Berkeley City Club
Started: 2023-09-23 11:06:50
Submitted: 2023-09-23 16:09:36
Visibility: World-readable
Touring the Berkeley City Club, and a concert in Berkeley
While wandering around the Internet looking for places to go in the Bay Area, I stumbled upon a reference to Open Doors California, a weekend-long event in the middle of September that gave access (and tours) to some sites of architectural or historical interest across the entire state. The sites were not arranged to be especially close to each other, and none were particularly convenient for our location in Santa Cruz; but one caught our eye: the Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club, open in the middle of the day on Sunday the 10th of September.
It turned out that I already had concert tickets to a show in Berkeley that evening, so Kiesa and I drove separately across the mountain so she could return earlier. (I took a quick look at the transit route across the mountain and remembered how poor the transit connections are in our car-centric county.) We parked at the Warm Springs/South Fremont BART station (which opened as the newest station on the East Bay trunk line while we were living in San Francisco in 2018), then rode north into Berkeley.
Berkeley City Club is a reinforced concrete building built for a group of women's clubs a hundred years ago. We arrived between tours and ended up on a private tour, who took us around the public spaces on the first and second floors, showing the way that the building used space and the major corridors through the building so that the hallway would open into a larger room with a fireplace as a focal point on the opposite wall, carrying the axis into the room. The building played with its parallel and perpendicular axes; the main entry was offset from the main axis through the building, but there was a large window on the outside giving a visual cue that there was a principal axis inside the building.
Our guide pointed out the rhythm of the size of the spaces we walked through on the main hallways: we would go from a large open space into a smaller space, and back into a large open space. This pattern was repeated throughout the building, and even followed in the exterior spaces in the courtyards behind the building.
The building was constructed out of reinforced concrete, but unlike Heart Castle, the ceilings showed the raw imprint of the wooden boards used in construction. The imprint of the wood, combined with the beams running lengthwise across the rooms and the paint scheme, gave the impression that the ceiling was built out of wood, rather than concrete. The interiors were lavishly decorated with period furniture from the early twentieth century; our guide pointed out the history of the furniture, and the original china pattern (also designed by Julia Morgan, because she wanted her hand in everything) as we toured the space.
The centerpiece of the club is the indoor pool, built under gracefully-curving concrete arches supporting the roof (with tiny cut-outs showing the rebar in the arches). The pool itself, and the deck surrounding the pool, was elaborately decorated in tiny yellow tiles in an intricate mosaic pattern. The pool was spectacular on its own, and also seemed to look forward to the even-more-elaborate pools at Hearst Castle that Julia Morgan built later in her architectural career.
This was the only site we attempted to see in the weekend-long Open Doors event, but it was worth the trip to Berkeley to see the architectural monument.
After the tour we ate a late lunch at a sandwich shop in downtown Berkeley, then got boba tea a few blocks away in a little shop across the street from the university campus. Kiesa took her leave and headed back home, and I dropped by the Berkeley Art Museum to see the museum's current displays, which highlighted a selection of the university's permanent art collection. They were roughly grouped by theme in rooms in the basement galleries, including Bay Area artists, and landscapes representing a changing world. The whole museum was interesting, and filled the time slot I needed to fill before the concert.
In the restroom at the museum I noticed that the soap dispensers were branded with "Cal", which seemed like a photographic opportunity I couldn't pass up.
I walked through the campus of the University of California at Berkeley to the Greek Theatre placed at the base of the hill overlooking campus and San Francisco Bay. (This was the first time I can remember walking through the university campus; my route took me past the library and the life sciences building and the physics building, which included reserved parking on the street in front of the building for Nobel Prize winners.)
The show featured Dashboard Confessional opening for Counting Crows. I knew the opening act more than the headline band; I listened to Dashboard Confessional's 2006 album Dusk and Summer when it came out, but I never managed to see them perform live (or listen to any of their other albums before I started cramming their top songs on Apple Music in advance of the concert). They opened their set with the first song from that album, "Don't Wait", and played other songs from the album that I recognized, as well as a bunch of songs I didn't know. The 2006 version of me was excited that I was finally seeing Dashboard Confessional live in concert, though possibly a bit disappointed it took me this long to see them.
I was seated on the concrete benches forming the main portion of the amphitheater. Before the concert started, the sun disappeared behind the triangular pediment above the stage, but in the middle of the set it reappeared in the tiny fragment of open sky.
By the time Counting Crows took the stage it was getting dark. I didn't recogonize most of the songs they played ("Long December" was the only song I could have picked out of a lineup before I started cramming their music); but mostly I recognized the vibe of the guitar-heavy rock music, which sounded exactly like the music that local rock station KBCO was playing in the 1990s while I was in high school.
Counting Crows played "Long December" to close their first set, and the crowd loved it. Living through 2020 this song took new meaning to me, from the line that frames the song's title: "long December, and there's reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last". (At various points in my life I identified with the line "it's been so long since I've seen the ocean," though now that I live in Santa Cruz I can see the ocean any time I want.)
Counting Crows returned for a second, shorter set and invited Dashboard Confessional to join them on stage to play the latter's "So Long, so Long". I didn't realize it at any point while listening tho the studio recording, but this song features a guest vocal by the frontman of Counting Crows, so it was appropriate for them all to play the song together.
After a few more songs the second set ended and the house lights came back. I joined the crowd heading for the exits, shuffling forward as everyone tried to exit at once through spaces that did not appear to be designed for this many people at once.
While I was in the concert, the last legacy trainset on the BART system entered regular service on a run from Milbrae to Richmond. It passed through Downtown Berkeley during the first intermission, then continued on to Richmond, and from there into history. I thought about the legacy fleet when I boarded my new "fleet of the future" train in Downtown Berkeley after the concert, configured in a six-car trainset that let BART put more individual trains in service, trading off crowding in some peak trains for more trains all day long. The train dropped me off at Warm Springs/South Fremont and I recorded the moment before driving home over the mountain.
