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Historian Warren F. Lee ’51 and his wife, Catherine, recently published The Selective History of the Codornices and the U.C. Berkeley University Villages, the City of Albany and Environs. The book looks at California’s East Bay from World War II to the present, including the towns of Albany and Berkeley, Richmond Shipyard and its railway, and Albany Village, a public housing project built for shipyard workers that now houses graduate students.
Lee’s long-time interest in railroad history links this book with his earlier volumes, Down Along the Old Bel Del (1987) and A Chronology of the Belvidere Delaware Railroad and the Communities through Which It Operated (1989). “I came out to California to research the Richmond Shipyard Railway,” Lee says. “My focus gradually expanded to what the residents of Albany Village would see, think, and do.”
The Lees were residents of Albany Village from 1992-98, when Warren was doing postdoctoral research at Berkeley. “During WWII, it was perhaps the first integrated public housing project in the nation,” he says. “The shipyard needed workers, and the workers needed housing. At one point a ship was being assembled every four days.”
Lee is completing The Militant Reconstructionists in Metropolitan London, 1880-1914. The Lees have homes in Albuquerque, N.M., and Hercules, Calif.