Community
A hum and chatter reverberates against the clean walls of a 90-year-old hallway above Oakland’s historic Fox Theatre. This is home for the Oakland School for the Arts, a charter school established in 2002. It’s Friday afternoon and the middle school students are giddy with anticipation. Two harmonious bells chime, signaling the day’s end. “We always have different bells that we play for the kids,” said executive and artistic director Donn Harris. “That’s a nice one. It’s got a kind…
At 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening, a damp breeze forced Oakland dwellers into puffy coats, and Café Underwood’s windows glowed with light and motion. At this moment, the café was home to five customers, spread across the square room with either beer or coffee in hand. Their laptops lit the space before them. Some scribbled notes by hand, until bright iMessage bubbles pulled their fingers back towards their keyboards. Others spoke with fervor into their headphones, with little apparent…
Ben Plumley, chief executive officer of Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation, has been on the front lines of the global fight against HIV/AIDS for over two and a half decades.
It’s the last day of the year to buy tomatoes at the Temescal Farmer’s Market.
Etelvina López, a 33-year old mother of two, is grooming the 400 square-foot nursery room located on the first floor of the headquarters of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA), an Oakland-based advocacy group for Latina domestic workers. She’s preparing for the arrival of the children who she takes care of every Thursday evening. López came to Oakland from Guatemala almost 16 years ago to seek job opportunities. In addition to this job, which pays $15 per hour, López works as…
The Crucible is a nondescript warehouse in West Oakland. Except for a few brightly colored metal signs and a large wooden crucible outside the building, the nonprofit industrial arts school could be any other structure in the freeway wrapped landscape. A swinging door in the lobby opens to a large, high-ceilinged workspace with bare cement floors. The constant hum of machinery vibrates throughout the space. In various nooks carved out throughout the expansive warehouse, people work. And they work mostly…
Thomas Denesha pulls up a purple bike on a rack and proceeds to take the front wheel off. The helmet is still attached to the handlebar. Its owner dropped it off at Uptown 19th Street BART Bike Station Friday morning, knowing his bike will be well taken care of while he goes to work. “He parks here every day and noticed some problems with his shifter,” said Denesha, who works there. The bike is now dismantled into two parts. The…
There’s a liquor store or a church on every corner, Bryan Appleton likes to say of the West Oakland neighborhood where he lives and has run an industrial salvage shop since 2010. One nearby church was torn down recently and the pastor offered him the 16-foot cherrywood pews, which are now lined up neatly along one wall in the back studio. Appleton recites their history easily: they’d been in three churches over their century of use, starting in Oklahoma before…
Oakland artists strive to improve working conditions for public art creators in the city.