Newspaper Article

The Other City By the Bay

KRICH, JOHN, JOHN KRICH is the author of "Bump City: Winners and Losers in Oakland" (City Miner Press).

1990

Overview

That may explain why the city may be known best for the slurs hurled against it: [Gertrude Stein]'s observation on a visit home that ''there is no there there''; Bret Harte's quip, after the 1906 temblor spared Oakland, that ''there are some things the earth cannot swallow.'' You have to pay a dollar toll on the Bay Bridge to get into San Francisco, it's often remarked, but Oakland is free. If so, then the hub of the East Bay may be the best bargain a visitor to California could ever encounter. Logging provided much of the early impetus for the city's growth. The elaborate mansions and dance halls of San Francisco's Barbary Coast were constructed largely from redwoods that choked the upper flanks of Oakland's hills. Despite a pace of defoliation to rival anything in the Amazon rain forest, Redwood Park - as well as the adjoining preserves of the 60,000-acre East Bay Regional Park District - still houses quite a few of the species for which it is named. The 2,162 acres of trails, meadows and lakes make the term ''park'' seem awfully meager. Along with the smaller Huckleberry, Roundtop and Anthony Chabot, Redwood forms an urban wilderness. Visitors who don't have the time or money to drive hundreds of miles up the north coast can get a pretty close approximation of unspoiled California flora and fauna with a hike through Oakland's hills. Along the park's approach up Joaquin Miller Road, near the estate of this self-styled poet laureate of fin-de-siecle California, there's still evidence of why he once declared, ''Thou Rose-land! Oak-land, thou, mine own! Thou shalt be the Throned Queen of this vast west sea!'' Another self-applied appellation has been the City of Homes - and the appropriateness can be borne out by anyone with the wheels or the will. Some of the most gracious living within an American urban setting is on display here. Of course, like most California cities, Oakland is really two-tiered, divided into constituent flatlands and hills. In such upper-crust heights as the Montclair district, Rockridge or Piedmont, best known for its high school's bird-calling contest featured annually on the ''Tonight'' show, the area's characteristically zenlike ''brown shingles'' share blocks with eccentric rancho-style stucco estates. Even West Oakland, the port-side district that is the city's most blighted ghetto, shows a rich architectural heritage of sea captains' homes in prime Victorian style.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: KRICH, JOHN / Merritt, Lake / NYTRAVEL / Stein, Gertrude / TRAVEL AND VACATIONS