It is almost the end 2024 and there were still some Piedmont streets our Piedmont Recreation Department’s Walking on Wednesdays group hadn’t walked this year. One was King Avenue, so when we assembled at the Exedra last Wednesday it was our destination. We could walk all of it from Lincoln to La Salle Avenues before some afternoon rain.
There was a strong turnout of 50 walkers and two K-9 best friends.
We went up Highland to Sheridan Avenue and then climbed Lincoln Avenue to King Avenue. Looking down King, Park Commissioner Jack Fischrup pointed out the trees with striking yellow leaves that lined both sides of the street. Jack said they are ginkgoes, the oldest tree on earth. They are native to East Asia and first appeared over 290 million years ago.
We went down King enjoying its lovely homes whose construction was spread out over the first half of the last century. The group stopped at 84 which was built in 1910. From Piedmont Historical Society’s research, it was shared that Wallace Alexander, who has been called “Piedmont’s Philanthropist,” built a three-story mansion at Sea View and Hampton in the first years of the 1900s and a carriage house that is now the home at 84 King. Across the street from it is Crocker Park. The land for it was purchased by a group of neighbors headed by Alexander.
By 1917, the City was making improvements to make the land into a city park, but the Key System extended their # 10 line to what is now the Hall Fenway and Crocker Park, and it acquired a right of way for its electric streetcars. From 1912 to 1956, this right of way ran on a straight diagonal path through the park from the Hall Fenway to the corner of King and Hampton. Two rows of Canary Island Pines were planted along the way, and what is left of them line up in a pair of lines through the park. A few years back, one of them fell on Hampton Road during a strong windstorm.
The streetcars stopped operating in 1956 and AC Transit used the right of way briefly to park buses. When this stopped, Herbert Hall bought the right of way land. He built the Japanesque house at 90 Crocker in 1961 and gave the deed for the right of way to the City. In his deal with the City, Hall negotiated the right to keep his pool equipment garage on a small portion of the land. This garage has the same Japanesque design as the house.
Since 1972, the Piedmont Beautification Foundation has contributed to the landscaping, planting, and maintaining the iron benches in the park. A granite sculpture of a smoothly rounded bear and her two cubs by Beniamino “Benny” Bufano sits in the park’s center. Bufano was a California-based Italian American sculptor and known for his large-scale monuments representing peace. This Bufano Bear was installed by the Piedmont Beautification Foundation in 1978, and the cobblestone base is a memorial to Marie Veitch who lived nearby.
We continued down King to La Salle Avenue. Just before La Salle there is a wonderful, exotic front yard garden. On a past walk the group met the homeowner and he told them the story of the garden’s creation. It was originally a typical Piedmont grass front yard, but he had an inspiration. A neighbor was doing an excavation and had a truckload of dirt that he was willing to trade for a case of beer. The mound of dirt provided the base for this large tropical plant garden. Jim Kellogg and Mike Henn were on the Piedmont Planning Commission at the time and Jim told us about the challenging approval process for the unusual landscape design. It started out with a 10’ hill but was reduced to 5’ after a “ballistic” neighborhood reaction to the plan. We agreed the garden turned out to be wonderful.
We made our way to the end of King at La Salle and turned up it. A PG&E crew was replacing a 1954 AT&T power poll just before Crocker Avenue. We navigated our way around the closed street and made our return to the Exedra. We passed the lower end of Crocker Park and went through the Hall Fenway with a new understanding of this beautiful part of Piedmont’s history.
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