Sulfur Springs, Streetcars, and a Lost Amusement Park

Our Piedmont Recreation Department’s Walking on Wednesdays group had another clear, sunny morning for our weekly walk last Wednesday. There was strong turnout of 47 walkers and four K-9 best friends at the Exedra to enjoy it.

The previous week we had talked briefly about Frank C. Havens and F. M. “Borax” Smith’s Realty Syndicate, which they formed in 1895. As part of it, Smith bought streetcar lines starting in 1890 to establish the Key System transit system. However, there was an earlier streetcar line founder who was also historically important in the development of what was to become the City of Piedmont.

Walter Blair was the first European settler in this area and Blair Avenue is named for him. His history was shared from Meghan Bennett’s History of Piedmont website and a past Piedmont Post article by Piedmont Historical Society president Gail Lombardi.

Blair came to San Francisco from Vermont in 1852 during the Gold Rush at the age of 22 and settled in Alameda County in 1853. He bought about 600 acres in the Piedmont hills, which were part of the original Vicente Peralta Spanish land grant, from the U.S. government for $1.25 an acre, or a total of $750. This was most of the land from today’s Mt. View’s Cemetery wall on Moraga Avenue to Scenic, Magnolia, and Grand Avenues. The cemetery came later. It was established in 1863 and opened in 1865.

Blair first camped and then built a one-room cabin on a campsite near a freshwater spring where the home at 111 Highland Avenue is today. Blair called this street “Vernal Avenue” because of its lush ferns and shrubs.

Ten years later, in 1862, Blair married fellow Vermont native Phoebe Harvey, with whom he had two daughters, and he built a more spacious ranch house with formal gardens. This "homestead" was located on what is now Waldo Avenue. The house stood until 1924 and was demolished in 1926 to create Waldo Avenue.

Later in his life, Blair moved to downtown Oakland, where he lived in an apartment at the Centennial Hotel, which he built in 1876 at 14th and Clay Streets. He died suddenly in 1888 at the age of 57 from complications related to diabetes at the hotel and is buried in Mountain View Cemetery.

Blair was initially a farmer and dairyman. His dairy farm was at the southwest corner of what is now El Cerrito and Blair Avenues and its pastures extended to Grand Avenue. The dairy supplied milk and butter to the surrounding area and San Francisco. He also raised cattle and planted wheat and barley on the land.

Shortly after he arrived, Blair also developed a quarry in the early 1850s. It was diagonally across from the dairy and he sold rock to pave streets in Oakland and Piedmont. The quarry was where Dracena Park is today. Some of the quarry’s rock can still be seen in Mountain View Cemetery where it was used to make gravestones. When the quarry filled with water around 1890, operations were ceased and it became a favorite swimming hole for local boys. However, it is reported there were drownings in the 1920s and the City partially filled the quarry with construction debris.

Blair also had an interest in real estate. He built the Piedmont Springs Hotel in 1872 near Bushy Dell Creek where natural sulfur springs bubbled from the ground. The water was thought to have curative powers. The most famous visitor to the springs was Mark Twain, who sampled the waters in 1871. Blair’s hotel was considered one of the finest resorts in California at the time. It had 20 bedrooms and five dining rooms. The main dining room featured a crystal chandelier, fine china, and velvet drapes, and could seat 35 guests. Sadly, it burned to the ground in 1892 after sparks from its chimney ignited the roof.

Blair was involved in transportation too. He partnered with other investors to build The Broadway & Piedmont Horsecar Line. Construction began on it in April 1875 and it officially opened in 1876. This line ran from downtown Oakland up Broadway to Piedmont Avenue and the Mountain View Cemetery. The streetcars not only provided transit service for Oakland, but they also brought prospective property owners to Piedmont.

In 1878 Blair decided to build his own horse car line. It was the first to transport visitors from Oakland into Piedmont. The cars ran hourly up Moraga Avenue, from where the Piedmont Avenue line ended at the gates of the Mountain View Cemetery, through Blair’s fields to Vernal Avenue and the Piedmont Springs Hotel.

In 1884, Blair developed a 75-acre amusement park in Moraga Canyon that was named “Blair’s Park.” It was an attraction to get people ride his street cars. Visitors could sail small boats, ride ponies, watch acrobats hang from hot air balloons, have a picnic by one of the waterfalls, and listen to music. This was the original Blair Park, not the open area on Moraga Avenue above Highland Avenue that people today think of as “Blair Park.” Many of the picnickers and hotel guests enjoyed the area, purchased land, built homes, and became Piedmont’s early residents.

After Blair's death in 1888, his widow and associates formed the Consolidated Piedmont Cable Company, which began cable service in 1890 and replaced the horsecar line. However, the company later faced financial troubles, was reorganized, electrified, and ultimately absorbed into the Key System by 1904.

In 1901 the park was abandoned and the land was vacant, but in 1917 new homes began to be built on it. A builder, Guy Turner, constructed 11 bungalows on the cemetery side of Moraga Avenue and at least six more in 1922.

We were at the Exedra, the site of the Piedmont Springs Hotel, and decide to walk the route of Blair’s horsedrawn line to and along where his Blair Park once was. We headed off in a long line down Highland Avenue to its end at Moraga Avenue and stopped in front of Piedmont’s long-time 4^th of July Parade announcer Patty Edmonds’ home for a group photo. But Patty saw us and happily came out and took it for us. In the background, across Moraga, was where the arched Blair Park entrance once stood.

We then made our way down Moraga looking at the homes that Guy Turner built a hundred years ago. At the end of the long wall boundary of the Mountain View Cemetery, we crossed Moraga and walked the seldom-traveled, one-way, Oakland portion of Ramona Avenue. At the street’s end was where on Piedmont Avenue that Blair’s trolley cars started their climbs up to Vernal (Highland) Avenue.

Across the street, we admired the Chapel of the Chimes mausoleum that was founded in 1909 as the California Electric Crematory and Columbarium. In 1928 and 1929 the chapel had a major expansion designed by Julia Morgan that incorporated its current ornate mausoleum, gardens, and intricate details.

We started up Piedmont Avenue towards Pleasant Valley Road and took a hidden path between 4476 and 4464 Piedmont. It cuts across the horseshoe-shaped North and South Pleasant Valley Court to Pleasant Valley Avenue. Across the street was a line of cute, waving preschoolers on their own Wednesday walk. Then it was up to Arroyo Avenue, down the newly repaved York Drive to a path up to Ricardo Avenue and the foot of Dracena Park, the site of Blair’s quarry.

We climbed the steep 100 block of El Cerrito Avenue to Blair Avenue, where Blair’s dairy once was, to Hillside and Magnolia Avenues for our return to the Exedra. It was about a three and a half mile loop, full of the history of Walter Blair and Piedmont.