Previously, people had been content to live in urban dwellings stacked on top of each other, or in rural homes with cows and chickens. It was built right about the time when the American concept of the subdivision was beginning to explode. Francis Wood and Oakland's Crocker Highlands developments. It was subdivided into quarter-acre lots within a year or two of San Francisco's St. What I discovered is that Broadmoor was originally a parcel of cherry orchards. That sent me down a different research path, wanting to know why my neighborhood was originally advertised as a massive rabbit and parsnip garden. Why didn't they just surround their homes with grass and spend Sunday afternoons trimming their lawns with a push mower? A new path Were parsnip sales needed to cover the mortgage? Were the first residents enthralled by the idea of part-time farming in order to make ends meet? Did they spend their weekends butchering chickens? Did they discover that if they didn't eat at least one rabbit per day, their original 84 would turn into 500 a month later? I wondered whether people from that era really felt a need to turn a profit by raising chickens at home. I know that shortly after the turn of the past century, people were leaving the fog of San Francisco and moving to the East Bay in droves, but the Great Depression hadn't yet arrived. So I found myself wondering why my house didn't originally have a front or back lawn. Or perhaps the rabbits and eggs were to be driven around the bay and sold in San Francisco. The advertisement even offered a brief comment on 'Working out this plan with profit,' which I am guessing was a recommendation that the new home would not only serve as an incubator for children and rabbits but might also allow a chicken or two to be sold to the neighbors across the fence. The front yard is filled with alfalfa and clover, which I suppose was to support the burgeoning rabbit population.

And about 75 feet of parsnips and lima beans. Instead, there is an allocation of space for 84 rabbits. Interestingly enough, the flyer doesn't recommend planting grass. It was intended to draw San Francisco residents to San Leandro, and it offered some practical suggestions for how potential homeowners might make use of the larger-than-average properties. Librarians are really good at that.ĭuring one of my library visits, the present curator of the History Room gave me a copy of the original 1918 advertisement for the Broadmoor subdivision. Fortunately, the librarians at the History Room saved some of the old treasures. Storage was expensive, so all the old architectural drawings went to the trash heap. I learned that in the 1970s, the city sent a mountain of original building permits and blueprints to the incinerator because no one thought that documents pertaining to architects Julia Morgan and William Yelland were worth saving. I made some unfortunate discoveries during my research.

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