This story is part of the Oakland Home Histories series, which explores residential buildings and the people who’ve lived in them. Want us to feature your home? Let us know.
It takes a couple blinks of the eye to notice that 10 of the houses around E. 23rd Street and 19th Avenue in East Oakland have a lot in common—though no two homes are exactly the same.
Most have large latticed windows and steep pitched roofs. Some are all sharp points and others have storybook curves—arched and rounded entryways, and decorative doors with conical caps.
It’s also clear that the houses have transformed over the decades, some painted white and blue, and others yellow or olive green, to highlight the faux bricks on their facades. Other homeowners have built cottages or fences or added extensions.
For Celia Goetz, living on this block of similar abodes comes with an additional fun-house element; she’s lived in not one but two of these homes, first renting with a friend, then jumping on a chance to buy the property next door when it was put on the market in 2020.
Now Goetz, husband Enrique Cabrera, their smiley toddler Clementine, and three cats live there together. They’ve contributed to the metamorphosis of Normandie Place—the original name of the 10-home tract built in 1925—by converting a structure in their backyard into an ADU and landscaping the large lot.
When Goetz, who works for an early childhood education nonprofit, returned to Oakland in 2018 after a stint in Seattle, she was floored by how much rent prices had risen. It was difficult to find somewhere appealing yet affordable to rent. She and her then-roommate were happy to eventually land on E. 23rd Street and wondered about the origin of the obviously similar homes.
They went to the Oakland History Center and dug up some information about the beginnings of Normandie Place. But she and Cabrera have remained curious about who’s lived in their property in the past, and what’s changed in the neighborhood since this quirky set of houses got its start.
“What did the evolution look like?” Cabrera asked.
Modern living meets “the old chateau”
When prominent Oakland developer E.C. Sessions sought buyers for large lots within his Highland Park-Highland Terrace property in 1878, he courted those who planned to build homes of “desirable character” and “first-class improvements only.” Four stately houses were built along 19th Avenue, between E 24th and E 28th streets, then purchased by lumber and mining executives.
In the following decades, Oakland built up rapidly, to accommodate thousands of refugees from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
“In the 1920s, the demand continued, spurred by postwar prosperity and by the opening of new real estate tracts made easily reachable by the automobile,” writes historian Beth Bagwell in her book, Oakland: The Story of a City.
In 1925, Helen Jackson & Co. built 10 houses on E. 23rd and 19th Avenue designed in the “French Norman style,” boasting beamed ceilings, large windows, gabled roofs, and stylish details.
“These homes are a combination of the most modern ideas in home convenience embellished with the art of the old chateau and cathedral architecture of the French province,” read a promotional piece on Normandie Place in the Oakland Tribune.
To this day, “the first thing people comment on is the exposed beams,” Cabrera said, standing in his living room. The Normandie homes have thick, visible timbers holding up arched ceilings like the trusses of a bridge.
The homes are examples of “period revival” architecture, according to the Oakland Heritage Alliance.
“Like all Period Revival styles, French Norman buildings were intended to be picturesque and emotionally evocative of a time and place most people were not familiar with firsthand”—even if they often mimicked the portrayal of European dwellings in films, rather than the actual architecture overseas, according to a report by the city of Los Angeles. Berkeley has its own Normandy Village built around the same time.
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Unlike Highland Terrace’s first fancy residences, the Normandie Place homes were intentionally priced “within reach of all” at $6,000 a pop, or about $107,000 today. Another ad in the Tribune suggested you could come home to eat lunch and freshen up on any workday, living in a neighborhood just five minutes away from downtown by automobile or 10 minutes by one of the streetcars that used to traverse much of the East Bay.
“In the nationwide mood of optimism at the time, the notion was that every family could buy a home,” Bagwell writes. But “every family” didn’t always mean “every family”’; she describes a 1929 brochure luring companies to Oakland, promising that most of the workforce was white homeowners and thus not susceptible to “radical agitation,” meaning labor unions.
Who’s bought these homes?
In 1953, the house on E. 23rd Street went on market. The agents selling it put out a call for specific groups of buyers.
“Attention Colored,” read one newspaper ad. “Attention, Orientals!” announced another. Just a few decades earlier, racist ads with the exact opposite message were commonplace, with Oakland developers promoting prohibitions against buyers of color.
The seemingly welcoming ads may reflect progress—or they could represent the same intention to profit off of the overt racism of the time.
In his book The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein describes a tactic called “blockbusting.” Real estate agents would pay Black people to walk around a white neighborhood or otherwise convince residents their block was changing. This would send white homeowners scurrying to sell their houses at bargain prices before their property values decreased further. Agents would then turn around and upsell Black buyers who had previously been unable to access homes in these neighborhoods.
Reached by The Oaklandside, Rothstein said it wouldn’t be far-fetched to speculate that this strategy was in play on E. 23rd Street in 1953. His book details a case of blockbusting in East Palo Alto just one year later, where similar ads were placed.
Around the 1960s, many Black residents were moving from West Oakland eastward, many pushed out by the construction of freeways and other infrastructure there.
Census records from 1950, the most recent that have been made publicly available, show mostly white and Latino residents, along with a couple of Black and Chinese-American families, living on E. 23rd and 19th Avenue. They worked a range of middle- and working-class jobs.
Notably, several of the neighbors at the time were born in Hawaii and Portugal. East Oakland became home to many Portuguese immigrants beginning in the 1860s and, according to the Oakland Wiki, many arrived via Hawaii. Later, in the first half of the 20th century, Puerto Rican residents also came to Oakland from Hawaii, where they worked in sugarcane fields. Cabrera is Puerto Rican and was intrigued to learn that there may have been others living on his exact block before him, as he doesn’t meet many Puerto Ricans in Oakland today.
Despite the enticing ads, it doesn’t appear that Cabrera and Goetz’s house sold in 1953. Records show a white family by the name of Mabon living there from at least 1945 to 1967.
Businessman Lloyd Mabon was civically engaged in the neighborhood and beyond, in the early 1940s serving as president of the Steamfitters and Pipefitters Union of San Francisco, and the chair of a local Townsend Club. The Townsend Plan, written in 1933, predated Social Security and would have gone further, calling for all Americans over 60 to receive a $200 monthly pension.
In the ensuing decades, Mabon became president of the Highland Improvement Club and a leader of the American Taxpayers Union local, a conservative anti-tax group. In a 1966 Oakland Tribune op-ed, he proposed a ban on campaigning for the 48 hours before an election.
“This would prevent last-minute smears and would give the voter a period of peace in which to think about his coming vote,” he wrote, a premise that could appeal to some in today’s climate.
These days, there are many Asian residents in the neighborhood, making up almost half of the census tract, though the population has declined over the last decade. Like in much of Oakland, the Latino (currently 42%) and white (7%) populations have grown there in recent years, and the Black population (16%) has declined.
But neighbors of Cabrera and Goetz said there are still many long-time residents in and around Normandie Place, including some who grew up there as children and inherited the homes from their parents. They said less has changed in their corner of Oakland than in many others.
Windows and well-fed cats
Cabrera and Goetz are tickled by the little historical quirks that remain in their home—from the small storybook window you can poke your head out of, to the large window taking up major real estate on the front of the house. Other features reflect less-coveted parts of the past; they’re itching to renovate a kitchen that screams 1980s.
“It’s been tricky trying to modernize and make updates without clashing with the style of the house,” said Cabrera, who works in leadership assessment and diversity consulting.
The couple has focused their efforts on landscaping their lot–which is unusually large for their modest-sized home. The previous owner had planted fuyu persimmon and loquat trees. The San Francisco skyline is visible from the expansive backyard.
When Clementine comes home from daycare she loves decompressing with a neighborhood walk. Those strolls have also helped her parents meet many of their neighbors.
Clementine has a clear favorite, Cabrera said: the woman down the street who feeds a “colony of cats.”
