City Hall Apartment Building, Martinez
Near Vallejo, California
You are near a quirky footnote in California civic history. The City Hall Apartment Building in Martinez went up in nineteen fourteen, making it the first apartment building ever built in this Contra Costa County seat. It was financed and built during a refinery boom that was reshaping the town, with Mayor John J.
McNamara and businessman George J. Winkleman among its backers. What made the structure genuinely unusual was its site: it was built directly astride Alhambra Creek, straddling the waterway rather than working around it.
The ground floor held retail shops while professional offices and residences filled the upper floors. The refinery wealth that funded it would define Martinez for decades, but the building's creek-straddling footprint remains the strangest detail of all.
