For a generation it was called the Athens of the West, and it built like it. Between about 1910 and 1930, Berkeley's architects gave it a golden age: Bernard Maybeck's serene First Church of Christ, Scientist (1910), a landmark of Bay Area Arts and Crafts; John Galen Howard's bell tower, the Campanile, rising over the campus in 1914; and Julia Morgan's Little Castle in 1929. In the hills above, the brown-shingle houses of the First Bay Tradition tucked themselves among the oaks and the fog.
All of it grew up around the University of California, chartered in 1868 and built on the first campus here — the institution that made Berkeley a city of learning, bookshops, and cafes that double as seminar rooms. In the 1930s, Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory and its cyclotrons made the hills a birthplace of modern physics. More than most American towns, Berkeley has been organized around ideas and the people who argue about them.
Why People Visit Berkeley
Berkeley balances learning with the outdoors. Visitors mix landmark architecture and famous kitchens with regional parks, rose terraces, and waterfront breezes. It is curious, green, and welcoming, with year-round appeal in its parks, paths, and public spaces. History and everyday culture sit side by side here in a welcoming way, from the Little Castle to the cafes of the Gourmet Ghetto and the trails of the hills above the Bay.
