About this site

Charles MacGregor built thousands of houses across the East Bay, and this site is not about most of them. It catalogs one specific kind — the 25-Foot MacGregors: the small split-levels he put up four at a time on 25-foot lots, mostly in the years around 1940 — nine hundred or so square feet of stucco with the garage tucked under the house, one bedroom at street level and another up a half flight, an arched doorway, a coved living-room ceiling, a breakfast nook.

"He tackled the 25 foot lots, of which there were very many, and it was very hard to do anything with them."

— Charlotte MacGregor Boggs, his daughter, in a 1983 interview

East Bay agents still list these houses simply as "MacGregors" — the name survives as an architectural style in the local MLS. This catalog gives them a narrower one, the 25-Foot MacGregors, to keep them distinct from everything else he built. And "one specific kind" is meant literally. Here is the same house three times, on the same Richmond street:

525 28th St533 28th St653 28th St

Every one of them started out as more or less the same house. Nearly ninety years later, none of them are:

• One has changed hands eight times; another has never recorded a sale at all.
• One came back on the market after roughly eighty years off it.
• The one for sale right now turned its garage into real living space, with a door from the living room leading down into it — the only house in the collection to do it that way.
• The same plan that sold for over a million dollars in Albany goes for a fraction of that a few miles north in Richmond.
• And the houses keep small secrets — owners still find storage tucked into attics, where a builder famous for wasting nothing hid a little extra room.

That slow divergence is what this site exists to record, one address at a time: an exterior photograph, the freely available property statistics, every recorded sale, and notes on what makes each house itself.

The catalog could someday widen to the rest of his work — the Berkeley cottages, the Piedmont houses, the Oakland apartment blocks — but for now it stays with the 25-footers. The author of the site bought one of them, which is probably how all this counting started.

The builder, briefly

Charles Manning MacGregor (1871–1954) was a Nova Scotia carpenter who landed in Oakland in 1889 and built at a pace that is hard to believe now. On a single day in September 1906 he pulled thirty-two building permits in Berkeley — and all thirty-two cottages are still standing. By thirty-six he had built six hundred homes; in Albany he built roughly 1,500, close to half the houses in town, which is why he is remembered as the builder of Albany.

He kept his own crews of carpenters, plasterers, and painters rather than hiring subcontractors, ran a lumber company on the side, and let young families rent their way into ownership through the Depression — while, the stories go, quietly leaving groceries and children's shoes on the doorsteps of families who were struggling.

Everyone called him "One-Nail MacGregor," and there are two versions of why. His own: he would walk the job after his men knocked off and drive one more nail for good measure. His competitors': he never spent a nail he could keep.

Albany sided with him. From 1936 until his death the city threw an annual MacGregor Day, which began with a parade and settled into free ice cream and movies for schoolchildren at the Albany Theater. A small plaque set into the sidewalk at Solano and Carmel still marks the site of his office.

Further reading

The best of what the internet holds on MacGregor, gathered in one place:

• Research yields the "truth" of MacGregor homes — a 1999 Hills Newspapers column (archived) by an Albany agent who went to the library to check whether "MacGregor" meant a style or a man. The source of his daughter's best quotes, including her father looking out over an empty Solano Avenue: "I think this will be a good town — a family town. I am going to start building out here."
• Charles Manning MacGregor, Indefatigable Builder — Daniella Thompson's 2006 Berkeley Daily Planet column (archived), the deepest single account: the thirty-two-permit day, the intact block of his 1906 cottages on Pine Avenue in Berkeley, and how his business methods were built for the Depression before it arrived.
• Charles MacGregor – The "Builder of Albany" — Karen Sorensen's 2014 Albany Patch profile, the fullest short biography. Sorensen went on to write the Arcadia Publishing Albany photo history with the Albany Historical Society.
• Albany History: MacGregor Day — Edwin Zee's Albany Gazette piece on the holiday a town threw for its builder every September from 1936 to 1954.
• Charles M. MacGregor on LocalWiki — the community-maintained hub: family, office addresses, and his Oakland buildings.
• Madison Park Apartments — his biggest single building, a 98-unit Edwardian block from 1908 that is on the National Register of Historic Places and ran a speakeasy in the basement during Prohibition.
• Site of Charles MacGregor's Office — the sidewalk plaque at 1393 Solano Avenue, number five of the Albany Historical Society's eight historical plaques.
• City of Albany residential design guidelines (PDF) — the city's official design-review guidance, written around its MacGregor housing stock, down to advice on how to add a second story without losing the house underneath.

The data

Property statistics and sale histories come from public records and may lag or contain errors; corrections are welcome.

Browse all the houses, jump straight to a particular city, or see how their sale prices have moved in Insights.