Of all the rock quarries in our hills since Oakland was founded, I’ll focus today on what may be the most striking one. It’s had several different names, but I call it the Davie quarry because for nearly a century it’s been a memorial to one of Oakland’s most colorful mayors, John L. Davie, and is home to the Davie Tennis Stadium.

Before that, it was the longtime quarry of Charles D. Bates (1833-1906), a major figure in the paving of Oakland streets. Bates had been building macadam (crushed rock) roads in the young town of Oakland as early as 1866, when he macadamized Broadway from 4th Street to the waterfront. In 1869 he partnered with Thatcher P. “T.P.” Wales in opening this quarry, exploiting the good rock that cropped out along the bayward edge of the Piedmont hills. Bates & Wales did a brisk business, especially in the growing town of Brooklyn across Lake Merritt from Oakland. They ran a horse-drawn railroad up present-day Lakeshore Boulevard to the quarry site and were well suited to compete with the Oakland Paving Company quarry, a mile and a half away in the same hills.

In an 1873 profile, the Oakland Transcript praised Bates & Wales and its “inexhaustible” quarry. As for the stone itself, “It is beautiful in color, hard as a rock ought to be, durable, cleanly and easily quarried. . . . The deeper they have mined the harder, more beautiful and and durable the rock quarried.” Let’s look at some of it.

The rock in the quarry is mapped as part of the Franciscan Complex and, appropriately, has a mix of lithologies. This is shale metamorphosed to the slate grade, but it doesn’t split like slate. I call it a low-grade argillite. The slight bluish color is largely an effect of sky light.

This appears to be a fine-grained sandstone that’s been shattered and ground by faulting, but remains well cemented. The majority of the quarry walls look like this.

And this seems to be a tough lava rock similar to the “blue rock” quarried nearby. The slight blue tinge is probably due to low-grade metamorphic minerals.

All of it was good for making 19th-century roads. When the city began formally testing road rock in the 1890s using the “rattler,” it achieved the highest grade.

Around that time Bates and Wales took on more partners and founded the Alameda Macadamizing Company. While Bates & Wales carried on as a street-building firm, the new company expanded the quarry, took over Walter Blair’s original quarry nearby and opened new ones. It employed hundreds of men and paved large sections of road in Alameda and Brooklyn township, but when the notorious 1879 state constitution outlawed Chinese workers, Alameda Macadamizing shut down. Bates went to Oregon for the next ten years, then returned to revive the firm.

Bates, a diversified entrepreneur, did well personally; he built a fine house in upper Adams Point and appeared often in the society pages. His son Charles Jr. (1872-1945) was the real socialite, making the news as the dashing young star of the Oakland Tennis Club. Nevertheless business petered out in 1892, and the next year Wales and another partner died.

Bates once again gathered new partners, including Charles Jr., and started the Piedmont Paving Company in 1893. At least one example of its concrete sidewalks survives. The firm was last mentioned in the newspapers in 1911.

The property was part of a brief flap in October 1906, when the junior Bates, who was City Treasurer under Mayor Frank Mott, was accused of holding an interest in the Piedmont Paving company while awarding it contracts, which Bates Jr. refuted by showing he had sold his shares the previous year.

In the spring of 1921, when Mayor Davie spotted the property during a drive, the abandoned quarry was a dank swimming hole visited only by kids. But it sat at the end of the E streetcar line out Lakeshore Avenue, just a few minutes from downtown. Siezed with the idea of turning the rock-lined bowl into a city-owned stadium “with capacity for 100,000 persons, and with perfect acoustic properties,” he personally bought an option on the quarry and announced he would offer it to the city once the new City Council took office on July 1. The new Council turned down the offer as money was tight. Instead, the mayor organized fundraisers — a boxing match and a public ball at the new Civic Auditorium — and used the money to clean up the property, and there things stood for several years while Davie, a headstrong guy, persisted.

In 1924, Davie’s son William acquired title to the quarry and two adjoining parcels, again with his own money, but the deed wasn’t recorded until 1929. The arrangement became a scandal in 1930, shortly after Davie appointed William as City Treasurer and offered the land to the city again. The whole idea, the mayor explained, was for the Davies to hold the land in trust until the city could develop the stadium he envisioned. “I found the owner willing to cooperate with me in giving to the children of Oakland the finest playground in the world. . . . I now have a government that stands for the city, and I hope to make suitable arrangements to turn it over to the city before I finish my public career as Mayor.”

The city finally relented in May of 1931, six weeks before Davie’s term ended. The city agreed to pay ten dollars for the land, dedicate it solely as a playground and recreational park, and commission a plaque stating that Davie Recreational Stadium was the gift of the Davie family to the children of Oakland (and the East Bay). The plaque is still there.

Given the Depression and the white-elephant status of the property, there was no more talk of a performance space to rival Berkeley’s Greek Theater. In 1933 the city unveiled plans for a swimming complex, but that idea fell through. That January Davie’s 10-year tenant, a man named John Gruber, was evicted from his compound in the old pit, when the Oakland Post-Enquirer published this photo of the “Quarry Ranch.”

It wasn’t until 1935 that work began on a set of tennis courts — which surely pleased the former phenom Charles Bates Jr., by then a wealthy Piedmont resident. Much of the labor was done with funds from the Works Progress Administration. The courts opened on September 1, 1937, and have served the public ever since.

Today the rock walls that beguiled Mayor Davie show a century of wear while the courts, which have been rebuilt at least twice, are in great shape along with the clubhouse, bathrooms and water fountain. The bleachers, not so much. The eucalyptus fringe, planted to muffle explosions, is a common feature of old quarries.

Chain-link fences are bulging with fallen rock — talus — that includes a significant fraction of old tennis balls.

The stadium has a proud place in local tennis history. It hosted the likes of Oakland’s own Don Budge, the world’s first Grand Slam winner in 1938, and was home of the Oakland City Championship tournament for more than forty years.

Oakland is still a lively tennis town. Like the plaque says, “On these courts dreams happen.”

This entry was posted on 8 June 2026 at 7:53 am and is filed under Geoheritage, Quarries and mines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.