CC SA-BY Our Oakland
The Moyles-Kappenman Building is at 1617-19 Broadway / 1618 Telegraph Avenue. It was built or redesigned for Mary Moyles and and Charlotte Kappenman in the 1920s.
Mary Moyles and Charlotte Kappenman were sisters, the daughters of Mary A. Kirchner (Godfrey) (Neary). When their stepfather, Nicholas Neary died in 1925, he left the bulk of his $250,000 estate to them.
The building was designed by architect H.G. Brelin and engineer T. Ronneberg, and built by W.C. Cone (probably Wilbur C. Cone)
Loeb and Velasco Jewelers moved into the building at 1617 in 1928 and were there until 1993. The California Optical Co. of Oakland moved into 1619 from 1221 Broadway in 1928.
The Downtown Oakland Historic District form describes it:
1617-19 Broadway / 1618-20 Telegraph Avenue is a small two-story brick and tile Beaux Arts derivative store building on a double frontage lot immediately behind the Federal Realty (Cathedral) Building, the southernmost of a group of five. Both street elevations are essentially the same. The tall ground floor, framed in black and green marble, has a single storefront which has been remodeled with aluminum frame display windows. The upper portion of the building is clad in tan pressed brick with four rectangular wood frame windows below a Romanesque corbelled cornice and a parapet wall with terra cotta relief panels with shields and garlands. The store space was occupied by Loeb and Velasco Jewelers from at least 1930 into the 1990s. The building appears to be one of the many small speculative real estate ventures developed in downtown Oakland in the 1920s, and is typical of them in its brick and tile construction and historicist styling.
CC SA-BY Our Oakland (needs a better image)
