Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption by Mitchell Schwarzer

Abstract

Oakland, California, situated across the bay from San Francisco, is the quintessential second city. It is, depending on the metaphor of choice, in the shadow of, little sibling to, or the grittier neighbor of its more celebrated urban counterpart. But those metaphors—to say nothing of the greatest cliché of all, Gertrude Stein’s “there is no there there” dismissal of the city—grew outworn long ago. Oakland is a city like any other, deserving of its own history and commentary, independent from constant comparison with San Francisco.Schwarzer offers just such a history in this rollicking, sprawling compendium of, in the words of its subtitle, the development and disruption of Oakland from the 1890s to the present. Focusing on the built environment, this book is primarily about parks, automobiles, highways, and housing, with some mass transit, shopping centers, and urban renewal alongside. It is organized accordingly, with chapters such as “Streetcar Stratification,” “The Politics of Parks,” “Housing Injustice,” and so forth. Schwarzer has read just about everything ever written about Oakland—so it would seem—and he synthesizes a narrative that is both familiar to urban historians and capable of occasional surprises and enchantments.The book’s two chief attributes are its fidelity to Oakland, and to cities generally, as a site of constant creative destruction and its empirical detail. A massive interregional system of streetcar lines was barely up and running before it was outdated, its private business model and fixed tracks supplanted by the public financing of roads and highways and the unfixed ambit of the automobile, truck, and bus. Downtown Oakland suffered from disinvestment and the effects of regional decentralization and subsequently turned to federal urban renewal as a lifeboat—before creeping gentrification saved it in the twenty-first century.That these stories of development and disruption are relatively familiar to urban scholars—as are the many other stories found in the book, of sports arenas, highway construction, housing segregation, commercial decentralization, deindustrialization, and so on—does not diminish their importance here. What is more, Schwarzer tackles them with an attention to empirical detail and specificity that will please even the most demanding local historian. Close readers will also find gems in those details. “The City of Oakland never fashioned a grand and accessible urban park, akin to Golden Gate Park,” Schwarzer writes, not because of a dearth of design plans (the noted urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson penned such a recommendation in his 1906 A Plan for Civic Improvement for the City of Oakland, California) but because of city council dithering (117). To this day, the best local parks are operated by the East Bay Regional Park District, a cooperative endeavor of Alameda and Contra Coast Counties, not the City of Oakland.For all its exhaustive research and factual detail, this often feels like a book in search of a thesis. Development and disruption only take us so far; they are the essential condition of urbanism throughout time. Oakland as a transportation crossroads also feels too generic: What major city cannot trace its origins to some sort of nodal network? Schwarzer writes in the introduction that the book focuses on how “emergent transportation technologies and systemic racism configured access to urbanized land” (5). That is the germ of a potentially urgent argument. But in truth, race plays an insignificant role in his analysis until a few late chapters, particularly one on housing, and what he means by “access to urbanized land” (by whom, under what conditions, to what end) is never meaningfully defined or developed.In the end, for all its merits (and there are many), the book is more encyclopedic than analytical. It is a fascinating, whirlwind ride through almost a century and a half of urban churn. Non-urbanists and Bay Area enthusiasts will likely find its informative and compelling chapters readable and charming. Interdisciplinary scholars of city life will, I suspect, miss a strong analytical framework as Schwarzer navigates the familiar terrain of modern American urbanism.