Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption

By Mitchell Schwarzer

Hella Town reveals the profound impact of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland’s built environment.
 
Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city’s postwar struggles.
 
Toward the turn of the millennium, as immigration from Latin America and East Asia increased, Oakland became one of the most diverse cities in the country. The city still grapples with the consequences of uneven class- and race-based development-amid-disruption. How do past decisions about where to locate highways or public transit, urban renewal districts or civic venues, parks or shopping centers, influence how Oaklanders live today? A history of Oakland’s buildings and landscapes, its booms and its busts, provides insight into its current conditions: an influx of new residents and businesses, skyrocketing housing costs, and a lingering chasm between the haves and have-nots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520381131

Book preview

Hella Town

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Peter Booth Wiley Endowment Fund in History.

Hella Town

OAKLAND’S HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND DISRUPTION

Mitchell Schwarzer

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Mitchell Schwarzer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schwarzer, Mitchell, author.

Title: Hella town : Oakland’s history of development and disruption / Mitchell Schwarzer.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020054657 (print) | LCCN 2020054658 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520381124 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520381131 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: City planning—Social aspects—California—Oakland. | City planning—Political aspects—California—Oakland. | Oakland (Calif.)—History—Political aspects. | Oakland (Calif.)—History—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC F869.O2 S38 2021 (print) | LCC F869.O2 (ebook) | DDC 979.4/66—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054657

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054658

Manufactured in the United States of America

30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For the Ohlone peoples,

who have long tended the land

now known as Oakland.

Contents

Introduction

PART I

1. Streetcar Stratification

2. Industrial Powerhouse

PART II

3. Space for Automobiles

4. The Politics of Parks

5. Major League Venue

PART III

6. The Promise and the Reality of Freeways and BART

7. In the Wake of Deindustrialization

8. Housing Injustice

9. Downtown Renewal and Ruin

10. Shopping Centers and Storefront Streets

Coda

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography of Books about Oakland

Index

Map 1. Streets, Highways, and Major Features. Map by Dennis McLendon.

Map 2. Neighborhoods. Approximate boundaries of 146 neighborhoods. Map by Ozan Berke and Stephen Texeira.

Introduction

There is no there there, Gertrude Stein’s notorious statement about Oakland, appeared in her 1937 memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography. Stein lived in Oakland from age 6 to 17. In 1891, she moved with her family to Baltimore, and in 1935, now a noted author and socialite, returned for a lecture tour. Speaking at the English club at Mills College, she grudgingly agreed to visit her former stomping grounds around 13th Avenue and E. 25th Street. In the intervening 44 years, the landscape had been recast from an occasional farmhouse, surrounded by rose bushes and peach and eucalyptus trees, to corridors of single-family dwellings. The Steins’ family house and expansive grounds were gone. Gertrude was disoriented and later penned the famous remark. Regardless of the fact that she was expressing the kind of disappointment that most people would feel upon revisiting a home long departed and witnessing that everything had changed, her words have since underpinned a false impression that Oakland is lacking in something, in someplace.¹

It is worth recalling that in 1935 what may have distressed Stein had uplifted the builders of the district as well as its residents and businesses. Starting in the 1890s, Oaklanders experienced a profound increase in their personal mobility through the aegis of electric streetcars, which turned the walking city into a radial metropolis. After the 1906 Earthquake, which destroyed San Francisco, Oakland’s growth accelerated. New industries capitalized on California’s growth. Housing construction ramped up, and macadamized roads were laid for the latest mass phenomenon—automobiles. At the time of Stein’s visit, the Great Depression had dampened investment, but it resumed with a vengeance during the Second World War.

Figure 1. Stein’s old neighborhood. In the vicinity of 13th Avenue and E. 25th Street. Photo by Mitchell Schwarzer, 2020.

Had Stein been able to come back 44 years after her lecture tour visit, in 1979, she would have experienced a city transformed once more. Scattered apartment buildings broke up single-family house rows, many of whose windows were now secured by metal bars. Buses ran where streetcars had. Upslope, an eight-lane freeway coursed across the base of the hills, and higher still, on what had been cascading carpets of wildflowers, the latest subdivisions were being erected. Down by the waterfront, the manufacturing belt was emptying. Once-vibrant commercial arteries were marred by unoccupied storefronts and vacant lots. Another process of city change was taking place: disinvestment yielding deterioration.

When Stein visited her former neighborhood, she had recently returned to America after having spent over 30 years in Paris. Approaching a city like Oakland with European preconceptions of stability, hierarchy, and monumentality invariably leads to disappointment. Place in California is better understood as a verb and not a noun, a process of moving and making and remaking. If Oakland appears faceless at times, that is less a flaw on its part and more an inability of an observer to appreciate the fits and starts of urbanization in a California city. Instead of a grand canvas showing finished pieces in flawless order, cities like Oakland, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and even the European-seeming San Francisco expose snapshots of city formation and deformation, driven by economics, technology, and politics: one where the Civil War jump-started cotton production in California farmlands, leading to cotton manufacturing alongside the waterfront; another where an innovation in transportation, the electric traction streetcar, cast commercial strips across the flatlands and lower hills; and another still where the racist approach to guaranteeing mortgage loans on the part of a federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, brought deprivation to minority neighborhoods.

Land-use and building patterns are a puzzle that can only be deciphered by going back in time, following the patchy moments when plans get realized, or not, when the variable trajectories of real estate acts become apparent, and when the changing priorities of governmental and business entities make themselves felt. After progressing northward from the waterfront, Oakland coalesced a retail district on lower Washington Street and an office center around 14th and Broadway. While a new office district arose along Lake Merritt’s western end, the retail district continued to move north along Broadway, and then disintegrated. Numerous plans were hatched for a civic center on the lake’s southern side; Oakland ended up with three dispersed collections of governmental buildings, and only one by the lake. When land was available, Oakland leaders failed to set aside a large central park in the vicinity of Lake Merritt. Park acquisitions took place primarily in the upper hills, far from where most of the population lived.

It is from those lofty heights where we can get a comprehensive visual picture of Oakland’s land-use and building patterns: the waters claimed from the bay for manufacturing and the Port of Oakland; the transportation-industrial corridors paralleling the waterfront; the high-rise offices and residences downtown and by the lake; the sea of low-rise housing stretching from those districts across the flatlands, lower hills, and upper hills, punctuated here and there by hospitals, church spires, and a tall office or apartment block. Equally, we can construe the city’s natural geography: a sweep of terrain fronting an estuary of San Francisco Bay and shielded by the San Francisco peninsula from the direct winds and fog of the Pacific Ocean; a landscape canvas ascending from the bay’s salt marshes to alluvial plains to undulating hillsides and finally steep canyons and peaks topping out at 1,760 feet.

•   •   •   •   •

Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption examines Oakland’s built environment from the 1890s to the early twenty-first century, from the time when population growth, industrialization, and mechanized transportation unleashed the conditions for the modern city, to the contemporary moment when the region’s galloping information-age economy has produced a dire housing shortage amid lopsided privatization of urban development. Over this span of more than 125 years, I track the uneven pace of development, the booms and busts, the buildups and breakdowns of a great American city. I analyze how transportation improvements charted its growth, how built functions—housing, workplace, shopping, and civic culture/recreation—were realized, and how those functions were subject to elite control and inequities tied to race.² Development, the act of adding to (and/or subtracting from) the physical makeup of a city, invariably brings forth disruption. How development proceeds, gradually or rapidly, thoughtfully or recklessly, openly or behind closed doors, determines the severity of the disruption as well as who comes out ahead and who gets left behind.

The title, Hella Town, draws from two local memes. Most Bay Area residents call San Francisco the City; by contrast, many Oaklanders refer to their home as the Town, Oaktown, an acknowledgment of its smaller size and status, and its gritty, down-to-earth vibe. The term hella popped up within East Bay youth culture after the 1970s, a shortened version of helluva or hellacious, signifying very or extremely, an adverb like the Southern California totally that gives an adjective or noun both emphasis and a distinct regional flavor. Together, the words hella and town, Hella Town, describe an Oakland that has struggled to measure up to its adjacent metropolitan center but, at the same time, an Oakland prideful in its upstart status, an Oakland not only warmer in weather but warmer in personality, an Oakland as an exceptional convergence of religions, ethnicities, races, social classes, and sexual orientations. Back in 1987, hip-hop artist Too $hort rapped on the song Oakland: Oakland, Oaktown, Oakland, Oaktown, straight from the west, Oakland is the best, baby it’s so fresh . . . To know why Oakland can be hella fresh or hella disrespectful, another song by Too $hort, we need to start with the economic geography that underlies the town’s advent. From colonial through contemporary times, land development has been central to the formation of an American society. Once surveyed, recorded, and put up for sale, land is developed and disrupted, recast into a more valuable resource and more intensive activity. An acre occupied by forest becomes, say, a farmstead. It might give way later to residences and, afterward, storefronts or office buildings. Each change cements the land to rules of law, political machinations, and a marketplace of expectation, exchange, and exploitation. Access is crucial: in both senses of the word. First, people benefit by being able to get to a particular location with increasing ease and speed—a plot of land links into a network that ramps up connections to other people and places. Second, people purchase, occupy, or benefit from the connected plot of land—control is taken by certain individuals or segments of society while others are kept out.

In Hella Town, I give special emphasis to how emergent transportation technologies and systemic racism configured access to urbanized land. Circulatory infrastructures, from public mass transit to private automobiles, and long-standing biases against people of color, were perpetuated at individual and societal levels, and operated as synergistic factors in the growth of the built environment and its patterns of neighborhood change and succession.

On one side, how people got around—walking, horse-drawn omnibuses, electric traction streetcars, automobiles, buses, freeways, BART, bicycles—regulated physical access to the town’s acreage, determining the distance that could be covered on a daily basis and the disposition of the trip undertaken: fast or slow; relaxed or tiresome; isolated or in closer contact to both the cityscape and other people. Each type of transportation infrastructure influenced where development took place, what kind was favored, and how it was built with respect to density and lot coverage.³ These networks were never fully public or private: managed by private companies in the railroad and streetcar era of communal travel, and later under the jurisdiction of governmental entities, while enabling privatized freedom of movement in automobiles. Circulatory vessels between the vital urban organs, the corridors were themselves contested as to their function, sometimes accommodating a range of users and uses, other times limiting their purview to rapid vehicular passage. Entire districts could be targeted or bypassed, given help to build up or purposely disempowered: a branching of the town, as symbolized by the coast live oak, into limbs of growth, stasis, regeneration, and decay.

Transportation has long been central to Oakland’s identity. In 1852, it was founded as a sailing and trading port. Over the course of the late nineteenth century, it grew into a commercial and industrial center on the basis of its interface between shipping and railroads. In the twentieth century, that interface was extended by highways, rapid rail transit, and a pioneering container seaport as well as a jet airport. Over and over, Oakland was wired to faraway destinations, other parts of California, the Bay Region, and its internal geography. It has remained a destination for migrants, both national and international. Yet in a place that has of late counted as one of the nation’s most ethnically and racially varied populations, barriers to land access have persisted. On the other side of the coin, then, the story of access was more complicated than being able to take BART or own an automobile. Technological innovation, in and of itself, did not inherently lead to a level playing field in the urban scene. It often-times reconfigured enduring societal pecking orders.

In American cities, residential property values were customarily set according to a scale ranging from undesirable to exclusive that corresponded to use, class, and race.⁴ Was a particular plot distant from industrial plants, commercial strips, and poor neighborhoods? Could legal contracts or, when they could not be enforced, social sanctions or brute force, keep white residents apart from Asians, Latinos, or African Americans? High home values in all-white neighborhoods—one of the key markers of wealth and status, and a sign that one had attained the dream of substantial property—depended upon a contrast with lower values in poorer, mixed, and majority-minority districts, much as the idea of whiteness itself depended upon other, subordinate racial categories. Building upon earlier transportation technologies like the streetcar, the automobile accentuated these tendencies; cars contributed to an enhanced sense of individual freedom and potency expressed through socio-spatial sequestration. From the 1920s onward, most new automotive routes led to (and catalyzed the settlement of) the hills or suburbs, areas that would long be off-limits to people of color, who were left with the older flatlands—that were separate but not equal.

Such inequities were endemic to California before the twentieth century. Oakland was founded on land that had been occupied for millennia by Native Californians: Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone peoples subsisting as hunter-gatherers and small-scale agriculturists. Starting in the late eighteenth century, their villages were pushed aside by Spanish colonialists who drew the Ohlone to newly established Christian missions, causing a demographic and cultural collapse. During the 1840s and afterward, the Mexican inheritors of the Spanish Mission Era found themselves dispossessed of the land by Anglo settlers. The lands they had taken from the Ohlone and used primarily for cattle ranching were divvied up by speculators for profits in farming and urban activities. Earlier genocidal practices against the Ohlone continued, including the almost complete eradication of their villages and burial mounds. Their survivors, alongside Mexican Californios, were consigned to low-paying jobs, segregated residence in barrios, and negligible opportunities for advancement. East Asian Californians from China, Japan, the Philippines, and elsewhere, who came during the Gold Rush and afterward, found themselves similarly oppressed and segregated, their competitive actions within the marketplace thwarted by legal statutes and outright violence. Chinese immigrants occupied a social stratum in California somewhat comparable to blacks in the Jim Crow South, forced to pay extra taxes, denied the right to testify in court, and after 1882, subject to the harsh provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Ideologies of white supremacy saw this imperium as just and rational. Peoples from lands outside Europe were products of less advanced or even primitive cultures and, accordingly, best subordinated to white leadership and example. Whites were insiders. Others were outsiders. A racialized blueprint to land settlement was in place before the urban development of modern Oakland, and operational thereafter.

Black migrants arrived to California from the South in large numbers only during the military buildup leading to the Second World War. From that point on, demographic change was swift. By 1980, Oakland had become almost majority black and one of the centers of black culture and politics in the United States. Due to their numbers, blacks represented a threat to white hegemony. Throughout much of the century, the town was torn asunder by its white political establishment into two parts: one white and one black and minority; one wealthier and one poorer; one whose communities were restricted and one whose were nonrestricted; one, blue- and green-lined, endowed with finance and improvements, and one, redlined, deprived of those advantages. Racist practices colored all aspects of housing, employment, criminal justice, and education, as blacks were prevented from attaining the kinds of safety, jobs, neighborhoods, and routes of upward mobility that whites took for granted. Black residents had the unenviable distinction of police harassment and recurrent housing dispossession, worsened by government programs like highway building and urban renewal. The disappointment upon finding out that Oakland, that California, wasn’t altogether different from the South, that urbanization instigated by business growth and new transportation networks wasn’t breaking down ghetto walls, accounts for the town’s gestation of political radicalism and community activism.

In theory, expanding transportation infrastructures should have opened up more of Oakland for all Oaklanders. In practice, those technological advances repositioned segregationist real estate practices across dispersed geographies. As streetcars gave way to automobiles and buses and later freeways and BART, the geographical lines between white and nonwhite, established and newcomer, changed in turn. Over the twentieth century’s first half, the town’s relatively small (under 10 percent) minority populations lived mostly in the nineteenth-century city alongside poorer whites, while more affluent whites settled in new, racially restricted, streetcar subdivisions along the lower hills. From the 1940s through the 1970s, amid an automotive-enabled exodus of whites to suburban locales within and without the town, and in an era of negligible immigration, blacks were able to leave the West Oakland ghetto and settle across the North and East Oakland flatlands. From the 1980s through the early twenty-first century, immigrants from East Asia, Latin America, and East Africa established themselves across those flatlands while white migrants (most called gentrifiers on the basis of their higher incomes and education levels) found their way to practically all parts of the town.

•   •   •   •   •

While my methodology for assessing city-making in Oakland stresses the relationship, with respect to land access and urban development, between transportation innovations and racist practices, several other parameters of analysis are crucial to understanding the unique path Oakland took during these times. To start off, the proximity of the town to the city worked to both the former’s favor and disservice. Oakland’s stretches of flat land on the continental side of the bay across from peninsular San Francisco led to it becoming a transportation hub. From 1869, when the nation’s first transcontinental railroad reached its western terminus at Oakland Point, the town was a center of networks enabling economic development for the region. About a century later, the Bay Area’s freeways and rapid transit corridors met in Oakland; BART’s four lines cross downtown; several interstate and state highways merge and diverge just east of the Bay Bridge. Because of the considerable amount of land devoted to right-of-ways, though, these passageways did not always benefit Oakland’s citizens: rather, they often cleaved and debased the neighborhoods they passed through. Their evolution underscores Oakland’s variable status within a rapidly growing, sprawling, and polycentric region, contending with its closest neighbors, the far-flung suburbs and, most of all, San Francisco.

The smoke of Oakland filled the western sky with haze and murk, while beyond, across the bay, they could see the first winking lights of San Francisco, wrote Jack London in The Valley of the Moon (1913). Here the Oakland-bred writer described a journey westward down from the Contra Costa hills into the checkerboard of fields and towns that made up Oakland, coming upon a view of the manufacturing waterfront just short of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the flatlands in sight of the Golden Gate but anchored on the continent and overshadowed by its glamorous neighbor. Oakland’s smoky skies, proof of its bustling factories, showed that it was not a satisfied second city but a relentless competitor, convinced that its expanses of flat land and transportation connections would lead to eventual preeminence. Its leaders equated progress with equaling or overtaking the far larger and wealthier city across the bay. They took immeasurable satisfaction in becoming the dominant Bay Area container port and in sporting, for decades, more major league teams than San Francisco.

If Oakland never counted many more than 400,000 residents, it consistently punched above its weight. Because it became the center of the populous East Bay, no city of its size in the United States attained as big a reputation: in politics, business, and sports. But as time went on, Oakland’s rivalry with San Francisco could lead it to unrealistic goals. Fisherman’s Wharf became a tourist mecca in the city; the town’s retort, Jack London Square, never coalesced. The BART rail system catalyzed a boom of office construction in downtown San Francisco; Oakland’s attempts to mirror that success fell short.

Part of the reason lay in the fact that the town was thwarted in its efforts to grow larger, unable to annex nearby East Bay cities and forge a greater Oakland. Its relationship with those adjacent places nonetheless proved pivotal. A small swath of the lower hills, Piedmont, incorporated as an independent municipality entirely surrounded by Oakland. Many of the town’s business elite resided in the well-off enclave, gaining from its excellent services while not contributing nearly enough to Oakland’s civic improvement. Berkeley, the university city to Oakland’s north, cultivated a vibrant cultural and political scene that profoundly influenced its neighbor: the Arts and Crafts and Modern movements in architecture; environmentalism with respect to parks, creeks, and the bay; the creation of regional agencies targeted to functions like water supply; the student-led Free Speech and anti–Vietnam War protest movements; lifestyle and gastronomic trends, from Zen Buddhism to California cuisine. After midcentury, the suburbs of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties drew Oakland’s residents, industries, and stores; over the final decades, tiny once-industrial Emeryville, wedged between Oakland and Berkeley, turned itself into the inner East Bay’s suburb-style shopping hub.

Analogous to Los Angeles, its larger and longtime industrial rival on the Pacific Coast, Oakland operated during those times as a Rust Belt city in the Sun Belt. Deindustrialization hit Oakland hard. Manufacturing plants shut down or relocated out of town. Swaths of the city corroded. The once-humming flatland corridors began to resemble downtrodden midwestern cities like Detroit. During those same times, however, while most of California and the Bay Area continued its virtual nonstop growth, other parts of Oakland benefited, as evidenced by a flurry of deluxe lakeside apartment buildings and mile after mile of hillside houses and planned unit developments that could be mistaken for nearby affluent Marin County. Again, race relations drove this contrast; the Rust Belt of laid-off factory workers and declining neighborhood quality was concentrated in the city’s flatland neighborhoods populated largely by black and other minority residents; the town’s Sun Belt of white-collar salaries and bay views was a reality for the whiter hill districts. In the novel Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, posthumously published in 1986, Philip K. Dick describes a white businessman visiting a black realtor in search of a property for a used car business: "Her specialty was business property in the non-restricted—he added in his mind, run-down—part of Oakland . . . What was a used-car lot, if not the embodiment of non-restricted Oakland?"

For the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the city’s movers and shakers lusted for growth—at almost any cost. The adoption of land-use zoning in the 1930s encouraged greater density and classified a disproportionate amount of land as commercial and industrial. Even when industry faltered, many of Oakland’s business leaders paradoxically viewed the suburbs as fertile territory for industrial growth: despite their financial and political independence. But starting earlier, other public entities—the Port of Oakland, the East Bay Regional Park District, the State of California—augmented the private sector’s historic control over urban development. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society brought about groundbreaking transportation infrastructure, residential complexes, civic buildings, and parklands. Their immense scale was highly disruptive, felling thousands of buildings and forcing tens of thousands of residents to relocate.

Through this period, the leading local actors in the fashioning of Oakland’s built environment were almost always white and often Republican businessmen with an outsized role in politics. Building the physical city was an elite affair—private entrepreneurs or governmental entities with the power and purse-strings to plan projects, buy land, finance buildings, secure permits, and see matters through to construction. The vast majority of building projects discussed in this book were realized in this top-down manner. In the century’s final quarter, this building culture began to democratize. Under pressure from community activists, the federal government grew sensitive to demands for involvement in future development. Black Democrats were elected to the city council and mayor’s office and took up leading positions in city agencies as well as the port. Nonprofit associations, neighborhood groups, and concerned citizens took larger roles, addressing underrepresented communities, amending proposed projects—even as the town’s business activity cratered.

•   •   •   •   •

I structure the narrative of Hella Town around urban functions: transportation infrastructure, workplace, housing, commerce, parks, and civic attractions. The first two chapters, Part I, take up the period between 1890 and 1945. Streetcar Stratification tells the story of how electric traction streetcars spawned subdivisions and commercial arterials across town segmented by class and race; at the same time, the meeting of streetcar lines downtown created conditions for intense commercial activities and a fiction of a unified city. Industrial Powerhouse looks into how Oakland became one of the nation’s larger manufacturing centers, home to both resource-based businesses and advanced industry.

The middle three chapters, Part II, analyze efforts over the course of the twentieth century to secure parklands, craft world-class civic structures, and modernize and expand the road infrastructure for automobiles. Space for Automobiles lays out the bridges, tunnels, street reconfigurations, and mass transit retrenchments that made up the vehicular conquest of urban transportation. The Politics of Parks scrutinizes why a growing Oakland never built a large urban park accessible to its citizens, and how the East Bay Regional Park District endowed the town with expansive semi-wilderness parks. Major League Venue looks at how civic complexes, museums, sporting arenas, and concert halls vaulted it into the national limelight, while at the same time sidelining the involvement of minority communities.

The final five chapters, Part III, concentrate on the period after the Second World War when governmental involvement in urban development ramped up and systemic racism continued to play a leading role in city-making. The Promise and the Reality of Freeways and BART describes the formation of the town’s rapid circulation networks and the consequences of their reorientation of mobility from neighborhood and city to individual dwelling unit and region. In the Wake of Deindustrialization highlights the evisceration of the city’s manufacturing economy, racial employment disparities, and the business community’s fixation on making Oakland a largely white-collar logistics center for global communication and trade—especially via the Port of Oakland. Housing Injustice explores the divergent tracks of affluent whites and poorer blacks and other people of color with respect to residential opportunities. Downtown Renewal and Ruin interrogates the related aim of business leaders to upmarket the central business district for high-rise office buildings and a huge regional mall. Finally, Shopping Centers and Storefront Streets explores Oakland’s mixed efforts to keep up with the suburbs by building car-oriented retail complexes and, later, its more successful revival of older streetcar strips amid an influx of immigrants and gentrifiers.

As Oakland recovered from the Great Recession of 2008–10, it became an up-and-coming place, as discussed in the Coda. Its natural beauty—a unique tree canopy of towering conifers and exotic palms, a varied topography offering vistas of mountains, waterways, and cityscape—was recognized widely. So too was its mild Mediterranean climate, mid-sized urbanity, idiosyncratic neighborhoods, and relative affordability. Construction cranes soon crowded the skyline. San Franciscans flocked in. Media reports, movies, and books covered the revitalization, but pointed out the displacement and resentment attendant to it. In There There (2018), Tommy Orange follows a BART train as it courses toward Fruitvale: the graffitied apartment walls and abandoned houses, warehouses, and auto body shops appear, loom in the train window, stubbornly resist like deadweight all of Oakland’s new development. Reactive to anything resembling the midcentury era of massive disruption and dislocation, other Oaklanders adopted stances on development pioneered earlier in Berkeley and San Francisco—low-impact visions rooted more in the village than the metropolis.

The facts emerging recently from the ground, the rumors and retorts wafting in from the media, followed a momentous and tumultuous twentieth century. Throughout, waves of people came and went, buildings rose and fell, neighborhoods transitioned. The town was shot in different directions, parts successfully gaining something greater, other parts finding their hopes deflated. What Gertrude Stein saw of Oakland in 1935, what any one of us observes of a city at a given moment, is but an ill-lit fragment of vast processes of historical change, the tip of what has happened. Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption seeks to illuminate and explain aspects of the iceberg beneath.

Part I

1

Streetcar Stratification

In 1919, the Fred T. Wood Company advertised lots for a promising 126-home subdivision, Lakeshore Terrace, nestled in the foothills just above Lake Merritt and a couple of miles from downtown. Like all of Oakland, the land had undergone fateful changes over the prior century. The Spanish Empire had granted much of what we now know as Oakland to Luis Peralta, who later passed his 45,000-acre Rancho San Antonio on to his sons. After the annexation of Alta California, then a part of Mexico, to the United States in 1847, the Peralta family lost most of their holdings to Anglo-Americans. Toward century’s end, Lewis Leonard Bradbury, who made his wealth in Mexican gold mining and California real estate, purchased the tract that came to be called Lakeshore Terrace; maintaining homes in Oakland and Southern California, Bradbury erected the famous Bradbury Building in Los Angeles, which opened a few months after his death in 1892.

Amid a building boom that coincided with America’s entry into the First World War, Bradbury’s oak-studded grasslands were ripe for development. Fred T. Wood was a California native who had arrived in Oakland in 1904 to work in real estate. He modeled his subdivision on an earlier, nearby effort, Lakewood Park. In a brochure, we read that the latter’s property values had doubled and tripled since development began there four years earlier. Logically, Lakeshore Terrace would attain similar success as a subdivision of choice for higher-income residents: Lakeshore Terrace is in the heart of the head-of-the-lake district, an established residence section of the highest type. The brochure extolls the fact that the south-facing slopes are protected from north winds, affording maximum sunshine and the warmest climate, as well as perfect drainage, and that the approach on Lakeshore Avenue, a broad boulevard of easy grade, is shaded by plane trees. Since Wood purchased the land at half its assessed value, he claimed to have added improvements of the finest kind: streets endowed with cement gutters, curbs, sidewalks, sewers, water mains, and gas and electric conduits. To top it off, we are informed that a streetcar runs from Lakeshore Terrace to downtown, and a Key Route interurban, whisking one to San Francisco in 40 minutes, is practically at the subdivision’s doorstep.

Figure 2. Lakewood Park tract. The intersection of Rosal and Balfour Avenues, across Lakeshore Avenue and alongside the upcoming Lakeshore Terrace, 1918. Photo courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

Lakeshore Terrace was part of the greatest groundswell of residential construction in Oakland’s history. During the first third of the twentieth century, the country estates of Oakland’s lower hills and farms of its flatlands were recast into houses and businesses by real estate entrepreneurs like Fred T. Wood. The engines behind this transformation were streetcars running on steel rails and powered electrically by overhead wires. Streetcar service freed people to reside farther from the city center in neighborhoods of their choice—to an extent.¹ The new subdivisions would be highly stratified along class and racial lines. Affluent whites had the lion’s share of the new dwelling opportunities, while poorer whites and people of color were limited to older buildings and districts. Upper-middle-class subdivisions were designed and advertised differently than working-class subdivisions. They were located farther from industry, set apart through pastoral aesthetic traits, and linked to office jobs in downtown Oakland or San Francisco. Legal barriers fortified their exclusivity. Lakeshore Terrace came with full building and race restrictions. Only people of Caucasian descent were allowed to purchase homes here and in most upscale Oakland neighborhoods.

Streetcars unglued the diverse functions of Oakland’s downtown. The electrified transit system allowed residents and businesses to relocate to more favorable and spacious locales. While homes rose up in the foothills and remote flatlands, industries followed the waterfront corridors north and south of downtown and shopping strips spread along the streetcar lines radiating out to these new areas. Downtown transformed into a largely commercial entity. Office buildings, department stores, hotels, and movie palaces were the new components of a dense zone of business operations and consumer attractions. For a time, downtown’s increased density and vibrancy produced the impression of a unified city. But hotels and department stores too catered to stratified markets.

Long before comprehensive planning and zoning regulations came into effect in the 1930s, distinct functional and social sections characterized streetcar Oakland: an industrial waterfront; a sea of houses across the flatlands and lower hills, divided according to class and racial lines; along the transit lines penetrating each of these zones, commercial strips; an unprecedented, intense urbanity downtown amid the streetcar system’s crossing points. This stratified cityscape would persist and even intensify after 1945. Other transportation improvements (e.g., automobiles, free-ways, BART), coupled with other, racially based discriminatory practices (e.g., redlining, urban redevelopment, white migration to the suburbs), continued to divide the town into zones marked by function, class, and race.

ELECTRIC TRACTION

In the years after its founding in 1852, Oakland slowly grew into a village on an estuary of San Francisco Bay. In 1860, more than a decade after the Gold Rush began, only 1,543 people resided there. Then, in 1869, the town became the Pacific terminus of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, an almost 2,000-mile line connecting California to the eastern rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa. Rail met sail at Oakland Point, the foot of 7th Street in West Oakland, from where passengers completed their train journey to San Francisco on transbay ferries. Industries, which we will discuss in the next chapter, gravitated to the West Oakland rail yards and shipping wharves, and Oakland soon passed Stockton and Sacramento to become California’s second-largest city after San Francisco—counting 34,555 residents by 1880. Growth centers succeeded one another; first downtown, then West Oakland, and later other parts of the city. Villages developed on stops of the Central (and later Southern) Pacific railway: Clinton, Fruitvale, Melrose, Fitchburg, Elmhurst—what would later be called East Oakland.² Yet aside from Clinton, they were for many years too small to be called either industrial towns or commuter suburbs.³

If steam railroads propelled long-distance travel and trade as well as commuter suburbs, the iron horses were impractical for intra-city commutes, and hence intensive city building. Streets could hardly bear the weight of trains, whose engines produced noise, smoke, and sparks that were both a nuisance and threat to nearby structures. The time it took speeding trains to come to a full stop so people could disembark resulted in stations spaced at least one to two miles apart. The train corridor was best situated in a separate right-of-way. Other means of transportation would be needed for city-making.

Through the early 1890s, most travel within Oakland was either by foot, on horseback, or in horse-drawn vehicles. Among the latter, most prominent were omnibuses, a version of stagecoaches, later converted to trams running along iron or steel rails and allowing for faster speeds and smoother rides. The horse-trams traveled four to five miles per hour, a little faster than walking. Nonetheless, they pushed out the boundaries of the walking city. Eighteen miles of lines of horse-car lines were built from downtown to West Oakland and Clinton.

San Francisco pioneered and made extensive use of steam-powered cable cars, a mechanized advance over horse-drawn omnibuses. Aside from a couple of brief experiments in 1889 and 1890, though, cable car technology, practical only for straight runs, was too inflexible and expensive for the flatter terrain being developed at lower densities in Oakland. Instead, electric streetcars (also called trolleys) would push Oakland’s next phase of urban transportation. A couple of decades into the harnessing of electricity, Frank Sprague, a naval officer, had linked electric traction motors on individual streetcars to overhead wires that sucked power from electric generating stations.⁴ His system debuted in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. The streetcars glided at an average speed of 10 miles per hour and could reach 15 miles per hour, three times faster than horse-drawn trams.⁵ Using the motor as a brake, they could easily decelerate. They were fine at climbing and descending hills, an important advantage over the horse-car.⁶

Electric traction streetcars took America by storm. In 1890, two years after Sprague’s initial run, 154 electric street railway systems operated on 1,263 miles of track, more than half equipped by his firm. By 1902, 22,000 miles of electrified streetcars accommodated more passengers than steam railroads.⁷ From 1890 to 1920, annual trolley ridership in the nation grew from 2 billion to 15.5 billion.⁸ A 1902 editorial in the weekly New York magazine, The Independent, didn’t hold back: We are entering the trolley age. We shall speedily develop the trolley system to reach every section of our hill and valley homes. These systems will spider-web the counties and the States and bring the whole country into a network of intercommunication.⁹ In Streetcar Suburbs, Sam Bass Warner highlighted the horse-car and electric streetcar’s impact on urban geography in Boston. Between 1870 and 1900, as Warner tells us, streetcars produced a new kind of fragmented city, one split between the old center and radiating rings of industrial and commercial subcenters and residential suburbs.¹⁰ Once their transit was electrified, cities began to sprawl up to 10 miles in every direction.¹¹

Oakland was no exception. The city’s first streetcar line began operations on Grove Street in 1889. A year later, the Oakland Consolidated Railway debuted and, by 1894, there were 98 miles of electric railway.¹² Around a dozen separate transit companies sprang up, all of them private, and many duplicating lines: Oakland Railroad Company; Oakland and Berkeley Rapid Transit Company; San Pablo Line; Oakland, Brooklyn, and Fruitvale Railway. Still, the costs of laying track and wires, building power stations, and assembling rolling stock encouraged centralized administration, and one of the town’s leading businessmen figured out the advantages that would accrue to economies of scale.

Francis Marion Smith—known as Borax Smith—began to buy up companies and consolidate lines. By 1902, the miner turned business mogul had unified Oakland’s streetcars into the 75.4-mile system of the Oakland Transit Consolidated. His story embodies Oakland’s streetcar-driven development. Born in Wisconsin, Smith moved west to prospect for minerals and, by 1881, when he settled in Oakland, had amassed a fortune from borax mining. Smith set about using his newfound wealth for building projects. In 1891, he erected a mansion for himself on 53 acres along Park Boulevard between E. 22nd and E. 28th Streets, a gaggle of gables, turrets, and chimneys in the Queen Anne style. Two years later, he expanded his Pacific Coast Borax Company refinery in Alameda, hiring Ernest Ransome to construct the first reinforced concrete building in the United States.¹³ Ransome, an English-born engineer, had earlier patented a crucial, twisted spiral rod to prevent steel reinforcements from losing their grip as concrete hardened.¹⁴

In 1895, Smith branched out, forming The Realty Syndicate (TRS) with Frank C. Havens. Soon one of country’s largest real estate operations, through the early teens TRS came to control 13,000 acres in the lower and upper hills from Berkeley to East Oakland. Originally from New York, Havens had arrived in California with ambitions as far and wide as Smith’s. In 1902, he had a mansion built in Piedmont, soon to be a separate and almost entirely residential city encircled by Oakland. Between 1910 and 1914, his Mahogany Eucalyptus and Land Company planted millions of blue gum trees along the high ridge of