Columns, Cranes, and Community: Walking Wildwood Gardens

This Wednesday was a “Piedmont hot” day with the temperature in the 80s. Our Piedmont Recreation Department’s Walking on Wednesdays group decided to stay in the central part of town and avoid a lot of climbing. Despite the warm weather, there was a good turnout of 42 walkers and two K-9 best friends at the Exedra our weekly walk.

August 6^th, a little over a month before, was a warm Wednesday too and we took a tour in the shade of Wildwood Gardens. This is the neighborhood that was once the site of developer Frank C. Havens’ early 20^th Century “Wildwood Estate.” We had made our way through the two lower loops of the neighborhood, but time had run short, and we didn’t get to the upper portion of the street. Last Wednesday seemed like a good morning to complete our walk of this historic neighborhood.

The group was reminded that Havens was born in 1848 into one of the founding families of Shelter Island, New York. He ran away from home at the age of sixteen and became a cabin boy on a sailing vessel which rounded the Horn on its way to California. He spent two years in Honolulu, went to China, and came to San Francisco in 1866. He worked in banking and became an Oakland attorney and big-time real estate developer in the East Bay, particularly in Oakland, Berkeley, and Piedmont.

We have joked that Piedmont is an industry, a construction industry that is. There is always building going on in Piedmont and we could also see some of it this morning. We started off going the short distance down Magnolia Avenue to the new aquatics center. At the beginning of the month its two pools had been filled and the “commissioning” process of testing its systems had started. Looking through and around the construction fences we could see the attractive pools and landscaping, as well as workers putting the finishing touches on the facility. We also noted four large, water-blue letters near the pool’s entrance that spell “SWIM.” That’s exactly what we expect people will be doing soon.

We retraced our steps back to the Exedra. Just to the side of it was the Recreation Department’s “Nanci’s Musiktime” group of about eight, very little people, their parents, and Nanci S making little people music. Nanci has been leading music classes for young children over 20 years. Some of us wished we could join in, but we had to continue on with our walk.

We took a scenic route through upper Piedmont Park, past the Tea House to Highland to Wildwood Avenues, and then a short distance up Wildwood to the entrance of Wildwood Gardens. Two partially hidden columns marked the former entrance to Havens’ estate. We regrouped and then entered the neighborhood. We bypassed the lower loops that we had walked on our August walk and continued up the street.

We stopped at a lot where the construction of a new ADU had recently started. A very large and deep hole had been carved out of the land. A worker named Octavio told us that his company was doing the foundation work and that 1,500 yards of soil was being removed. The piers and wall at the back of the hole are temporary and there to protect the workers from a potential hillside collapse. Octavio expected the foundation work to be completed by the end of this year, and the house will be fully done near the end of 2026.

We make our way through the rest of Wildwood Gardens, past an impressive treehouse in a backyard. We continued to the bottom of the seldom-visited Wistaria Way loop and took a group photo. Up the loop, there once was a vacant lot that was once part of a home. When the owner died at the beginning of this decade, the lot was donated to a local church and sold in 2022. The new owners twice submitted applications in 2022 to build a single family home on the lot but were rejected both times after neighbors and the City objected to the project's size.

The owners then developed a new project to divide the lot into two parcels and construct new homes on them with an ADU alongside one. This is allowed under a new California law, known as "SB9". It went into effect on January 1, 2022, and is intended to address California's housing crisis by allowing homeowners to divide their lots and construct up to four houses on a single-family parcel.

This Wistaria project's application was approved by the Piedmont Planning and Building Department in December 2023. Building permits were approved in July 2024 and construction was started immediately. The new homes’ structures have largely been built. They are of a modern design with glass exteriors. There is some work still to be done, but they are attractive homes. On a Wednesday walk of Wistaria last fall, the owner, Geoff G, was by chance at the site and told us that he and his family hoped to celebrate Christmas this year in their new home. It looks like that could happen.

We continued on and emerged on Woodland Way. We went up it to Lafayette Avenue, and returned to the Exedra via Crocker, Wildwood, Sheridan, and Highland Avenues. It had been a warm morning walk with some local history and seeing construction work of new structures that will make Piedmont even more beautiful.