East Bay history podcast that gathers, shares & celebrate stories from Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and other towns throughout Alameda and Contra Costa Counties.
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“The neighborhood time forgot”: A strange sliver of waterfront
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There’s a small stretch of Oakland’s shoreline unlike any place else. Nestled between the restaurants of Jack London Square and the modern apartment blocks of Brooklyn Basin sits 5th Avenue Marina. This collection of rusty warehouses, eclectic studios, and surreal art installations recalls a bygone era, when crafty Bohemians dwelled amongst decayin…
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“Climbing was all I had”: A history of bouldering in the Berkeley Hills
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It would be easy to overlook the significance of Indian Rock and Mortar Rock, two relatively modest outcroppings located in the Berkeley Hills. Unlike the towering cliffs of Yosemite, which dominate the landscape, these boulders are partially obscured by the homes and trees that surround them. But for nearly a century, some of America’s most influe…
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“The streets have changed”: “Drug Lords of Oakland” author on the rise and fall of local kingpins
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After spending more than three decades working in the underground economy, Titus Lee Barnes compiled his stunning stories of “the street life” into a self-published book titled “Drug Lords of Oakland: The untold stories of California’s most notorious kingpins of the 1970s, 80s and 90s.” Starting with the rise of infamous heroin kingpin Felix Mitche…
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"Rotten City" no more: The history of a tiny town's transformation
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Emeryville is a tiny town – less than 2 square miles. It’s nestled between Oakland and Berkeley, right at the foot of the Bay Bridge, and most people probably think of it as a place to go shopping. Two major freeways cut through Eville and from your car, while you’re inevitably sitting in traffic, you can see giant signs for Ikea, Target, and Bay S…
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“He was bringing people together”: Why was Dr. Marcus Foster murdered?
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In 1970, Dr. Marcus Foster was hired as the first Black superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District. Widely recognized as one of the greatest educators of his generation, he was brought here to help rescue a deeply troubled system. Within three years of his arrival, exactly 50 years ago this month, Foster was assassinated by a shady milit…
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Unearthing “lives of the dead”: A tour of Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery
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When Oakland’s most prominent graveyard celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2015, SF Gate honored the occasion with this description: “There are 177,000 people at historic Mountain View Cemetery, many of them famous and all of them dead.” The permanent residents of this picturesque site may indeed be deceased, but their stories live on through Mich…
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Abortion, poetry, and stink-bombs: A different kind of “self-help” movement
1:00:23
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19-year-old Laura Brown started the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center in 1972. In the early days, Laura would answer the clinic’s phone using different voices so it sounded like there were multiple people working there. From its humble beginnings in a tiny Temescal house, this DIY project would eventually grow into an institution that would se…
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Tales from the pit: Lessons from Berkeley’s landfill
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These days the East Bay’s waterfront is lined with parks, restored wetlands, marinas, and beaches, but for most of the twentieth century this shoreline was a dirty, dangerous wasteland. Factories stretching from Emeryville to Richmond treated the San Francisco Bay as a garbage bin. The habit of using the Bay as a dump was so common in Berkeley that…
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"End of the line": How we lost the Key System
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Long before BART or AC Transit, East Bay commuters relied on the Key System, a network of electric streetcars, for local travel and even to cross the Bay (there used to be tracks on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge!). Despite serving millions of passengers annually, the rails were ripped out and the network was completely dismantled by 1958. This e…
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Long Lost Puzzle: What happened to the grizzly bears and old growth redwoods?
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Up until the 1850s, the East Bay was home to hundreds of grizzlies and some of the tallest redwoods in the history of the planet. Within about a decade of the Gold Rush, nearly all of the bears and the trees were wiped out. This episode looks back at the local environment before colonization—and explores how such a massive wave of devastation was a…
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“You get to play a game of detective”: Longtime librarian Dorothy Lazard uncovers a whole new world
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As a librarian at the Oakland History Center, Dorothy Lazard helped countless patrons research their connections to the past. In her new memoir “What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World,” digs into her own history, examining the forces that shaped her young life in San Francisco and Oakland. After getting bounced around between relatives, sc…
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A curious conversation: Myth-busting and more with Olivia Allen-Price
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For the past eight years, Olivia Allen-Price has been solving local mysteries and debunking myths on her KQED podcast Bay Curious. Each week the show tackles listeners’ questions on topics ranging from architecture to salad dressing. Now a new book called “Bay Curious: Exploring the Hidden True Stories of the San Francisco Bay Area” has compiled so…
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From volcanoes to potholes: Excavating stories below the soil with Andrew Alden
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Did you know that downtown Oakland is built on ancient sand dunes? Or that the East Bay hills used to be honeycombed with quarries and mines? Or why Fruitvale was such a great place to plant orchards in the 1800s? These are just a few of the stories Andrew Alden explores in his new book “Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City.” (Heyday) According …
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“Time is not money”: Challenging clocks, nostalgia, and more with Jenny Odell
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In her new book “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock,” Jenny Odell takes a tour of the Bay Area. She begins at the Port of Oakland and travels as far as the Pacific Ocean before turning around and heading back to Mountain View Cemetery in the East Bay hills. Along the way, she also brings readers on a different kind of journey. At each…
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"Who was Joaquin Miller?": Assessing the legacy and land of a controversial icon
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Oakland’s largest city park is named after Joaquin Miller, an eccentric writer who lived on the property more than a century ago. After gaining international attention as the flamboyant “Poet of the Sierra,” Miller transformed the Oakland hills by planting an estimated 75,000 trees. He called his estate “The Hights” [sic] and it became a renowned c…
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"We were being erased": The woman who saved California’s Black history
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Delilah Beasley didn’t have much education or money, but when she saw that African Americans were being ignored by history books, she knew she had to do something. Beasley ended up spending nearly a decade interviewing elders and digging through crumbling archives to compile “The Negro Trailblazers of California,” a book that rescued dozens of nota…
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“Is reform possible?”: Investigating Oakland’s dysfunctional police department
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Journalists Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham have been investigating the Oakland Police Department for more than a decade. Their coverage of violent misconduct, corruption, and sexual abuse has led to multiple resignations and terminations within the department, but even more shocking is the relative lack of consequences for many of the officers r…
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Saved from the wrecking ball: The resurrection of Oakland’s Paramount Theater
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Oakland’s Paramount Theater is now recognized as one of the grandest examples of Art Deco architecture still in existence, but this masterpiece almost met the same fate as many other prestigious movie palaces of its era. Originally constructed in 1931, the Paramount was a torn and tattered dump by the late 1960s. At the time, the Oakland Symphony w…
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Rooted in Richmond: Touring a "cultural gold mine"
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For the past year, I’ve been part of a team developing Rooted in Richmond, a free app that allows visitors to take a self-guided tour through the city’s history. The tour covers 16 locations over 6 miles and includes maps, photos, videos, 3D renderings of historic objects, and more. Topics range from sacred Ohlone shellmounds to the formation of en…
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What happened to “America’s most-read woman”? Rediscovering Elsie Robinson
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Elsie Robinson was a pioneer of women in media, an early advocate for equal rights, and at one point the highest-paid woman writer in the nation. Before launching her journalism career, Elsie’s life was an astonishing rollercoaster that included everything from a marriage to a wealthy Victorian gentleman to a job working deep within the bowels of t…
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“It’s okay to talk about sex toys”: Nenna Joiner digs deep into pleasures of the past
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After years of working a corporate job in downtown Oakland, Nenna Joiner woke up one morning with a dream: They wanted to be in the sex industry. After their job applications were rejected by every adult pleasure shop in the area, Nenna decided to launch their own business. They started by selling sex toys and porn DVDs out of a box at bars (and so…
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Nurses, Novelists, Politicians, and Punks: Miriam Klein Stahl’s “Hella Feminist” portraits
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Miriam Klein Stahl came to the Bay Area in the late ‘80s seeking a community of queer punks that she’d read about in underground zines like Homocore. She wasn’t a musician, but she loved working with her hands and quickly realized that she could contribute to this thriving scene by drawing flyers and creating illustrations. Miriam’s rebellious pass…
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“What made Julia Morgan different?”: Exploring the early years of a superstar architect
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Julia Morgan wasn’t just one of the most renowned architects of the 20th century, she was a true pioneer of her profession. She was the first woman to be admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which was the most important architecture school of its era, as well as the first woman in California to earn an architecture license and eventually …
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“If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with”: When Ronald Reagan sent troops into Berkeley
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[This is a re-broadcast of an episode originally aired in 2019.] 50 years ago, a group of students, activists and community members transformed a muddy, junk-filled parking lot into a park. When the University of California, under heavy pressure from Gov. Ronald Reagan, tore up the grass and surrounded the land with a heavily-guarded fence, this re…
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“They’re scared of this book”: Oakland history under attack
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Over the past few years, there’s been a huge upsurge in efforts to remove books about gender and race from libraries and schools, and in some cases even ban them from being sold to minors altogether. One of the books frequently targeted by these campaigns is “The 57 Bus,” which examines a 2013 incident involving a nonbinary teenager who was lit on …
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