May means graduation at UC Berkeley, and the ritual drop by the Theta Delta Chi fraternity to see where Dustin Hoffman curbed his red Alfa in "The Graduate" and dashed past the dog being fed atop the dining room table and upstairs to smoke out the Makeout King.

Few notice the Julia Morgans behind it or the Walter Ratcliff designs that bookend a congested stretch of College Avenue. The three short blocks from Bancroft Way to Haste Street span 108 years of California collegiate residential architecture. It started in 1897 with a Berkeley brown shingle on Durant (now Theta Xi, next to Theta Delta Chi) took a break 60 years later with completion of the regrettable state-issue dormitory towers, and is going again. A Craftsman-style student apartment building opened two years ago, and four new residence halls are coming, including a throwback brown shingle, adding 1,300 beds to the Southside crush.

For the next few weeks, before students disappear into the summer, College Avenue is something to see, with the ivy greened up and energized for its climb toward the roof lines.

The place to start is across from the open mining pit that used to be Underhill Field, between Channing Avenue and Haste Street.

Quick, look the other way to a proudly weathered three-story building with red-brick steps rising through the ivy and hedge to an arched portico. This is Channing Apartments, a masterpiece of Walter Ratcliff, City Beautiful practitioner.

"People see it and stop in their tracks," says John Goldberg, the resident manager. When they start back up again, they head up the brick stairs to inquire about moving in.

At the top is the soft-spoken Goldberg, 53, ready to pleasantly advise them that there are no vacancies and there is no waiting list. No deposits or year-leases, either. Everything is passed along word of mouth, and that's how the 15-unit apartment house has been run since it opened in 1913. It has had just one owner, the family of John Weston Havens, a descendant of Francis Kittredge Shattuck, founder of Berkeley and donor of the land for the university.

The blue-and-white china that used to come in all rooms has been removed, and so have the roll-top desks and Murphy beds. But the sleeping porches and Wedgewood stoves are still there, as are some of the tenants. Former manager David Browne has kept his apartment since he graduated in 1975, even while living in Spain and Sonoma. Goldberg graduated in 1976, and when the complication of marriage arose some years later, his bride, Christine, took the apartment across the hall. "We go back and forth," he says.

With the windows open, he can hear the bells of the Campanile, his signal to walk down to Caffe Strada, on the corner of College and Bancroft. "That is the best coffee in Berkeley," he says. Best sun deck, too. As the manager, it is his duty to stay up on developments so that he can "take the residents of the Channing Apartments on a neighborhood walk some day,'' he says, noting that in 20 years that day has yet to arrive.

On the corner of Bancroft is Westminster House, Ratcliff's "collegiate Tudor" completed in 1926 as the campus ministry. The upstairs has been remodeled into apartments, and the Great Hall below as a restaurant named Adagia. Signs and gift certificates have been printed, awaiting an operating permit, which should come next fall, this being Berkeley.

Across College and next to Caffe Strada is the Bancroft Hotel, built in 1928 as the College Women's Club. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it was designed in the Arts and Crafts style by Walter Steilberg, an associate of Julia Morgan. Reopened in the 1990s as a hotel, the Bancroft has a picture in its lobby of Morgan in a Mary Poppins hat, staring into the adjacent grand ballroom.

By contrast, the simple Smith House, hidden behind a fence next to Caffe Strada, is a Morgan from 1905. A man with a thick accent answers the door and says, "Julia Morgan, same one as San Simeon, the castle.'' A rescued rooming house, it is now an office for the coffeehouse Caffe Strada.

"We came in, and there were holes in the walls and hammocks hanging down from the ceiling,'' says the owner, Darrell Ross.

"The Graduate" house next door is either the most famous fraternity facade in America, or second to "Animal House." With its garden setback and wood-frame windows opening over the porch, it should be a city, state, even national landmark. But the Theta Delts don't want to hassle with the regulations and be told they can't expand.

The entryway is what counts, and the only change since the 1960s is that the ivy has taken over. But that's not the trivia that sticks from the film.

"They drove the wrong way on the Bay Bridge," remembers Ross.