Culture
At Broadway and West MacArthur, car engines whir and belch, stopping and starting according to a choreography determined by an orange-vested flagman. A street sweeper circles the intersection, picking up dust and debris from a massive construction site at the southeast corner. A yellow bulldozer, perched on Broadway’s asphalt median south of MacArthur, looks ready to pounce. Kaiser Permanente, Oakland’s largest hospital, is extending its vast reach south across this intersection. Kaiser already has several buildings on the north side…
The Fremont-bound train shudders to a stop above my head as I race up the escalator of my local BART at fifteen of nine this morning. The doors stay open for far less time than they normally do—I am rushing, yes, but still must manage to slip in the cavernous opening as the red lights blink furiously at me. Doors closing. Off we go. Turns out the Fremont train is running behind schedule. Our conductor admonishes us at each stop—stay…
Townes yipped and squealed as his owner led him near the fence at North Oakland’s Hardy Dog Park. He saw a few friends inside the dog run and strained against his red collar and leash to say hello. Townes’ owner, Bonnie, led him through the gate, bringing a black hound, a collie, and a black and tan Australian sheep-dog running to greet the newest member of the morning run. Townes bounded in. He’s 11 months old and big. He pawed…
The dead televisions were coming in from all over Oakland, their screens stained and shattered, the green of circuitry panels showing through their split plastic sides. Men hunched into a cold wind blowing off the bay as they pushed their shopping carts up Peralta Street, past the tiny triangle of Fitzgerald Park to Alliance Recycling. On a normal day, a T.V. could get you some money, but on Wednesday there was a little change-up—nobody on Peralta Street knew why—and Alliance…
Entering the dark little storefront in Oakland’s Chinatown, the first thing I smell is caramel—the scent of toasting sugar and oil. No one is behind the counter, but I can see that the back area is alive with activity. Women in hairnets work attentively over the enormous, creaking wheels of six cookie baking machines. A middle-aged lady with her hair in a bun notices me and comes to see what I want. No one told her anything about a reporter. …
There’s something about waiting rooms; all that time and nothing to do but listen to the radio love songs and read trashy magazines. It leads to speculation—about men, life, student loans and bunny-killing felines. Or at least that was the scene in the waiting room of the VCA Animal Hospital, which is on 45th and Shattuck, at 9 am. “Do you guys treat chickens?” said a woman in a bright pink sweater and black body warmer. “No, we don’t here,”…
It was 9 a.m. on a November day in 2009, but Golden Gate Donuts seemed to be stuck in a 1970’s time warp. The orange tiled floor, the faux-wood wall paneling, and the brown Formica benches felt like a set from the sitcom Happy Days, and less like a modern-day donut shop in North Oakland. The steam from a glass coffee pot swirled upward as it slowly evaporated, and a tall glass case filled with every kind of donut imaginable…
We met Wednesday at 9:08 AM in the Office of the Mayor’s greeting room, just beyond the iron and glass Art Deco-like divide separating the mayoral cluster of offices and conference rooms from the rest of City Hall’s third floor. One of the bulbs was out in the hexagonal light fixture that looked like beeswax forty feet above the room’s lone cherry wood desk. Below, the office manager pounded on her stapler about once a minute. The room was quiet…
Neither the pies nor the woman upon whom a royal appellation was bestowed for making them is in evidence at Lois the Pie Queen at 9 a.m. this Wednesday morning. That’s no surprise—Lois died many years ago, and everybody knows her granddaughter Margot now makes the pies. Her dad Chris, Lois’ son, runs the joint at the confluence of 60th, Adeline and Genoa streets on the dilapidated fringe of northern/western Oakland near the Emeryville and Berkeley borders. Tempting as the…