Culture
9th Floor Radio is not a “regular” radio station. It has no call letters, and no frequency where its shows can be heard playing over the airwaves. Tucked inside a portable building with no address near the corner of 8th Street and 5th Avenue in Oakland, 9th Floor Radio streams over the internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Chabot Space and Science Center, America’s largest public telescope facility, was the vantage point of choice for viewing the annular solar eclipse in Oakland this weekend, as more than 450 astronomy enthusiasts and families thronged the hilltop observatory to see what astronomers say is the first in a “triple play” of spectacular celestial events this summer.
Oakland’s first annual Murmurama — a multi-venue celebration that mixed Chinoiserie with the avant-garde, baroque, cubist, or monochrome — challenged the San Francisco Fine Art Fair Saturday by luring hundreds of art enthusiasts to the East Bay for a night of open galleries and performances
Senior citizens from Oakland performed in front of nearly 100 people at Frank H.Ogawa Plaza on Wednesday for the city’s 8th annual Older Americans Month celebration. The site, which has become synonymous with the Occupy Oakland protests, was transformed into a concert hall where folk dancers and Baby Boomers took center stage, despite some disruptions from Occupy protesters.
The sleepy Rockridge district was an unlikely home for scandal. But in 1927, it came to light that a small Rockridge bungalow had become the international headquarters of a mystical society called the “Great White Brotherhood.”
“Rock Ridge—a part of the city below, yet apart from it.”
“Rock Ridge—a city beautiful where dreams come true. Where successful men are building their homes apart from the noise of a great city.”
“Rock Ridge—a private park residence place built to an ideal—planned in the Broadway hills for successful men.”
These advertisements were a part of a 1910 campaign by the Laymance Real Estate Company which spent the then-whopping sum of $38,000 to attract the rich to buy in a new part of Oakland, in the hills among sandstones known as “Rock Ridge.”
Oakland North is taking a look at the history of Rockridge. Go here to check out our page: We have stories on its early beginnings as a home for Oakland’s upper class by Ryan Phillips, a profile of one of Rockridge’s founding fathers by Amna Hassan, as well as what the area used to look like, in the words of some of its earliest settlers, by Megan Molteni. We also have photos of what the area looked like at the turn of the century.
Take a look at some early photos of Rockridge, before the hills were built up and the BART station arrived. Photos courtesy of the Oakland History Room.
It’s been nearly three decades since the Bhopal disaster left thousands dead in India, altering the face of one of the world’s largest agriculture economies following a leak of methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals at a plant run by Union Carbide India Limited. Today, attitudes towards the excessive use of chemicals in India have changed, but the pollution of public water systems with industrial waste from plants run by major chemical manufacturers continues with very little regulation. This was…