3 Plans For 7th Street that Didn't Work
The Loma-Prieta earthquake of 1986 accelerated West Oakland’s fall from the grace. A fall set in motion in 1964 when BART began construction. The naturally-occurring event, combined with those man made, created the perfect conditions for a nationwide trend in urban areas to take hold here in Oakland.
The increased privatization of public resources--like land and housing--transformed whole cultural and historical landscapes in their wake. And that is how 7th street went from a thriving Black business district to the blighted street with dusty windows and empty lots under the BART track.
Since then, multiple attempts have been made to re-establish what once was on the corridor, but none have taken root. Of recent memory are:
Village Bottoms Cultural District
Walter Hood’s 7th Street Urban Design Plan
The City of Oakland’s Site Specific Plan
All these plans lack local Black leadership and community input. And that’s why they didn’t work. We at EB PREC are local, and are purposefully injecting Blackness into this project. The missing piece is community buy in. That’s you! We need you to be fully bought into this vision in order for this project to be successful. There are multiple phases of challenge in this project. The first is acquisition. The second is construction and redesign.
The third and perhaps most important is opening day. Everything that happens after that point also determines the success of this project. We are all about learning from mistakes; and these formerly pitched and failed plans have given us so many lessons.
Join us. Let’s make the Esther’s Orbit Room Cultural Revival Project a success together.
