Culture
Residents came to shake hands, share food and build new friendships in their neighborhoods Tuesday night, banding together with their Neighborhood Watch Groups to host “National Night Out” block parties throughout the city.
For a week in July, hundreds of people gather in a small community camping out creekside in the foothills of Placerville to get away from it all. Enlightenment seekers call it Massive, though the movement is better known as Alt Blues Recess making its way through the Northwest, Aspen, Portland, London, Drift Creek and now California.
Despite funding issues that have forced the West Oakland Youth Center to remain closed for now, last week the center’s staff kicked off Friday Night Live, a new series of community events that will run through August.
A monthly art walk is an unlikely place for a shooting, but in Oakland last February, that wasn’t the case. After a man’s death at First Friday, where art lovers crowd the sidewalks and often enjoy food and wine at local galleries, two filmmakers decided to make a movie about the gathering in hopes of starting a dialogue about Oakland’s many facets.
It’s official: The Supreme Court has made same-sex marriage a reality in California. The justices dismissed an appeal Wednesday by sponsors of Proposition 8, a voter-approved ban on gay marriage, and ruled that same-sex couples are entitled to the same benefits as opposite-sex couples.
Bob Schleicher has been repairing Hammond organs and Leslie speakers in Oakland for nearly five decades–and he’s one of the best at what he does. Something magical happens when you plug in a Leslie speaker to a Hammond organ, he says.
Chipped paint, metal bars and boarded windows and doors are all that’s left of Greenside, a notorious housing complex in East Oakland that was condemned and shuttered 10 years ago. Now, Oakland native and internationally- renowned artist Ise Lyfe has returned to his hometown to convert the dilapidated buildings into a work of art.
Oakland North reporter Tasion Kwamilele explores the history of West Oakland from the perspective of her family and other long-time residents who have watched it change.
At more than 226 acres, Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery is a final resting place for some of the Bay Area’s most notable figures. And docents there are uncovering new and interesting tombstones all the time, helping to piece together Oakland’s rich history. Madeleine Thomas has the story.