Street Plan by Picasso, Self-Image by Gertrude Stein
Written: Dec 23 '00 (Updated Dec 23 '00)
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Pros: Impossible to navigate ...
Cons: Impossible to navigate ...
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Oakland |
Shortly after former Governor Jerry Brown returned from his spiritual journeys and took over as mayor of Oakland, the historic Oakland Tribune tower put up a new flag. In simple black-on-white lettering, it simply said: "THERE".
The reference, of course, is to Gertrude Stein's offhand and possibly apocryphal comment: "The trouble with Oakland is that there's no THERE there." Stein would have been speaking of a very different Oakland of course, much smaller, much whiter, much safer, much blander, but already overshadowed by the its far more decadent and spectacular neighbor across the bay. Even as Oakland has grown, diversified, risen, fallen, and now risen again, Stein's comment lingers like Monica Lewinsky's cheap perfume, one of those stains (so to speak) on the reputation that no piling-on of virtues can erase.
Today, ironically, Oakland is one of the more "there" cities in the Bay Area. It has a downtown of sorts, some vibrant neighborhoods, lively redevelopment areas, and everything else you'd expect of the Last Affordable City in the Bay Area. Compared to most postwar suburbia, Oakland has plenty to hold the interest, though there is still plenty to work on.
It starts, though, with the street grid.
The what? you ask. Who cares about the street grid? Well, we city planners do, because it does all kinds of weird psychological things to people that most of them never acknowledge consciously. Simple grids are easy to navigate, but if they extend too far too consistently, they achieve an effect of monotony (as in Phoenix or southcentral Los Angeles) that can be simply depressing. Evenly spaced wide arterials extending in all directions say: "You're not there. You want to be somewhere else." Even the best architecture can have trouble fighting against the lure of the endless straight street pointing you onward, onward, onward.
Grids with a little unevenness to them may irritate the Fire Department by slowing their trucks down, but these little interruptions in a grid are also places where thereness is mostly likely to occur. San Francisco's Market Street, New York's Broadway, Chicago's many great diagonals all interrupt grid patterns and gain much of their vibrancy from the irregular intersections and oddly-shaped wedge-blocks that result.
Oakland is one of the best places to see what grids do. Look at a map of the city, and it looks a bit like Picasso's cubism -- lots of griddiness, but no pervasive grid. It looks a little violent, as though Phoenix has been run through a Cuisinart, or (since this is earthquake country) that hundreds of catastrophic quakes have gradually shredded a once-neat Cartesian plane. Oakland has hundreds of rectilinear grids, most of them only tiny fragments, all smashed against each other at odd angles. As a result, Oakland is one of the most maddening cities in America to navigate in, but in the spaces where grids collide, the city also finds itself, and is most likely to be THERE.
This city's most vibrant neighborhoods are all at the edges of a grid, never in the middle of one. Rockridge, the Dimond District, and Grand Lake -- three of the city's trendiest spots -- are all at places where the grid is distorted or shredded in some way. Many other areas will soon redevelop to a similar degree, but the focus will be on the folded and buckled parts of the city, where either hills or water disrupt the march of numbered streets and force us, for a moment, to be where we are.
The largest grids, the places where it is easiest to navigate, are also the bleakest. West Oakland and the middle part of East Oakland (in the East 60s to 90s) are the object of intense revitalization efforts but remain some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the Bay Area. They are also parts of the city where the grid is unusually consistent, with relatively straight arterials, neatly numbered streets, nice right angles.
Downtown Oakland is a fascinating example of how grids and their obstacles can enliven or kill a city. The most vibrant parts of downtown are on edges of it: Jack London's Waterfront, a redeveloped warehouse district, is on the shipping channel, a bit of salt water that is as close as a pedestrian can get to the Bay itself. The fastest highrise construction is on the other side of downtown, facing the rare urban jewel of Lake Merritt. Much of the north lakeshore is lined by brutalist skyscrapers from the 1960s, but the south and east sides of the lake are pleasant neighborhoods offering an intimate view of the diversity of the city.
The middle of downtown, along the major grid streets, is where the center of everything would logically be, but despite some triumphs around the 12th & Broadway BART station, including a hotel and convention center, this true downtown -- landlocked and largely gridded -- remains one of the bleaker parts of the city's public face. Extraordinary architecture awaits rediscovery here, but so too do buildings that have been red-tagged since the 1989 earthquake but never torn down.
Come visit Oakland, but when you do, look for the places where grids collide, where you could easily get lost. That's where you're most likely to be there.
Recommended:
Yes
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Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
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Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
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