About Oakland Sidewalk Stamps
This is a collection of sidewalk markings in the city of Oakland. It also includes marks by makers who did not date their work.
I’m Andrew Alden, hopefully better known as the operator of the Oakland Geology and About.com Geology blogs. I live in Oakland and decided that I need a new hobby. This is it.
This is not a complete documentation of Oakland’s sidewalk stamps, which would be very boring. It’s a collection of unique date-and-stamp combinations, analogous to a coin collection of unique date-and-mint-mark combinations. What I have here is less than 10 percent of the marks out there.
July 10, 2008 at 12:32 pm |
Hi Andrew. Your Oakland Geology blog, which I just came across, is great.
I’ve long been interested in sidewalk marks and how they could be used to research a neighborhood’s history. I’ll start carrying my camera on walks (I live on Haddon Hill). Are you interested in contributions?
July 10, 2008 at 8:01 pm |
Steve, I think I’ll set up a category for outside contributions. I started this blog just for my collection, not to document neighborhood history (although I’m certainly picking up a lot of that). I’m a former coin collector, and the whole idea is to assemble the best example from each year. I already have collected multiple examples for some years, but right now I’m filling in the dates first.
I’ll put up some guidelines for contributed photos in a few days. Thanks for coming by.
July 11, 2008 at 11:04 am |
Today I put up eight more new dates. I think that for now, I will have each batch of new dates fit on the front page–that is, I’ll adjust the number of posts on the front page to match the size of the latest batch. After a while, I expect to settle down to a specific batch size, maybe five, and that will be the default page size.
I also went in and added notes to some of the pages.
At the moment, only the 1980s are devoid of dates. It’s frustrating because there’s a 1980s-era mark right on my own block, but I just can’t make out the last digit. I’ll surely find a good one somewhere.
July 14, 2008 at 3:53 pm |
It seems that “sidewalk stamps” is the preferred term for this kind of work, and maybe I’ll change the name. Another local practitioner is Lincoln Cushing; see this Daily Planet article and a similar page here with some photos. Unfortunately, Cal just last week disabled all its library employees’ personal websites, so Cushing’s master page is currently homeless, unless the material at Docs Populi is a copy.
There’s also a short set of nice photos from the sidewalks of Alameda on Flickr.
July 29, 2008 at 11:36 am |
From now on I’m allowing comments on all new posts. As I get around to it I’ll open up earlier posts to comments too.
Also, because I dislike the avatars that WordPress has decided to give everybody, I’m disallowing avatars. If someone knows how to allow personal avatars without permitting this ugly behavior, let me know.
August 6, 2008 at 11:10 am |
Andrew
I was interested in knowing more about sidewalk stamps with the name Salamid. My great uncle was Frank, my grandfather, Angelo and father, Anthony, also did cement work throughout Oakland in the first and second haf of the last century.
Thx
Patrick
August 6, 2008 at 7:50 pm |
Patrick, I’m delighted that you visited. Let’s take up this discussion in the A Salamid post.
August 17, 2008 at 8:34 pm |
The new banner image is from an old PG&E cover plate on Broadway near 51st Street (but you’ll see them everywhere). PG&E used to outsource their cover plates to Art Concrete Works, on Adeline Street in Oakland. Later PG&E cover plates, and those of other utilities, bear the names of other manufacturers.
By the way, I have found another excellent sidewalk-stamp site for Martinez by Kristin Henderson called Stepping Through Time.
March 11, 2009 at 12:55 pm |
But what ARE sidewalk stamps ?
[Here's your answer.—Andrew]
May 7, 2009 at 4:29 pm |
I am disappointed in the Tags feature here at WordPress. I thought that tags would work as well as the Categories do, but they don’t. Another way to find marks by a particular maker is to use the Search box and put the exact tag in that, but that doesn’t work well either. Probably the solution is to put the maker’s name in the title—that’s inelegant and a lot of work to backfill the site, but robust for searching.
July 15, 2009 at 10:55 am |
It has been one year since I started this collection, which now includes more than 400 items. I’m still missing seven years from the 1900s, one year from the 1950s, three years from the 1960s, five years from the 1970s, eight years from the 1980s, six years from the 1990s and one year from the 2000s.
Totals so far (this also includes marks set to drip through August 15):
1900s: 8 items
1910s: 72 items
1920s: 91 items
1930s: 129 items
1940s: 76 items
1950s: 28 items
1960s: 9 items
1970s: 5 items
1980s: 2 items
1990s: 7 items
2000s: 13 items
There are also approximately 60 makers who did not date their work, or for whom I have not yet found dated marks.