seven stories of love

The Key System building, 11th street facade showing Key System mural.

There is a building here in DTO that I love, that I love in a way that made me fall in love with the entire surrounding area. I can just see the scrolling edge of its terra-cotta, beaux-arts cornice from my window. On my way to the train it stands above me, singled out amongst the glass towers. The care and consideration of its design imparting a sense of, “hey, look, we made this thing beautiful, to last many years, and we did it because we like this town and we believe in its future.” Sure, I’ve got some rose tint going here, but, I really do believe that there was a real sense of civic pride put into this building that just does not exist in many buildings tossed into the downtown environs since the 1960’s.

Renaissance, terra-cotta detail of the top floor windows. Take that glass box!

It makes me feel good when I see it. It makes me wish that I could own it and restore it… make it live again with the thrum of people. I’d fill one tower with studios for sculptors, writers, painters, cranks and weirdos. The other tower would be filled with musicians and other bothersome, noisy freaks. There’d be a garden on the roof for the café below, and a performance space on the top floor. There would be educational programs for teens and kids. Seven stories of utopia at 1100 Broadway. It would be a destination; a high class building that wealthy industrialists would pine for office space in––but they would be denied.

When the season is right, the sunrise and the sunset line up down 11^th street and light up the building in sharp relief. It is not tall but it is regal, imposing even, and most of all, it is beautiful. It follows a U-shape, twin towers from a single base, plan shared with a few other buildings in the Bay Area. One is the Powell-Sutter building in San Francisco which was known as the Physician’s Building… a place where I randomly selected a dermatologist in the early 90’s to check up on fungal activities. The same San Francisco based architect, Frederick H. Meyer, designed both of these buildings as well as the landmark Monadnok Building, also in S.F.

Who could not love this building?

Comissioned in 1911 by the Security Bank and Trust of Oakland, the building was one of the early, post 1906 earthquake “sky scrapers” that defined Oakland’s building boom of the period. The projected cost by contractor P.J. Walker was 250,000. I don’t know if they came in over or under budget. Security Bank and Trust was bought out in 1917 by A.P. Giannini’s Bank of Italy, soon to become Bank of America, and the bank held onto the building until 1943 when The Key System, precursor of AC Transit, took it over. As of the early 1980’s the building was vacant, but it’s historical value was recognized by the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. According to a report filed in 1985 by the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey, the building was slated for restoration. The Loma Prieta quake of 1989 put those plans on hold. For a better look at this building and its innards I direct you to my new hero, Jonathan Haeber, and his incredible website, Terrastories which is filled with his great photography and the tales of his incredible explorations.

In the winter.

I am a history junkie, and seeing a great old building in disrepair is at once a romantic, nostlagic feeling, and also a kind of bitter one. As I researched this post, I found a story by a man named Guy Span, and he reminded me of the scandal in which GM, Firestone, and Phillips Petroleum formed a shell company, called National City Lines, for the purpose of buying public transportion companies so they could dismantle the electric systems and put in buses. The corporate titans were found guilty, and paticipants were each fined $5,000, senior executives fined $1.00. That’s ONE dollar.

I also ran into this gem of a promotional film made by the Key System in 1945, just after WW II had ended. The typical narrative of the period is a laugh, filled with tidbits such as, “there’s that spice and coffee smell again” when the train pulls into the Transbay Terminal, in San Francisco’s former industrial heart, blocks away from the old Hill’s Coffee roaster. The little slices of past pie from Oakland and San Francisco alone are worth it.

Morning sun reflected onto Key.

It is also worth a view and listen for those of us into that “local/sustainable” tag line. Back in that day, the Bay Area could produce and manufacture everything under the sun, and thanks to the sun we grew most everything too. Nowadays, if it isn’t streaming on 4G we probably can’t make it. Instead, we import it from a totally polluted factory town in China and ship it on a giant freighter that burns the lowest grade fuel oil imaginable. Go watch one fire up the engines one day down at the Port of Oakland and think about it.

My glorious view. The Key cornice is just in between the horrendous Marriott wedge and the Clorox obelisk, which is just behind the "Ask" building. Question: when was the last time you used "ask"? I thought so.

I would like to thank Oakland History Room librarian Martha Bergmann for her assistance on this project. I would also like to thank Betty Marvin for all her work over the years, preserving, and compiling Oakland's heritage. Every city should be so lucky as to have these two ladies.

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photos by k. thomson