Sewer Maps, City Borders, and a Walk to Valant Place

Our Piedmont Recreation Department’s Walking on Wednesdays group had a rare destination last week. Zillow reported a Piedmont home at 23 Valant Place for sale. This seemed like a mistake because a Piedmont street named Valant Place did sound right, but then it was recalled we walked to Valant, a cul-de-sac off Trestle Glen Road,  some years back, but had never returned.

Walker/real estate broker Stacey Isaacs was going to meet us at the house for a tour. History about why this house is in Piedmont was to be shared too. A large group of 54 walkers and five K-9 best friends were at the Exedra on a lovely morning for it all.

Valant Place sits right along the irregular Piedmont–Oakland boundary, which zigzags through its neighborhood. The border cuts unevenly through the area, one side of a lot, or even part of a house parcel, can technically be in Oakland while the mailing address is Piedmont. 23 Valant Place is often noted as the only house on Valant that is officially within Piedmont city limits while neighboring parcels are associated with Oakland. However, current real estate and property records identify 20, 21, 23, 24, and 25 Valant Place as “Piedmont, CA 94610.”

This curious situation is a result of Piedmont’s founding fathers using the Piedmont Sanitary District’s sewer map to define the city’s borders when they incorporated Piedmont as a city in 1907. The sewer lines follow topography rather than streets, which led to an irregular Piedmont city limit zigzagging through today’s neighborhoods.

We had talked about the sewer map and the chaotic founding of Piedmont before, but we hadn’t discussed why Piedmonters didn’t want to be part of Oakland. A February 1, 2024 KQED Bay Curious feature by Chris Hambrick told the story.

Hambrick reported that in the second half of the 1800s Oakland started to grow from ranch land to small settlements. Oakland librarian Steve Lavoie, who curated an exhibit on Piedmont, provided information for Hambrick’s report. Oakland leaders wanted to enlarge the city’s boundaries and increase its population. This program was called the “Greater Oakland Movement.” It was motivated by the belief that small cities were susceptible to corruption. The smaller the city, the greater the chance of greedy folks raiding the treasury or discouraging business competition.

Their plan was to create the largest city on the Pacific Coast at the time, but this could only happen if neighboring towns or communities without their own governments could be convinced to join Oakland. In 1872, Oakland annexed the town of Brooklyn and Temescal twenty-five years later. They tried to get Berkeley, but it turned them down.

Piedmont was also a target, but each annexation required a vote by the people in that town. Oakland’s City Council set a vote on annexing Piedmont for January 1907. However, they failed to name one of the districts they wanted to annex in their paperwork, so the vote was postponed until March.

During the delay, a group of Piedmont residents filed a petition to hold their own election to incorporate and prevent Oakland’s annexation. They wanted Piedmont to remain rural and undeveloped. They saw how densely populated Oakland was and didn’t want to be part of it.

Piedmont historian Ann Swift said that convincing other Piedmonters to incorporate was not easy. “Hugh Craig and James Ballentine were the two leaders of the incorporation effort, and they are having meetings every other night, practically trying to rally the troops and get everybody excited about creating this new city.” But she said, “There was also opposition.”

The burning down of the Piedmont Springs Hotel in 1892 weighed heavily on the minds of Piedmont voters. This three-story, white structure in the center of the city was Piedmont’s biggest tourist attraction. Piedmont didn’t have city services, so Oakland’s Fire Department was called to come put out the fire but it took them two hours to get to the hotel.

“In those days, there were no fire hydrants. You had to bring the water with you,” Swift said. “Well, imagine a team of horses dragging a big tanker full of water up Oakland Avenue, for instance. Very, very difficult and slow going. So by the time the fire wagons got to the hotel, they were just sitting with everybody else watching the embers burn. It was completely gone. And that was what happened if your house in the Piedmont hills caught fire. So Piedmonters were adamant about wanting their own fire service.”

All the Piedmont residents agreed that they needed a better solution for fire response, but they differed on whether better meant being a part of Oakland or figuring it out as their own city. Swift said, “Piedmont had no experience with levying taxes and evaluating property and providing all these city services like street sprinkling. The streets were mostly unpaved, and especially in the summer, you had water trucks that went through the city and watered down the streets so that it wasn’t so dusty. Well, Piedmont had no water street-dusting things, and so all of that was going to have to be created. And there was a sizable part of the city who thought there was no need to go through that.”

The big vote on whether Piedmont should incorporate happened in January 1907. Eighteen more men voted to become a city than voted to not become a city and Piedmont was officially a city. But Oakland’s vote to annex Piedmont still went forward, and in March a majority of Piedmont residents voted to join Oakland. The vote was 63–43, but this was impossible now that Piedmont was its own city.

The only thing the opponents could do was to hold an election to disincorporate. So they held another election on September 5, 1907 to disincorporate Piedmont and merge with Oakland. The vote to failed by 10 votes. While 92 men voted to disincorporate and 62 voted to stay separate, the measure required a two-thirds majority, or 102 votes.

Swift said, “It means that there are 136 parcels … a portion of which are in Piedmont and a portion of which are in Oakland … Sewer boundaries wouldn’t ever be what you would want to use in defining city boundaries. You’d want to use streets or major roads. But they didn’t have that choice, so we’re stuck with it.”

We headed off for the long walk to Valant Place. We went up Highland, Sheridan, Wildwood Avenues, through the Hall Fenway to Crocker Avenue and up LaSalle Avenue to Indian Road. Down Indian the street becomes Sunnyhills Road when it crosses into Oakland. Further down Sunnyhills is the steep Bowles Place and at its bottom is an extraordinarily long set of wooden steps that end at Trestle Glen. Up this handsome street with homes in variety of architectural styles is Valant Place. The street was originally called Kingsley Place before it was changed in 1928. There is not a definitive record explaining why the name was changed, but Oakland commonly renamed streets during the 1920s to eliminate duplicate or confusing street names.

We went into Valant and at the end this cul de sac was 21 Valant with Stacey Isaccs waiting for us. Stacey gave us an update on the local real estate market and told us about the house. She said that while there has been some price weakness in parts of Oakland, the more affluent neighborhoods are seeing price increases and Piedmont was experiencing significant increases in home prices.

The first home on Valant was built in 1932 with others in the 1960s. 23 Valant is the newest, built in 1993, and is a 4-bedroom, 3.5-bath, 4,207 square foot home built. The house was listed at $2,795,000 just over a month ago but was repriced this week at $2,800,000 to establish a price that would be acceptable to the sellers. Stacey said at $666/square foot this is currently the best Piedmont home value on the market.

Also for sale is the empty lot next to it at 22 Valant. It’s 8,237 square feet or .19 acre (a football field is about one acre) and listed for $540,000. It went on the market in March. Its listings says, “Set on a steep hillside, the site presents both challenge and opportunity. Construction here is not for the faint of heart but for those willing to take on the project, the reward could be extraordinary.”

Stacey invited us to go inside the spacious home. It has 12 to 14 foot ceilings throughout and a large eat-in kitchen and a family room with a fireplace. It has been beautifully maintained and looks new. We enjoyed our visit and appreciated Stacey letting us tour this lovely home on the far side of Piedmont.

After seeing the house it was time for us to start our way back to the Exedra. We went up Trestle Glen to a different set of hidden stairs. Climbing them took us to the St. James Place cul de sac for some more climbing up to St. James Drive. Going down it was a familiar route back to the city center via Hampton Road, Crocker, Wildwood, Sheridan, and Highland Avenues. It was a long loop of almost four miles, longer than most Wednesday walks, but an enjoyable one with Piedmont history and a unique Piedmont home.