Color lithographed map. 87.5x56 cm (34½x22"), folded.
Striking color real estate maps showing the land contours, trees, roads, etc., with the plots for sale and their acreage. The area was part of the 44,800-acre Rancho San Antonio granted to Luis Maria Peralta for his services the Spanish Crown. In 1842, Peralta divided the lands among his four sons, and Hose Domingo Peralta received the portion that today comprises Berkeley and Albany from Alcatraz Avenue to El Cerrito Creek. The portion delineated here eventually came to be owned by Maurice B. Curtiss, a successful Jewish-American stage actor, who here subdivides and sells a portion. There are a few neat ink notes on the map referring to his ownership. OCLC lists only one example, at the University of California, Berkeley.
The transition of the land to Curtiss is quite interesting and reavealling. In the early 1870's, after Domingo’s death, sixty acres of his lands were bought by financier William Ralston, who envisioned the development of Peralta Park, but drowned (or committed suicide) swimming in San Francisco Bay before he could begin. 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 of the loan, the company, founded by Caspar Hopkins, one of the early Fruitvale settlers, seized the land, and Hopkins set about looking for a buyer. In 1878 he found one, who came up with the $32,000 needed. Maurice Strelinger, aka Maurice B. Curtiss (1849-1920), was an American stage actor, producer, and real estate developer, a Jewish immigrant from Hungary. He was best known for starring as Samuel Plastrick, the lead character in the comic melodrama “ Sam’l of Posen”. which earned him substantial fame and wealth amounting to $250,000. In the early 1870's he moved to Berkeley with his wife. He used his wealth to pay for Berkeley’s new train station and fire house, paving roads, installing street lights and helping many other causes. He bought sold some other Berkley lands before he bought Peralta Park. In 1878, the Peralta Park was subdivided.
Curtis planned an elegant subdivision anchored by a luxurious resort hotel. He organized the Peralta Park Hotel Company and began construction in 1888. Always highly leveraged, Curtiss recruited investors from among his San Francisco business and theatre connections, and some of them bought parcels and erected homes, including Curtiss’s own house on 1505 Hopkins Street. It was Curtiss streets, Posen (play name) avenue, and Albina Del Mar (stage name of the Curtiss’s wife).
In addition to its fantastic turreted exterior, the hotel boasted sixty bedrooms and twenty bathrooms—an unheard-of luxury. The Peralta Park Hotel never opened as a hotel. The expenses and cost overruns of building this extraordinary and dramatic hotel caused Curtis to look for someone to lease it. It became a girls’ school, and later was purchased by St. Joseph’s and became part of St. Mary’s College High School. A fire devastated the upper floor in 1946 but the lower floors were still utilized as a dormitory until the building was deemed a seismic hazard and demolished in 1959.