Leona Heights Neighborhood News

by Gordon Laverty

Like most neighborhoods in, or adjacent to, major cities, we've had our share of problems visited on us. It's unfortunate that so many of us who work hard and care about our homes and neighborhood have to be impacted by occasional random acts of a few. Leona Heights is such a great neighborhood, and what a wonderful mix of people we are in this generally peaceful little part of Oakland. As most of you know, I'm a big fan of the history of our neighborhood and want to supplement the news of goings-on here with things that have gone on in the past.

One hundred years ago today in Leona Heights, few homes dotted the landscape dominated by rolling grass-covered hills, mines, and rock quarries. Up the hill from our neighborhood in what is now the site of Merritt College, several quarries supplied rock needed for building the roadways and buildings of early Oakland. If you walk the fire trails in the area between Merritt College and the Bermuda Triangle neighborhood, you can see remnants of the operation. Railroad ties from where ore cars traveled above Leona Canyon periodically work their way to the surface in this stretch of the trail. The graffiti-decorated ruins halfway up the fire trail are where the rock was crushed and loaded onto a tram that carried the material downhill and through the concrete bunker just past Bermuda Ave. on Mountain Blvd. to an elevated section that eventually deposited the material into train cars that hauled it away.

Along certain parts of the northern section of Leona St., you might run into a railroad spike in your yard left over from the days when the trains ran through here. All this activity came to a close by about 1934. In case you think history is irrelevant to our lives today, it isn't, as it's clear that not only the layout of our neighborhood but the character of this place was significantly influenced by the local quarries. Here's to Leona Heights, our pride and joy.

Gordon Laverty can be reached at lavertyhillmob2\@sbcglobal.net.