I write this with a large degree of bias because he's my friend, but I'm welcoming William Wong to SFGate.com and the CityBrights blogger section. "Bill", as I call him more than deserves to be here. He's written expressively about his Asian American culture and in the process has given all of us a great window into a world too often ignored in America.
Bill wrote for the Oakland Tribune for more years than I can remember and offered views on everything from Oakland politics to sports and of course his life. But Bill's also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, too. His work has received much attention. But his best stuff in my view is in Images of America: Oakland's Chinatown and in a multi-part series ran in the Oakland Tribune about his trip to China and a rediscovery of his roots.
I'm a big believer in celebrating great people while they're here, and that should be done for Bill Wong. Please join me in welcoming Bill to SFGate.com and CityBrights!
On Thursday, August 5th, a well-attended dedication was held to honor the newly restored Oakland Boathouse and welcome a much needed shot in the Lake Merritt arm, The Lake Chalet at 1520 Lakeside Drive. The event, which you can relive minus the long speeches, in this video, attracted about 300 people just by eyeballing it.
It was a kind of reunion of Oaklanders. There was Mayor Ron Dellums, the Oakland Rowing Club (The Oakland Strokes) members, staffers from the City of Oakland Parks and Recreation Department and other offices and a lot of onlookers on a sun-drenched day. But the feature attraction was the Lake Chalet.
If you've been to the famous Beach Chalet and Park Chalet in San Francisco and enjoy the fun, festive indoor-outdoor setting, then the Lake Chalet will be like Heaven. Unlike the other two great eateries, it's right on the shore of Lake Merritt at the dock, basically part of it. Inside, the room is marked by a very long bar.
The bar's estimated to be the longest one in Oakland, if not the East Bay or the Bay Area (well, ok, someone go on a tour and check!). But take a look for yourself and let me know. As a whole, Gar and Lara Truppelli, the owners and operators of the "Chalet group" as I call it, hit this one out of the park. It's right for Lake Merritt and fills a need a long time in coming.
Food wise, Executive Chef Jarad Gallagher promises offerings that are as diverse as Oakland itself. I'm headed over there now to meet a friend and check it out; all this blogging's making me hungry.
LakeFest is a street fair that was held last Saturday and Sunday August 1st and 2nd on Lakeshore Avenue between Lake Park and Mandana near the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. After a long absence, it's back for its second year and with great bands and vendors selling clothes and representing everything from the new Lake Chalet restaurant to "Friends of the Oakland Public Library."
I talked with a number of Oaklanders about the festival because there was a long period of time that, well, there was not an event of this kind at this location. That is until Helen Wyman stepped in.
Helen Wyman is an event producer currently best known for the first, successful Uptown street fair held June 18th of this year. She explained that this event has nothing to do with the version of year's past and is brand new. "'LakeFest' was a concept we came up with through my company Oakland Events. We decided that Lakeshore was a great spot because of the community and the neighborhood, location and the weather and so many people that can walk here. And they didn't have a festival so we wanted to bring the festival back here."
But what happened to the first version of what is now called "LakeFest"? For the answer to that question I turned to long-time Oaklander Pam Drake, who is Executive Director of the Lakeshore Business Improvement District (LBID). "WE had put it on with an art organization that didn't work with the vendors and it ended up costing us a lot of money and didn't involve our stores as much as it should. So the businesses, we weren't really sure if we wanted to go on with it.
"So, we hadn't done anything in a while and we felt like even though we have the wonderful farmers market, that people wanted to see Lakeshore on the map again. So Helen Wyman, who's someone who I worked with her mom, came up and said 'We've done all these events and I'd really like to do an event for this district.'"
LakeFest was Wyman's first independent event so she wrote a proposal to the LBID's Drake and she liked and endorsed Wyman's idea. Last year was the first one; this is the second year in a row for Wyman's festival concept.
Personally, I love what she's done. It captures the feel and the sprit of Oakland without really any "trick" other than organizing businesses and entertainment and booths. But with that, I have to complement Oakland Events on taking steps to guard against overcrowding. Many street fairs in San Francisco have the booths so close to the side walk that its hard to walk back-and-forth because folks are pressed so close together; not so at LakeFest.
LakeFest also helped the businesses along Lakeshore, especially Easy Lounge, which was perpetually crowded with a great mix of people and Starbucks and Noah's Bagels, which benefited from being near the music stage at the Mandana Avenue end of the street fair. Combined with the Grand Lake Farmers Market, the whole neighborhood was just one big party.
So, congrats to Wyman and Oakland Events for a fun time. But I look forward to the day when both Grand Avenue and Lakeshore are both closed down for one big Grand Lake Festival.
In the ongoing gaga of the Parkway and Cerrito theaters in Oakland and El Cerrito respectively we have read or heard the views of many people over the past seven months except two: Catherine and Kyle Fisher, who created both the Parkway Theater in Oakland, California and the Cerrito Theater in El Cerrito, California. I was honored to be given the exclusive first video interview with the Fishers over brunch at the Lakeshore Cafe in Oakland.
They talked with me on video for 19 straight minutes - nothing edited - about what happened that led to the closure of the Oakland Parkway Theater and that led to the current very messy relationship between the Fishers and the El Cerrito Redevelopment Agency (ERA) regarding the Cerrito Theater, a situation which saw the Fishers lose that business too, and watch as the owners of the Rialto stepped in to take over.
First, some house cleaning: this is the Fisher's platform. The interview style was to give them a place to explain what happened in their own words and with comfort. This blog entry is not a text transcript for the video: I'd prefer you watch or listen to the video because how anyone says what they say is as important as what they say. Got that? Lastly, I do have my views on this matter - no surprise there - which I present at the end of this post.
Regarding what happened in El Cerrito, the Fishers said its hard to expand a business and especially do when you can't rely on all of the players involved in that process. Kyle Fisher said that they were approached by the City of El Cerrito in 2001 with the idea of starting a new theater in that town. The Fishers said "no" because they didn't have the financial resources required to open a second location. The agency came back to them in 2002, and had what Kyle Fisher called a "back and forth" such that the Agency said "What if we pay for it?" in other words, the ERA would give the Fisher's money to open what's now called The Cerrito Theater.
The Fishers were excited that the public private partnership served as a template for community centers in America. But the time they spent on the development of the Cerrito hurt the Parkway, and the ERA and City of El Cerrito's promise of money to help them never came through.
The Parkway was always profitable
The popular perception is the Parkway closed because it wasn't making money; not true. "The Parkway was always profitable", Kyle Fisher said. But the Fishers were using money from the Parkway to keep the Cerrito going with the idea that the City of El Cerrito's promise of money to help them with the Cerrito would come through; again, it never did. Because of this, the Parkway was "crippled" as Catherine put it. So the Cerrito's underfunded condition cost the Parkway. If they closed the Cerrito, the Parkway would have survived.
On the Parkway employees and the last minute closure
I said to the Fishers that many Parkway employees felt like they had the rug pulled out from under them. They got the notice that the Parkway would be closing, and they would be losing their jobs, just four days before the March 22nd Sunday it closed. Kyle said "I completely screwed that up, and there's no excuses for that. I misread a notice. I misread a legal notice. I'm an attorney and misread a legal notice. We had fully intended to give our employees a month's notice before closing." Kyle was under the impression the Alameda County Sheriff was coming to evict them but that was not the case. But Kyle admits he made the mistake and did so right on camera. Good for him.
The Parkway was the Fisher's labor of love
The Parkway started in 1996 because the Fishers wanted to have a place where their friends could get together and watch movies over pizza and beer. Then-Councilmember John Russo was one of their earliest supporters. He contacted them because some neighbors were concerned about what their plans were for the building the theater was to be located in. He connected them with the right people and essentially "held their hand" through the process of working with the City of Oakland. As a gift, they gave John what he wanted: a sandwich named after him.
The Parkway was the Fisher's labor of love. They were a young couple when they got involved in making the facility and essentially grew together and had kids - two now - while they were growing the Parkway.
The future of The Cerrito
Now, the Cerrito has a new operator who's currently running it in a conventional fashion. They're the same group that operates the Elmwood Theater. Kyle says that eventually they want to have the "pizza and beer and couches" formula that the Fisher's established. I shared the view that it seems like the City of El Cerrito has stolen their business. Again, that's my personal view. Kyle doesn't see whatever they do as being a speakeasy theater.
Support for the Parkway
The Fishers support whatever the Oakland Redevelopment Agency does with the building that was the Parkway Theater on 1834 Park Blvd near E. 18th. They love the community and the theater and would do anything to help if asked. Catherine says it needs a lot of work and investment, some of it the person or group may not get back. For them the Parkway was an expression of their love for Oakland and the community.
The Thrill Ville
This entire episode has broken up the close relationship between Will Vaharo and the Fishers. Will has been one of the main driving forces behind the planned resurrection of the Parkway. Vaharo and the Fisher's have known each other for 25 years, having worked together at the Berkeley Faculty Club, and before that published a book for him called "Love Storues are Too Violent for Me." According to the Fisher's it was Will who started the "Thrill Ville" on Thursday nights to bring more people in.
The Thrill Ville was a kind of celebration of B-movies that featured a kind of weird and funky movie preview with Will and Kyle. It's also the place where, according to the Fishers in the video, Will met the woman that would become his second wife. (In fact, the Parkway was the scene for a lot of dates and pairings!) A lot of memories, but for reasons we didn't talk about on or off camera, Will and the Fishers are not the friends they used to be. Sad, because it was their collective creative energy that made the Parkway go.
The Fishers' next stop
Right now, the Fishers are living on unemployment, taking care of their kids and trying to deal with the horror that has become the Cerrito issue. After the close of the Parkway, they put materials from that theater into storage at the Cerrito, but they can't get them back for reasons that are not clear to me. One thing is certain just from reading this webpage report of the March 19th 2007 minutes of the City of El Cerrito City Council meeting, the City had a really unrealistic view of what was capable with the Cerrito: they wanted first-run movies. If not getting them was the City Council's reason for not supporting the Cerrito, it was really bad for them to ask for that to begin with.
Ok, it was just plain stupid.
The Fishers speciality was second-run and "B-movies" and getting first run movies calls for number of distribution deals and relationships they weren't set up to do. In my view, the City of El Cerrito should at least take responsibility for bring the Fishers in and making representations that they would give them money to operate.
There's a lot of mess here. The El Cerrito Redevelopment Agency had recently offered to help the Fishers make a business plan for presentation to the City Council, but due to "personalities" that didn't happen. But the ERA did put that in writing. Also, while the ERA expained in a letter dated January 27, 2009 that Downey Street Productions was not paying rent but when businesses are having that kind of problem, where they're saddled with more debt than they can handle, the ERA's job is to step in and help. That didn't happen.
As I stated on camera and will write here, the El Cerrito Redevelopment Agency seems to have engaged in a kind of taking of their business without just compensation for it. That's a serious legal issue the Agency should answer for; the question is will it do so? It would be great for them to do something that at least gets the Fishers out of their current financial situation. After all, it was their business and they say their property is still behind the walls of the Cerrito Theater.
For those who bring up the matter of reported taxes owed by the Fisher's business Downey Street Productions, that too is something the El Cerrito Redevelopment Agency can take care of; it could have forgave (and still can forgive) the tax debt . When I worked for the Oakland Mayor's office, I personally worked to eliminate a $989,000 tax owed to the City of Oakland for a property owner so that person would have enough money to refurbish his building. If I can do that, El Cerrito can certainly handle $200,000. When I look at it, there are more questions I have for the City of El Cerrito and the way they handled this matter, but for the present someone needs to hire the Fishers as theater consultants.
Yesterday I posted a blog entry which contained set of videos from the YouTube channel of "EASTOAKLAND106", and contained scenes that were shocking. One showed two young black men basically exacting an ugly form of "street" justice on a white man in East Oakland. The other videos were created during "The Sideshow", an activity featuring muscle cars revved to full-throttle by their drivers, spinning donuts in the middle of the intersection of 106th and Mac Arthur Blvd. The YouTube channel contained other videos that together gave the viewer a real picture of what was going on (or "going down") in that part of Oakland.
I made the decision to create the blog to get the attention of the normally placid blog reader, tossed a steady diet of texts about celebrities, sports, and Erin Andrews. These videos showing the real life in East Oakland are there, but bloggers generally ignore them. I thought it was time to change that state of affairs, so I did.
The reaction on my blog Oakland Focus was basically normal, one email of concern about what's happening in that part of our city. But on SFGate.com, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, it was different. At first, some were hostile, angry that I placed such videos up for public view (forgetting that the videos were already up and out in the open on YouTube), others accused me of trying to "glorify" what they saw as "black culture". Still, others said that by installing that blog post I was simply advancing how whites saw blacks. All of these views I take issue with to a degree.
Yes, I know the old saw that "if it bleeds, it leads" but my intent was to poke and prod at a system of local bloggers that has ignored East Oakland. While there's a blog called "Oakland North", which focuses on a part of our town that, considering the Rockridge scene, can be as sexy as it is charming, there's no blog called "Oakland East" or "East Oakland" for that matter, and some of the blogs that certain Oakland Councilmembers read give only one view of Oakland. And SFGate.com and the w Oakland Tribune website only report crimes that happen in East Oakland, but don't give one an idea of what it's like to be there. So, with the help of the SFGate staff, that all changed.
I thank the SFGate's Vlae Kershner for taking the daring leap of giving my post the visibility "above the fold" of the front page and in the face of the visitor. The result - in part because of this and because of Google News and the way I designed the post to trigger it - was 149 comments, and it was gratifying to see the outpouring of emotion, the dissension, and eventually the melding of views and ideas. People who started out far apart were able to find common ground: we agree that some set of policies must be enacted to change East Oakland beyond just "more cops" and even though some don't think anything we try will work, they agree something must be done.
I still favor a return to a manufacturing-based economy in East Oakland. I'm tired of seeing whole states like Alabama work to bring auto plants and steel plants to those areas, while people here who have low-skills struggle to find work while the government tells them to get "retrained" for jobs that others move here to get, and land them. California as a whole has forgotten how to compete for industry, and has become lazy: more willing to build prisons and lock people up than assure the maintenance of a well-funded education system and a great jobs-building economy. The objective should be "a job for everyone" and not "I will arrest you."
All that and we're surprised at what we saw in East Oakland, or for that matter, the riots after the shooting of Oscar Grant? That is us, not the black "us" or the white "us, or the Asian or Latino "us", but us as Americans, or as Oscar Goldman said to "The Six Million Dollar Man", Steve Autin, "This is your arm, Steve." We have to deal with the reality we face and change it.
Some lament the passing of "old media," and I certainly mourn the loss of giants like Walter Cronkite, but new media - open, in your face, connective of everyone, and rapid in motion - is the social mirror we've never had before. We can see who we are, talk about what needs to change, then go out and do it.
Consistent followers of my videos and Oakland Focus Blog will remember my coverage of the proposed 1100 Broadway building in downtown Oakland at the historic Key System Building site, as well as the terrific Rocky Rische-Baird-created mural at the corner. The 20-story structure is planned as a spec office building that will dramatically transform the center of Oakland and give the American President Lines (APL) office building across the street on Broadway a lovely sibling.
Its construction next to the giant APL Building will mark the first time two modern skyscrapers were constructed right next to each other but from different developers and not part of an overall master-developer plan in the history of Oakland. By contrast, the Kaiser and Ordway buildings were erected by The Kaiser Corporation, and the Federal Building and ASK.com building are part of the overall City Center Development Complex.
But the shiny new building to come, has gained an award today: it's the recipient of the U.S. Green Building Council's "LEED" award, for "Leadership In Energy and Environmental Design." 1100 Broadway is one of just a few buildings in America to be blessed with this award. It's a true "Green Building."
1100 Broadway will have solar cells, a special HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) system, and other green technologies such that it will make efficient use of daylight to heat its interior and reduce energy expenses.
It's really a great step in our society that we're finally making buildings that help maintain and improve our environment rather than harm it. 1100 Broadway's a building Oaklanders can and will be proud of.
In the third installment of my series on the "Top 10 on Twitter" in different cities, I took a new look at Oakland today and found some dramatic changes. But first, from Dharmesh Shah's awesome Twitter Grader app, here's the list by name, score, and number of followers:
The news? Well, compared to two day ago when I started this, I jumped from number 7 to number 4. How? Well, I really didn't set out to improve my Twitter Grade from 99.8 to 99.95. What happened was that in losing followers - which happens all the time - I gained a better score! I was up to about 6,000 followers, then at 6,001 I lost followers, a weird development that happened right after the installation of my first blog on this matter of Twitter rankings. Well, all I can say is "Thanks!" to those who dropped, it really helped my score.
MistahFab Rules; KTVU needs a Twitter lesson
But some things remain the same: Rapper @MistahFAB still rules Oakland, and has a healthy following (visit his site to hear his music at http://www.mistahfab.com), Tom Merritt and Molly Wood are in the mix at two and three, and while Oakland-based KTVU Channel Two is still in the rankings, I'm over them by two!
YEAH!!! Woot! Woot! Alright!
I cheer this because it's yet another example of how some - ok, most - big media organizations don't get new media. If KTVU knew what it was doing, it would be at the top of this list with a score of 100, but it doesn't so it's not. By contrast, CNN gets it. CNN now has over 2.2 million followers on Twitter. What CNN does is encourage people to follow them on Twitter. Of course that doesn't mean CNN's use of Twitter is flawless, as MC Siegler points out over at TechCrunch, having millions of followers means a lot of people will be upset with you when you install tweets that have broken links!
Moreover, to digress for a moment, broken links mean no traffic from Twitter, which then means less online ad revenue than CNN has a right to expect from CNN.com given having 2 million followers. Fix the links! I doubt this is KTVU's fear - they just plain don't give a care or don't know what they don't know. For example, KTVU's website lack's a link to their Twitter page as of this writing. So if you see one there, top of the fold, you know this blog post had something to do with a change they should make ASAP.
Of course, they could consult me. I certainly hope they're not so naive as to think I've given them all the answers to the problem here. We'll see.
DaveyD out of the top 10 in Oakland
I had to admit I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that Oakland's hip hop journalist and UC Berkley alum, DaveyD fell out of the top 10 here. DaveyD, what happened? Well, one thing that has occurred is he's not tweeting as much as he should, and he needs to discover the joy of retweeting so he can gain more followers. But that written, I expect to see him back in the ranks again, especially once he sees my blog post!
Oakland Twitterers need to improve
Look, it's a total shame Oakland's not on the top 10 Twitter cities list and that can only happen when the ranks of us are not as engaged or partnered with each other as we should be. Every one in Oakland on Twitter should follow each other first of all, then promote each other second. In fact, I'll lay out a plan in a future post.
