MacArthur Blvd is named for General Douglas MacArthur of WWII fame. It is the only street in the city that runs from the western extreme of Oakland to the eastern extreme.
MacArthur is interesting in that it has always been a dividing street; in East Oakland it is the divider between the flatlands and the hills and on the other side it's the divider between West and North Oakland. As a result, MacArthur Blvd has always been at the heart of the city. Not coincidentally, it reflects the current state of affairs in the entire city; the diversity of the middle class of Laurel and Dimond, the gentrification of Piedmont Ave, the natural beauty of the lake, the collision of dilapidation and redevelopment on the West/North Oakland border and the contrast of poverty and wealth between Foothill Square/Castlemont and Chabot Park/Oak Knoll are all present on the Boulevard.
This thread is a tour of the section of MacArthur that runs through Laurel and Dimond. The Laurel neighborhood association put on a music fest yesterday so I decided to capture parts of it.
And anybody who finds me in one of the pictures (other than me holding the calpyso bottle) gets a cookie.
Laurel
couple hours later...
^That is a scraper bike, a fairly recent East Oakland trend where kids put painted cardboard or foil in the wheels that make a pattern when they're riding.
Dimond
^Oakland is the only place that I've been to that sells Calypso lemonade. Has anybody else ever seen this?
Good stuff yet again, Flava. You are killing off a lot of negative generalizations about Oakland, folks tend to think it's all hood and nothing good, judging from your numerous neighborhood threads it seems different from that.
Once again Nineties Flava, you've done an excellent job showcasing yet another section of this fair city.
Yee scraper bikes! I've made my bike into a scraper bike on a couple of occasions just for the hell of it. They're quite the interesting art form.
And Nineties Flava, I've had Calypso in many towns and cities around the Bay Area although I don't think I've ever seen it outside the Bay. I'm not the biggest fan of the drink, while I appreciate the use of real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, it's just too sweet for my preferences.
Once again Nineties Flava, you've done an excellent job showcasing yet another section of this fair city.
Yee scraper bikes! I've made my bike into a scraper bike on a couple of occasions just for the hell of it. They're quite the interesting art form.
And Nineties Flava, I've had Calypso in many towns and cities around the Bay Area although I don't think I've ever seen it outside the Bay. I'm not the biggest fan of the drink, while I appreciate the use of real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, it's just too sweet for my preferences.
Really? I'm originally from the peninsula but I've never seen it over there or in SF. I guess it must be mostly an East Bay thing.
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