1914: A Pivotal Milestone for a Railroad Station in the San Francisco Bay Area

February 19, 1914

In the city of Oakland within the San Francisco Bay Area, a major addition to the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sixteenth Street Station was officially opened. This station, in the years following the calamitous San Francisco earthquake in 1906, had gained ever-increasing importance for its role in helping to facilitate the renewed travel, growth, and business throughout that region of California.

That still-standing version of the Sixteen Street Station was dedicated on August 3, 1912. It replaced a wood-frame building that been at that site as a depot since the 1870s. The San Francisco Call reported that the formal public debut of the new station was marked “with impressive ceremonies, beginning with a parade through the city of 500 automobiles and ending with a reception and speeches in the waiting room of the structures, which has just been completed at a cost of $350,000.” The dignitaries taking part in those festivities included Frank K. Mott, mayor of Oakland; W.E. Gibson, president of the city’s chamber of commerce; and W.H. Scott, general manager of the Southern Pacific Company.  

The usefulness of this station, however, was initially hindered to a great extent by the often crowded conditions within the one level in place there for passengers and trains. This ground level, in other words, was the only infrastructure available at the station for passengers traveling on forms of transit such as main-line trains, electric suburban trains, and streetcars. These congestion challenges were finally alleviated — and the regional impact of the Sixteenth Street Station significantly optimized at last– with the opening of the station’s second level in 1914.

Electric trains first rolled into that new level on that opening day — and would continue to do so for the next 26 years — and those additional tracks proved to be a boon for the station’s overall viability and effectiveness. Within just a few years after the inauguration of that second level, the Sixteenth Street Station was handling a grand total of 50 main line trains, 488 electric suburban trains, and 200 streetcars on a daily basis.    

This new level not only helped the Sixteenth Street Station improve the large-scale prospects for that area in the post-earthquake period; it also played a vital role in spurring the evolution of Oakland from a sleepy neighborhood in San Francisco’s shadow to a major city in its own right. (The accompanying photo of that elevated section of the Sixteenth Street Station was included in Werner Hegemann’s 1915 work Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland & Berkeley.)

Photo Credit: Public Domain

Additional information on the Sixteenth Street Station in Oakland is available at https://memory.loc.gov/master/pnp/habshaer/ca/ca3600/ca3618/data/ca3618data.pdf