Otis R. Taylor Jr.:
Returning to the West Oakland neighborhood that was once the Black Panthers’ turf.
The iron security gate is wide open.
Broom bristles scratch the concrete to sweep dirt, leaves and street trash, like the plastic film from cigarette wrappers, into a pile.
Bruce Loughridge listens to a flute-and-piano composition from a speaker propped on the back of his Prius as he cleans the driveway of his Victorian house on Peralta Street in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland.
Loughridge, who is black, has been in the neighborhood for 16 years. He chuckles about the party his nextdoor neighbor is hosting, pointing to the deflated bounce house in the yard to be used later by adults.
Two doors down from Loughridge, a luminous green house at 1048 Peralta St. was once the headquarters of the Black Panther
Party. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale established the organization, whose members openly carried firearms while patrolling this West Oakland neighborhood, in 1966.
A six-minute walk from here is the spot on Center Street where Newton was fatally shot on Aug. 22, 1989. He died in a neighborhood then rife with drugs, crime and poverty.
Twenty-seven years ago, this wasn’t an area you’d casually walk or ride a bike through. But I’m walking the streets of the Lower Bottoms on a sunny Saturday morning on my way to buy a bike from a Craigslist seller.
I take BART to the West Oakland stop. In May, a poster touting West Oakland as the new edge of Silicon Valley was placed on trains. It was mocked for, among other things, being geographically mistaken.
After hurdling the techspeak on Digital Realty’s website, I learned the company specializes in data-center expertise.
One of its 119 data centers is in, according to the company’s website, “the fiber rich Jack London district” of Oakland. A high-fiber diet is essential for keeping a system on a regular schedule, but Digital Realty’s messaging left some in the community feeling gassed.
Locals groaned. At a meeting at Oakland Public Library’s main branch, community organizers discussed gentrification’s effect on life in Oakland. The ad was wind to a wildfire of uneasiness.
The ride-hailing company Uber said in September that it’s parking a new global headquarters in the Uptown district. Rental prices, continually driving upward, have become too steep for many longtime residents to maintain a solid foothold.
It’s unconscionable that residents who have contributed mightily to cultivating and preserving Oakland’s roots might not be around to enjoy its newfound prosperity. As Oakland leaders contemplate housing solutions, they should be mindful that the people who didn’t follow money here are more likely to stick around when the money well inevitably runs dry.
Cruising the streets Newton and the Black Panthers once stalked reveals a complex portrait of gentrification.
From BART, I pass Bottoms Up Community Garden, which hosts workshops, breakfasts and Oakhella parties. Latino children play tag in front of a Catholic church as adults comb yard-sale racks. A white man slams floor mats against a gate, part of the standard car-washing routine.
“All right,” is the greeting a Latino man wearing a straw hat gives as the mobility scooter he’s guiding in the wrong direction on the road putters past.
A maroon 1948 Ford Super Deluxe model is parked in the corner of Loughridge’s driveway. The 65-year-old was born and raised on Divisadero Street on the edge of San Francisco’s Fillmore district, once a predominantly black neighborhood. It was dissolved by gentrification.
“My neighbors are wonderful,” he tells me. “I speak to everybody. There’s a lot of music in the neighborhood. You can walk through at night and hear bands practicing. There’s a lot of artists here. It’s eclectic.”
Still, window bars and iron gates that require a pole vault to penetrate guard homes. Drugs are still bought and sold in the area. Stay on the sidewalk or sit in a parked car in one place too long, especially at night, you’ll encounter bike riders slowly zigzagging the block, some of them grown men with runny noses.
Newton, who earned a doctorate after serving two years for involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Oakland police Officer John Frey, had several scrapes with the law and was familiar with gun violence. Gunshots can still interrupt sleep here.
“It’s not safe everywhere,” Loughridge offers. “When I first came over here, I got more respect out of (drug dealers) than I did the people in San Francisco.”
Gentrification for Loughridge, who recently began a Victorian restoration project one block away on Peralta, is hard to define.
“One thing there’s always going to be that no one can stop is change,” he says. “I think in some respects, it’s changing to a much more community-type environment.”
It’s a community dotted by properties charging hefty entry fees. A one-bedroom, twobathroom loft is listed for $3,250 per month on Craigslist. Another loft, this one in a converted schoolhouse, is available for $3,995 per month. But renters have to put down a $6,000 security deposit.
A two-bedroom apartment in a Victorian triplex is — and I write this literally with my tongue in cheek as I chase shards of carrots — laughably cheap at $2,800. The rental market in the Lower Bottoms is unreachable for many of the residents and their families who raised their fists in support of — and, for some, in fear of — the Black Panthers.
A few blocks east on Peralta, Daisy, a small, white fluffy dog with curly hair, sniffs me as the white woman who’s selling me the bike shows me the vintage Schwinn. Her roommate, who is drying dishes, waves one of his tattooed arms. The bike seller has lived in the Lower Bottoms for two years.
“It’s changed a lot, especially in the last six months,” the 26-year-old woman says. “I really like it.”
The woman says she used to ride her bike to commute but now lives and works near BART stops. She throws in a never-used lock, a security measure that doesn’t keep bikes safe no matter where they’re parked in the Bay Area.
As I ride my new bike on Center Street, I overhear the final salvo of an argument — “Not even your mama wants you.” A driver blows through a stop sign, passing teens sitting on a hood of a car blasting music.
Young men on a corner tilt their heads upward as I pass. I return the hello.
Outside of the West Oakland BART Station, a woman, with jeans at her ankles and her legs wide open, urinates all over the new edge of Silicon Valley.