Culture
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 While some buildings have remained intact, most retail stores have been replaced by new businesses.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.
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.
Frank Garcia can’t help but start laughing. He’s standing in the middle of the Bushrod Recreation Center gym on a Thursday night, wearing gym shorts and holding a small, red plastic ball that looks like a miniature version of the ones found in schoolyards from coast to coast. Two of his high school buddies are standing next to him, and they’re cracking jokes of the ball-pun variety at each other’s expense. All around the gym, these plastic balls are whizzing by, as dozens of people warm up for a night of dodgeball.