The Lueders House, Peralta Park, and Tom Roe’s Legacy

Thomas Eldon Roe (1943–2011) was a designer-builder of the rarest breed. Combining an unerring eye for beauty, uncompromising craftsmanship, and a deep knowledge of architectural styles, he was also a compulsive collector of heirloom-quality salvaged materials and fixtures, which he incorporated into the houses he restored in San Francisco and the East Bay.

I first met Tom in 1988, while I was house hunting in Berkeley. At the time, he was transforming a derelict Monterey Revival house on Euclid Avenue into a small jewel. As soon as I stepped into the house, I wanted desperately to live in it and asked Tom to give me the right of first refusal. Over the ensuing months, I dropped in from time to time to check on the progress of “my house.” 

Tom took his painstaking time in the eternal quest for perfection, and eventually it became clear that the cost had risen beyond my means. I ended up buying another house, but not before Tom had inspected it and pronounced it satisfactory. We remained friends, he dispensing valuable advice when I was remodeling my new residence.

Tom’s own house was in a different league altogether. An enormous Victorian crowned by two imposing turrets, it loomed over its modest 1920s stucco neighbors on Albina Avenue, near the Albany border. Surrounded by tall pines and cypresses, the was a mysterious presence on an otherwise ordinary block.

I didn’t step inside Tom’s house until the spring of 2006, when I was researching the history of the neighborhood, Peralta Park, for a series of articles. 

Work was going on in the sunroom, at the northern end of the house, which had originally been a gazebo, and which Tom had glazed with windows salvaged from a Mills College demolition. The cupola had been fitted with a skylight, and rough framing circled by electric lights was in place, ready to receive an antique stained-glass dome that I wouldn’t see until my next visit, in 2010.

In the southern turret, which Tom himself had built to balance the building’s composition, the window frames were boarded up. The third floor, where Tom was planning to build a self-contained suite, was bare but for the framing.

By the time I returned in September 2010, the sunroom was complete in all its glory, and the third-floor suite was receiving its finishing touches. Tom, who was stricken with cancer and had not long to live, was determined to leave behind a perfect house, and the work was proceeding apace.

Tom passed away on May 13, and his house is now on the market (Berkeley Patch's real estate blogger Brett Weinstein ). Tom had owned the house since 1972, but the latter’s history goes back to 1889, when the first development took place in Peralta Park.

Lying northwest of Hopkins Street between Gilman and Colusa, the Peralta Park tract straddles Berkeley and Albany across Codornices Creek. Built up in the 1920s, the neighborhood presents to the eye a sea of low stucco bungalows among which one can pick out a handful of Victorians. Of the latter, three average-sized Queen Annes may be found along Hopkins Street. The other two, however, are giants boasting remarkable architectural features. Relics of a grander era, they stand as a reminder of the larger-than-life people who harbored bold visions for this land.

In the public domain until 1820, the area was part of the 44,800-acre Rancho San Antonio granted to Luís María Peralta for his services to the Spanish Crown. In 1842, Peralta divided the lands among his four sons, and José Domingo Peralta (1795–1865) received the portion that today comprises Berkeley and Albany from Alcatraz Avenue to El Cerrito Creek. Having his pick of many prime locations for his home, Domingo settled on the bank of Codornices Creek, where he erected a 30-by-18-foot adobe (removed after the 1868 earthquake) and, in 1851, a two-story frame house (moved to the nearby Schmidt tract in 1876 and torn down in 1933, when the University of California owned the tract). Had these structures survived in the original location, their addresses would be 1304 Albina Avenue and 1505 Hopkins Street.

During the Gold Rush, cattle robbers, squatters, and fortune hunters all had their eye on Domingo’s possessions, and by 1853, he had sold most of his rancho for $82,000, reserving 300 acres around his house. After his death, squabbling among his many children and their legal fees did away with the remaining acres. Sixty of those acres were acquired by William Chapman Ralston (1826–1875), the boldest speculator on the Pacific coast, founder of the Bank of California, director of the Central Pacific Railroad, and builder of San Francisco’s fabled Palace Hotel. Never one to do anything on a small scale, Ralston was the first to have visions for Peralta Park, but his untimely death in the aftermath of a rush on his bank stopped any development for a while. The executor of Ralston’s estate fraudulently used the land as collateral for an $8,000 loan from the California Insurance Company. When he defaulted on the loan, the company, founded by Caspar Thomas Hopkins in 1861, seized the land, and Hopkins set about looking for a buyer. In 1887 he found a fabulous one.

The man who reputedly peeled off $32,000 for a deed was Maurice Strelinger, aka M.B. Curtis (c. 1850–1920), a wildly successful actor who made his name playing the lead in the comedy “Sam’l of Posen” (more on him in this article). Strelinger’s visions were as grand as Ralston’s. He planned an elegant subdivision, anchored by the luxurious, multi-turreted Peralta Park Hotel. The hotel was to be surrounded by large houses on spacious lots, circled in turn by medium-sized houses on standard lots.

Always highly leveraged, Strelinger recruited investors from among his San Francisco business and theatre connections, and some of them bought parcels and erected homes. In all, thirteen houses were built on the tract, including Strelinger’s own home at 1505 Hopkins Street. Six of the houses went up in 1889, all constructed by Lord & Boynton, who in the same year also built the Peralta Park Hotel, the Niehaus Brothers’ West Berkeley Planing Mill, and George C. Pape’s East Berkeley Planing Mill. Most of the six Peralta Park houses built in 1889 contained between eight and ten rooms. The largest belonged to the San Francisco physician Robert Macbeth and was located on a large creekside parcel on the east side of Albina Avenue. On the west side, also on outsize parcels, stood the houses of Anita Fallon and Julius Alfred Lueders. Although both of the latter survived, only the Lueders house at 1330 Albina Ave.—Tom Roe]s house—remains on its original site.

The Lueders house was built (most likely from a pattern book design) by Ira A. Boynton (c. 1845–1920), a Maine-born carpenter who was related to Moses Chase, a former seafarer and forty-niner known to have been the first squatter on Antonio María Peralta’s land and the first American settler in Oakland. Boynton came to Berkeley in 1877 and first lived on Berkeley Way near Shattuck Avenue, but soon moved one block north to College Way (now Hearst Avenue) at Shattuck. Among the houses he built locally are 2328 Channing Way (1889) and the Edward Brakenridge house (1892) at 1410 Bonita Avenue. In 1895, Boynton’s daughter’s wedding took place in Joseph Clapp’s cottage at 2007 Berkeley Way. It is not known whether Boynton designed this Gothic Revival cottage, commonly known as the Morning Glory House (built c. 1878), but it’s possible, since Clapp was another transplanted New Englander.

For a while, Boynton was associated with Horace Kidder (later of the contracting firm Kidder & McCullough), but in the mid-1890s he was drawn by the building boom in Alaska and settled in Douglas. His final residence was in Seattle.

Boynton’s client on Albina Ave. was one of the San Franciscans lured to Berkeley by Strelinger. According to his daughter, Mrs. Frieda Frohwerk, Julius A. Lueders moved his family from San Francisco to Peralta Park because his wife wanted to live in the country. Born in Germany, he “had no use for the Prussian military system, so came to San Francisco in 1877.”

The Berkeley Daily Gazette columnist Hal Johnson interviewed Mrs. Frohwerk in 1947, at which time she divulged that her father “had learned the perfumery business in Germany by serving a four-year-apprenticeship to a leading chemist. He brought to California several formulas along with his family. In a few months he had worked up quite a business in perfumes in San Francisco. Interested in the life insurance business, he started his own life insurance company. And because he was particularly careful whom he insured, he prospered.”

Mrs. Frohwerk didn’t tell Johnson that her father was secretary of the Pacific Endowment League, a real-estate firm whose reputation was less than a stellar, and that the family finances were kept on an even keel through the exertions of her mother, Anna, a stern woman who operated a dress shop in San Francisco.

The Lueders house cost $4,900 to build and was second only to the Macbeth house, which came in at $6,900. In addition to ten rooms on the first and second floors, there was a third-story attic with four rooms and surmounted with a bell-shaped cupola. The three-acre lot was a block deep, extending from Albina to Fleurange Avenue (now Acton Street). The amenities included a gazebo, a large garden, a barn, and a well house with windmill. A gas plant on the premises provided illumination. The well water was still being used in 1947.

Julius and Anna Lueders had four children: Hilda, Frieda, Walter, and Edgar. Hilda was principal of the West Berkeley Kindergarten until she married George Bruns. Thereafter she helped her husband run the D.H. Bruns General Merchandising store and post office on the corner of San Pablo and University.

Frieda attended the Sprague School in Peralta Hall (formerly the Peralta Park Hotel) before becoming a teacher in the West Berkeley Kindergarten. When Sunset Telephone & Telegraph introduced 24-hour telephone service, Frieda became the night operator. Later she advanced to chief operator, and eventually went to work as a county employee. In middle age she married the carpenter William Frohwerk.

Neither Walter nor Edgar married. Walter worked as a bookkeeper and Edgar as a mechanic. Both continued living with their mother at 1330 Albina. Walter bought the Bruns store, renamed West Berkeley Hardware. He died in 1924, and Edgar continued running the store until his own death in 1971.

That’s when Tom Roe stepped in.

Earlier versions of this article were published in the Berkeley Daily Planet and on the Berkeley Architectural Heritage (BAHA) website under the title “Peralta Park Grew in the Shade of Giants.”