Anatomy of a Public Records Search:
Of Farmers, Hippies, and Satin Pajamas
in the History of a Berkeley Mansion

BERKELEY -- After nearly an hour of scouting possible houses on the streets of Berkeley near Civic Center Park for our property records search, we discovered a curious-looking candidate: A wooden shingled house on Dwight Way with two dragons hung above the door on the porch entrance.

We knocked on the door of this house, hoping in vain to catch the tenants at home. After taking many notes on this house, we found a more appealing looking house across the street, a looming, pale yellow, white trimmed, three-story Victorian mansion with a second-story veranda that was begging for investigation.

The three of us followed a tall African-American man who jumped out of a silver-blue Chrysler Sebring convertible and ran up the steps into the house. After knocking on the door we were greeted by a woman in stained, peach satin pajama bottoms and a gray heather sweatshirt who held a cup in her hand. She was quite friendly and invited us in after we told her we were interested in the property at 1545 Dwight Way.

The woman, named Tabitha R., was 33 years old, blonde, with chipmunk cheeks and a pleasant disposition. She volunteered to give us a tour of the house and property.

Something that initially perked Violet's interest was a table full of pamphlets next to the door and a blackboard with postings of information. We knew that we had come to more than just a private home. We had found S.T.E.P.S. (Sobriety Through Education and Peer Support), a clean and sober transitional housing facility.

The house on the inside was clean and comfortable with four couches and sofas on the left side of the entrance and on the right side, occupying the formal dining room was the office of Gary Ferguson, the director of the treatment program and a former heroin addict of 32 years. According to the program's brochure, Ferguson was known as "Dirty Ferg" during his years of drug abuse. While we were eager to interview him, Ferguson declined and asked Tabitha to talk us instead.

Later, we took a tour of the house with Tabitha, who showed us bedrooms, bathrooms, a skewed spiral staircase, and backyard with a sauna and a hot tub. Tabitha, who is a waitress by night, came to the center to recover from her 11-year addiction to alcohol and marijuana. She has lived in the home for the past 11 months, where she lives and participates in the program with others who have alcohol and drug addictions.

"People need to be around each other who've been through the same things," Tabitha said. "It's a process of reconnecting ourselves."

Fifteen people ranging in age from 20-59 live in the house. Tabitha said that being together in a group keeps her from drinking and that isolation is dangerous for addicts because they're more likely to use alcohol and drugs when no one is there to watch them.

She showed us 17 rooms, which tenants can rent for between $550-$850 per month. Tenants must share rooms to avoid being on their own for extended periods of time. There are five bathrooms, including one on the third story with a skylight where Tabitha said she enjoys taking bubble baths and watching the rain beat down from above.

Outside the house, we walked down a rickety staircase from the third story deck to the spacious backyard. There we learned that the backyard hosts many birds (there to eat from the stone bird feeder) and squirrels (Tabitha pointed out a home built just for them). We also found a broken sauna and a hot tub behind the gate of the enclosed back corner of the yard. Tabitha said the tenants of the S.T.E.P.S. program must smoke outside because the old wood house could easily catch on fire from a cigarette butt. They must not stay in the yard past 10 p.m. out of respect for neighbors.

Tabitha told us that hippies used to live in a commune at the Dwight House during the 1970s. When we asked Tabitha if S.T.E.P.S had ever had any problems with the neighbors (i.e. a NIMBY attitude towards the recovering addicts), she said that most of the neighbors have been nice, especially "Brother Matthew" who lives in the house directly across the street. In fact, Brother Matthew had helped the residents clean the yard at the house on the corner of Dwight and California when the elderly owner had been hospitalized.

When we left the house, we went across the street to 1536 Dwight to talk to Brother Matthew. Matthew Farrington is a tall, lean 73-year-old African-American man with a shy smile, a touch of gray at his temples, and oversized eyeglasses. He has lived at this address for 30 years, he told us. He drove from his hometown of Chapel Hill, NC to the Bay Area with a friend in 1958. For 33 years he worked at the Gillig school bus manufacturing company in Hayward where he was the shop steward for Teamsters Local 853.

Although Farrington was unable to tell us anything about the house's previous owners because, he said, he "never got acquainted with the people who lived there before." He did say more than once that Ferguson seems like a nice person. He also told us that Ferguson had bestowed on him the nickname Brother Matthew.

Berkeley Building Permit Office

With the tip from Tabitha that the hippies had added onto the house during the 1970s we headed up to the Berkeley Building Permit Office at 2118 Milvia Street to take a look at the permits previous owners had requested. At the office we found out that the house at 1545 Dwight Way had a confusing history of multiple owners.

We asked the clerk for the building permits for the house and she handed us a small, square envelope containing six or seven microfiche files. One of the first documents we examined was Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance transfer form dated August 2, 1991. Bernard T. Adeney was listed as the seller and Richard C. Stancliff was listed as the buyer. A $205,456 selling price was noted. While helpful, the record of this transaction was not old enough to get us going on the history of the house, so we chose one of the earlier microfiche files.

Searching the earlier records we were able to confirm Tabitha's information that the house had been a hippy commune in the 70s. In a November 27, 1972 "Request for Service" form a fire prevention inspector instructed Peter Clark and members of a group called "Village of Arts and Ideas" to "clean up the yard of all debris" and remove a TeePee on the premises before they could proceed with making the additions to the property.

During the hour we were at the office a number of other owners' names appeared on the various pest reports and building permits including Peter Clark, Duncan Killen, Ralph Anspach, Malcolm Smith, Adeney and Stancliff. We found records that over the years the house has undergone a significant amount of remodeling/improvements including an additional bathroom, an added deck, electrical re-wiring, plumbing work etc.

Berkeley History Room of the Berkeley Public Library

In order to find out more about the origins of the house, we proceeded to the Berkeley History Room at the Berkeley Public Library. We thumbed through half a dozen books on Berkeley's historical buildings but we didn't find any mention of the Dwight Way house. All we were able to find was an old map of parcels in the neighborhood dated from 1911-1929 (the map was made up by Sanborn Map Company during this time for the reference of insurance companies). On the map, we spotted a house with the listed address of 1545 Dwight Way showing six apartments. The librarian at the history room referred us to the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association to find out more details.

Alameda County Assessor's Office

At the Assessor?s Office, Dory Bond, an 11-year employee, took us under her wing and showed us how to use the computer to look up an address. Bond, a middle-aged white woman, told us her life story when we told her we were journalism students. It seems that she always wanted to be a journalist, but she didn't have the money to pay for college. Bond grew up in Northern Idaho where she attended a two-room schoolhouse. At the school, the boys chopped wood for the potbelly stove and the girls pumped the water. Each classroom held four grades.

With Bond's help we found the parcel number for 1545 Dwight Way 55-1913-52 and proceeded upstairs to the second floor Assessor?s office. There, despite Bond's tutorial, we encountered some technical difficulties using the computer system (in fact we froze three of the computers), but finally we were able to learn some information about the property's value.

In 1991, for example, the Dwight property value was listed at $556,173 (land value at $165, 320 and improvements at $390,853). Confused by the term "improvements" we asked the clerk what that meant. It turned out that instead of referring to the house as a "house" the Assessor insists on calling it "improvements." We also learned that the house is now owned by Malcolm A. Smith, a San Francisco criminal attorney, and Gary Ferguson, the director of the program. Smith declined to answer a number of telephone messages we left for him.

At the Assessor's we were able to trace the home's ownership history back to 1961. We also retrieved the deed numbers we would later use at the Recorder's office.

Alameda County Recorder's Office

Searching for the deeds at the Recorder's office took up the majority of our time. The first problem we faced was that the documents that are scanned into the computers only go back to 1999. Seeing anything older than that would require a head-spinning trip into the land of microfilm. The second problem we faced was that the computers only hold property records going back to 1969. For earlier records we would first have to find the grantee's name on the special grantee microfilm by the year that the transaction occurred. On that microfilm we found the microfilm reel and image numbers of the deed or deed of trust we wanted to find. Then we had to give the numbers to the clerk who would pull the microfilm that contained the document.

After a couple of hours of searching this way we were finally able to find the deed for Ralph Anspach and Duncan Killen who bought the home in April 1961. According to the deed, Arlene M. Slaughter, Marcia Killen and Ruth Mary Rogin Anspach granted the home to Anspach and Killen as "separate property." Marcia Killen and Ruth Anspach were married to the two men but the deed did not indicate who Slaughter was. The deed of joint tenancy, executed on April 4, 1961 read in part: "...the wives have joined in the execution of this deed for the purpose of establishing the herein described property as the separate property of their husbands."

This information sent us down a rabbit-hole. We speculated that perhaps the three women were sisters who had received the home as part of their parents? will. This led to a wasted half hour of trying to find the birth certificates or marriage certificates for the women, but to no avail.

The previous day, we had searched Internet phone directories for several of the owners? names we found at the Assessor's office. Through that search, we found two listings for Anspach that seemed promising, one in San Mateo and one in San Francisco. As a last ditch effort we called the San Mateo number and hoped for the best. As our luck would have it, this was the Ralph Anspach who had purchased the home in 1961.

Eureka!

Anspach told us that while he was a graduate student in Economics at UC Berkeley in 1961, he and his fellow student Duncan Killen, a painter, bought the house. After some initial confusion, he explained that because he and Killen were students without any collateral to put up when they bought the house, they gave their wives the money they had and they actually bought it. The wives were able to do this because they both had rich relatives. So the 1961 deed reflected the transfer of the house they had purchased to Duncan and Killen. There went the whole sister and will theory. Unfortunately, Anspach was unable to remember the name of the person from whom they bought the house.

He did tell us that when he and Killen bought the house it had been a ?total disaster? and they had spent a year re-modeling it. We also learned that the third-floor area where Tabitha now enjoys bathing beneath the skylight had originally been the attic. One time, he and Killen rented the attic to a group supporting a "left-wing Congressman" for a fundraiser. They had a rock band (complete with those new-fangled electric guitars) and a "light show."

He also shed some light on Arlene M. Slaughter. It turns out she was the realtor who handled the sale for them, but why her name appears on the deed is a mystery.

Armed with Anspach?s information, we tried looking up the wives as the grantee in the microfilm files to find the name of the person who sold them the house. We searched backwards through the film for the years 1961-1958 but could not find another deed associated with the house.

History

Perhaps the most interesting part of this whole story is the origin of the house. On Thursday afternoon, we went to the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association for an appointment. Leslie Emmington, the organization?s preservation consultant, handed us information from a man named Mike Edwards, who is trying to make a nearby house a historical landmark. Edwards has done considerable research on the Turner House at 2418 California St., the house right behind the Dwight house. Edwards' landmark application contained information about who built and originally lived at 1545 Dwight Way property.

Both the Turner House and the Dwight House were part of the Spaulding Tract subdivision marketed Oakland Land Association in 1876. A renowned developer at the time named A.H. Broad, who built numerous houses in Berkeley through the 1920s according to Emmington, built the house in 1884 for Mr. A.C. Fish. Edwards's records didn't state Fish's occupation.

A year later, Fish sold the house and property to "the Clark family." The Clark family bought four acres along the house and maintained the property as a "mini-farm" for the next ten years.

An 1891 "Birds Eye View of Berkeley, California" was drawn by artist E.S. Moore and shows the West Berkeley neighborhood of Dwight and California as rural with sparse development. According to Virginia and Lee McAlester in their definitive Field Guide to America's Neighborhoods and Museum House, Victorian-era suburbs were often platted with oversize lots that provided enough space for a chicken house, vegetable garden, orchard, horses for transportation and perhaps even a cow or two.

According to Edwards, the Park Match Company in West Berkeley (at Fourth and University) "came at a significant time in Berkeley's development, because although the city was known as a center of learning, there was some disagreement as to whether manufacturing should continue to be developed. The West Berkeley Progressive Club, an alliance of businessmen with socially minded clergy, was trying very hard to attract new manufacturing to relieve the serious unemployment and poverty in the area.

It wasn't until after the 1906 earthquake that more houses in this neighborhood were built. "In 1912, the California Street line of Southern Pacific electric street railway began operating along California Street, thus hastening the complete suburbanization of the area," Edwards wrote.

-- Reported and written by Violet Feng, Nick Wilson, and Lisa White