1930 A Map of Berkeley Oakland & Alameda
DESCRIPTION
One of the great American pictorial maps of the Art Deco era, this spectacular 1930 view of Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda turns the East Bay into a riot of color, local history, architecture, wildlife, and California eccentricity.
Designed by Michael Baltekal-Goodman in collaboration with University of California professor and artist Eugene Neuhaus, the map covers Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda, Piedmont, and the surrounding hills and waterfront. The underlying street network is surprisingly detailed, with major roads identified and dozens of prominent buildings illustrated in elevation, including the University of California campus, Oakland City Hall, the Claremont Hotel, Mills College, the Oakland Municipal Airport, and numerous schools, churches, theaters, and civic buildings. San Francisco Bay is rendered in deep blue waves and populated by ferries, steamships, sailing vessels, gulls, fish, and fanciful sea creatures. The bold palette of orange, blue, green, red, yellow, black, and white gives the map much of its unmistakable Art Deco character.
History, Humor and the East Bay
The map becomes increasingly playful as it moves away from the city streets and into the surrounding hills. Deer, cattle, horses, birds, flowers, hikers, hunters, and horseback riders fill the landscape, joined by humorous captions and references to local places and events. A large compass rose dominates the eastern hills, while blowing wind heads, oversized flowers, ships, and elaborate decorative cartouches give the entire map the appearance of an illustrated tapestry. Goodman and Neuhaus were less interested in producing a conventional street map than in capturing the personality of the East Bay, combining recognizable geography with the stories, landmarks, and humor associated with the region.
An elaborate border carries the historical narrative even further through a series of illustrated scenes from the history and folklore of Alameda County. Among them are the completion of the Overland Railroad, a nineteenth-century temperance society battling the bottle, early settlement scenes, and the wonderfully strange account of a "supernatural mirage" reportedly seen around the shores of Alameda County in 1872. At the top, a decorative scroll reproduces George Berkeley's famous lines beginning "Westward the course of empire takes its way," a phrase closely connected with the naming of Berkeley itself and the nineteenth-century idea of America's westward expansion.
An Art Deco Portrait of the Bay Area
Published by the Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley and printed by Union Lithograph in San Francisco and Oakland, the map is a particularly accomplished example of the American pictorial map boom of the 1920s and 1930s. Its combination of bold graphic design, local history, architecture, humor, and dense illustration places it alongside the work of better-known California pictorial mapmakers such as Jo Mora and Harrison Godwin, while its striking Art Deco treatment gives it a character entirely its own. It was originally issued as a folding map with a decorative envelope, suggesting that it was intended as both a guide to the East Bay and a colorful souvenir of Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda.
CONDITION
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