Development
Community advocates came together to participate in a panel discussion focused on the link between healthy and affordable housing in downtown Oakland on Friday. East Bay Housing Organizations’ 16th Annual Affordable Housing Week began last Friday with a kick-off celebration at Uptown Body and Fender. This year’s event, entitled “Affordable Housing: Building A Movement,” offered a weeklong series of more than 16 presentations, tours and discussions about the benefits and successes of affordable housing in the East Bay area. As…
When the class of 2012 graduates at Oakland’s Civicorps Elementary School on June 8, it will be the last time that any of the 150 students currently attending the K-5 charter school will be setting foot on its campus. The school’s management is shutting the school down after 10 years of operation, citing budgetary constraints.
Bites off Broadway is back, and maybe this time, thanks to a new food truck ordinance in Oakland, it’s here to stay for the summer.
The city of Oakland has a program that charges fines for banks that fail to maintain blighted homes that have been foreclosed upon that the bank now owns. On Tuesday night, the city council voted unanimously to expand those controls to include homes going through the default process.
“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.
Compare historical photos of Rockridge to those taken in 2012.
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.
In 1954, local historian Frank X. Flood interviewed many of Rockridge’s first settlers about what it was like back in the “good old days.” These are their reminiscences in their own words.