The East Bay Auto Camp Mystery
The post card reproduced on the following page provides a glimpse into a unique part of Emeryville’s past. It is a view of the East Bay Auto Camp at 4811 San Pablo Avenue. Fifteen wooden cabins can be seen. hardly bigger than children’s playhouses. Six people appear also. The sign “Main Street” is attached to one roof and a streetlight juts out from another. Its companion, postcard number 5722 shows Emery Grammar School on the left. then the Auto Camp market with awnings and a scale in front and rooms upstairs. Next. the Union gasoline Station with its sign CLEAN YOUR CRANK CASE-USE OF PITS FREE. The camp office was behind the gas station. Tiny cabins appear at the right, six peaked roofs about the height of the service station, seemingly hooked together like paper dolls.
The phenomenon of auto camping began in the Teens. The camps were used by people with a car, vacation time and cash who wanted to be free of expensive hotels and restrictive train schedules. The city of Denver, for example. provided municipal campsites which had stoves, laundry tubs and hot water. Other early camps were glorified chicken coops. curious shacks with community showers. Municipal auto camping spots grew in response to tourists who had money to spend. But when times grew hard. fees were assessed to discourage the poor.
A Hundred Cabins
An auto camp once existed in Emeryville as well. The Oakland City Directory listed “East Bay Auto Camp, W.A. Chapman, mgr.” at 4811 San Pablo Avenue in 1924. The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for this period show streets named North. South, East. West. Front, Main. 1st and 2nd. Along these streets ranged more than a hundred cabins yet the 1930 City Directory has no listing for Emeryville’s only auto camp. What happened to it?
According to the 1933 Emery High yearbook, the main (San Pablo Avenue) school was remodeled for use exclusively as a high school in the summer of 1927, when Anna Yates School was built on 41st Street. Land was purchased for an athletic field in the summer of 1929. Could this have been the auto camp? Funds were transferred from the High School district to the Elementary school district for land to the rear of the main school in the summer of 1930. In 1931, the new (Sutter, then Hawley, finally Waldorf) school building was constructed on 61st. The High School auditorium. a classroom annex and a woodshop were also built the same year. The first unit of the new gym was built in 1932.
An Early Demise
It’s possible that the expanding High School simply gobbled up the auto camp. By 1933, only the Geyser service station remained of the cluster of automobile-centered businesses on the comer of San Pablo and 48th Street. It was advertised in the High School Yearbook at 4809 San Pablo, telephone Piedmont 6144. One hundred cabins fully occupied might mean 200 adults and as many children, a large voting bloc and possibly an overwhelming increase in school-age children. Was this a “flivver jungle” full of “rubber tramps?” The communal shower was directly over Temescal Creek and presumably drained into it. Probably school expansion, sanitation and politics all played a hand in the early demise of this curious institution.
This story originally published in 1996 for the Emeryville Centennial Celebration and compiled into the ‘Early Emeryville Remembered’ historical essays book.
