Oakland: Dark Star in an Expanding Universe Richard A. Walker Department of Geography University of California Berkeley CA 94720
[email protected] Unpublished paper Draft of Nov. 21, 1997 ANYONE MAY DOWNLOAD AND USE THIS PAPER WITH THE USUAL COURTESY OF CITATION. COPYRIGHT 2004. “Somebody, please, give me a reason to stop saying what I am saying.” --Oakland rapper, Paris1 Oakland is a great American city. But like so many ordinary, workaday places across the country it is disdained and dismissed. Oakland has always played Other to San Francisco, ugly duckling in a bay of swans, sow among pearls, a humdrum and workaday city squatting enviously across from the Golden Gate. In the kind of boastful projection of east coast urbanity typical of the 19th century, the undistinguished settlements across San Antonio slough from little Oakland came to be known as Brooklyn. The appellation might better have been given to Oakland itself, forever just out of reach of the Pacific Coast Manhattan, and following a similar trajectory from ferryboat suburb to brawling industrial giant to present-day catchment for the world’s migrants. Oakland is everything San Francisco is not: never glorious, never glorified, never gloating. Yet Oakland has a story, too, and one that has as many lessons as its cousin across the bay and a geographic landscape replete with both stunning success and sordid failure. Oakland's subordinance has not been as complete as San Franciscans might have hoped, however. After the turn of the century Oakland and the East Bay became the principal arena of growth and the industrial dynamo of the region, a second orb of the metropolis challenging the primacy of the old core.