People who have recently moved into the area are often perplexed by the community’s love for Club Knoll. “I’ve never been there, what’s it like inside?” or “Why do you want to keep the building so much?” are both questions often directed to us.

The reasons can be simple or complex depending on how you want to examine the answer. For many, Club Knoll was the place for having parties and weddings, or a place to relax while visiting the Navy Hospital. For others, it was the place where community functions, such as the early Oak Knoll base closure discussions, took place. These are the social connections to the grand mission revival building that once served as the club for the golf course that preceded the Navy hospital.

If one digs back further into the cultural and architectural history of this area, other connections emerge. So let’s take a brief tour of the past to highlight the prominent historical places linked to this part of what is now Oakland.

Although Native Americans probably used some of the resources of this hill area, fewer artifacts have survived than for other sites, such as Niles Canyon, the Emeryville flats, and the marshes adjoining the Dumbarton Bridge in Fremont.  Indeed, on the 1890s early U.S. Geological Survey maps, the named features in this area are “Arroyo Viejo” a creek that runs along Golf Links Road and “Grass Valley,” an area that still bears the name on Golf Links Road. The area was largely part of the Mexican Land Grant to the Peralta family (whose homes are preserved in San Leandro). The area seems to have been more closely connected to the San Leandro farming community than Oakland, which was a Gold Rush boat terminal on the route to the Sierras for people from Asia as well as Europe and elsewhere. San Leandro was probably the historic center for this region, not Oakland.

In this relatively undeveloped territory in the late 1800s, the nationally popular nature adventure writer, Joaquin Miller, settled. Miller’s tiny cabin home, which could be compared to Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, still stands in Joaquin Miller Park, a large parcel gifted by him to the public. This park represents a strikingly modern pose. It illustrates Miller’s concern for nature with his replanted redwood forests, yet it also includes numerous statues and monuments he commissioned to represent art, history, and classic literature. It is fitting therefore that outdoor Woodminster Theater, with its lavish waterfalls, reflecting ponds, and gardens, presents a sublime view of the bay and succeeds in combining art with nature in a surprisingly modern way. Great credit goes to those who have recently restored some of Woodminster’s beauty and repainted Miller’s cabin. These people are reviving our local connection to the ethic for sustaining both nature and art.

Another turn of fate would bring three golf courses to the area in the early 1900s, each with its own mission revival-style clubhouse. All three repeat features found at the large Peralta home in San Leandro: stucco exterior with arch detailing; tile; high interior ceilings with large, dark (and sometimes ornamented) beams; nearly enclosed courtyard garden spaces; heavy wooden doors; and relatively small windows. The grandest, most elegant and best-preserved example is at the private Sequoyah Country Club on Sequoyah Road. The smallest, most publicly used version exists at Chabot Golf Course, one of the oldest public courses in Northern California, at the upper end of Golf Links Road. The mid-sized version is Club Knoll. Club Knoll has two grand rooms and one modest room on its upper floor, with a kitchen and utilitarian rooms on the lower floor. The great rooms and indeed the smaller one are characterized by wood detailing and stucco walls, complex trim, and because of the thick walls, a distinctive humidity quite different from that of a modern building. The grand room also contains a huge, large-scale fireplace. It was here, in this room, that the first public discussions about the fate of the closed base were conducted. We have recently learned that Club Knoll has fallen from its graceful state into disrepair by vandals, thieves, and neglect. But this could be only a temporary state.

The final home in this tour is the Dunsmuir House, tucked into a valley behind the East Bay Regional Parks office, near the Oakland-San Leandro border. This lovely estate represents a decadent lavishness that sets it apart from the natural world, but its accompanying gardens and constructed ponds and caves hint at attempts to connect with nature. Yet, the site is rarely accessible to the public and is unlikely to ever become a symbol for history of this region because of its connection to family wealth rather than public aspirations.

Many people find regional identity in terms of the shopping centers they frequent or with the governments that oversee their “public good,” however defined. Yet, for others, the symbolic center can be envisioned as a place where connections with the past and hopes for the future are most palpable.  Club Knoll is just such a site. It connects this part of Oakland to the Mexican history of the Peralta estate, to the concern for landscape and nature envisioned by Joaquin Miller, to the perils of World War II and its aftermath, and to the rebirth of Oakland as a center for the arts, sustainability, historical preservation, and awareness of place.

To lose Club Knoll now would be a tragedy.

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