Oakland Geology

The intersection of Broadway and 20th Street features strong buildings on all four corners. We all know the I. Magnin building (built 1930) and the Capwell (Sears/Uptown Station) building (built 1929) facing it. Across Broadway, we have the metal-clad urban spaceship of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research building (built 1982) and finally the dark cube of the Golden West Tower Building (built 1968).

One of the nice things about taking the bus is that while you wait, you can look around like architects and urban planners do, as if the cityscape were a stage set. And so, waiting for the 33, I finally took notice of the building wall that I’ve walked past hundreds of times.

It’s chips of dark serpentine, embedded in cement and polished. People in the building trade must know exactly what this is called, but I can’t crack their code. Here’s a closeup.

So all this time, the Golden West Tower Building has been giving the serpentine-clad I. Magnin building a nod, a salute, a shoutout, a heart-tap. I thought that was cool.

That day the 33 took me to Piedmont, where I recognized the same material in Bufano’s “Bear and Cubs” sculpture in Crocker Park, featured here previously.

The other element in that Broadway streetscape is the sidewalk. You’ve all seen it.

This is what’s called a pebbledash finish. Concrete is laid down, then pebbles are pressed into it. When I look at it I think, “What a lovely Franciscan color scheme,” because the reddish and greenish mixture of metamorphosed argillite and chert is so typical of our coastal Northern California rocks. I also think fondly of the red-and-green gravel of Rodeo Beach.

The Lakeside Regency Plaza, 1555 Lakeside Drive, is the 15-story condo building next to the Scottish Rite Temple. Built in 1968, it’s definitely of its time yet of enduring taste. I paid it no mind until a few days ago, when I noticed the four artisanal lampposts that flank its driveway.

In their own way, these are even cooler than the serpentinite cladding I wrote about the other week. The large cobbles lining the shaft are peridotite, a stone that’s rare in the first place and not often usable in the second place. Peridotite (accent on the “rid”) is what the Earth’s upper mantle is made of. Because its minerals are more stable at depth than they are on the Earth’s surface, peridotite characteristically acquires an orange weathering rind as the iron content is released from its olivine and pyroxene crystals. It’s usually shot with veins of serpentine, which degrade its strength.

These cobbles are field stone, not quarried but gathered from the ground in their natural state. They probably came from a riverbed or talus slope in the Klamath Mountains.

The capstones, on the other hand, are lava — specifically, vesiculated (bubbly) basalt like that found in the volcanic Cascade Range. Lava is the opposite of peridotite, to put it briefly, the stuff of the Earth’s crust. These hand-dressed blocks may well have come from northernmost California too, in the vicinity of the Modoc Plateau.

Here’s a look at both rock types in closeup.

Or, of course, inspect the lampposts yourself next time you’re at the lake. I think of them as examples of deeply understated, perhaps even inadvertent, geologic wit.

This is the last of my set of posts on Oakland building stones, although I reserve the right to come up with more. What you’re looking at below is gneiss on the wall of the Lionel Wilson Building, in City Hall Plaza.

Gneiss is a fun rock, for me anyway, because when I see it I think, “Nice.” And that’s exactly how the word is pronounced.

Gneiss is made of the same kinds of minerals that granite is — quartz, feldspar, garnet, hornblende — and stone dealers call it granite. A large share of your granite countertops are actually gneiss.

The difference is that strongly directional fabric, in which the mineral grains are stretched and aligned and separated into bands and stripes. Gneiss, you see, is actually a metamorphic rock, squeezed like taffy under high heat and temperature.

That fabric, and nothing else, is what defines gneiss. The fabric is called gneissosity (and geologists will skunk you in Scrabble because they know words like this).

Here’s a gneiss boulder I used to keep as a pet. I gave it a new home by slipping it into the front yard of a home with lots of other cool rocks.

And here are two gneisses I photographed in New York. The first one is a garnet gneiss, a quarry-faced ashlar in the wall of a cemetery visitors center.

And the other one is a wild boulder near Albany, the New York Albany.

Gneiss is a stone of infinite variety. The pink-and-gray stone in the Wilson Building is probably Morton Gneiss, an extremely old stone quarried in Minnesota. David B. Williams, author of the very fine Stories in Stone, considers it America’s most beautiful building stone. I’ve posted other examples from Oakland here and here.