fflint
05-18-2007, 11:42 PM
In West Oakland, a Second Freeway Collapse Threatens a Fragile Recovery
By Jesse McKinley
The New York Times
May 18, 2007
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/05/18/us/18oakland.600.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/05/18/us/18oakland-2.190.jpg
In Oakland, Calif., residents of West Oakland sitting on the corner of 16th and Center Streets. Above, a house stands vacant.
OAKLAND, Calif., May 17 — To get a sens0e of the problems in West Oakland, a rough-and-tumble corner of a city known for having a few, you need look no farther than places like 14th Street, where a house floats in midair.
One of dozens of Victorian-style houses that dot the neighborhood, the house sits on six makeshift wooden pilings. It has broken windows, peeling paint and a front yard strewn with garbage. A sign announces, “House Moving,” but the inhabitants are nowhere to be seen.
It has been nearly two decades since the Loma Prieta earthquake caused the collapse of a freeway here, killing 41 people and drawing the spotlight to a long-neglected neighborhood. Now another freeway collapse, precipitated last month by a gasoline tanker explosion, has exposed how desperate things remain.
“It’s not like an atom bomb; its more like a neutron bomb,” said Brian Beveridge, co-chairman of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which monitors conditions in the neighborhood. “The people are gone, but the buildings are still there.”
An angry and sometimes profane Web site, BeautifulWestOakland .com, tracks the neighborhood’s various maladies, with photographs of unseemly images like used syringes, graffiti and unclean streets. Recently, photos of diverted traffic from the damaged freeway were added to its list of annoyances as something that has destroyed “what quality of life we have been able to piece together.”
If there was a silver lining to the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, it was the decision to rebuild the Cypress Freeway in a more industrialized area to the west. That freeway had long been blamed for dividing the neighborhood and choking its air.
In 2005, a small park opened at the point of the Cypress Freeway collapse, its memorial plaque emblazoned with this hopeful slogan — “With the collapse of the freeway, a neighborhood divided was reunited” — and the freeway’s former path was converted to a manicured boulevard, lined with high grass and flowers.
But for large swaths of the neighborhood, that is by and large all that has bloomed.
Drugs, unemployment and poverty remain pervasive in much of West Oakland, longtime residents and community advocates say. Killings and violence are too common occurrences, they say, and health problems — mental and physical — remain a part of the landscape.
“People who had problems still have problems,” Mr. Beveridge said.
Last month, after the gasoline tanker set off a fire that disabled a pair of Interstates here, Margaret Gordon went down to the detour route, West Grand Avenue, to check the progress of the traffic being diverted through her neighborhood.
It was not a happy experience.
“My throat got scratchy almost immediately,” said Ms. Gordon, a longtime resident who serves with Mr. Beveridge on the environmental indicators group. “And I had my inhaler out before I got home.”
One of the principal concerns is asthma. Health officials say that nearly two out of every five Oakland adults suffer from it, as well as one out of every five children, a situation that some fear may worsen with the influx of cars detouring around the current collapse.
The April accident, which took place in a nearby jumble of roadways known as the MacArthur Maze near the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, has sent tens of thousands more vehicles down West Grand Avenue each day. That additional traffic comes on top of thousands of trucks that already travel through West Oakland, heading to the nearby port.
Dr. Washington Burns, a retired pathologist who is the executive director of the Prescott-Joseph Center, a community center in West Oakland, said the exhaust from trucks and idling boats in the port had worsened longstanding problems in poor households.
“Ten thousand diesel trucks a day go through the port,” said Dr. Burns, who is also the director of West Oakland Asthma Coalition. “Then there’s the shipping, also diesel. There’s a lot of smoking, a lot of mold and a lot of pests in the households. All these factors contribute.”
The entrenched poverty and occasional flashes of violence have also contributed to many people’s malaise, Dr. Burns said, even in the elementary school across the same street from his center.
“We went over there and found that there were three kids who were suicidal,” he said. “In one case, the kid’s brother was killed, and he was scared for his life. It’s that sort of thing that worries me.”
All of which is frustrating for those who remember West Oakland’s heyday. Queen E. Thurston, 75, has lived in West Oakland since 1942, part of several generations of African-Americans who gravitated to the area to fill good jobs available in the ports or along the railroads. Ms. Thurston recalls a different place, one where Count Basie played in local nightclubs and where streets were safer and more vibrant.
“When I was growing up, you could skate on the street,” said Ms. Thurston, who raised six children in the neighborhood. “You can’t do that now because the attitude of the drivers. They’ll run you down.”
Also populating the streets, Ms. Thurston said, are drug dealers who are periodically arrested or chased off by police crackdowns. “But they are still there,” Ms. Thurston said. “In the night, we can hear them in their cars, playing their radios.”
The relationship between the Oakland police and residents of West Oakland has also been uneasy for a long time, highlighted in 2000, when four officers assigned to the neighborhood’s late-night shift were indicted on corruption charges, accused of assaulting and falsely arresting suspects, and sometimes planting drugs on them.
The four officers, known as the Riders, were later acquitted, but the city paid nearly $11 million in a civil suit and the police department agreed to institute reforms.
Mayor Ron V. Dellums, a former congressman who took office in January, grew up in West Oakland, has toured his old neighborhood and has promised to attack joblessness, lack of heath care, and crime, including a soaring rate for murders, some of them in West Oakland.
Still, for all the problems, there are signs of progress throughout the neighborhood, especially in the eastern parts, which lie nearer downtown. There, several stretches of elegant houses are near renovated low-income housing tracts, and children play in a pair of handsome parks.
The area to the east, known as the Bottoms, is less picturesque, but also has pockets of life, including Esther’s Orbit Room, a famed nightclub that is one of the last vestiges of the area’s entertainment past.
Residents are also dealing with what many view as the pernicious influence of gentrification in a neighborhood whose train station is only one stop, or about seven minutes, from downtown San Francisco. New market-rate housing is being built along the westernmost stretches of the neighborhood, and some residents complain that opportunistic developers have pushed out longtime residents.
“Since 2000, there’s definitely been a surge of investment in the community,” said Adam Gold, the administrative director of Just Cause, a nonprofit housing organization based in Oakland. “But that investment has caused a new set of problems.”
The neighborhood, Mr. Gold said, “is finally getting attention, but it’s not necessarily the attention it needs.”
By Jesse McKinley
The New York Times
May 18, 2007
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/05/18/us/18oakland.600.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/05/18/us/18oakland-2.190.jpg
In Oakland, Calif., residents of West Oakland sitting on the corner of 16th and Center Streets. Above, a house stands vacant.
OAKLAND, Calif., May 17 — To get a sens0e of the problems in West Oakland, a rough-and-tumble corner of a city known for having a few, you need look no farther than places like 14th Street, where a house floats in midair.
One of dozens of Victorian-style houses that dot the neighborhood, the house sits on six makeshift wooden pilings. It has broken windows, peeling paint and a front yard strewn with garbage. A sign announces, “House Moving,” but the inhabitants are nowhere to be seen.
It has been nearly two decades since the Loma Prieta earthquake caused the collapse of a freeway here, killing 41 people and drawing the spotlight to a long-neglected neighborhood. Now another freeway collapse, precipitated last month by a gasoline tanker explosion, has exposed how desperate things remain.
“It’s not like an atom bomb; its more like a neutron bomb,” said Brian Beveridge, co-chairman of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which monitors conditions in the neighborhood. “The people are gone, but the buildings are still there.”
An angry and sometimes profane Web site, BeautifulWestOakland .com, tracks the neighborhood’s various maladies, with photographs of unseemly images like used syringes, graffiti and unclean streets. Recently, photos of diverted traffic from the damaged freeway were added to its list of annoyances as something that has destroyed “what quality of life we have been able to piece together.”
If there was a silver lining to the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, it was the decision to rebuild the Cypress Freeway in a more industrialized area to the west. That freeway had long been blamed for dividing the neighborhood and choking its air.
In 2005, a small park opened at the point of the Cypress Freeway collapse, its memorial plaque emblazoned with this hopeful slogan — “With the collapse of the freeway, a neighborhood divided was reunited” — and the freeway’s former path was converted to a manicured boulevard, lined with high grass and flowers.
But for large swaths of the neighborhood, that is by and large all that has bloomed.
Drugs, unemployment and poverty remain pervasive in much of West Oakland, longtime residents and community advocates say. Killings and violence are too common occurrences, they say, and health problems — mental and physical — remain a part of the landscape.
“People who had problems still have problems,” Mr. Beveridge said.
Last month, after the gasoline tanker set off a fire that disabled a pair of Interstates here, Margaret Gordon went down to the detour route, West Grand Avenue, to check the progress of the traffic being diverted through her neighborhood.
It was not a happy experience.
“My throat got scratchy almost immediately,” said Ms. Gordon, a longtime resident who serves with Mr. Beveridge on the environmental indicators group. “And I had my inhaler out before I got home.”
One of the principal concerns is asthma. Health officials say that nearly two out of every five Oakland adults suffer from it, as well as one out of every five children, a situation that some fear may worsen with the influx of cars detouring around the current collapse.
The April accident, which took place in a nearby jumble of roadways known as the MacArthur Maze near the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, has sent tens of thousands more vehicles down West Grand Avenue each day. That additional traffic comes on top of thousands of trucks that already travel through West Oakland, heading to the nearby port.
Dr. Washington Burns, a retired pathologist who is the executive director of the Prescott-Joseph Center, a community center in West Oakland, said the exhaust from trucks and idling boats in the port had worsened longstanding problems in poor households.
“Ten thousand diesel trucks a day go through the port,” said Dr. Burns, who is also the director of West Oakland Asthma Coalition. “Then there’s the shipping, also diesel. There’s a lot of smoking, a lot of mold and a lot of pests in the households. All these factors contribute.”
The entrenched poverty and occasional flashes of violence have also contributed to many people’s malaise, Dr. Burns said, even in the elementary school across the same street from his center.
“We went over there and found that there were three kids who were suicidal,” he said. “In one case, the kid’s brother was killed, and he was scared for his life. It’s that sort of thing that worries me.”
All of which is frustrating for those who remember West Oakland’s heyday. Queen E. Thurston, 75, has lived in West Oakland since 1942, part of several generations of African-Americans who gravitated to the area to fill good jobs available in the ports or along the railroads. Ms. Thurston recalls a different place, one where Count Basie played in local nightclubs and where streets were safer and more vibrant.
“When I was growing up, you could skate on the street,” said Ms. Thurston, who raised six children in the neighborhood. “You can’t do that now because the attitude of the drivers. They’ll run you down.”
Also populating the streets, Ms. Thurston said, are drug dealers who are periodically arrested or chased off by police crackdowns. “But they are still there,” Ms. Thurston said. “In the night, we can hear them in their cars, playing their radios.”
The relationship between the Oakland police and residents of West Oakland has also been uneasy for a long time, highlighted in 2000, when four officers assigned to the neighborhood’s late-night shift were indicted on corruption charges, accused of assaulting and falsely arresting suspects, and sometimes planting drugs on them.
The four officers, known as the Riders, were later acquitted, but the city paid nearly $11 million in a civil suit and the police department agreed to institute reforms.
Mayor Ron V. Dellums, a former congressman who took office in January, grew up in West Oakland, has toured his old neighborhood and has promised to attack joblessness, lack of heath care, and crime, including a soaring rate for murders, some of them in West Oakland.
Still, for all the problems, there are signs of progress throughout the neighborhood, especially in the eastern parts, which lie nearer downtown. There, several stretches of elegant houses are near renovated low-income housing tracts, and children play in a pair of handsome parks.
The area to the east, known as the Bottoms, is less picturesque, but also has pockets of life, including Esther’s Orbit Room, a famed nightclub that is one of the last vestiges of the area’s entertainment past.
Residents are also dealing with what many view as the pernicious influence of gentrification in a neighborhood whose train station is only one stop, or about seven minutes, from downtown San Francisco. New market-rate housing is being built along the westernmost stretches of the neighborhood, and some residents complain that opportunistic developers have pushed out longtime residents.
“Since 2000, there’s definitely been a surge of investment in the community,” said Adam Gold, the administrative director of Just Cause, a nonprofit housing organization based in Oakland. “But that investment has caused a new set of problems.”
The neighborhood, Mr. Gold said, “is finally getting attention, but it’s not necessarily the attention it needs.”
