Saint Mary's College and High School celebrate their shared Sesquicentennial Year in 2012-2013.
Saint Mary's Moves to Oakland
Saint Mary's College & High School (1863) relocated from the cold and fog of their distant San Francisco campus to the schools' second location at 30th & Broadway in Oakland in 1889. The school was a multi-story brick building, affectionately named "The Brickpile," and fronted on Broadway adjacent to the Key System Line A streetcar. For context, the Brickpile was a mile-walk from Fenton's Creamery (1894) and St. Leo Church (1911) on nearby Piedmont Avenue, and just a block below "Pill Hill" with its old Providence Hospital (1904) and medical centers. Today the area is known as Broadway Auto Row.
The two school departments moved to larger facilities after four decades in Oakland, the high school to Berkeley in 1927 and the College to Moraga in 1928. The Brickpile came down in about 1930 and many of its bricks were trucked to Napa, where the Christian Brothers were building their Novitiate and winery at Mont La Salle. In April 1959, school alumni arranged for California State Historical Marker #676 to be placed at the Oakland school site. The bronze plaque is on the front of today's Bay City Chevrolet at Broadway and Hawthorne.
Read about the schools' San Francisco origins on Patch.
