Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emeryville to the south and the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington to the north. Its eastern border with Contra Costa County generally follows the ridge of the Berkeley Hills. The 2020 census recorded a population of 124,321.
Berkeley is home to the oldest campus in the University of California, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is managed and operated by the university. It also has the Graduate Theological Union, one of the largest religious studies institutions in the world. Berkeley is considered one of the most socially progressive cities in the United States.
History
Indigenous history
The site of today's City of Berkeley was the territory of the Chochenyo/Huchiun Ohlone people when the first Europeans arrived. Evidence of their existence in the area include pits in rock formations, which they used to grind acorns, wildflower seeds, grass seeds, and many different foods, including squirrel fat, and a shellmound, now mostly leveled and covered up, along the shoreline of San Francisco Bay at the mouth of Strawberry Creek. Human remains and skeletons from Native American burials have been unearthed in West Berkeley and on campus alongside Strawberry Creek. Other artifacts were discovered in the 1950s in the downtown area during remodeling of a commercial building, near the upper course of the creek.Spanish and Mexican eras
The first people of European descent arrived with the De Anza Expedition in 1776. The De Anza Expedition led to establishment of the Spanish Presidio of San Francisco at the entrance to San Francisco Bay." Luis Peralta was among the soldiers at the Presidio. For his services to the King of Spain, he was granted a vast stretch of land on the east shore of San Francisco Bay for a ranch, including that portion that now comprises the City of Berkeley.File:Peralta Family.jpg|thumb|right|Berkeley and much of the East Bay was part of Rancho San Antonio, granted to the Peralta family in 1820.
Luis Peralta named his holding "Rancho San Antonio." The primary activity of the ranch was raising cattle for meat and hides, but hunting and farming were also pursued. Eventually, Peralta gave portions of the ranch to each of his four sons. What is now Berkeley lies mostly in the portion that went to Peralta's son Domingo, with a little in the portion that went to another son, Vicente. No artifact survives of the Domingo or Vicente ranches, but their names survive in Berkeley street names. However, legal title to all land in the City of Berkeley remains based on the original Peralta land grant.
The Peraltas' Rancho San Antonio continued after Alta California passed from Spanish to Mexican sovereignty after the Mexican War of Independence. However, the advent of U.S. sovereignty after the Mexican–American War, and especially, the gold rush, saw the Peraltas' lands quickly encroached on by squatters and diminished by dubious legal proceedings. The lands of the brothers Domingo and Vicente were quickly reduced to reservations close to their respective ranch homes. The rest of the land was surveyed and parceled out to various American claimants.
Politically, the area that became Berkeley was initially part of a vast Contra Costa County. On March 25, 1853, Alameda County was created from a division of Contra Costa County, as well as from a small portion of Santa Clara County. The area that became Berkeley was then the northern part of the "Oakland Township" subdivision of Alameda County. During this period, "Berkeley" was mostly a mix of open land, farms, and ranches, with a small, though busy, wharf by the bay.
Late 19th century
In 1866, Oakland's private College of California looked for a new site. It settled on a location north of Oakland along the foot of the Contra Costa Range on Strawberry Creek, at an elevation of about above the bay, commanding a view of the Bay Area and the Pacific Ocean through the Golden Gate.According to the Centennial Record of the University of California, "In 1866, at Founders' Rock, a group of College of California men watched two ships standing out to sea through the Golden Gate. One of them, Frederick Billings, thought of the lines of the Anglo-Irish Anglican Bishop and philosopher George Berkeley, 'westward the course of empire takes its way,' and suggested that the town and college site be named for the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish philosopher." The philosopher's name is pronounced BARK-lee, but the city's name, to accommodate American English, is pronounced BERK-lee.
The College of California's College Homestead Association planned to raise funds for the new campus by selling off adjacent parcels of land. To this end, they laid out a plat and street grid that became the basis of Berkeley's modern street plan. Their plans fell far short of their desires, and they began a collaboration with the State of California that culminated in 1868 with the creation of the public University of California.
As construction began on the new site, more residences were constructed in the vicinity of the new campus. At the same time, a settlement of residences, saloons, and various industries grew around the wharf area called Ocean View. A horsecar ran from Temescal in Oakland to the university campus along what is now Telegraph Avenue. The first post office opened in 1872.
By the 1870s, the transcontinental railroad reached its terminus in Oakland. In 1876, a branch line of the Central Pacific Railroad, the Berkeley Branch Railroad, was laid from a junction with the mainline called Shellmound into what is now downtown Berkeley. That same year, the mainline of the transcontinental railroad into Oakland was re-routed, putting the right-of-way along the bay shore through Ocean View.
There was a strong prohibition movement in Berkeley at this time. In 1876, the state enacted the "mile limit law", which forbade sale or public consumption of alcohol within of the new University of California. Then, in 1899, Berkeley residents voted to make their city an alcohol-free zone. Scientists, scholars and religious leaders spoke vehemently of the dangers of alcohol.
On April 1, 1878, the people of Ocean View and the area around the university campus, together with local farmers, were granted incorporation by the State of California as the Town of Berkeley. The first elected trustees of the town were the slate of Denis Kearney's anti-Chinese Workingman's Party, who were particularly favored in the working-class area of the former Ocean View, now called West Berkeley. During the 1880s Berkeley had segregated housing and anti-Chinese laws. The area near the university became known for a time as East Berkeley.
Due to the influence of the university, the modern age came quickly to Berkeley. Electric lights and the telephone were in use by 1888. Electric streetcars soon replaced the horsecar. A silent film of one of these early streetcars in Berkeley can be seen at the Library of Congress website.
Early 20th century
Berkeley's slow growth ended abruptly with the Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The town and other parts of the East Bay escaped serious damage, and thousands of refugees flowed across the Bay. Among them were most of San Francisco's painters and sculptors, who between 1907 and 1911 created one of the largest art colonies west of Chicago. Artist and critic Jennie V. Cannon described the founding of the Berkeley Art Association and the rivalries of competing studios and art clubs.In 1904, the first hospitals in Berkeley were created: the Alta Bates Sanatorium for women and children, founded by nurse Alta Bates on Walnut Street, and the Roosevelt Hospital, founded by LeRoy Francis Herrick, on the corner of Dwight Way and Milvia Street.
In 1908, a statewide referendum that proposed moving the California state capital to Berkeley was defeated by a margin of about 33,000 votes. The city had named streets around the proposed capitol grounds for California counties. They bear those names today, a legacy of the failed referendum.
File:Berkeley Women's City Club .JPG|thumb|right|The historic Spanish Colonial Revival–style Berkeley City Club, designed by famed architect Julia Morgan in 1929
On March 4, 1909, following public referendums, the citizens of Berkeley were granted a new charter by the State of California, and the Town of Berkeley became the City of Berkeley. Rapid growth continued up to the crash of 1929. The Great Depression hit Berkeley hard, but not as hard as many other places in the U.S., thanks in part to the university.
In 1916, Berkeley implemented single-family zoning as an effort to keep minorities out of white neighborhoods. This has been described as the first implementation of single-family zoning in the United States. By 2021, nearly half of Berkeley's residential neighborhoods were still exclusively zoned for single-family homes. In 2025, Berkeley legalized small multi-family buildings in most of the city.
On September 17, 1923, a major fire swept down the hills toward the university campus and the downtown section. Around 640 structures burned before a late-afternoon sea breeze stopped its progress, allowing firefighters to put it out.
The next big growth occurred with the advent of World War II, when large numbers of people moved to the Bay Area to work in the many war industries, such as the immense Kaiser Shipyards in nearby Richmond. One who moved out, but played a big role in the outcome of the war, was U.C. professor and Berkeley resident J. Robert Oppenheimer. During the war, an Army base, Camp Ashby, was temporarily sited in Berkeley.
The element berkelium was synthesized utilizing the cyclotron at UC Berkeley, and named in 1949, in recognition of the university, thus placing the city's name in the list of elements.