OAKLAND: SEVENTH STREET

125th Street in Manhattan is known as the “Main Street of Harlem.” Similarly, Seventh Street in West Oakland—known as the “Harlem of the West” in the 1940s and 1950s—was the cultural epicenter of the black community in Oakland. Seventh Street was a thriving scene full of Black-owned jazz clubs, movie theaters, restaurants, retail, and other businesses contributing to a prosperous Black middle class.

In 1941 when the rails were ripped out and the ferry-service ceased, Seventh Street lost its centrality as the funnel through which transbay traffic passed. Still the area thrived into the 50s even as the transit network was dismantled and government-backed red-lining purposefully depressed values. This wasn’t to last.

In 1957 the government plunged the Cypress Freeway through the middle of West Oakland, badly wounding the surrounding community, dumping bridge traffic and exhaust into the greater neighborhood. Just off Seventh Street in 1960, over 500 homes were demolished to make way for the hideous USPS distribution center—most of those homes were demolished for the facility’s parking lot. Finally, the retail strip of Seventh itself was demolished to make way for the BART Station parking lot and the elevated rail viaducts leading to the Transbay Tube. Whereas transit should promote equitable growth, in this case BART was designed to pass through Oakland rather than properly serve it. With it’s far-flung, suburban stations, BART’s goal was to connect the new, racially-restricted suburbs to San Francisco. West Oakland was merely in between. West Oakland station was constructed as a park-and-ride, displacing businesses for another parking lot.

With the collapse of the Cypress Freeway in 1989 and its replacement as the Mandela Parkway (more on the earthquake in a future post), West Oakland finally had some reprieve from the government’s infrastructure-based assault. Seventh Street, however, remains a shadow of its former self.