Cloyne Court Hotel

About this property

The Cloyne Court Hotel, often referred to simply as Cloyne, is a historical landmark in Berkeley, California, and currently one of the houses of the Berkeley Student Cooperative (BSC), a student housing cooperative. It is located at the north side of the University of California, Berkeley campus at 2600 Ridge Road, near Soda Hall and Jacobs Hall, and is the next door neighbor of the Goldman School of Public Policy. The building is owned by the Regents of the University of California. "Cloyne Court was designed by campus architect John Galen Howard in 1904 as a luxury residential hotel for visiting scholars." Cloyne Court, named after Cloyne, the village in Ireland where George Berkeley was bishop, was built in 1904 for $80,000 by the University Land and Improvement Company, which included several University professors, University benefactresses Phoebe Apperson Hearst and Jane K. Sather, future Regent James K. Moffit, Dr. Louis Lisser, John L. Howard, Warren Olney, Dr. Kasper Pishel, Louis Titus, John Galen Howard, the architect of the building and James M. Pierce, the later owner of the hotel. The building, described as a "high-class, modern apartment house," originally contained 32 suites, each with bath, that were not connected by common hallways, but rather were paired onto private stairways to the first floor public areas. Each section was separated by heavy brick firewalls with automatic fireproof doors and each suite was wired for telephone. In 1911, the music room (today called lib-ed room) was added to the building, directly opposite the main entrance, which hosted numerous lectures and music recitals. The building was one of a rare few to survive the devastating 1923 Berkeley fire, remarkable also because the building is made of redwood and all of the buildings had (and still have) wood shake siding and roofs. Pierce and his family purchased Cloyne Court - Apartment-Hotel from the investors and managed it from its opening in 1904 until 1914. The family continued operating the hotel until it was sold in 1946. Notable residents included Lizzie Glide, Mrs. George Morton Randall, Mrs. Henry M. Black, John Frederick Wolle, Anna Miller Wood, and Liberty Hyde Bailey, and guests included Francis E. Leupp, Charles Zueblin, Ludwig Boltzmann, James Mark Baldwin, Susan B. Anthony, and Edgar Odell Lovett. Cloyne Court - Silence and peace in an insane world. - Ernest Bloch, 1944 Cloyne Court, a haven and a place where the gentle art of hospitality is made manifest to the unknown stranger as well as to the great ones of our day. - Mary Lambert, 1942 Giving people a happy home is a divine service. - Benjamin Ide Wheeler, 1923

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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