Lakeshore Highlands Portals - Oakland

The Lakeshore Highlands Portals are two sets of ornamental metal gates constructed as part of the Lakeshore Highlands development. The gates are owned and maintained by the Lakeshore Homes Association and visually identify the entrance to the neighborhood.

From Mitchell Schwarzer's Hella Town:

“Entered through gates off Lakeshore Avenue, Lakeshore Highlands boasted quality architectural design and landscaping as well as an interurban line. It pioneered the use of model homes to sell lots and houses. It targeted higher-wage professionals. An advertisement, hawking appreciating values and accelerated transit, called attention to a new relationship between Oakland’s homes and San Francisco’s workplaces: “Read the picture on the opposite page. There you can see San Francisco—the city of offices and business. Now note, just across the beautiful bay of San Francisco, Lakeshore Highlands, nestling on the sloping terraces from Piedmont to Lake Merritt, in Oakland. San Francisco, the business place, and Lakeshore Highlands, the permanently restricted residential park of beautiful homes.” The words express the core values of America’s suburban ideal: easy transportation access to professional workplaces and a socially exclusive domestic environment. As this and other realty ads promised, for the aspiring class of managers and professionals, a home distinguished by fine architecture and sylvan landscaping, spaciousness and up-to-date appliances and furnishings, and a community of all-white neighbors, somehow all went together. In the community’s Declaration of Restrictions, Clause XV—Limitation of Ownership read: “No person of African, Japanese, Chinese or of any Mongolian descent, shall be allowed to purchase, own or lease said property or any part thereof except in the capacity of domestic servants of the occupant thereof.” The clause was deleted only in 1979, 29 years after the US Supreme Court, in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), declared that courts could not enforce racial covenants on real estate. Delays in rescinding (and also prohibiting the enforcement of) racial covenants affected scores of subdivisions across Oakland and the East Bay, where getting a supermajority vote for racial justice was difficult in America’s lingering racist climate.”

On November 15, 1977, the Lakeshore Highlands Portals was designated Oakland Landmark #19, under Zoning Case #LM 77-374.