Castro Valley's Adobe Art Center

The construction of an adobe structure required the ingredients of sand, clay. and water mixed to form a thick mud to which straw was added for stability. The mixture was then pressed into wooden forms and sun dried to create bricks. Once dry, the bricks were stacked forming the structure with a wet adobe mixture used as mortar, and finally the dried walls were typically painted with a protective white lime coating.

There are a handful of original adobe structures of Spanish Heritage dating from the mid-1700’s to the mid-1800 still standing in the East Bay. Fremont’s Mission San Jose Museum, Higuera Adobe in Warm Springs and Vallejo Adobe in Niles, along with Casa Peralta in San Leandro and Dublin’s Francisco Solano Alviso have been carefully restored, or are being held in a state of arrested decay. Not among the original adobes is the Hayward Area Recreation and Park Department’s (HARD) Adobe Art Center in Castro Valley, an authentic adobe reproduction built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1938. The building is located in an old elm grove planted by Boy Scouts in 1926 on the rear of the former location of the Castro Valley Grammar School on Castro Valley Blvd. The building is constructed from hundreds of 4x9x16 inch adobe bricks from soil excavated from the site of Redwood School on Redwood Road, hand hewn timbers from discarded telephone poles provided by the Pacific Telephone Company, and coated with special paint developed by the Gliddon Paint Company of Oakland. Unlike the original crude adobes, the Castro Valley reproduction featured a tile floor, entrance lobby, kitchen, restrooms, a large meeting hall with a copper mural over the large fireplace portraying scenes from of life of California Indians, and a mosaic at the entrance to the building depicting a bull fight and the completion of the intercontinental railroad.

The Adobe Art Center has become the center for local community arts and history housing permanent exhibits and hosting rotating shows, temporarily for other purposes in intervening years, but most memorable to me, The Castro Valley Adobe is the grammar school where I attended kindergarten under the patient and thoughtful teacher Mrs. Bea Hampton in 1947.