Development
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…
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…
Keith Salminen is passionate about his favorite team, the Oakland A’s. He’s the host of an Internet radio talk show called “A’s Fan Radio,” has been going to games since he was 2 years old, and says he regularly goes to 50 or 60 games a year. (The exception was the four years when he was in the Marines, stationed at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, when he only made it to handful of road games.) Last weekend, Salminen had the finishing touches put on his arm tattoo: the A’s logo with the Oaklandish tree behind it.
“Basically, for the last decade I’ve been planning on getting an A’s tattoo because of avid of an A’s fan I am,” Salminen said. He’s such a big fan, he recently became part of a group of committed fans who are working to keep Oakland’s three professional sports teams—the A’s of Major League Baseball, the NFL’s Oakland Raiders and the NBA’s Golden State Warriors—from leaving town.
As more consumers choose alternatives to banks, Bay Area social enterprises rise to meet their needs
Jose Rivera, 62, needed to cash two checks totaling $176—the fruits of a few days’ work as a gardener in Oakland. Though Rivera has a bank account with a small community bank chain based in San Francisco, he doesn’t deposit these or any other checks into it. Since the company closed its only Oakland location two years ago, Rivera has relied almost exclusively on fringe bankers, such as check cashing stores, to handle his financial affairs.
Occupy Oakland protesters marked Occupy’s six-month anniversary on Saturday by hosting the first of what organizers intend to be a series of weekly neighborhood barbeques.
As the number of homeless and illegal boat dwellers has increased, they say, so has a chronic wave of thefts that has kept marinas on both sides of the Oakland estuary under siege. Meanwhile, they complain, the illegal estuary dwellers are causing a host of environmental problems by disposing of sewage in the water or abandoning their boats, which can leach toxic substances as they disintegrate.
Cities like Oakland would like to see more residents commuting by bike. But urban biking is risky, and sometimes both drivers and cyclists aren’t sure how to keep things safe.
On the Oakland waterfront, in a historic area called“Jingletown” that recalls the sound of full-pockets and big paydays from years ago, an American manufacturing survival story lives on amid big box stores and artists’ residences.
Last June, Girls Inc. of Alameda County purchased a five-story building as the site for their new headquarters located in downtown Oakland. The 34,000 square foot structure is strikingly different from their current headquarters in a 1950s warehouse in San Leandro, and it will include staff and administrative offices, a mental health clinic, fitness center, teaching kitchen, and other amenities for the 145 teenage girls who are served by the organization.