El Cerrito Historical Society Quiz
With our El Cerrito Round Up issue, we thought it would be fun to include a quiz provided by
the El Cerrito Historical Society. How much do you know about El Cerrito?
Answers are at the conclusion of this quiz. Don’t peek!
1. From its earliest days, El Cerrito had several
neighborhoods named after people from Germany
or of German ancestry. Which of the following
neighborhoods did not exist in El Cerrito?
a. Schmidtville, an area around Schmidt Lane, which
was laid out by two gentlemen named Schmidt and Fink
in 1893, one of the earliest subdivisions in the area. It was
later followed by “Schmidt Village,” in the vicinity of
today’s Schmidt Lane.
b. Rust, named for an early settler William (or
Wilhelm) Rust, who operated a hardware shop at the site
of today’s Pastime Hardware store.
c. Kaiserville, named for Henry Kaiser, who
developed a small neighborhood of upscale homes in the
El Cerrito hills for managers at Richmond’s nearby Kaiser
Shipyards during World War II.
d. Stege Junction, named after a German immigrant
Richard Stege who’d been a fur trader, among other
occupations, before marrying Minna Quilfelt, owner of
a prosperousranch in Richmond. Stege added frog ponds
whose denizens he sold to French restaurants.
2. From at least the mid-1910s through the
mid-1950s El Cerrito was awash with gambling
dens, prostitution, prize fighting rings, and even a
greyhound racing track. Vice flourished in our town
because? All, some or none of these may be true.
a. Big time gamblers from out of the area brought
their talents to El Cerrito.
b. Few people lived in town so no one complained.
c. The territory was lawless because it was
unincorporated.
d. Both lawmakers and law enforcers were on the
take.
22 MARKETPLACECONTRACOSTA.COM DECEMBER 2017
3. In the late 1990s when city officials contemplated
a rebuild of El Cerrito Plaza, help arrived from a
member of the royalty. The royal urban reformer was:
a. Then-Prince Willem Alexander of Netherlands,
today the King, whose strong interest in infrastructure
and ties to leading Dutch architects produced a
conceptual plan for solar-paneled buildings.
b. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who
became emir of Dubai in 2006, and proposed in 1997
four 10-story towers alongside an outdoor souk-like
bazaar to be designed by architects in Dubai along with
the American firm of SOM.
c. Prince Charles of England who, working with
students from the Wales Summer School of Architecture,
proposed a neo-Urbanist plan for the center that was
inspired by Old World models of village living.
d. Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, a pretender to
the throne of Russia, who was living in San Francisco
and teamed up with the family of Paul Hammarberg, the
architect who first designed the center, to modernize and
refurbish it.
4. In the early 2000s when the city of El Cerrito
and the first operators of the Cerrito Theater began
restoring the long-closed theater, the Art Deco murals
and art glass were intact, but the neon marquee was
long gone because:
a. The city demanded that the prior owner remove it
for aesthetic reasons.
b. In the mid 1960s the marquee caught fire due to
an electrical issue. It was the final straw leading to the
theater’s closure for more than 40 years.
c. The city ordered it removed in the 1970s because
structural problems were endangering pedestrians.
d. No one knows why it disappeared.