Mayor of Oakland

This is the list of mayors of the city of Oakland, California, which was founded in 1852. It was incorporated as a city in 1854.

Until the early 20th century, all Oakland mayors served terms of only one or two years each.

On May 17, 1852, thirteen days after Oakland was incorporated, the board of trustees who governed the city during its first two years, granted Carpentier rights to the entire waterfront for a period of 37 years (soon amended to "in fee simple forever"), in exchange for $5 and the building of three wharves and one school house. Besides ownership of the waterfront, Carpentier also built up a ferry monopoly and a toll bridge across present day Lake Merritt, so that "he and his associates were collecting a fee on virtually every passenger, animal, or item of cargo that entered or left Oakland." Vehement efforts to overthrow Carpentier's monopoly of the waterfront began almost immediately and were later centered on the Central, or Southern Pacific Railroad, which had title to most of the estuary transferred from Carpentier in 1868.

In 1852 he was elected to the State Assembly in what was generally viewed as a highly fraudulent victory, but in the legislature he pushed for the creation of Alameda County and/or Oakland's incorporation as a city, not a town, in 1854. He was then elected Oakland's first mayor on April 17, 1854, defeating S.J. Clark, 192-92, in another election whose legitimacy has often been questioned. Only 29 years old, Oakland's first mayor was also the youngest ever elected. He lived at a "sumptuous estate" at Third and Alice Streets (the latter was named after his only sister): Although reviled as the man who tied up Oakland's waterfront for personal gain for the entire 19th-century, Carpentier was also fully committed to the development of the new city, and he delivered a far-sighted inaugural address calling for, among other goals, Oakland becoming the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad (fifteen years before this goal was accomplished), and for strict preservation of the city's native oaks.

An unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for State Attorney General ended his political career, and for the next ten years he was president of the California State Telegraph Company, which built the state's first telegraph system, and president of the Overland Telegraph Company, which linked California to the East, as well as a founder of the Bank of California. He returned to New York in 1880 and died at his home at 108 East Thirty-Seventh Street in New York City on January 31, 1918, at the age of 93. He is buried at Galway, New York.

Carpentier had been elected to the boards of trustees of both Columbia University and Barnard College in 1906, at the age of 81, and served on the boards until his death. He was described as the "most progressive, enlightened, financially generous trustee" of his era, who endowed the first chair in Chinese studies at any U.S. university (which he had named after his Chinese valet, Dean Lung); pressed for alumni representation on the board, and for the recruitment of Catholic and Jewish trustees; championed the place of Barnard women within the university (out of respect for his mother, whom he described as a remarkable woman who had been denied an education); and continually pressed the president of the university, Nicholas Murray Butler, to make the university not only "great" but also "democratic." Carpentier, who lived with several servants and his collie dog for many years before his death, was also a trustee and benefactor to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. A lifelong bachelor without any immediate descendants, he left an estate of $3.5 million, and gave over $2 million of that to Columbia University and Barnard College (in addition to the $2 million he had left those institutions previously), $100,000 to the University of California and $100,000 to the Pacific Theological Seminary in Berkeley. He left nothing to Oakland institutions.

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