Business
For the second consecutive time, the Oakland City Council’s finance and management committee failed to meet because not enough members showed up. The lack of a quorum—only Councilmembers Jane Brunner (District 1) and Patricia Kernighan (District 2) were present—shelved a resolution that would have taken away the power of the City Administrator’s Office to extend the city’s banking contract with Wells Fargo past this year, instead giving the power to the city council to negotiate a new deal.
“The Waiting Room” is an upcoming feature-length documentary film shot entirely at Oakland’s Highland Hospital. The film follows a group of patients and doctors as they struggle through the realities of the public health care system—lack of insurance, the high cost of care, a shortage of beds, and extremely long wait times. Peter Nicks, the film’s director sat down with Oakland North reporter Adam Grossberg to discuss the project.
The dissolution of the redevelopment agencies in California forced the city to eliminate much-needed programs for first-time homebuyers. Now hope rests with a California Assembly bill currently in revision that, if passed, would allow the allocation of new funding for moderate to low income housing programs run by California cities.
Take a tour of Golden Gate in the 1950s and earlier, and the neighborhood today. While some buildings have remained intact, most retail stores have been replaced by new businesses. What do you think of the changes in the neighborhood?
Charles Porter, 68, has lived his most of his life in the Golden Gate district of Oakland.
Porter grew up in a two-story Victorian at San Pablo Avenue and 63rd Street that his parents purchased for $7,500 in 1949. He spent much of his youth at the Golden Gate rec center and the public library, playing games and reading books. He remembers San Pablo Avenue during the 1950s and 60s as a a commercial corridor—department stores, grocers, barber shops, car mechanics, five and dime stores, donut shops, even a movie theater. Back then, Porter remembers, it was one of the first Oakland neighborhoods to open up for African Americans.
Over the past 60 years, he has watched the neighborhood go through a number of changes, and seen the community change with it. For Porter, the changes are just part of the natural life cycle of the neighborhood.
The place where the Mai Tai was invented is now a vacant lot. The original Trader Vic’s—where the world famous rum cocktail was invented in 1944—once stood at 6500 San Pablo Avenue, on the corner of 65th Street. But Trader Vic’s closed that location in 1972 and moved to Emeryville. In the first half of the 20th Century, there were “50 bars from the Emeryville line to the Berkeley line” around San Pablo Avenue, according to historian Don Hausler, who…
Many of the 20,000 people from Ethiopia and Eritrea living in the Bay Area call Oakland home. Oakland North is taking a look at the culture and history of the Ethiopian or Eritrean community in Oakland with “East Africans in Oakland” a series of profiles on everyday people living in the city.
The San Francisco Bar Pilots navigate all the ships through the San Francisco Bay. They take the occasional cruise ship in and out of Monterey Bay, as well as piloting commercial vessels as far up the Sacramento River as Stockton, but the majority of the traffic comes from the Oakland port.
Mike Hannigan and Sean Marx of Give Something Back have come a long way from selling office supplies from Hannigan’s living room office. In 1991, the two started a business-to-business office supply company with an out-of-pocket $40,000 investment that had a different mission in mind