Culture
The Night Light lives up to its name. The brand new watering hole, which opened its doors on Broadway in Jack London Square about two weeks ago, is a bright spot when the sun goes down—a place where Oaklanders can gather on comfortable bar stools and enjoy smart cocktails and local beers.
On the first Friday of every month, the Oakland Metro Operahouse becomes the rendezvous of some of the wildest wrestlers in Northern California. They call it Hoodslam. It’s not exactly a wrestling tournament, it’s their version of a Friday night out, where humans become demons, furry mascots are referees and videogame characters come to life. It’s a party with rock music, drama and a wrestling ring. Nothing makes much sense to first-time goers. All they can do is enjoy the show and watch out for flying objects. Or people.
Across the country bugs are popping up on restaurant menus and on Internet cooking shows and blogs. They’re the focus of festivals and a main ingredient in a number of proposed future foods, like granola bars and seasonings. You can definitely find bugs on the menu here in the Bay Area. Fried wax moth larvae tacos are served at the Don Bugito food cart in San Francisco and chocolate-coated fried grasshoppers made a crunchy addition to Oakland’s homemade ice creams at Lush Gelato last summer. East Bay resident Scott Bower, founded a group for like-minded foodies—the Bay Area Bug Eating Society—back in 1999, and the poster-child of edible bug consumption, Daniella Martin, hails from the area as well.
A thriving commercial strip. Open country, with dairy farms, cottages and ranches. A small town created by an eccentric showman remembered for his multi-colored jackasses. A tavern haven. What is now Oakland’s Golden Gate district, the area north of Emeryville, centered around San Pablo Avenue and 59th Street, has had many faces over the years. Oakland North is taking a look at the history of the Golden Gate district.
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 While some buildings have remained intact, most retail stores have been replaced by new businesses.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?
Even to his family, Charles Klinkner was known as an eccentric character. That tends to happen to a man who is arrested for counterfeiting after distributing nickel-sized coins carrying the name of his rubber stamp company, who wears a suit with 40 or 50 pockets in order to carry goods he could sell to a customer at any time, or who drives a team of red, white and blue painted mules through the streets of Oakland on the Fourth of…
Photos from the early days of Oakland’s Golden Gate District. All photos courtesy of the Oakland History Room of the Oakland Public Library.
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…
On March 5, the highest-ranking woman in San Jose’s fire department, Teresa Deloach-Reed, replaced Oakland’s interim fire chief, Mark Hoffman. She became the first black woman to lead a major fire department in the United States. Oakland’s Fire Department ratio for women to men is more than three times the national average.