that was pushed onshore in what is now San Francisco’s Marina district.
“Ferry boats on the Bay were tossed about like corks, with the result that early morning commuters had interesting trips to work,” the Gazette reported.
Football flight: Mentioned in a previous column, Memorial Stadium’s first UC Berkeley football game in 1923 has a footnote. An Alameda man was being sought on charges of flying his airplane as low as 150 feet over the stadium crowd.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.