Oakland Geology

The Lincoln Square shopping center, which I featured in my previous post, has nothing to do with President Lincoln, just as Lincoln Avenue has nothing to do with Honest Abe (it was named for Lincoln Rhoda, son of landowner Frederick Rhoda). It wasn’t on the Lincoln Highway either. Nope, it was named by the prominent citizen and developer, Luther H. Lincoln, on whose land it was built, to honor himself. Admittedly, Lincoln had his own measure of fame from serving as Speaker of the state Assembly in the late 1950s.

The shopping center, which opened in 1963, sits on the site of a messy, sensational landslide.

When it comes to landslides, the blame usually lies uphill. And in the late 1950s one of Oakland’s largest suburban developments, Crestmont, was under construction on the steep hillside above Lincoln’s land.

The hillside of Crestmont was acquired and developed by Andres Oddstad’s residential construction company. He made his name building whole neighborhoods of “economy homes” in South San Francisco, Pacifica (Linda Mar was his work), Redwood City and other West Bay localities. Crestmont was Oddstad Homes’ big splash in the Oakland market, a luxury development tagged “Riviera of the East Bay.” The ads in the Tribune cried, “Grand, sweeping panoramic views from your home in Crestmont leave you breathless day or night. Here is the charm and freedom of country living only 15 minutes from downtown Oakland!” The redwood-and-stucco houses cost $30,000, a premium price in those days. And the views truly are terrific.

Oddstad worked big and fast, leveraging its economies of scale. This aerial photo shows the state of things in early 1957.

And here’s a similar oblique view from Google Maps with the street names. The landslide I’ll describe was on Van Cleave Way, down at the bottom of the development. You can see from the airphoto how much digging and grading was involved. The serpentine rock making up the hillside was . . . mostly strong. The homesites built up on filled land were . . . mostly reliable.

Luther Lincoln and his family lived on the large lot of 4000 Redwood Road, just below the bottom of the image, as early as 1952. As Crestmont went in on the hillside above him, Lincoln built a big new home and arranged to have part of his land rezoned from residential to commercial. It was an ideal site for a shopping center to serve the new residents. And the land was largely waste already: The defunct Alma Mine, with its 5000 feet of abandoned tunnels and piles of waste rock, sat next door.

Oddstad’s project went well until the winter of 1957-58, the wettest season in 50 years. Ten inches of rain occurred in February, another ten in March. Two more inches fell during the last weekend of March, and just past midnight on 30 March, in the midst of a pounding rain, about 300 feet of landfilled hillside on the west side of Van Cleave Way began to crumble.

The Tribune reported that Mrs. Walter Horberg was moving the furniture out of 79 Van Cleave Way. “At 2:45 a.m., as beams groaned and snapped, the rear portion of the handsomely designed ranch-type home sagged and then, with a mighty crash, tumbled down the hill. The rear rooms of the house tumbled 100 feet, most of it straight down, and were carried along by the mud slide. The front section dropped a lesser distance. Somewhere in the rubble, the Horbergs’ family parakeet, Nickie, chirped on.” No one was hurt, but six homes on the block were lost or endangered; two of them hadn’t even been sold yet.

This photo from the next day’s paper, one of many from the catastrophe, was reproduced in US Geological Survey Professional Paper 944, “Relative slope stability and land-use planning in the San Francisco Bay region, California,” published in 1979 and still a good read. You can see that there’s no bedrock visible in the landslide scar, just dirt.

Here’s the scene below Van Cleave Way today. The lots for the five lost homes were rebuilt, turned into four larger lots, and developed 20 years later. The leftmost house, its roofpeak just visible, is one of the original ones from 1957.

This was not the last slide in Crestmont. Two new houses on Kimberlin Heights Drive were lost in June 1958 when the concrete piles holding them up failed. (A mild earthquake on 31 May was made the scapegoat.) And in 1962 a mudslide from the hill above Kimberlin Heights Drive swept a 5-year-old girl to her death.

But back to the Van Cleave slide. The wall of mud poured onto Luther Lincoln’s new home directly below, destroying the house and all of its contents except for a car. A few years later, Lincoln turned the scene of ruin into the Lincoln Square shopping center, and the textbook exposure of serpentinite in the hillside behind it that I showed you in the last post dates from that time.

To my knowledge, no slides have occurred in Crestmont since 1958. The streets look sound to my eye. But some empty lots remain below Van Cleave in the landslide scar that could be developed some day.

The pressure to fill open land with traditional suburban houses is relentless. And all the land left open today is precarious.

_{Edited to correct the date of the fatal slide in 1962, not 1955.}

This entry was posted on 10 June 2019 at 8:10 am and is filed under Landslides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.