Good Samaritan

On Sunday, right after we went to sleep around one or so, the honking started.

It would go for a while, maybe a minute, stop, and then resume. A wimpy honk, annoying like a mosquito. Right in front of our house.

I was halfway asleep, and I was dreaming of smashing the honker's windshield with a giant pick I have leaning against the fence, next to the gate. I was envisioning a drone strike hitting the most deserving target ever: the honker right outside my window.

What sort of a sick, demented being blows a horn for a half hour straight in the middle of the night in a residential neighborhood? I was dreaming of applying the giant pick all over the demented being's car, piercing the radiator, prying the tires off the rims.

And then: Bam! Bam!

Two shots, really close, into the air.

Immediately, the honking stopped. The car was trying to leave, but it wouldn't start. I looked outside — it was a maroon Saturn, cranking like crazy. It finally started and took off. A quiet night followed.

The Summer 7th Street Won the Lottery

This summer 7th Street in West Oakland finally won the lottery and hired construction crews to fix its sidewalks. The crews dug them up, put up no parking signs ("no stopping any time until 9-2"), orange cones, wooden stakes and forms, and left. Things have looked like this for the past five weeks:

I'm not worried. It allows me to reminisce of my native USSR, where few construction projects were ever finished and the sidewalks, when they were eventually paved, they were paved with asphalt. USSR nostalgia is far from the only benefit of this crying administrative clusterfuck. Consider this:

Kankles 4 Life

West Oakland Safety

Most people who come to this blog via search engines are looking for information about "West Oakland safety".

Oakland has a ridiculously high murder rate — a symptom of the economic predicament of a high concentration of poor people in a rich country that was founded by racist slaveowners with guns — that's true, but victims do not appear to be chosen at random, they appear to be on the losing end of argument resolution between acquainted parties.

Sometimes victims are confused for an acquainted party.

Sometimes people are shot as part of a gang initiation ritual — usually the victims are older (35-45) black men walking to or from a liquor store.

But Oakland isn't Ciudad Juárez. If you live in an affluent neighborhood, home invasion is your primary concern. If you live in the ghetto or Downtown-ish, your concern is being robbed at gunpoint in the street. Home invasions are less common in poor neighborhoods, because there is less to steal in the homes of poor people. Robberies of homes with marijuana plantations constitute a notable exception to this hypothesis.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons why I support total decriminalization of marijuana: to stop marijuana-related home robberies. Other reasons include freeing state funds used to hunt and imprison offenders, stop the need for trafficking weed via Mexico, tax it, and to stop the hypocrisy — those who don't smoke don't do it because it's illegal. They don't do it because they don't want to.

I used to blindly wonder how sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds so casually and predictably become murderers and the murdered in one of the most opportunity-rich lands in the Land of Opportunity. How dumb do you have to be to embark on a path that almost guarantees either prison or death at an age reserved for education and discovery? — I used to think. Then, while hanging out at the Alta Bates NICU for three months, I discovered that it was not uncommon for babies to be born into the custody of the State of California. Little babies, they don't know anything yet. Some have mommies and daddies and grandparents with flowers and little puffy bears — pink or maybe blue, but definitely made in China — and some have the State of California. Like, imagine if your parents were the DMV.

Imagine being born in a trench at a World War I battlefield. Your odds of living long enough to learn about the possibility of a meaningful life look very, very grim.

Anyway, let's define "safe". You're safe when you are unlikely to be anyone's target. You're safe when you walk alone in the dark and you are more likely to fall into an open manhole than to get mugged.

The area around West Oakland Bart station is not safe for walking alone in the dark. It is a little bit safe for walking alone in the light.

The West Oakland Bart station is surrounded by public housing projects. Robbing pedestrians is an excellent income model for young men who are born into the world where they will spend a substantial portion of their life in prison, survival permitting. These young men don't have a chance, nor much of a choice, really. They will risk their lives to get your iPhone. A human life does not appear to be worth much to them, but killing you probably represents an inconvenience. Plus, once murdered, you can't be mugged again, so your death also constitutes a loss of future revenue.

Being murdered while being mugged is possible, but — statistically speaking — unlikely.

If you're a woman, you might also get raped.

I've lived in West Oakland for over three years before I should have gotten mugged, had I not run away. The taller and bigger you are, the less likely it will happen. Chances are, though, if your daily commute involves walking alone after dark, sooner or later you will be breaking yourself.

The trick is not to walk. Biking is an excellent alternative. I used to ride the two blocks from BART to home, just to widen the safety corridor. I got sick of dealing with a bike on the train, all for a 50-second ride. So I started carrying a Mace gun and a knife. I also called the city and got them to repair the street light on 7th Street that was broken for at least three years. I slowly began to despise gun-control laws, because gun laws take guns away from law-abiding citizens only. Criminals — by definition! — don't concern themselves with gun control laws. If all Bay Area residents were like this lady, there would not be any muggings.

I began to report every single sufficiently-sized pile of illegally-dumped trash I encounter to Oakland Public Works. That couch remnant miraculously gone from 7th and Henry? I've emailed a picture of it to pwacallcenter@oaklandnet.com. There really should be an iPhone app for that. Anything that makes the streets cleaner and brighter will reduce crime. The problem is most of us think that there's a special being who is supposed to make things cleaner and brighter, we just don't recognize that being as ourselves. Or move to St. Francis Wood and don't worry about it.

Whenever I see someone finishing the chips and tossing the wrapper on the sidewalk, I feel nothing but barbarian violence within, but the solution is to just pick it up and throw it away.

Over the last fifty years, West Oakland and its residents have been terrorized by Public Works projects. These projects, along with other economic currents, have systematically destroyed a cohesive African-American neighborhood. Gentrification is not welcome here, obviously, because it involves a hostile takeover of the neighborhood with intent to displace the indigenous population. If you look Eurasian and you're moving to West Oakland, be sure to realize that you are the enemy, that you're coming to destroy and suppress, and the people who have lived here for generations will not experience an improvement in the quality of life associated with an influx of residents with good jobs and meaningful aspirations — without a miracle that is.

So far I've invented only one potential miracle — raising public teachers' starting salaries by a factor of three.

Today, to be a teacher at a public school is roughly equivalent to being a loser. When we meet a public school teacher, we suddenly feel a little out of place, a little embarrassed, as if hearing someone's story of a messy divorce or how their retirement account just got wiped out or how their landlord is a dick.

Our society has created a pariah profession — public school teacher — and now is wondering what's wrong with its public schools.

To fix this problem one thing has to happen: the tripling of a teacher's starting salary. This will turn it into a viable profession. The starting salary of a public school teacher in Oakland has to be about $100,000 per year. We pay $400 per gallon of gas to fuel American machinery in Afghanistan.

A great starting salary will draw talent and create competition. It will turn a tenure-driven sea of ineptitude into a meritocracy. If we flood our public schools with very smart teachers, the students — over time — will stop failing to achieve. As much.

Also, smart teachers will stop leaving the district once they start having kids who want to eat and a place for a toy kitchen.

This will never happen, because investing in the education of children economically confined to the Oakland Unified School District (controlled by the state between 2003 and 2009 due to being bankrupt and even more awful than usual, by the way) does not guarantee a quick-enough return of investment. But placing these children in prisons — when they grow up — does! And we can always just hire immigrants from the Eurasia and the Midwest to do work to which a good primary education might eventually lead.

I've digressed.

The ongoing foreclosure tsunami is placing many dozens of West Oakland homes into the hands of developers and professional landlords. These homes get a quick do-over before showing up on Craigslist as "charming West Oakland Victorians", for around $1500-$2000 per month.

As a result, people with deterministic gaits and laptop bags are beginning to appear in the streets. I've yet to see a pink-faced woman walking from BART alone while not talking on the phone, but the vector is clear: people are moving in. It feels cozier. (To me.)

When I see little boys on the street trying to break an AT&T box with pieces of a two-by-four, I have a very difficult time imagining that those boys will become enamored with City Slicker Farms. Newcomers, however, may move to West Oakland because of City Slicker Farms. There is a boundless rift between social classes. It's widening. The neighborhood is composed of two parallel universes, where schools of PBR-fueled cyclists swish by the hooded shadows on street corners and young happy couples in blue school buses with Vermont plates sip herbal tea while drunk women in slippers scream at each other in the middle of the street at three in the morning, all to the sounds of gunshots and police sirens and a new BMW motorcycle starting proudly behind a sliding electric gate and wind blowing through the holes in the roofs of foreclosed homes twenty feet away from an array of solar panels — it's not that they aren't aware of one another, these universes, it's that they pretend the other does not exist.

But sometimes there's an error in the matrix, and you get mugged at gunpoint.

Meanwhile, in West Oakland

Tour of West Oakland

Oakland-bashing is a lot of fun, because it makes you sound really hardcore. Unfortunately, I have to tone down the hardcore a bit, since I have an active interest in enticing people to move here. Interestingly, I don't want the value of my house going up, I just want the neighborhood to become safer. I don't want the value of my house going up because I don't want to pay more property taxes than I already do.

I must say that I know absolutely nothing about digital photography. In fact, I'm pretty certain that photography is best conducted through film. On the other hand, I'm also certain that the medium, apparatus, and software are all secondary to the eye. Recently, I've been eyeing through a Canon 30D, which is way better than the iPhone because it shoots when you tell it to, not at some point in the future. The thought of actually going through the Canon 30D manual frightens me, so I decided to just not worry about it.

The area San Francisco Chronicle calls "West Oakland" when reporting on the murders is way too big to be a neighborhood. When I say West Oakland, I mean the area called Lower Bottoms, The Bottoms, Prescott, or Oakland Point. Until the name is settled, let's just say West Oakland for now. Here's a map:

View Larger Map

West Oakland has the highest concentration of really cool old Victorian homes that are in remarkably dire shape per square block in the world. Many of these homes stand next to vacant lots, because the cool old Victorians in dire shape that occupied those lots had burned down.

This possible former church on the right has been undergoing some sort of renovation for years.

This is the Prescott-Joseph Center. This building will put every single Painted Lady to shame.

Prescott-Joseph Center fragment. A statue of Zeus. Or maybe Julius Caesar.

About three years ago we watched this big white building being wheeled into its current location by a huge semi truck. PG&E was on site, removing electrical cables so the building could get by. The building was born in another part of Oakland, where it lived happily until the Condos started moving in. The building decided to relocate, so it sold for $1 and moved. It has since acquired a new — expanded — derriere, another floor, new siding, new roof, and several new windows.

This big building occupies half a block. It appears to be condemned — it's been empty for at least three years, possibly twenty-five. The runes are new. It's astonishing there exist people who think they can paint something on old red brick that will be more interesting than the old red brick.

It's hard to tell at the moment, but in its prime this corner beauty would have turned the head of the Sentinel Building. Until very recently the building housed a corner store which was registered in the Guinness Book of Records as the record-holder of the "Corner Store You Are Least Likely to Enter" title. Then, apparently, Chuey was killed either inside it, or in its direct proximity, and the store has been closed every since. For the time being the building is called "Chuey Team Bitch".

Just down the street we see AMERICAN STEEL. I hope this sign is too big to fail. No, I'm serious, I dread the day this building will be gone — it's absolutely spectacular.

West Oakland is the last bastion of residential life before the Port of Oakland begins. Many streets feature mysterious tracks that suddenly end. We know some people who used to live right next to these particular tracks. They say that sometimes the Port gates open and wagonettes laden with export goods roll out and just sit there, waiting.

If I stood where I'm standing to take this picture on October 17th, 1989 at 5:04 PM, the Cypress Viaduct, a double-decker freeway, part of Interstate 880, would have fallen on me. Luckily, at the time I was sleeping in the USSR.

After the freeway collapsed, the residents of this neighborhood put up a titanic fight to prevent the motherfuckers from rebuilding it here again. Instead, I-880 went around the neighborhood, leaving this space for Mandela Parkway. In five years, when the trees will get taller, this parkway will cause people to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.

Mandela Parkway is a perfect biking corridor. The problem is the safety hazard created by all amazing distractions on the left, on the right, and in the middle. The parkway begins at West Oakland BART and goes straight to the Home Depot parking lot.

Speaking of Home Depot, the Oakland-Emeryville Home Depot (nobody knows within which city it is actually situated, but sales taxes go to Emeryville, because Emeryville is business-friendly and Oakland hates businesses) has just undergone a metamorphosis from Despicable Garbage to Hardware Store Mona Lisa.

Five years ago, they had these buckets with rotten fish at the entrances. Upon entering, you had to pick up a rotten fish and gnaw on it throughout your shopping experience. This way you would not notice the fact that the three employees there to help you are not only retarded, but also drunk, high, and haven't slept for six days. The merchandise was comprised of the returned items from the other Oakland Home Depot. There were twenty seven checkout registers and 0.4 cashiers at peak hours and 0.2 during other times. But you didn't notice any of it, because you were gnawing on a rotten fish.

Today, they've cancelled the fish.

Self-portrait.

This is Brown Sugar Kitchen. When we moved to the neighborhood almost four years ago, this building housed a permanently-closed Jamaican restaurant.

Brown Sugar Kitchen opened and quickly developed a Bay Area-wide following large enough to guarantee a 40-minute wait for a Sunday brunch. While I was going through some serious soul-searching regarding the sanity of staying in this neighborhood earlier this year, BSK hosted its second birthday party. I talked to some people, and it definitely helped in convincing me to stick it out. Things are getting better.

Oh, and the food here is amazing, I'm telling you.

Every once in a while, the Devil comes up for a field trip. To remain incognito, he settles into somebody's head. His stint in Lovelle Mixon's head was particularly devastating for Oakland — last year on March 21st, before exiting, he killed four police officers. This is a memorial to officers Hege, Dunakin, Romans, and Sakai.

Industrial zone.

This is a fragment of Lone Star Industries, a functioning concrete factory.

Peralta Studios, the proverbial lofts.

On the way to the port we see Downtown Oakland. I'm standing about a mile away from the Bay Bridge toll plaza.

When three generations ago black people from the South boarded trains and headed to California in search of better life, they got off here, at 16th Street Station. The current state of the station is a condensed version of what happened to the people, who didn't have enough time to build up enough Old Money before the economy emigrated.

The rights for new development that we're about to pass on our left were granted with some sort of a clause that requires the developer to restore the train station.

We'll see.

Own a loft from $1900/month. PCLofts.com. After this housing was completed, it was vacant for so long, our initial disdain for it turned to pity. For so long exactly one apartment had any signs of life, and even those were fake — it was staged to lure prospective buyers.

Now the people are moving in, and it's great, absolutely great to see all the new cars, TVs in the windows, and occasional humans sitting on the porches of their new dwellings. Welcome!

The Port of Oakland is the fourth busiest container port in the United States.

Residential West Oakland is on the other side of this underpass. The pavement of the underpass is quite possibly the worst in Alameda County, which would place it high in the running for worst worldwide.

Berths and US Customs.

These are AT-AT walkers' kids' toys.

AT-AT walkers on a break feeding their young. Also a bus stop who thinks it's in Chernobyl.

Our chariot. In West Oakland, we don't use license plates. Just kidding — it was stolen back in January. I've been driving this truck since July 1999.

Since 1999, the Oakland Army Base hasn't welcomed anybody.

Ukraine St.

My wife thinks the gravel is where the taco truck stops on weekdays.

Streets here are vast, kind of like prairies in Kansas.

Oakland is home to the world's largest brachiosaurid zoo in the world.

All the tarmac around the Port of Oakland is excellent for road biking.

This is where BART trains dive out for oxygen.

To the left we have Port View Park. Middle Harbor Shoreline Park is just ahead.

Port View Park.

After a BART train dives under the bay, it takes about six minutes to get to the first San Francisco stop — Embarcadero. Proximity to San Francisco produces major dividends in compound commute time for West Oakland residents who work in SF.

Domesticated AT-AT walkers at work.

The lord works in mysterious ways. If we board this thing and ride it for about a mile, we'll end up in Jack London Square.

In the summer of 1997 I got a job. It was in this building. I worked as a sculptor's assistant — my duties consisted of applying drywall mud to structures cut out of styrofoam. This building is a few blocks from West Oakland BART, but my employer picked me up Downtown Oakland, citing safety. A few weeks into the job, on my 16th birthday, I got a driver's license. From then on I drove our 1985 Caprice Classic to work. The bridge cost $1.

This is a fragment of Svenhard's Swedish Bakery. It always smells like pastries here. Also, check out the benches.

This is a fragment of the MacArthur Maze.

Bus bench ads are the lowest form of advertisement. Any bus bench ad revenue is offset by the loss in property taxes because of decreased property values.