June 5, 2019 | Connecting Hillside Club and FOFW

Friends and neighbors: On Monday, June 3, members of Friends of the Fountain and Walk presented an illustrated talk about the connections linking Berkeley’s venerable Hillside Club with the development of our Northbrae neighborhood and the construction of the original Fountain at The Circle and Fountain Walk.

The talk was very well attended, with about 80 people filling the Hillside Club. Those on hand learned that the essential philosophy of the club’s founders — “to protect the hills of Berkeley from unsightly grading and the building of unsuitable and disfiguring houses; to do all in our power to beautify these hills and above all to create and encourage a decided public opinion on these subjects” — was embraced to a great degree in the development of Northbrae.

And that a charter member of the Hillside Club, UC Berkeley supervising architect John Galen Howard, designed the landmark fountain and walk that, with your help and support, we so devotedly help care for today.

There was much more, of course, from why Northbrae is ringed by rose-colored sidewalks ,to why upper Marin Avenue climbs straight up the steep hills while virtually every other road travels along the contours of the hills, to the semi-serious and nearly successful bid to make a plot of Northbrae the home of a new state capital.

Like the walking tour FOFW led a few weeks before, another version of this talk will likely be offered in the future. We’ll alert you about when and where. In the meantime, we hope to post a version of the annotated PowerPoint presentation on this website in the near future.

Stay tuned for more proigramming by Friends of the Fountain and Walk.

— Michael Gray for the FOFW Board of Directors