Sport and leisure in the building of an urban community: The case of Oakland, California, 1850-1906

This study examines the non-work activities of the people who lived in and visited Oakland, California during the second half of the nineteenth and the early-twentieth centuries. The focus is Oakland's physical culture, specifically physical recreations and sport and the institutions that facilitated these multifaceted group behaviors.; Beginning in the 1850s, Oakland's favorable physical environment attracted visitors from the growing city of San Francisco. They came to Oakland to enjoy a day or longer of outdoor recreation in the healthful climate of the semi-rural East Bay. For both San Franciscans and Oaklanders, engaging in traditional physical recreations had a specific utility. For some newcomers such activity aided in their adjustment to a strange place; for others, recreation with members of their own ethnic group helped keep important elements of their native culture alive.; By the mid-1870s, Oakland's popularity as a place for out-of-doors leisure time gatherings had motivated numerous entrepreneurs to establish for-profit recreation enterprises in and around the city. Many of these "parks" provided attractive, open-air sites for their patrons to engage in, or observe physical recreations and sport.; Oakland's "natural advantages" were not lost on the city's business and political leadership and they sought to take advantage of them. During the 1880s and 1890s, leisure amenities and commercial recreation were among the attractions that Oakland's civic leaders used to advertise the emerging city both locally and across the United States. Oakland's geographic and climatic good fortune were believed to make Oakland unusually healthy, especially when compared to other American cities. In a time when growing attention was directed to various aspects of personal and public health, Oakland's low mortality rate was especially stressed.; Attention was also directed to the wellbeing of the city's school and college-aged populations. Out-of-doors games and sport were increasingly associated with the development of good physical and mental health. Thus, in the decades between the Civil War and the great 1906 earthquake, Oakland's public and private school students were exposed to programs of physical training, calisthenics, and later sport, that were believed able to simultaneously build strong bodies and minds.