Gutters and Roofing for Oakland

History and character

When Oakland was settled, oak groves stood by the shore and redwoods crowned the hills, tall enough that ships used them as landmarks. Logging began around 1840, and in the City’s 1996 account, “by 1860, hardly a tree remained”; eucalyptus went in along the crest about fifty years later.

In 1820 Luis Peralta received the Spanish land grant Rancho San Antonio. Its hacienda, says the State’s marker, was the rancho’s “nucleus”; the 1870 Italianate house there is one of two remaining Peralta buildings.

Oakland became a town on May 4, 1852 and a city on March 25, 1854, and Horace Carpentier was its first mayor. It grew around its wharves, the 1854 ferry to San Francisco and, by 1863, the railroads.

In 1852 Samuel Merritt bought the slough that became Lake Merritt. The law that made it a wildlife refuge passed on March 18, 1870, and the refuge is a National Historic Landmark.

The railroad’s service yards at Oakland Point brought workers and, from about 1875, tracts of Italianate Victorian houses. By the 1920s the Southern Pacific rail yards were Oakland’s largest employer; East Oakland built cars, and Clorox started here in 1913.

The Port of Oakland was set up in 1927 as a department of the City, the same year the airport was built.

The first East Bay census, in 1852, already recorded African American residents of Oakland. Henderson Luelling founded “Fruit Vale”, and Oakland Chinatown was settled in the 1850s.

Gertrude Stein grew up here in the 1880s and 1890s, Julia Morgan came from an Oakland family, and Joaquin Miller lived on “The Hights” from 1886 to 1913.

Chabot began as an observatory in 1883, the Oakland Zoo opened in 1922, Children’s Fairyland in 1950 and the Oakland Museum of California in 1969.

In the City’s words, “Oakland has a serious wildfire history, with the 1991 Tunnel Fire taking 25 lives and destroying 3,469 houses and apartments.” After it, the City added special building rules, fire-resistive roofs among them, for the area the fire damaged.

Oakland, roof and gutters

Oakland is really two places for a roof and gutters. About two-thirds of the city sits on the flat plain by the Bay, and the other third climbs into the hills, up to just over 1,760 feet near Grizzly Peak Boulevard.

Down in the flats, the City’s own plan names the trouble spots: around the Coliseum and Lake Merritt, heavy rain that meets a high tide has nowhere to drain. Up the hill, it’s the trees. Oakland is named after the coast live oak, and about 71 percent of the city’s tree canopy stands on private land. Live oaks drop their old leaves while the new ones come in, February to April, and fall and early-winter storms knock the acorns loose.

The rain comes all at once. Federal weather stations in and near Oakland record about 23 to 25 inches a year, and about 90 percent of it falls between November and April. Whatever’s sitting in your gutters when the rain starts is what the rain finds.

The houses are as varied as the ground. The median Oakland home was built in 1953, and more than a third went up in 1939 or earlier. In the City’s 1994 account, Italianate Victorians went up at Oakland Point from about 1875, and the 1920s neighborhoods around Trestle Glen, Lakeshore, Claremont Pines and Rockridge are mostly Tudor, Norman and Mediterranean.

In the hills, the fire inspector comes every year, and in 2025 the City expanded its Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone to its whole Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Area, larger than the zone the State’s 2024 maps drew. New homes there need a Class A roof.

We’ve been working on Oakland roofs and gutters since 2002, in the flats and in the hills. If yours haven’t had a look in a while, we’d be glad to come by.