signs: Happy Time Liquors

From the other week when I was in West Oakland for the walking tour with Luke. Not a great sign by any stretch, but one of relatively few signs in West Oakland.

walking tour: West Oakland

World Impact

Saturday morning I joined Luke Prince for a walking tour of West Oakland. This isn't part of the city tours program or the Oakland Heritage Alliance tours program, but it should be. The city tours are focused downtown, and the OHA tours in different neighborhoods of Oakland, but none covers the significant history of Prescott and Lower Bottoms.

Luke and I met at the West Oakland center of World Impact, a ministry working all over the world and here in Oakland. Coincidentally the building is across the street from a liquor store that has a sign I'd been meaning to photograph. The area near the liquor store used to be a magnet for drug trouble in the neighborhood before World Impact came in.

where OPD officer was shot

The first spot we went to was where OPD officer John Frey was shot. Frey had stopped Black Panther Party (BPP) co-founder Huey Newton during one of the BPP defense patrols in the pre-dawn hours. After fellow officer Herbert Heanes arrived for backup, shots were fired, all three were wounded, and Frey died. Newton claimed that Frey shot him first, which made him lose consciousness. He awoke in Kaiser Hospital handcuffed to his bed, and was convicted in 1968 of voluntary manslaughter. He served two years before the California Appellate Court reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. After two mistrials, the California Supreme Court dropped the case.

We walked along admiring the Victorians and other houses. Luke pointed out an "almost polite house" where he had lived when he first came to Oakland. An "almost polite house" was one that had multiple families living in it, and was subdivided each night by curtains to provide more privacy for sleeping. Some were designed with that in mind, resulting in houses with an odd assortment of half walls.

West Oakland was the home of a happening soul, R&B and jazz scene during the 40s, 50s, and 60s until construction of BART and the main post office brought it to an end. One place that survived longer was the Continental Club, which still opens for occasionally for private events. A lot of the music had Louisiana and New Orleans influences, because many of the workers recruited during WWII came from there. Read more in my post about Esther's Orbit Room.

16th Street Station

No discussion of Oakland history is complete without talking about the influence of the railroads, and that's especially true for West Oakland. The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and had its western terminus in Oakland. The first trains ran to Alameda, and the original terminus station was on 7th Street in Old Oakland, but eventually the 16th Street Station became the hub. We talked about the Pullman porters and the rise of the black middle class, and the importance of unions like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the civil rights movement -- recall that MLK was in Memphis to support the sanitation workers union when he was shot.

Victorian

While better in many ways, life in West Oakland wasn't a complete bed of roses. Jack London (who lived at 807 Pine) described a cannery as a "hell hole" where he worked 12-18 hour days as a 15-year-old. It was not uncommon to see children around West Oakland who were missing fingers or limbs, lost working in the factories north of 13th Street. Pullman porters, while better paid than some, were not fairly paid compared with whites. The 1949 construction of the Cypress Structure split West Oakland in half for decades. Industry has left contaminated soil.

But despite some modern problems like gentrification, drugs, and cleaning up past pollution, West Oakland is a lively, beautiful part of Oakland full of interesting people (who all seem to know Luke). It has great weather, easy access to Uptown, Downtown, and the Bay Bridge, and a burgeoning art and maker scene. If you're interested in taking the West Oakland history tour, contact Luke via email at lprince14 at gmail.com. He told me a ton more than I've written about here, and it makes for an interesting tour.

More reading:
Putting the "There" There: Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland
Black Panthers history
Pullman porter museum
Oakland Local : Right beneath our feet: Brownfields in West Oakland

More pictures:

West Oakland walking tour

my Oakland map

Finishing off map week is the most accurate but least useful map: how I visualize Oakland. It's by definition 100% accurate because it's how I think of things, but it's not terribly useful outside of telling people how I think of our fair city.

View my Oakland map in a larger map
It's kind of like a single data point in the Mapping Oakland project. Not nearly as useful as a bunch of maps like this aggregated together.

Some good news is that I heard back from Robert, the researcher behind the Mapping Oakland project. Although the web page hasn't been updated, he's still working on things:

I am actually finishing up the analysis for Temescal and Fruitvale districts... I hope to have the maps up on the web page sometime by mid April. I'm presenting the results in April, so after I complete my presentation I will have a bit of time to start uploading the maps to the net.

Back to my map. You may be wondering why some large areas are a single district, while a few small neighborhoods get labeled. In no particular order:

• Hiller Highlands - this is known (at least by name) to most residents of the Oakland hills, because it's where the 1991 Oakland firestorm started
• Sobrante Park - this neighborhood at the far south end of Oakland is where I've been volunteering to help build houses with Habitat for Humanity East Bay for the last several years (and an older development 10+ years ago, too)
• Village Bottoms - I first heard of Village Bottoms because of a workshop at West Coast Green last year
• Ghosttown - I heard about Ghosttown because of Ghost Town Farm, Novella Carpenter's urban farm. It got a big jump in publicity when she published Farm City, a book about her experiences with urban farming.

The rest of my map is much more arbitrary, depending on how much time I've spent in different parts of Oakland and their proximity to different landmarks like Lake Merritt or the zoo.

All in all, not a particularly useful map. It'd be great to be able to compare other people's similar maps, though not very practical because of the difficulty in creating them.

diversity

Oakland is a wonderfully diverse city, which is part of why so many of us love it.

Thursday I was over to Village Bottoms for an open house, a follow-up of sorts to a workshop at West Coast Green where people from a wide variety of backgrounds brainstormed ideas about how to recreate the area. It's gone through a lot of changes from a terminus of transcontinental railroad to a reemerging neighborhood today. Two of the biggest changes were the building of the Cypress Structure in the 1950s which cut off the area from the rest of Oakland, and its subsequent collapse in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Since then residents have been working to reshape the area. We started with a tour led by Marcel Diallo, community activist and businessman in the Bottoms:


I was also there to check out an open house for Central Station, a multi-part housing development in the area, centered around the 16th Street Station that once formed the hub of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Oakland. SFGate.com's Chip Johnson was there and has a nice write-up on the project. There are even some nice green features in parts of the development, like a living roof on the apartment building.

Nearby to the apartments and lofts are The Blackdot Cafe, The Soul Foods Cooperative Grocery Store, and other burgeoning businesses. Food and drinks for the event were provided by Linden Street Brewery, Brown Sugar Kitchen, and other Oakland businesses. There's still a lot of work to do such as cleaning up the old Phoenix Ironworks site, but Village Bottoms is looking up.

Then last night, K and I attended an interfaith service at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 'Keeping the Faith'. People from a wide range of faith traditions in Oakland, from Jewish to Christian to Buddhist to Native American spoke about the keeping the faith towards a day when Prop 8 will be overturned. It was an amazing service, and a reminder for all that not all people of faith are against gay marriage. Oakland city council-member Rebecca Kaplan spoke about her experiences of being a lesbian and growing up in an orthodox Jewish household, reps from the Episcopal Church and the ELCA (Lutherans) spoke about recent decisions to open the churches to the LGBT community, and Sheilagh Brooks read a powerful poem about her struggles. Around the sanctuary there were banners about different aspects of the struggle and successes. We spotted one that told the story of a former co-worker of K's and her partner. And we all prayed for the elections today in Maine and Washington, that the LGBT communities in those states might have the freedoms that were briefly enjoyed here in California.

building green for people

electric car

Last week I was at West Coast Green, a green building and design conference in San Francisco. Besides speakers on all sorts of green technologies, standards and legislation, there were two exhibit rooms of companies with green products, and a special section called the Innovation Pipeline with new and upcoming products. One of the more interesting displays was a portable, on-demand housing unit that's designed to shelter people in the wake of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, and be zero-impact, too. It's an impressive unit that can be shipped anywhere in the world in a shipping container, and set up in two hours with unskilled people, and includes solar panels and water treatment. But even with a product like that, never mind expensive solar-power roof tiles or fancy countertops, it's easy to lose sight of people in the equation and just be looking at costs and carbon.

presentation

That's why I was delighted to find one session titled Creating Social and Sustainable Economic Development in West Oakland, sponsored by the Home Depot Foundation. People with a wide variety of backgrounds came together with Ecocity Builders to brainstorm ideas for land use in West Oakland. But the kicker was that we weren't designing in a vacuum. People from Village Bottoms and A Black New World joined the discussion, and told us what their priorities and visions for the area were. I knew a tiny bit about the area since I'd worked on some Habitat for Humanity houses nearby, and been to City Slicker Farms, but mostly we knew nothing but what a few briefs told us about the former Phoenix Iron Works site. So having residents there to work alongside was amazing and inspiring. We heard about Village Bottoms Farms, about the burgeoning artist community, and about the history of the area.

Admittedly there was a limited amount we could do in 2 hours, but it was a great session, and a reminder that people are the most important part of the equation for any urban planning.