East Bay Yesterday

After years of working a corporate job in downtown Oakland, Nenna Joiner woke up one morning with a dream: They wanted to be in the sex industry. After their job applications were rejected by every adult pleasure shop in the area, Nenna decided to launch their own business. They started by selling sex toys and porn DVDs out of a box at bars (and sometimes even at BART stations), but from these hum...

Miriam Klein Stahl came to the Bay Area in the late ‘80s seeking a community of queer punks that she’d read about in underground zines like Homocore. She wasn’t a musician, but she loved working with her hands and quickly realized that she could contribute to this thriving scene by drawing flyers and creating illustrations. Miriam’s rebellious passion infused her heavily politicized images with co...

Julia Morgan wasn’t just one of the most renowned architects of the 20th century, she was a true pioneer of her profession. She was the first woman to be admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which was the most important architecture school of its era, as well as the first woman in California to earn an architecture license and eventually the first woman to win the American Institute of A...

[This is a re-broadcast of an episode originally aired in 2019.] 50 years ago, a group of students, activists and community members transformed a muddy, junk-filled parking lot into a park. When the University of California, under heavy pressure from Gov. Ronald Reagan, tore up the grass and surrounded the land with a heavily-guarded fence, this response triggered a surreal and tragic set of event...

Over the past few years, there’s been a huge upsurge in efforts to remove books about gender and race from libraries and schools, and in some cases even ban them from being sold to minors altogether. One of the books frequently targeted by these campaigns is “The 57 Bus,” which examines a 2013 incident involving a nonbinary teenager who was lit on fire by an Oakland High student while taking AC Tr...

Looking back to the West Oakland of his childhood during the World War II era, Ed Howard remembers a place where kids felt safe roaming the streets, Black businesses thrived along 7th Street, and a flood of newcomers from the South created a prosperous, tight-knit community. His own memories present a jarring contrast to the contemporary media’s portrayal of this neighborhood as a dangerous slum....

Instead of waiting around for a solution to California’s housing crisis, about a decade ago Violet Thorns decided to move into one of the hundreds of vacant homes scattered throughout Oakland. During the Occupy era, she was part of a loose network of dozens of squats, but since then nearly all of those were evicted as local property values soared. After her community crumbled, Violet found herself...

Growing up in West Oakland during the 1940s, Evangeline Canonizado Buell remembers the neighborhood as “a melting pot of… adobo, linguisa, tamales, blues, and jazz.” From an early age, this child of Filipino immigrants learned how to connect with her Black, Portuguese, Mexican, Greek and Japanese neighbors through food and music, skills that she later built into careers as a guitar teacher, histor...

Why has Oakland produced so many all-star athletes? This is the question that propels Paul Brekke-Miesner’s book “Home Field Advantage: The City That Changed the Face of Sports” through decades of local history, from the playgrounds to stadiums. His exploration helps explain not only the origins of this highly concentrated pool of athletic ability, but also why so many local stars have used their...

Although most “blaxploitation” flicks from the 1970s were action thrillers, “The Mack” feels more like a documentary. The film was shot on location in pool halls, barber shops and speakeasies throughout Oakland and features real people, not professional actors, as extras. But the driving force of the film’s authenticity came from the Ward Brothers, a family of pimps who dominated the Bay Area’s un...

In many ways, Berkeley is a city defined by dichotomies. The hills and the flatlands, academia and industry, counterculture and The Establishment. Despite the city’s progressive reputation, Berkeley has never been a monolithic place. The tensions between conflicting political and cultural forces are what have made it so dynamic and unique. Although Berkeley’s reputation will forever be tied to the...

Some cities were founded by warriors, prophets, or idealistic visionaries. The man who established Oakland was an unscrupulous lawyer looking to get rich quick. This 1877 newspaper quote captures the sentiment shared by many residents about The Town’s first mayor: “If the early settlers had taken Horace W. Carpentier to a convenient tree and hung him, as they frequently threatened to do, the act w...

In 1968, an exhibition titled “New Perspectives in Black Art” opened in the Kaiser Center Gallery of the Oakland Museum. The show was curated by Evangeline “E.J.” Montgomery, a woman who was at the nucleus of the West Coast’s vibrant Black Arts movement during that radical era. According to Montgomery, the “New Perspectives” collection was “the first time that a Black Arts association has organize...

The Bay Area’s status as a rock & roll mecca may have peaked during the psychedelic sixties, but the party didn’t stop after the hippies took the flowers out of their hair. Following the height of the Haight-Ashbury scene, a wild diversity of styles and iconic performers continued to emerge from this region’s clubs, cafes, and even churches. These locations are compiled in “Rock and Roll Explorer...

In the early 20th century, the largest employer of Black men in the United States was the Pullman Car Company, which operated luxurious trains that carried millions of passengers around the booming nation in an era before airplanes and interstate highways. Ever since the company’s founding during the Civil War, Pullman exclusively hired Black men as porters to keep the train cars clean and serve t...

Samantha Durbin’s acid was just kicking in as she entered an Oakland donut shop to score a handmade map to a secret warehouse party. On that chilly winter night in 1996, she ended up dancing to pulsing beats and kaleidoscopic lights until the sun came up. Thinking back to her first rave, Samantha remembers it feeling “like a neon space carnival.” Soon the highschool sophomore was chasing after big...

Thanks to its natural deepwater port, San Francisco quickly emerged as the West Coast’s leading metropolis during California’s Gold Rush era. In the decades since, many of Oakland’s development patterns have been influenced by its competitive relationship with the sparkling and sophisticated city across the Bay. As a result, the elitist ambitions of Oakland’s political and business leaders often o...

William Gee Wong almost didn’t exist. A few years before Wong was born, his father was shot four times over a dispute involving Oakland Chinatown’s underground lottery. Thanks to the quick work of doctors at Highland Hospital, Wong’s father survived, and after retiring from the gambling business, he opened the Great China restaurant on a busy commercial stretch of Webster Street. William Gee Wong...

A few years ago, Aussie Holcomb was going through a divorce, and her relationship with her dad wasn’t going well, either. Feeling lost and lonely, she began reading her grandparents’ old love letters, which had recently been uncovered after sitting at the back of a dusty closet for more than 60 years. As Aussie made her way through bundles of envelopes, the emotions captured in those letters spill...

The quickest way to start a dance party in the Bay Area is to play a Mac Dre song. Countless times, I’ve seen mellow crowds instantly transform as soon as the first few beats from hyphy hits like “Feelin’ Myself” and “Thizzle Dance” come blasting out of the speakers. Everyone from little kids to grandmas know how to bust the lyrics, the dance moves, and, of course, the thizz face. In the 17 years...

When Andre Jones (AKA Natty Rebel) does a mural in Oakland’s Hoover-Foster neighborhood, he doesn’t just paint whatever he feels like. Andre meets with longtime residents, shop owners, and other local artists to dig into the area’s rich history. He’ll study old family photos to make sure the vibrant images that cover the walls along San Pablo Ave. reflect the people who walked these streets in the...

Oakland’s Hoover-Foster neighborhood encapsulates more than a century of Black Liberation struggles. It was a destination for migrants fleeing the Jim Crow South to find work in the East Bay’s booming shipyards or as Pullman Porters. The newcomers brought their music, cuisine, and creativity with them, changing California forever. Civil rights leaders, pioneering writers, revolutionary activists,...

Before Huey Newton and Bobby Seale started the Black Panther Party, they spent years learning from the leaders of the Afro-American Association. During the early 1960s, when the struggle for racial justice was evolving from a civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the rise of Black Power, the Afro-American Association brought leaders like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali to the East...

It’s nearly impossible to summarize the magnitude of the New Deal’s impact in the Bay Area. From the creation of Lake Anza, Woodminster Amphitheater, and Treasure Island to countless murals, schools, and other public amenities, federal funding dramatically transformed the local landscape and culture during the 1930s. President Roosevelt’s decision to invest in arts and infrastructure as a response...

Two decades ago, Brontez Purnell fled his Christian family in Alabama, landed in a warehouse full of punks in East Oakland, and quickly got to work hooking up with as many guys as he could get his hands on. Janelle Hessig, creator of influential zines like Tales of Blarg and Desperate Times, urged Brontez to chronicle his eclectic trysts, and in 2014 they published an illustrated compilation of th...