Abstract
The cultural, educational, and medical metropolis we know as Oakland was, before the Civil War, a bucolic country retreat. Custom has it that the name was derived from that of an early landowner, William Eichbaum, whose surname means "oak tree" in German. In the late nineteenth century, a series of improvements in public transit made the area increasingly attractive for middle-class development, and speculators rushed to subdivide antebellum estates into lots for middle-class housing. South Oakland, especially, grew into a dense residential patchwork of compact single-family and row houses in a variety of vernacular Victorian styles.
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