Second Annual Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny Memorial Lecture

Sutter’s Fort from Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion

Wednesday, 9 October 2019
7:30 pm
Ballroom, Berkeley City Club
2315 Durant Avenue, Berkeley

Free admission; reservation required

Speaker: Richard Longstreth, Professor of American Civilization, the George Washington University

Topic: “Ruin and Reconstruction” in the Making of Historic Sites

Richard Longstreth, well known to Bay Area architecture fans through his authoritative book On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century, has enjoyed a long and storied career as an expert in American architecture and historic preservation.

In his Cerny lecture, Professor Longstreth will focus on the processes and pitfalls of the interpretation and reconstruction of historic sites that have fallen into disrepair or ruin. In California, this work began with Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento, and it extends through the United States to places such as Fort Ticonderoga in New York State, which Professor Longstreth has studied extensively. He will also offer perspectives on the preservation struggles and choices many communities face as development confronts historic resources and local character.

Professor Longstreth’s ties to Berkeley go back to his architectural history studies at the Universty of California, where he received his PhD in 1977. He still remembers his residence in a historic shingled building on Dwight Way. We welcome him back for what promises to be a thought-provoking and stimulating talk.

M.B. Curtis: An Immigrant, Actor and Philanthropist in Berkeley

Peralta Park Hotel

BAHA & The Hillside Club Present:

M.B. Curtis: An Immigrant, Actor and Philanthropist in Berkeley

A lecture by Richard Schwartz

Monday, 4 November 2019
7:30 pm
The Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley

$10 donation requested. Get advance tickets here.

Historian Richard Schwartz will tell the fascinating story of the numerous philanthropic and significant deeds of immigrant Maurice B. Curtis, a once famed but now largely forgotten actor, for the city of Berkeley, and that still have an effect on us today. As Curtis catapulted to fame and fortune, he was thrilled to help the town he loved and its people thrive.

Schwartz will also discuss many never-before-shared events at Curtis’s Berkeley-based Peralta Park Hotel, the tallest hotel in the Bay Area at the time (now the site of the Saint Mary’s College High School). This presentation will include Berkeley-specific stories not included in Schwartz’s book, The Man Who Lit Lady Liberty: The Extraordinary Rise and Fall of Actor M.B. Curtis, which was recently released in paperback.