Foot of Park Ave - Commercial Union Hotel & Judson Steel (Both Razed)

Here at the foot of Park Avenue was once the nexus of manufacturing, transportation and political power in Emeryville.

The south-west corner of Park Avenue, now the “Park Place” industrial units, was once the Commercial Union Hotel.

Across the tracks at what is now the IKEA Home Furnishings store that straddles the Oakland-Emeryville border was Judson Iron Works.

The Commercial Union Hotel was originally built as the O’Neal House around 1883. The four-story, 68 room hotel also had a saloon, card club, barber and butcher shop. Connected to the hotel was the Emery Train Station that was serviced by a Southern Pacific electric streetcar and railroad line.

The hotel served as a venue for the City’s Board of Trustees in 1896, when the city voted to be incorporated, until Emeryville Town Hall was completed in 1903. A large driver of the city’s incorporation efforts was the desire to maintain the nearby California Jockey Club horse race track and the lucrative gambling revenue that came with it.

This 5 member board of trustees included founders Joseph S. Emery as well as John T. Doyle, William Fieldwick & Fredrick J. Stoer.

They voted to elect 36-year-old Wallace Christie, a manager at Judson Iron Works, to serve as board president and eventually the city’s first Mayor. Christie went on to serve for 40 years in the role.

Sadly, the hotel was badly damaged by a fire in 1910 and was razed.

Judson Iron Works was founded by Egbert Putnam Judson who began operation in 1882. It quickly became one of the largest factories in Alameda County and a powerhouse of steel manufacturing in the East Bay.

The original plant consisted of 28 brick buildings that included a complete bridge and structural steel shop, machine shop, foundry and pattern shop as well as a nuts & bolts shop. At its peak of productivity, the plant employed more than 600 workers. The enormous glowing furnaces were said to be visible from miles away.

Judson Iron not only provided the steel for the Bay and Golden Gate Bridges, their bridge building department built the approaches for both iconic bridges. They also provided structural steel for the Capwells, Bacon and the Oakland Bank & Savings buildings as well as the YMCA and Oakland’s new City Hall.

In 1945, Judson merged with the J. Philip Murphy Corporation to become the Judson-Pacific Murphy Corporation. The move helped the factory expand and tripled their production capacity.

By the 1950s, manufacturing in California was subjected to increased scrutiny amid the modern environmental movement. The Bay Area Air Pollution Control District, now the Bay Area Air Quality Management District or BAAQMD, was founded in 1955 to regulate the amount of “smog” emitted by plants like Judson. Judson was considered among the worst violators in the region with its very visible plume and open arc furnace that illuminated the area during the night shift.

In the 1960s, under increasing regulatory pressure, Judson attempted to mitigate the pollution emitted by their plant by installing filters on their plumes.

In the early 1970s, in an apparent last ditch effort, Judson pushed to be annexed by the lower-tax, more business-friendly Emeryville. The controversial effort was defeated when Oakland politicians became aware of the effort that would have deprived their city of $20,000 in annual tax revenue.

These tougher environmental regulations in tandem with labor disputes and foreign competition continued to apply financial pressure to Judson and they abruptly closed in 1986.

In 1987 the plant was sold to Birmingham Steel Corp. for $15 million and renamed the Barbary Coast Steel plant. The plant closed a few years later in 1991 because of a combination of rising fuel costs, taxes, freight and labor. At the time is was one of the last steel manufacturing facilities in California.

Equipment and some parts of the structures were disassembled and shipped off on railroad cars to Seattle where the firm had two other plants.

The site was remediated and acquired by the Swedish furniture manufacturing company IKEA who opened the doors of their first Bay Area location here in 2000.