EL CERRITO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUIZ
With our El Cerrito Round Up issue, we thought it would be fun to include a quiz provided by the El Cerrito
Historical Society. How much do you know about El Cerrito? Answers are at the conclusion of this quiz. Don’t peek!
1. From its earliest days, El Cerrito had several neighborhoods named after people from
Germany or of German ancestry. Which of the following neighborhoods did not exist in El
Cerrito?
a. Schmidtville, an area around Schmidt Lane, which was laid out by two gentlemen
named Schmidt and Fink in 1893, one of the earliest subdivisions in the area. It was
later followed by “Schmidt Village,” in the vicinity of today’s Schmidt Lane.
b. Rust, named for an early settler William (or Wilhelm) Rust, who operated a
hardware shop at the site of today’s Pastime Hardware store.
c. Kaiserville, named for Henry Kaiser, who developed a small neighborhood
of upscale homes in the El Cerrito hills for managers at Richmond’s nearby Kaiser
Shipyards during World War II.
d. Stege Junction, named after a German immigrant Richard Stege who’d been
a fur trader, among other occupations, before marrying Minna Quilfelt, owner of a
prosperousranch in Richmond. Stege added frog ponds whose denizens he sold to
French restaurants.
2. From at least the mid-1910s through the mid-1950s El Cerrito was awash with gambling
dens, prostitution, prize fighting rings, and even a greyhound racing track. Vice flourished
in our town because? All, some or none of these may be true.
a. Big time gamblers from out of the area brought their talents to El Cerrito.
b. Few people lived in town so no one complained.
c. The territory was lawless because it was unincorporated.
d. Both lawmakers and law enforcers were on the take.
3. In the late 1990s when city officials contemplated a rebuild of El Cerrito Plaza, help
arrived from a member of the royalty. The royal urban reformer was:
a. Then-Prince Willem Alexander of Netherlands, today the King, whose strong
interest in infrastructure and ties to leading Dutch architects produced a conceptual
plan for solar-paneled buildings.
b. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who became emir of Dubai in 2006,
and proposed in 1997 four 10-story towers alongside an outdoor souk-like bazaar to be
designed by architects in Dubai along with the American firm of SOM.
c. Prince Charles of England who, working with students from the Wales Summer
School of Architecture, proposed a neo-Urbanist plan for the center that was inspired
by Old World models of village living.
d. Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, a pretender to the throne of Russia, who was
living in San Francisco and teamed up with the family of Paul Hammarberg, the
architect who first designed the center, to modernize and refurbish it.
4. In the early 2000s when the city of El Cerrito and the first operators of the Cerrito
Theater began restoring the long-closed theater, the Art Deco murals and art glass were
intact, but the neon marquee was long gone because:
a. The city demanded that the prior owner remove it for aesthetic reasons.
b. In the mid 1960s the marquee caught fire due to an electrical issue. It was
the final straw leading to the theater’s closure for more than 40 years.
c. The city ordered it removed in the 1970s because structural problems were
endangering pedestrians.
d. No one knows why it disappeared.
ANSWERS:
1. C. While it is often said that Kaiser built homes for his managers in the hills
there is no evidence that this is so. In fact many of the fine, Period Revival
homes that are sometimes cited as Kaiser homes, on such streets as Barrett
Avenue, Edwards Avenue and Charles street, were built years before the 1940
opening of the shipyards.
2. All are true at least in part except for “B.” In fact, although El Cerrito only
had a few thousand people in the 1920s, complaints about gambling were
frequent – so much so that mayor Phil Lee had to defend the city and his
administration often. “El Cerrito has been pictured as the home of vice and
the center of a hideous vice ring,” he said in defense of the city. “The fact
is that El Cerrito is a city of average Americans -- responsible, home-loving
people, who work in the industries of the East Bay section.”
“B” is only partially true. Many people say gambling flourished here
because the land was unincorporated and thus lawless. But after El Cerrito
incorporated in 1917 gambling continued to flourish. What makes the
statementpartially true is – once El Cerrito cracked down on gambling and
crime in 1946, both continued unabated in the Bayview district on the west
side of San Pablo Avenue near Central Avenue until that land was added to the
city in 1956.
3. C. Prince Charles. The plan, more a student exercise than a serious
proposal, nonetheless was well thought out and called for creating a town
square, and in part for returning the Plaza’s layout to a standard street grid
for a more town-like atmosphere. For a time city officials did try for more of
an “urbanist” rebuild of the Plaza but no developer would go along.
4. A. Harry Kiefer, who used the marquee sign to advertise sales for his store
Kiefer’s Furniture, which used the theater for storage, was ordered to remove
it in the mid-70s by what he called the city’s “taste board,” probably referring
to the Design review Board or a predecessor agency.
Source: elcerritohistorialsociety.org. The El Cerrito Historical Society is a
non-political, non-profit organization and has only one agenda: to locate and
preserve local history - of course focused on the history of El Cerrito.