Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley by Richard Schwartz

The landmarks ordinance, the Gaia Building, UC Berkeley’s construction boom and Western Berkeley rezoning have generated endless debate, litigation (threatened and often realized) and political campaigns while consuming reams of print and barrels of ink. In Berkeley of late, all the serious politics have been about land use, often pitting neighbor against neighbor, and neighborhoods against developers and officialdom. Part of the land where Dunn raised his horses is today occupied by the Claremont Hotel, built eight years after his death. In affably agreeable prose, Schwartz describes the unique role of the horse in fighting fires and of the affection that bonded the highly intelligent animals and their human trainers and partners in firefighting. The opening essay tells the tales of Irish immigrant Martin Murrey Dunn, who owned some of the choicest acreage in the Berkeley hills, and of Dave, the fire horse who loved him. Boyd, an oft-lauded and occasionally arrested homespun essayist and sometimes city-official-cum-town-drunk-in addition to his self-anointed role as Boss Baggage Buster of Beautiful Berkeley.Ī vivid stylist whose wordsmithing some thought comparable to Twain’s, he also became a cinematic hero, a rescuer on horseback in the 1906 film A Trip to Berkeley, which still plays on the Pacific Film Archive’s silver screen.Ĭourts closed when he died, the City Hall flag flew at half-mast and Odd Fellows Hall filled with mourners. Self-proclaimed Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, he was also a familiar figure in the city across the bay from the seat of his realm, conducting reviews of UC Berkeley military cadets and upstaging a real-life emperor who’d come to lecture on a university stage.

Take Emperor Norton for example-that genteel and majestically delusional soul and legendary San Franciscan whose funeral in 1880 drew 30,000 mourners. If, in the year 2107, someone were to write a book like Richard Schwartz’s latest effort, he could well be one of its subjects.Įccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley is a guiltless pleasure, a delightful collection of tales about some of the city’s most fascinating and wrongly forgotten characters.Ī builder by trade, Schwartz is Berkeley’s resident amateur historian, the author of two previous works of community history.Īfter his Berkeley 1900 account of the city at the dawn of a new century and Earthquake Exodus, 1906 with its account of Berkeley’s response to the Great Earthquake of 1906, Schwartz moves on to profile in words and contemporary images some of the folks who help the city’s justifiable reputation as home to some of the most colorful, cantankerous and fascinating folks on the nation’s Left Coast.

Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley by Richard Schwartz