Oakland used to be a beautiful city
I spent a fair bit of time in the area 10-12 years ago. I arrived in Oakland at night, to a hotel that was surrounded by a 8-foot wall topped with spools of concertina wire. I said, "I gotta find me a different place to stay!", and did so the next day. :-)
Jack London square was nice, but *literally* just crossing the street put me into an area that I really didn't want to be.
When I said “used to be” I’m talking about 1968. We lived in nearby Piedmont. (Herb Caen called Piedmont “a white, Repbublican enclave where all the ladies have blue hair”.) Piedmont is totally surrounded by Oakland, but a very different community.
We used to love to go to Lake Merritt on a Sunday morning after church. We’d take the children to Children’s Playland I think that was the name — it closed earlier this year). Maybe it was Storyland. All of the features were on a children’s book theme. And then we’d have lunch, or an early dinner, at one of the nice restaurants in the area. In 1972, we spent a week in Honolulu and came home to breakfast in Oakland. I thought I’d returned to heaven after the mugginess and monsoon rainstorms of Honolulu.
There was a restaurant (Biff’s?) that had the best hot chocolate. A couple of radicals blew themselves up arming a bomb in the parking lot a couple of years after we moved away (1972). I think they were part of the Weathermen. Karma.
There was a great Chinese resturant in Jack London Square where they served bottomless won ton soup. Otherwise, it never appealed to me.