We complain a lot about our city, Oakland. But I took a long walk yesterday, from my home in Adams Point down Broadway to Jack London Square, and back up through Old Oakland to City Center and Frank Ogawa Plaza, and I re-fell in love. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, the air mild, the sun strong, the sky blue, as it almost always is. And I couldn’t help but think, What a beautiful city.
The architecture downtown is great: Tribune Tower. City Hall. What I call the Ghostbusters Building, at 16th and Broadway, whose real name is The Cathedral Building (1913). So many wonderful little restaurants and cafés and coffee shops. Broadway looking spiffy with all those new towers between 12th Street and 17th Street. And what a fabulous diversity of people: a true rainbow of races, ethnicities, cultures, languages. I love checking out street fashion, which has influenced my own clothing over the years. I like sagging (not that I would do it—too old).
I like watching the skateboard kids at Latham Square, with their athleticism and determination. De Lauer’s Super News Stand is still there, ancient when I moved here 35 years ago, and has survived earthquakes, depressions, downtown riots. I hope it’s always there. I love the breweries and winetasting shops sprinkled between Jack London and Uptown. There was nothing like that when I moved here, in 1987, and regardless of your views on gentrification, I should hope everybody’s glad Oakland has a great local beer and wine scene. And I love the reassuring presence of the OPD building on Seventh Street, possibly the ugliest in town, but one where brave men and women don the uniform to keep us safe.
I love the downtown dispensaries; I hope they don’t price themselves out of existence and force us all back onto the black market. I love Whole Foods Market, although I hate the prices. I’m right around the corner, and remember when it opened, 15 years ago or so. That was a game changer for the neighborhood; it really made Uptown happen. When I moved to Adams Point, it was a threadbare, boring neighborhood of little character—although it did have a lot of trees and nice old houses. Whole Foods was the signifier of change, and now we have all those condos going up in the Valdez Corridor, which promise—or threaten—to bring tremendous change to the neighborhood. Which is okay with me. I’ve always lived in big cities like New York and San Francisco. I know that gentrification has forced many people to move. I’ve lost good friends who couldn’t afford to remain here. That makes me sad. But you can’t freeze time. Neighborhoods change; it’s a law of human culture. All you can do is adapt.
I love Chinatown, and I especially love eating in Chinatown. Ming’s Tasty, on Webster? Don’t even get me started on their shrimp dumplings! I love Tao Yuen Pastry, on Franklin, a hole in the wall whose shumei is insanely addictive. I love the smell of newly-mown grass at the downtown Oakland Senior Center. I love the sight and sound of the little kids at St. Paul’s Episcopal School, laughing and shouting in the playground, and I love the old people from St. Paul’s Tower, just across the street, on their canes and walkers: the beginning of life and the end, all on Montecito Avenue. I love the trees on my block: splendid old Magnolias, Japanese Maples, Redwoods, Eucalyptus, gnarled old Oaks and others whose names I don’t even know. This is the Urban Forest, and we have to protect what little we still have. PG&E cut down two gorgeous, ancient Royal Palms on my block a few years ago, and I miss them to this day.
That’s the thing: Oakland is my city. I love it, revere it, respect it, want to protect it. I have as much right, after 35 years, to call myself a true Oaklander as anyone. I love Uptown, Broadway, Telegraph, Webster, Franklin, Oak, Snow Park. Lakeside Park! What a miracle. Lake Merritt! A gift. I must have run thousands of miles around that lake back in my running days. I love the botanical garden and the bonsai garden within it. I love watching the waterfowl. I used to bring Gus there, before he died, and we’d sit on a bench as the gulls, ducks, herons, egrets, cormorants and pelicans dove and soared and waddled and floated on the water. I love sprawling on a nice green slope of grass next to Children’s Fairyland on a warm, sunny day, although you have to watch out for goose poop, and with my lack of melanin, I have to put on plenty of sunscreen. I love the youthfulness of Oakland. It’s a young town, at least in my flatlands neighborhood. When I was walking, I saw three young LatinX kids, maybe 16. Two boys and a girl, on a single scooter, laughing and having a great time as they zoomed down the sidewalk. It was beautiful.
There are so many wonderful things about Oakland which I don’t want to get lost in the conversations about crime, camps and cops. That just plays into the Republican talking point that Oakland (and San Francisco) are inhabitable hellholes--another Big Lie. It’s so important to remind ourselves that Oakland is much more than 101 murders and counting, more than defund the police, more than homelessness. Oakland will always be so much more because, well, it’s Oakland!
Steve Heimoff