The Mostly Real Estate Podcast, with Declan Spring

Grifters, Racists, a DeLorean, and a Mountain of LSD: Uncovering The East Bay's History with Liam O'Donoghue, Host of East Bay Yesterday - #63

• Declan Spring

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Dive into the captivating underbelly of East Bay history with Liam O'Donoghue, the passionate storyteller behind the acclaimed podcast East Bay Yesterday. From corrupt political beginnings to cultural transformations, this conversation unveils the hidden forces that shaped Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, and beyond.

Did you know Oakland's first mayor essentially stole the town? Horace Carpentier, a shrewd lawyer turned politician, manipulated his way into ownership of Oakland's valuable waterfront before selling it to railroad barons for personal profit. This foundation of opportunism set a precedent that would echo through generations of East Bay governance – a reminder that today's political challenges have deep historical roots.

The struggle for housing equity takes center stage as we explore Byron Rumford's groundbreaking Fair Housing Act of 1963 and the fierce backlash it faced from the real estate industry and a pre-gubernatorial Ronald Reagan. This pendulum of progress and resistance reveals how neighborhood demographics shifted over decades – from Italian immigrants moving up from West Oakland to Temescal, to the complex dynamics following Japanese American internment during WWII.

Emeryville's transformation from a vice-filled "gambling hell" (complete with corrupt police chiefs driving DeLoreans and taking bribes) to today's shopping destination demonstrates how quickly a place's identity can change. Meanwhile, the once-thriving warehouse art scenes that defined East Bay counterculture in the 1990s and early 2000s have largely disappeared, raising questions about where tomorrow's cultural innovations will emerge in an increasingly expensive region.

Whether you're a longtime resident or recent arrival, these stories provide crucial context for understanding the East Bay's present challenges and future possibilities. Join us for this illuminating journey through the colorful, complicated history that continues to shape one of America's most dynamic regions. Follow Liam's work through East Bay Yesterday's podcast, Substack, or join one of his popular boat tours for an immersive historical experience.

Click here for the East Bay Yesterday podcast front page and tour info

Follow East Bay Yesterday on Instagram @eastbay_yesterday

Click here for information about the book Hella Town by Mitchell Schwarzer

Click here for information about the book The Pacific Circuit by Alexis Madrigal

Click here for a prior episode with Liam O'Donoghue from 2021 

Declan Spring is a licensed CA REALTOR® DRE#01398898

Declan:

Welcome to the Mostly Real Estate Podcast and thank you everybody for stopping by today to join the conversation. This is my first live audience podcast. It's a nice tight little group here, which is perfect for me, because I'm a little bit nervous and if I suddenly forget how to speak into the microphone, just know that you're witnessing history in the making by me trying to do this for the first time, and thank you to Liam for not running off stage if I ask something completely backwards. Okay, my guest today is Liam O'Donoghue, the very articulate, affable and mission-driven host of East Bay yesterday. Liam's passion for the people he meets and the stories that he uncovers is very contagious, in my opinion. He's been doing this work for 10 years and his work is a perfect example of how the podcast platform can empower creative people with a genuine desire to serve their community. Liam also highlights a multitude of books on local histories and their authors, one of which is Hellatown, written by Mitchell Schwarzer, and we'll talk more about that book today. Hi Liam, hey Declan, thanks for having me. Thank you for coming in and making the time. I want to talk to you about your journey from mainstream journalism to making East Bay yesterday a primary focus and I want to thank you for the care that you take to faithfully and accurately represent your guests and subjects, and I want to talk a little about the method behind your storytelling and your podcast, which I've been listening to a lot in preparation for this. It covers the physical, cultural, political history of the East Bay, and it's a scope that's so broad that I can only highlight a little bit of it here and just encourage people to listen to East Bay yesterday and support you as well on Patreon, so we can get to all of that later on. Now, fortunately for me, you've been on the show before, on episode 19 in 2021. So I'm going to read the intro I had for that Okay, and then you can tell us what's changed in your life. Okay, sounds good, all right. Here's what I wrote at the beginning of that show.

Declan:

Liam O'Donoghue is the host and producer of East Bay Yesterday. His journalism has appeared in outlets such as KQED Arts, berkeley Side Open Space, mother Jones Salon, east Bay Express and the syndicated NPR program Snap Judgment. In 2018, you were honored by the East Bay Express as the best journalist turned historian and presented with a Partners in Preservation Award from Oakland Heritage Alliance. Liam has given many presentations on local history at library, schools and bookstores throughout the Bay Area, as well as institutions such as the California Historical Society, the Hearst Museum, oakland Rotary, nerd Night, east Bay. Liam O'Donoghue's quotes are used on Oakland-related issues and have appeared in media outlets like New York Times and the Washington Post. So, liam, anything to add since I wrote that way back in 2021?

Liam O'Donoghue:

Probably just the only real significant update to that resume is that now I'm a regular contributor to SFGate, so I'm writing for SFGate as well these days.

Declan:

Okay, is that very regular.

Liam O'Donoghue:

I wish it would be more regular, but I'm trying to. I'm also. I've also launched my own sub stack, so I've got to feed the sub stack and SFGate. So I try to do about one post on my sub stack per month and SFGate probably gets about once every other month.

Declan:

Yeah, Okay, and is SFGate asking you to write about history, or what are you covering? They've given me pretty free reign. You know, my territory is the East Bay, I Okay. And is SFGade asking you to write about history, or what are you covering?

Liam O'Donoghue:

for them They've given me pretty free reign. You know my territory is the East Bay. I do try to focus on history but I also do some cultural coverage for them as well. I go to a lot of concerts so sometimes I'll just sit at my friend who's also the arts editor and say, hey, do you want a little blurb about such and such show? And he'll let me do a little blurb. But um, for my longer features I do try to do things kind of rooted in east bay history.

Liam O'Donoghue:

My most recent um like serious feature for sf gate was about the history of this magazine called maximum rock and roll, which is kind of known as the punk rock bible, started in uh berkeley before moving to san francisco for many years and since they launched uh actually as a kpfa radio show in the late 70s. Over the years they amassed the largest collection of punk rock records on the entire planet as far as we know and I wrote an article about how the archives are moving to an academic institution in Tennessee of all places, because there's an organization there called the Center for Popular Music outside of Nashville, and so they have the resources to digitize and share all these records which up until pretty recently were just sitting in an Oakland basement Amazing. But I walked through the record collection and it's like a labyrinth. I mean like 60,000 records, something like that An insane amount.

Declan:

And East Bay Yesterday has several great strictly music kind of episodes which are fabulous and everything from blues to punk to, and also I recall an episode on the rave scene.

Liam O'Donoghue:

The rave history, the hip-hop history. Yeah, I'm a big music fan, so, yeah, at least you know, every couple months or every year. So I try to weave in at least one or two music episodes, yeah, and you were, like always, destined to be a journalist.

Declan:

Because didn't you?

Liam O'Donoghue:

as a teenager, you had, like you were writing a zine yeah, I started doing my own zine when I was about 15 years old. Yeah, uh, just going to little punk rock shows in Chicago and interviewing bands and things like that. So that started it all, although I guess probably even before that I was making my own little coloring books. You know how little kids do making their own little story books, so I guess it was just in my blood.

Declan:

Were you a big reader as well growing up. Oh, always yeah.

Liam O'Donoghue:

I was the type of kid who my parents would drop me off at the library and just leave for hours. I'd be fine, just, you know, just reading, hanging out, listening to like. Remember, in libraries they used to have like little stations where you could listen to first tapes and then later CDs. So, yeah, I was more than happy just to wander the stacks or, you know, hang out with librarians. And nothing much has really changed, because I still find myself going over to the oakland history center on the third floor of the oakland uh main branches library, just hanging out there, going through the files, chatting with my librarian friends.

Liam O'Donoghue:

We actually, um, can I give a plug real quick? Yeah, please, we uh in. So this was, uh, one of the librarians ideas, but we've launched a history-themed diorama contest this summer. So people are submitting dioramas now based on different episodes of Oakland history, and we're going to have a big event next month where some celebrity judges like Alexis Madrigal, the host of Forum, and Dorothy Lazard, a great local author, are going to be the celebrity judges of the dioramas, and I'm going to be hosting a trivia competition for some prizes and then the dioramas will be on display at the library for a few months.

Declan:

That's just great.

Liam O'Donoghue:

You know, people reach out to me about collaborating constantly and I try to say yes to everything. I probably say yes to too much, but there's just a lot of great people around here and they're fun projects. So, yeah, I love working with different organizations, institutions, individuals yeah.

Declan:

Remind us what brought you into the Bay Area.

Liam O'Donoghue:

You were in Chicago right, I grew up just outside of Chicago, yeah, and then I went to journalism school at the University of Illinois, finished school in 2002. Kind of bounced around the West Coast for about a year and didn't really have a particular reason for coming to the Bay Area. I just love the music history, the literary history. I like the climate. I didn't know anyone here, I didn't have a job lined up, but there were a couple golf courses here and I'm not a golfer, but I did grow up caddying and so when you're a caddy, if you can find a golf course, you got a job. So I started caddying at the Olympic Club and at the San Francisco Club in 2003, while I was working on getting my feet wet as a freelance writer working for places like the Bay Guardian. And, yeah, that started at all a little over 20 years ago.

Declan:

And tell us the origin of the East Bay Yesterday podcast. When did that all start up? About 10 years ago, right?

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, about 10 years ago, Officially launched in 2016. And I had been working my last full-time journalism job, uh, was for saloncom and, uh, we rode that uh tech bubble in the kind of early 20 teens where facebook and other social media sites really kind of cranked up the traffic, yeah, and so they were just hiring, hiring, hiring. The traffic was going up and up and up and then, um, as those tech titans tend to do, they switch their algorithms up and Salon, just like every other media organization you guys probably remember BuzzFeed and Vice and all these other properties that were very hot during that era just traffic crashed for everybody and, like about half the industry, I got laid off, which turned out to be a great thing. Actually, I was getting a little burned out. It was during the 2016 presidential cycle and I was just like I don't know how much longer I can do this. It was getting a little hectic, and so when I got laid off, it was wonderful timing because it gave me a little chance to take a step back and kind of think about what I wanted to do for the next phase of my career, and I knew that I didn't want to just jump right back into kind of national political media. I want to do something more positive, something more local, and it felt like Oakland was really changing a lot at the time and it felt also like a lot of new people were coming in and a lot of old people were either leaving, getting displaced Maybe they couldn't afford the rent anymore because the socioeconomic conditions were changing really rapidly as well and just from being in Oakland already for about 10, 15 years at that point I just felt like these are really important and fun and interesting stories that needed to be shared.

Liam O'Donoghue:

So I started interviewing people and it just grew from there and I wanted the podcast format for a couple reasons. One was, you know, I wanted the people who were telling their stories, their voices, to really be elevated. Yeah. So with that podcast as opposed to print journalism where you're taking people's quotes, maybe just using a tiny quote here and there yeah, with a podcast you can really let people tell their own stories, yeah.

Liam O'Donoghue:

And then also, I wanted a way for new people, all the new people coming here to connect and learn about the history of this place, because you know, I do tours too, so a lot of the people who listen to the show I get to talk to in person and hearing from folks who are moving here. You know folks they want to know about this place. You know they're like. I know this place has an interesting history. I know there's a lot that's happened here, but where do I find this information? And so one of my goals for East Bay yesterday was to make that accessible and, you know, really wide-ranging, so people could figure out the topics that they're interested in, whether it's the history of, you know, bruce Lee's time in Oakland or motorcycle gangs or whatever. I've covered a lot over the last 10 years.

Declan:

I mean, I've always encouraged anyone who will listen any realtors and people in my industry to listen, because it's a fabulous show to introduce people to who are moving here or who live here. But people who are moving here because, as you said, they do want to feel like they're being, they're responsibly joining the culture or becoming part of the culture, and this is a great way to understand what you're becoming a part of.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Definitely one of my goals, and I get that feedback from people, although I will say my favorite feedback is from people who have lived here for their whole lives or two, three generations, and they're like I've lived here my whole life and I didn't know that and I'm like I just learned it too. For every episode I do, I'm doing a ton of research, I'm learning a ton of things, so it's exciting and I feel like that curiosity is really contagious, and so I love kind of discovering stories that are really fascinating and then sharing them and seeing other people react.

Declan:

I mean, you know, I didn't know about the kangaroo mouse until I, you know, until I looked at this map that you brought in. We'll, we'll get to that. The long lost history which is a fabulous map. Yeah, yeah.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Not a lot of kangaroo mice left, unfortunately, in this area and that was because of the influx of cats domestic cats when people moved here to the East Bay Hills. You know those cats do make quick work of the local small mammals.

Declan:

Yeah, and funny little things Like I was just reminded today that there's only a single redwood remaining from back in the day, and I'd forgotten that little bit Old Survivor.

Liam O'Donoghue:

You know, it's really funny that you bring that up. Yes, so this is the story that I am familiar with and that many people are familiar with was that you know, even before the gold rush, these loggers were coming in and just decimating the redwood forest forest in the east bay hills um to to basically build up the bay. You know, these logs were getting shipped across the bay and building up san francisco and, and you know, this whole region, um, and the story is basically that there was one tree that was kind of maybe a little runty and also in a very difficult um to harvest, um location. It's kind of like right on the edge of sort of a ravine and surrounded by poison oak and all this stuff, and so old survivor was the one that was left.

Liam O'Donoghue:

But there's a guy, dennis evanoski, another local historian, and he was telling me the other day he thinks there might be two other old growth redwoods that survived the the chopping block back in the 1840s and 50s and 60s, but um, that you're not allowed to do a core sample test on them because they're protected. So it's, you know, this is still a theory, okay, but they're in basically the same place as old survivors and you know, again, it's a theory, he could be wrong about that. So we'll see. You know, I mean a lot of the history, as I've learned over the years, isn't settled. You know there's still debates raging on about many topics, it's the beauty of history, exactly.

Declan:

You know, one of the things that occurred to me this week as well, when I was preparing to chat with you again for a second time, is that now we have AI right, we have these LLMs right and there's so much history available now in such a nice, curated and narrated form. And that's good and bad right, because, as I was looking at, oh wow, it's so much easier to prep, to talk with Liam for this episode. It occurred to me one of the reasons I love your podcast so much is because you get to hear the voices, because you interview so many people, to hear people like Betty Reid Soskits.

Rachel Melby:

Yes, right To hear Mitchell.

Declan:

Schwartzer talk about his book, but all of these people, william Wong as well, you know that's because your show brings things to life. It's people's actual memories and experiences, you know, of being in the East Bay. So I want to talk about, I want to get into the podcast and I want to talk specifically about a few episodes that I think are probably really relevant. If you're a local realtor, these are the kind of episodes that I personally get drawn to. And the first one I want to talk about because I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I'm an Irish guy, right, I'm not born or raised here.

Liam O'Donoghue:

You're Irish, what who would have?

Declan:

thought.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Is it that?

Declan:

obvious. Yeah, but I couldn't believe it when I listened to the episode. It's episode 85, he Stole the Town.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Oh yes. Right, it's about Oakland's first mayor Horace Carpentier. Horace.

Declan:

Carpentier. It's an absolutely bizarre story and he was an unbelievable grifter.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Oh yeah, Apparently his real name was just Horace Carpenter, but he added the Carpentier to make it sound more exotic.

Declan:

Yeah, just little nuggets that you throw in there like that. The East Bay was generally referred to Prior to being Oakland, it was just Contra.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Costa, contra Costa. Yeah, basically the opposite coast from the city San Francisco, right Definitely.

Declan:

And so that's where Contra Costa comes from. I always find those things interesting, like El Sobrante. Oh yeah, the leftovers. Yeah, and I don't speak Spanish, so when I hear oh that's what that means, Right?

Liam O'Donoghue:

Or we have El Cerrito, right is the little hill, the little hill, yeah Right.

Declan:

So, but this guy I want to talk a bit about episode 85 and Horace, because this guy was you know, he's not remembered fondly in Oakland, right.

Liam O'Donoghue:

No, definitely not in Oakland, right? No, definitely not. Although it is funny, I talk about Horace on some of my boat tours and one of the things that I've been throwing in lately because, as a lot of people are probably familiar with the story, our previous mayor, shang Tao, was, you know, raided by the FBI while she was in office. Yeah, not the first Oakland mayor to run into legal problems, and I kind of have a little sort of one-liner joke about how, when people ask me about when Oakland politics started getting kind of corrupt, I'll say day one it was like in our DNA. Look at the guy who was our first mayor. He was a grifter, like you said, a con man. Some might just say a very shrewd lawyer, but yeah, we can get into it. What do you want to know about horace?

Declan:

well, so he so well. I want you to tell me the story of how you know, of how oakland became oakland, why he was the first mayor, and when I say he was a grifter, what exactly he got up to and how did he create the town. He made off like a bandit, I know. Oh yeah, he tried to he tried to redeem himself later on with endowments to Columbia or something.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, with his ill-gotten gains, yeah Well, yeah, I mean we can go into it however much detail you want to. I mean there's. You know, I did like a 45-minute long episode about this and even that didn't cover everything. There's still so much to say about Horace, but the nutshell version would be that he came from the east coast during the era of the gold rush and he was a young lawyer, yeah, and the thing that people don't think about oakland, I feel like, is that it really was like the wild west. Yeah, you know, people think of the wild west and you think of, you know kind of cowboys and indians quote unquote in arizona, or you know wyoming places like that. But that same, uh, kind of lawlessness, um, that kind of get rich quick mentality it was, you know, not just in in san francisco, the gold rush town, or like in the in the, you know the kind of wild plains it was. It was all over the West and Oakland's a perfect example of this. So, um, when, uh like around the time that California became a state, you know after the Mexican American war, uh, around 1850 or so 1849, um, you know, oakland wasn't a town, it was part of a land grant that had been given to this family called the Peralta family, from the King of Spain, and this was a grant that was given to this family in service, because the patriarch of this family, don Luis Maria Peralta I want to say they've all got like four names he basically worked at Mission San Jose. He basically worked at Mission San Jose, okay, and so in in you know, gratitude for his service, the king of Spain gave him this giant land grant that stretched from roughly San Leandro up to about, I think about El Cerrito, albany, right around there, and this patriarch split the land up between his four sons sorry, the ladies, the daughters didn't get anything. So it was, you know, back, although of course some of those attitudes are still prevalent, you know, these kind of patriarchal attitudes. But the four sons got the land split up and they were running their little plots as ranches essentially, and very sparse population at the time.

Liam O'Donoghue:

So gold is found in 1849, famously, san Francisco goes from about five, or I think it went from less than 5,000 people to about 150,000 people in less than five years. So just a huge boom town. People are flooding in here from all over the place and you know a lot of people had sort of their dreams on going up to the gold fields and getting rich. Most of the people that went up to the gold fields of course did not try to get rich, but a lot of the people that kind of stuck around towns like San Francisco and Oakland and kind of figured out another way to make money did get very rich. And Horace Carpentier was one of these folks. He was, like I said, a lawyer. He came over to Oakland with two of his friends, also lawyers Moon and Adams were their names.

Liam O'Donoghue:

So this is a little bit murky. I'll kind of give a version of the story but depending on kind of whose history you read, there's differing versions. But the long and short of it is essentially they probably didn't really have the legal right to start carving up oakland, laying out street grids, but they, that's what they started doing. Um, again, you know, it's kind of like a legal gray area. Like were they leasing this land from the peraltas? Did they kind of start squatting on the land and then, when the peraltas tried to kick them off, they kind of said, like what are you going to do about it? Like you know, maybe we'll give you this or that. And also, even though this was like an adversarial relationship. Supposedly horace carpentier also started serving as the Peralta's lawyer, which it seemed like probably he was just doing it so he could kind of con them out of more money and land. Anyway, it's a very sort of complex, murky thing, but he did end up becoming Oakland's first mayor. He supposedly got more votes than there were. People living in Oakland at the time and also most of the people living in Oakland at the time and also most of the people living in Oakland at the time didn't even know that he was trying to make Oakland a town. He was working for someone in the state legislature at the time.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Some might say nothing has changed, but certainly the case back then was that people who were going into politics were not doing it for the good of the common man. They weren't doing it to make the world a better place. They were basically getting into politics so they could have power and use that power to enrich themselves. You know, a famous example around the same era would be Leland Stanford, who Stanford University is named after. He was the, you know, one of the founders, one of the heads of the railroad at the time, which is the most powerful corporation in California and then he became California's governor, basically to grease the wheels so the railroads could continue getting their way, and Horace was kind of doing the same thing.

Liam O'Donoghue:

The most significant thing, I think, for the story that we're talking about now is that, as part of his power grab on the town of Oakland that he had created, he essentially gave himself ownership of the waterfront, which turned out, especially during that era, to be the most lucrative property in Oakland.

Liam O'Donoghue:

I mean, you know, this is a port town and that port was really important back then as it is now. And so flash forward 20 years when the railroad, the big four, came to Oakland to establish the terminus of the very first transcontinental line. The railroad needed that property. And so, you know, horace, carpenter and Carpentier and the Big Four kind of did one of these smoky backroom deals to form the Oakland Waterfront Company. That gave the railroad control the waterfront and Horace walked away from Oakland. A very, very rich man. The railroad control the waterfront and Horace walked away from Oakland a very, very rich man. I think he only came back to Oakland once and that was because he was getting sued and he had to go to court. But yeah, he got really wealthy and, like you said, ended up moving to China for a while and then endowed a chair in Eastern Studies at Columbia University.

Liam O'Donoghue:

But again this is just scratching the surface. There's a million stories about this guy.

Declan:

I mean, how does it feel to you these days when that kind of power grab, transactional politics for one's own benefit is like so completely obviously in our faces again, in a way that we haven't seen it since any decades actually?

Liam O'Donoghue:

I mean, it's just kind of a reminder that like, the more things change, the more they stay the same, in a way, reminder that like the more things change, the more they stay the same, in a way. I mean, technology has changed so much, you know, culture has changed so much. We've come so far in the, you know, 170 years, 175 years, since horace carpenter was the mayor of oakland to. You know, now, looking at the, you know, just in your face, corruption that's happening at the federal level, um, but you know this has been going on for thousands of years.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Basically, you know, you can read like archaeology you know like I'm sure there's like hieroglyphics about like corrupt tax collectors and stuff like that. I mean it really. I mean that's sort of the nature of power right.

Declan:

Well, that episode also features you doing a lovely victorian woman's accent. I think you're quoting, for you know somebody uh verbatim on on their opinion of his character at the time. I wish I could remember that quote. Yeah, he's a scoundrel.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, I mean there's all kinds of rumors. There was a rumor that he dressed up as a priest one time to trick some people, and another rumor that he built his house right on the channel that connects Lake Merritt to the Oakland estuary so that if people came and tried to attack him he would basically have like a getaway boat parked out back that he could escape on.

Declan:

Right, unbelievable. So Oakland's origins as a city then are it's a fairly interesting episode. Yeah, it's fairly interesting, and, to your point, it's kind of corruption and that kind of thing seems to have been, you know, present in Oakland history from the beginning, right, yeah?

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean just like so many other cities. It's not like Oakland is an anomaly in that way, but yeah it is. It's a lot, a lot of very shady, shady characters throughout history.

Declan:

Well, thanks for bringing them to life. Um, I do want to talk about probably my my. Probably the most important episode, in my opinion for realtors is episode 56. In fact, I did a follow-up podcast of my own on all of this as well was episode 56 is 56 is Unfair Housing and you know, I don't know how many people know it, but as you drive on Sacramento Street near Ashby, there's a statue there and I don't know how many people know who they're driving by, even when they see that statue. You know the one talking about yeah, it's Byron Rumford, of course, who is, and the opening of that podcast, by the way. Talking about yeah, uh, it's byron rumford, of course, who is. Uh, and the opening of that podcast, by the way, it's just beautiful. You talk about byron rumford when he because he was a pharmacist, but he was the first african-american to state assembly right yeah, in northern california, correct, yeah, northern california, and so he um, he was trying to get a room and he had a room in a hotel.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Oh right, yeah, yeah, in Sacramento when he got elected.

Declan:

And there was this. There's this story. You tell where exactly in Sacramento. There's this story. You tell where. He goes into the hotel. He says I'm Byron Rumford, I have a room. They're like no, you don't, we don't have any room. He goes outside, goes to a phone booth, he calls. He says I'm just checking if I have a room. They say yes, you do. He goes in. He says they say no, you don't.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Right, right, yeah, and exactly. And I mean this was, you know, in your face. Segregation, right, they were basically trying to prevent a black man from renting a room at the hotel. And this is not Mississippi, this is not Alabama, this is Sacramento, like the early 1960s, right, I mean? So that's one of the things that I think is important for people to remember. People think of, you know, jim Crow and segregation and things like that. As you know, something way far in the past or something that only happened in certain regions of this country, but it was, you know, just as prevalent in California in some ways as anywhere else in the country.

Declan:

Yes, yeah, he told the hotel clerk that he was in Sacramento to change all of that right, right, that was his goal.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, I mean, his goals were challenging employment discrimination and housing discrimination. Yeah, and he really made that his mission.

Declan:

Yeah, because we had the Rumford Fair Housing Act. That was passed in 1963. And it's amazing to me what occurred after. That was really. What was so fascinating to me as an outsider coming to live here was to understand that you had this incredible Fair Housing Act passed in 1963 in California and then it was pushed back on by even Ronald Reagan at the time. Proposition 14 was an effort to repeal the Fair Housing Act. Go a little through the Well and it did, it passed.

Liam O'Donoghue:

So yeah again. Just to kind of summarize so Byron Rumford, berkeley representative, you know, is pushing against this practice of, you know, housing segregation where black people, other people of color, couldn't buy houses, whether it was through explicit you know deeds and covenants that prohibited that, or just you know, in practice, discrimination that was happening. And so he gets elected, you know, uphill battle, but it gets this fair housing law passed. And there was a huge backlash, kind of spearheaded by the real estate industry, and they brought Reagan Ronald Reagan on board before he had ever held any elected office, to sort of be the kind of face of this campaign to repeal this fair housing law. And the backlash was successful, it worked.

Liam O'Donoghue:

And that is a dynamic that you so often see in politics, whether it's at the local, the state, the federal level. I mean, you know one could argue that. You know we're living through one of those backlashes right now and it's the pendulum swinging back and forth and you know the there's the famous Martin Luther King quote about the arc of history, you know, bending towards justice and I hope that's true. You know, I'm still an optimist and I do believe that in the long run, but it's never a straight line right. It's always like it can be one step forward, two steps back, and you know the other.

Liam O'Donoghue:

I think key takeaway from that story is not only about the you know, the backlashes that we have to be prepared for anytime there's social progress, but also the importance of organizing. Yeah Right, I mean, I think that's kind of one of the keys to a lot of the episodes is, I try to make people understand that, like you know, history isn't just this thing that happens like people make it happen, and it's you know, one individual like a Byron Rumford can make a huge difference, and it's you know, one individual like a Byron Rumford can make a huge difference, absolutely.

Declan:

And it was so painful for me to hear that the it was the California real estate. That's what we recall. At the time we weren't the California Association of Realtors, we were the California Real Estate Association was actually the association that launched the campaign to repeal the Fair Housing Act. It was kind of painful and I guess the idea and Reagan's whole push against it was just that people should have the right to decide who they can sell their house to. So it was kind of like it was just nasty, it was just mean, you know.

Liam O'Donoghue:

No, but that's what you just said is really important. Because you know, usually these um, you know politicians or organizations that are, you know, pushing in a like a agenda like that are not just kind of out gonna come out and say we're racist, we don't want. You know, black people in our neighborhoods, they'll always find a um, you know, a kind of economic argument or kind of some other messaging or framing that you know switches the focus from, I think, some of the underlying motivations. And yeah, and exactly in that case they said this isn't about race, this is about property values, this is about individual liberty, this is about the homeowner's freedom to decide who they want to sell to. And yeah, yeah, that again still something we see all the time today.

Declan:

It was lovely to hear Byron Rumford III's voice as well talking about that. You know. What was interesting in that episode to me as well, though, was that we talk about there's some great African-American history and people coming, you know, coming into this part of America at that, you know around the 40s, and you talk about and I maybe thought you could expand on it in a future episode, or perhaps you have, and I just haven't listened to every episode, but the African-Americans episode, but the um, the african-americans coming from the south were they had an opportunity to move into housing that was left vacant by japanese going into internment camps.

Liam O'Donoghue:

I thought that was a really fascinating layer yeah, absolutely, and that wasn't just in berkeley, that was also in, uh, san francisco, okay, as well. A lot of the um japanese-americans had been in, been in what used to be called the Film War District. Now a lot of the time people refer to it as the Western Edition. But similar story, these neighborhoods, and in Richmond as well, where there had been these really thriving Japanese communities that were, you know, people were incarcerated, you know, sent away to these camps for several years during the war. Right, yeah, african Americans coming to the Bay Area for several years during the war. Um, right, yeah, african-americans coming to the bay area primarily to work in the wartime industries like shipbuilding and things like that. Right, um, in places like more dry dock in oakland and the kaiser shipyards up in richmond, um, you know, there was a huge housing crunch so those properties got filled up and, um, you know it's.

Liam O'Donoghue:

It's interesting that you, that you brought up up that kind of like cycle of kind of how neighborhoods change, because I'm just doing, I'm researching an episode right now about the history of this organization called the Oakland Scavenger Company. It was basically Italians that had come to the Bay Area in the late 1800s and early 1900s and you know, I've been interviewing like guys who are like third generation garbage men. Their grandpas had been the ones who started this, you know, over 100 years ago, and they were saying you know, our grandpas came here from Italy A lot of them were from Genoa specifically didn't know how to read, didn't know how to write, and so they kind of would just get like a wagon and a horse and go around picking up garbage and that was, and and recycling stuff too, like people think recycling is new. No, like collecting glass bottles, rags, you name it, there's all kinds of things, even collecting the organic garbage and then selling it's like hog farmers to use as pig feed and stuff like that. And then they teamed up to form the scavenger company, which ended up being one of the biggest independently owned garbage companies in the United States, until it was bought out by Waste Management in the 80s.

Liam O'Donoghue:

But getting back to the neighborhood issue, a lot of the Italians, when they first came to Oakland, were living in West Oakland, which even back then was a more working class neighborhood, partially because it was right next to all these heavy industries, so it was very polluted and loud, noisy factories and stuff like that, the ports right there and then, after you know, maybe like a decade or two or three of these guys learning this trade and kind of forming this alliance to improve their, you know, social mobility.

Liam O'Donoghue:

That's when the Italians started moving up to temescal, okay, and it became temescal was known as little italy, probably from like I don't know, maybe like the 20s or 30s, all the way up until probably like the 70s, 80s. Um, there's still some social clubs, italian social clubs around there, but yeah, it was like this huge italian neighborhood in west oakland and then slowly it shifted to temescal and then then it shifted out of Temescale again and we can talk about that as well. But yeah, these kind of ethnic groups, social groups you know, these neighborhoods are usually not static forever All kinds of social forces changing the demographics of things.

Declan:

Well, so episode 129, which is another one I want to talk about a little bit, is titled Not on the Wealth Corridor, and you chat a lot with Mitchell Schwartzer, who wrote the book Hellatown. I think you've talked to him about his book a couple of times on your podcast and he's a fascinating guy and it's a great book and I had a read of it. But in that podcast you guys talk about how, prior to proper roads and automobiles and all that stuff, there weren't a lot of people in the hills, but at a certain point wealthier people or maybe white people were able to move away from the water and up into the hills and there was a shift then in where people were living in Oakland. So that was a change that occurred as well. And this is a fascinating podcast episode to me because you guys get into a conversation around bringing another BART station.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Oh yeah, the San Antonio proposal.

Declan:

Yeah, talk about the San Antonio proposal.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Well, so there's a group called I think they're called the San Antonio Station Alliance, I believe, and this is a group that formed a couple years ago mostly people who live in that area, sort of east of Lake Merritt, and in a nutshell, their messaging is that the longest gap in BART service yeah, and I think it's like I forget what section, but it's like I think in like the heavily urbanized areas of BART is between Lake Merritt and Fruitvale and so, and it's a pretty densely populated area. I live in that neighborhood as well and so basically they're saying there's this need, especially with Brooklyn Basin development happening down there, kind of just southeast of Jack London Square. You know thousands of new units going in. I believe Brooklyn Basin is the largest new housing development in Oakland since about World War II. Housing development in Oakland since about World War II there's like 4,000 or 5,000 units going in. You know the area.

Liam O'Donoghue:

It just yeah, I think there are arguments that it would be really served well by a BART station that could not only be a transportation hub but also, going back to the founding of BART, the idea was that there would be transit villages, essentially located near BART stations, so people wouldn't. There would be transit villages, essentially located near BART stations so people wouldn't have to be as reliant on cars to get around. And they've located this section right there about halfway between Lake Merritt and Fruitvale, where you could put a BART station and it would serve these new communities, these older communities you could put in a transit village and on paper it sounds like a great idea.

Declan:

It really does, and I encourage anyone to listen not only to listen to that episode and that conversation, because it's a real deep dive into a lot of what shaped. You know, shaped where people live and why in Oakland, especially people of lesser means, Oakland, especially people of lesser means but it's also a really compelling argument for that Enfield BART station.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, yeah, I mean that episode, like so many kind of came from my question which was like why is this part of Oakland so kind of like underdeveloped? Yeah, Like I said, I live around there and you know, around the lake it's so beautiful, it's, you know, it's not a bad location. But you go along the stretch of like East 12th or International and 12th or or international, and there's just like it's all empty storefronts, Um, you know, vacant lots. It just seems so underutilized. And so, getting into like the history of that sort of disinvestment over the years, there's a lot of different threads. You know we we spend like an hour kind of exploring it, but one exploring it.

Liam O'Donoghue:

But one of the interesting insights that Mitchell mentions in it is that it's cheaper for developers to kind of build on the outskirts, right, so like this is why it's harder to redevelop in, you know, a place like San Francisco or Oakland or Berkeley, than it is just to kind of buy land, you know, on the outskirts of the suburbs and Contra Costa or places like that, and expand out.

Liam O'Donoghue:

I mean, some of the fastest growing suburbs have been places like Dublin right In the last like 20, 30 years and it's just, you know, a lot easier to expand out and invest in outward growth than try to deal with, you know, environmental remediation, building codes, existing neighbors, you know all these different things, not to mention you know a kind of whole host of um other issues related to you know kind of urban areas that have been sort of left behind, disinvested etc.

Liam O'Donoghue:

For for decades. And, as the episode explores, like a lot of the reasons for that disinvestment or the kind of um, yeah, under development of that neighborhood go back to the very origins of Oakland. Like this is where factories were located, so it was like dirtier and then it got redlined in the 1930s, Then the highway came through here and devastated this area in the 50s. So there's kind of like every generation or two there's like a factor that kind of set it back or kind of kept it from redeveloping in kind of like a way that made it a nicer place to live for a lot of people.

Declan:

What are some of your other books that you really like on Oakland history, because I've read just Helletown, yeah.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Well, I got to give a shout out to my friend Alexis Madrigal. He's the host of a great show called Forum on KQED radio here in the Bay Area and he just came out with a great book that he'd been working on for about a decade called the Pacific Circuit, and it really explores Oakland's place in the global economy. So he's kind of focused on West Oakland and the port and also its relationship with Silicon Valley.

Declan:

OK.

Liam O'Donoghue:

And so it's kind of like two different. There's kind of two different main threads of the book. One is about how, you know, the development of global trade requires these things that like academics have called sacrifice zones. And West Oakland would fall into that category where basically, like, the success of the port kind of relies or at least did in the development report on the people of West Oakland like not really having power right. So it was kind of like taking power away from these places to kind of make sure that the kind of powers of the forces of global capital could have its way with these areas that they wanted to develop.

Liam O'Donoghue:

And on a more micro level, it's a story about this woman named Margaret Gordon who is an environmental justice organizer. And to kind of make this more concrete, I can explain that basically one of the things that the port was doing for a long time is there would just be rows and rows of semi trucks lined up all day, you know 24-7. And they would be idling in front of people's houses, in front of schools, in front of you know everywhere trying to get into the port and they would just be idling burning diesel fuel. So you know, decades of this resulted in people in West Oakland having some of the highest rates of lung cancer, asthma etc. In the entire state of California, and so what people like Margaret Gordon did through their local organizing was work with the port.

Liam O'Donoghue:

She actually got a seat on the port commission I think she was the first black woman to ever hold that role and was able to negotiate policies that would say, okay, the trucks have to stick to these routes and they can't idle, and yada, yada, yada and kind of all these legal policy improvements that kind of made it so that the port and the people could coexist in a healthier way. Okay, so that's just one example. I mean the book gets into a lot, but that's a great. It weaves together the history of Oakland, you know current state of Oakland and, yeah, that would be one that I would recommend for folks.

Declan:

I'll put that book in the show notes as well, so people can just look into the show notes.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Excellent, and I've got an interview with Alexis on a recent episode so people can listen to that one as well. Oh, that's wonderful yeah.

Declan:

I think I just want to mention one other episode, sure, and then I want to see if anybody else has questions for Liam. I want to know what you're working on coming up. I do want to talk about boat tours as well, but I really enjoyed tours as well, um, but I really enjoy the emeryville episode because it was.

Liam O'Donoghue:

It's hard to yeah because it's fairly the history of emeryville in the insane, totally insane. People think like oh ikea, the mall, emeryville seems like so innocuous, like oh pixar, but it's like crazy. There's a reason. People called it evil, right yeah absolutely bon, absolutely bonkers, bonkers place.

Declan:

And I think it's called the Oaks Card Club.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

Declan:

Which I think, and I didn't listen to that episode this week, but my recollection is that it was grossing more in tax revenue for the city of Emeryville than any other commercial enterprise.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, that's what happens when you've got like a mini casino that's open 24 hours a day. Yeah, definitely, that's a legacy business, for sure. But yeah, the the history of Emeryville again, you know gamblers, grifters, um, before we started taping this, uh, someone was talking about greyhound racing. We were talking about greyhound racing. The first mechanical rabbit ever to be used at a racetrack was used in Emeryville.

Liam O'Donoghue:

So I picked up a lot of fun little tidbits about Emeryville throughout the years. But yeah, basically talk about the Wild West. Well, up until the 80s, emeryville one of the there's like I love these characters there was a former police chief of emeryville named john lacoste. His dad used to be the mayor, so he was like a nepo baby cop and, uh, he used to drive around in the back to the future called the delorean, with the arm, with the, with the um doors that opened up and he would. He was basically a gangster, you know he was. He would drive around in his gold chains and like shake down business owners, yeah, and do um like he would drive around in his gold chains and like shake down business owners, yeah, and do like he would hide cameras in the back of restaurants to like trap politicians in these quote unquote honey traps with like sex workers and black male people.

Liam O'Donoghue:

And I interviewed this guy who was a city manager for Emeryville in the 80s and he talks about like going into the office after John Lacoste got pushed out and it had been been like sealed by I forget what legal authority it was, maybe the county sheriffs or something and there was just like envelopes full of cash all over the place. And then of course he was like politically connected, so he ended up like totally getting off on everything and never ended up getting in trouble. But yeah, there's, there's a lot of really crazy, but oh, like I could go on and on. He was like supposedly taking bribes to let the steel factory just like dump industrial waste into the bay and stuff like that it was wild.

Declan:

No, I happened to have. It was funny. I had a client, at the same time as you released that podcast, who was working in Emeryville in one of those industries and I said you listen to this, tell me if it's accurate. He said you listen to this, tell me if it's accurate. He said he said yeah. He said he said after I, after I retired and I got out of that industry, he said I, I, I've given most of my money to charity, because I had a hard time living with myself.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Wow, wow, that's amazing.

Liam O'Donoghue:

And and one thing I would just say is, you know um folks in the real estate industry, if you ever get a chance to talk to kind of like retired city bureaucrats, like former city planners, former city managers, um people who like aren't worried about getting in trouble anymore, yeah, like they know so much, um like once they're not you know on on the clock anymore and they're willing to kind of tell their stories.

Liam O'Donoghue:

The people who kind of understand how these cities really work behind the scenes and sort of are in these positions where they are. You know, seeing things from all these different you know committees and commissions and from the mayor and the city council, and like the folks who really understand how cities work. Yeah, I love sitting down and talking to those folks, especially, like I said, when they retire, because they just have such a like long view of like the whole. You know all the changes they've seen, but also like, yeah, just how, how crazy things really are. You know, behind all the paperwork, behind all the red tape, like the way things really get done, it's it's shocking well, yeah, I want to be mindful of the time, respectful of everybody's.

Declan:

Sure I'm here and that kind of brings us nicely to you know upcoming shows and people that you might be interested in meeting because you have ideas for the show. So getting introductions to certain people, what's coming up on the show and who would you love the opportunity to talk to.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, well, I guess I can say this. I think it's probably going to be announced sometime soon, but I'm hoping to do an interview with Barbara Lee, our new mayor, pretty soon. You know a lot of people are familiar with her long career in Congress, you know, serving our district. But she has been active in East Bay politics going back to the early 70s. She was, I think, the first president of like, the Black Student Association at Mills College. First president of like the Black Student Association at Mills College. She helped Bobby Seale, you know, the Black Panthers co-founder, when he was running for mayor in 73. You know had a long career basically from. So I would like to talk to her about that early phase of her career, roughly from the 70s up to the 90s, to kind of, you know, fill in that gap. I think, like I said, a lot of people are probably familiar with her more recent record. But she's been in politics for many, many decades now and I'd love to circle back with her and explore that political evolution that brought her to this point.

Declan:

Okay, what other kind of shows are you working on? Oh my gosh.

Liam O'Donoghue:

A million different things. I was talking to a guy this morning about Silicon Valley, for example. People think of the tech industry as sprouting out of Stanford. You know Palo Alto, places like that. Berkeley had a huge role in that. This is not a topic I'm very familiar with yet I'm about to get into my research but I talked to a guy who was part of these early kind of hacker clubs in the like early 80s. You know Steve Wozniak and these guys were. They were like computer 80s. You know steve wozniak and these guys were. They were like computer nerds back before the internet, like unix these the foundations of the internet. Some of it, you know, was developed right here in brooklyn, just a couple blocks away from where we're sitting right now so I'm fascinated in filling in that part of the story and understanding kind of the cultural side of that story as well.

Declan:

Yeah, I, I'd love personally I'd love for you to have Tom Butt he's getting older and I'm sure he's ready to share some stories at this point and he was instrumental in so many historical landmarks that are now available for us to visit, like the lighthouse East. Coast Lighthouse and the Rosie the Riveter Memorial and I know he wanted to do something with Winehaven. That's never come together, but I'd love for you, I would love to talk to him about that.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, a lot of the sites you just mentioned we see on my boat tours of richmond. But another funny little tidbit about tom but I've actually never met him in person so I've been meaning to connect with them. A couple years ago he was I don't know if obsessed is too strong a word, but he's very interested in um, a mystery connected to point richmond history, and this was, uh, the mystery of the one of the most prolific and influential lsd laboratories in american history owsley, who was you know?

Liam O'Donoghue:

the grateful dead, you know the Grateful Dead sound man. Yeah, his nickname was the Bear. Yeah, he was renowned for basically being like the Pied Piper or the Johnny Appleseed or whatever. You know historical analogy. He was basically the LSD dealer to like America.

Evelyn Freitas:

Yeah.

Liam O'Donoghue:

In the late 60s this guy was making, like you know, I don't know maybe millions, at least hundreds of thousands, of hits of acid Really good stuff supposedly and he had a lab in Point Richmond and I know Tom Butt was like on a mission to like figure out what house that lab was in Because for obvious reasons this was not public knowledge and I think he narrowed it down to like one or two places. He might have solved that mystery. I've got to follow up with him and figure out. But he wrote like a blog post about it. I want to say years ago. He had that blog for a long time but I've been meaning to talk to him about that because it's just a funny little. You know now that we're in the middle of this psychedelic renaissance, now, right, I'm always looking for kind of good news hooks to bring these stories back.

Declan:

I would love to hear that. And of course, point Richmond has ties to that era as well of American culture, with people like wasn't Hunter S Thompson a good friend of the mayor at the time and would hang out in Point Richmond with the mayor and the Hells Angels would be out in Point Richmond? But yeah, the mayor at that time of Richmond was a big friend of Hunter S Thompson.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Interesting. You know that's been on my reading list for a long time. I still haven't read that Hunter S Thompson Hells Angels book, but I've been meaning to.

Declan:

Yeah, well, peter Richardson's book about Hunter S Thompson is even more fun because the Hunter S Thompson was the caretaker for the grounds that are now Esalen.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, yeah, no, I did, I read that book. Actually, I think Peter's hosting a panel at the Berkeley library soon about the history of the Berkeley Barb. Oh yeah, it was a you know, famous underground. Yeah uh, you know publication newspaper back in the day and, um, yeah, uh, some of the people who worked on it are still around. They're like in their 70s, 80s, 90s now and I think, yeah, there's some kind of anniversary party happening at the Berkley Library where I think it's Peter who's going to be interviewing some of the former contributors.

Declan:

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, listen, I want to ask anybody here if you have any questions for Liam or any ideas you'd like to see.

Rachel Melby:

Okay, you talked about the-.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Oh, introduce yourself please. Oh, my goodness, I am so sorry. Who are you?

Rachel Melby:

I'm Rachel Rachel Melby, realtor and follower of both of your podcasts. We spoke earlier about my affinity for El Cerrito, where I I live, and how I sometimes like to publish historical tidbits there, but my main platform, if you will, is about revitalizing some parts of San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito that have been disinvested from, as you were were speaking about in the Fruitville International area earlier, and I'm wondering if, from a historical context and all of the research that you've done throughout the East Bay, you have seen similar resurgences where El Cerrito had a heyday in the 50s and it's kind of changed quite a bit. We have a lot of vacant storefronts now. I always think about gosh. Couldn't the city just incentivize these commercial real estate owners to make their spots more marketable, to turn them over or let them go? Have you seen that happen anywhere else in the East Bay that we could point to as a great example?

Liam O'Donoghue:

Well, I'm thinking of a couple of things right now. One is that I know San Francisco did a big push to enliven some of those vacant storefronts, starting about a year or two ago. This started under Mayor London Breed, I believe, and I think Daniel Lurie is continuing the policy of working with commercial building owners to do really cheap or free or reduced rent on the ground floor just to bring some life into some of those spaces. It seems like a win-win for the organization that get the reduced rent as well, as anyone who's investing in a neighborhood doesn't want to have that ghost town feel right. So from what I've, you know, read that that that those programs have been, you know, somewhat successful in terms of just like generating more excitement and foot traffic and liveliness in those areas.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Um, but in the east bay, you know, I think these things always kind of take really like years and decades to unfold. Well, I, I guess you know, like North North Oakland and South Berkeley, it was like really cheap to live here for a long time. I mean, there was like all these kind of like you know, hippies and you know people, people had storefronts in places that are, you know, kind of some of the most fashionable or upscale parts of the East Bay now, like on in the Rockridge area, along College, along P, along Piedmont, you know those weren't always kind of like the bougie sections of the East Bay. You know those processes like, I guess, the classic sort of cycle of you know, I guess, if you want to call gentrification would be.

Liam O'Donoghue:

You know, you get like these kind of disinvested neighborhoods, sometimes they're just post-industrial or just old housing stock etc. Then then you get the artists and then you get like the coffee shops and then you get like the um kind of young professionals and then you get like, you know, fully, fully, developed, fully, you know kind of gentrified neighborhoods. And I think that the key like there's nothing wrong with development. But I think that one of the things I've tried to focus on on my show is talking with people about how there can be investment and development without displacement, right, so making sure that if there is new development that there's going to be some, you know, affordable housing or below market housing kind of baked into that. Or you know, as you were talking about, kind of reduced rent for storefronts or incentives for, you know, artists or local businesses to come in so you don't just get the row of kind of cookie-cutter corporate yeah, big boxes and franchises and stuff like that.

Liam O'Donoghue:

So that we can hold on to our uniqueness here in the East Bay.

Declan:

I hear that's happening in Detroit now. It's part of what's making Detroit feel somewhat lively again.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah.

Declan:

That exact thing anduce, rents and possibility for artists and creative people.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Those people live and work in the neighborhood. There's a group in the East Bay called the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. I believe Noni Session is the head of that. I've done some interviews with her. They're focused on doing that in West Oakland primarily. The big example of what they're trying to do would be Esther's Orbit Room. Focused on doing that like in West Oakland primarily like around um, like the kind of big example of what they're trying to do would be Esther's Orbit Room, this famous old like blues jazz club that they were able to buy and they're renovating now and they're going to try to turn it into like sort of an artistic venue music, but then um reduced uh rate housing above the venue and on the block and things like that.

Liam O'Donoghue:

So not just all pickleball courts, not just all pickleball courts. Yeah, exactly.

Declan:

You know, speaking of pickleball courts, I'm waiting for a show that goes a little more deeply into something we talked about before, which I find fascinating and just kind of too lazy to do my own research. Hoping you will is because I live in Richmond and we had this enormous influx of people from African-Americans from the South for the shipbuilding push and all that kind of thing. And then you told me and I thought it was just desperately awful and very fascinating how those people, the jobs, like, for example, the Ford Auto Plant we talked about, that's bringing it back to the pickable, because that's now pickable, right, but the ford auto plant, where a lot of african americans worked, uh, you know, shut and and moved location yeah, down to milpitas where you know african americans couldn't travel.

Declan:

They weren't allowed to live there yeah, so they were left with no employment and that's what created these terribly difficult neighborhoods in Richmond. It's because the employment was just robbed from them and relocated, and that's a history because it's the town I live in. That's a history that I'm super interested in and another reason to talk to Tom Butt and all that kind of thing.

Liam O'Donoghue:

And by the way, if anyone listening hasn't checked out the Rosie the Riveter it's like a very long name, it's like the Rosie the Riveter World War II Homefront National Historic yada, yada, yada, which is connected to the Craneway Pavilion, the building that you were just talking about. That used to be the Ford plant that now is Pickleball Courts. It was a bunch of stuff in between. I saw Bjork play there back in like 2007. Great show.

Declan:

Yeah, the Rosie the Riveter Museum has a lot of great history there and of course that's where the ferry terminal is now. Does anybody else have a question?

Evelyn Freitas:

My name is Evelyn Freitas, I'm a lender here in the East Bay and I've lived in the Bay Area my entire life. It really seems like, even though we have this area that was this huge land grant that then got divided up and you've got all this grift that really the history and the culture of the area has been driven by the working class and you know cannery workers, people working out, you know in the port, out in Point Richmond, all of those places, and that that's also driven our culture right. We have a really rich culture of music and entertainment that seems to have risen out of that working class background and so I'm curious, with all the people that you talk to, knowing that today will be history tomorrow, what are you seeing in the east bay as far as the, the groups or the people who are driving what we're seeing coming down the pipe, as far as east bay culture, and who's going to be really driving that?

Liam O'Donoghue:

gosh. You know that's a great question. I was just having a conversation with someone about this the other day, because they're doing a like a master's degree on sort of urban space use and the issue they're focusing on or one of the events that they're focusing on is the ghost ship tragedy, where you know, about 35 people died in a fire at a warehouse party in East Oakland about a decade ago and I was talking about how that was kind of the end in a lot of ways for this era. Roughly, I would say, the height of it would have been maybe from the late 90s up until about 2015, where you had all these disused industrial spaces, whether they were actual factories or just warehouses, where there was, you know, underground venues but also tons of people living. You know, when I came to the bay, when I was in my early 20s, I lived in the old post office that we didn't have walls, it didn't have bathrooms like we built that stuff. And I was in my early 20s, I lived in an old post office that we didn't have walls, it didn't have bathrooms like we built that stuff, and I was living with like 15 people. The rent was super cheap. We're doing like group meals and stuff like that, and that was just. I mean, there was dozens of those all around the Bay Area, like if you were looking for people like, oh, there's a party at the French fry factory or the noodle factory or mother's cookies or whatever, and yeah, exactly. And so there was so old canneries and things like that, and so there was the um kind of physical, uh space that you need to incubate uh scene, whether that's art, music, dance, you know, you name it even people who are like building and making things, like who need big studios, like the burning man people and things like that. Um, I think having those large spaces with cheap rent really was crucial for all those scenes that kind of were coming out of the bay. Yeah, like in the in the 90s and the 2000s, um, and it wasn't just, you know, the ghost ship tragedy. The end of that. There was, uh, the cannabis, the rise of the cannabis industry, so a lot of these spaces were getting uh leased to uh grow operations, industry. So a lot of these spaces were getting leased to grow operations and things. A lot of redevelopment, of course, because of just like, the economic boom that the tech industry brought to the Bay Area, et cetera.

Liam O'Donoghue:

And so, to get back to your question, I feel like it's really hard for any kind of young kind of cultural scene to develop here just because young people who are moving here, often moving here now to work as AI developers. There was just a big article in the New York Times earlier this week about this kind of new crop of CEOs who are in their early 20s and they're already getting tens of millions of dollars invested in their companies. And, of course, as these stories go, it's just they work all day, every day. They never sleep. They sleep on a cot next to their desk or whatever. So I mean, people are still moving here, but I think that they're moving here for different reasons.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Now, I don't think if you're a young artist or musician and you're looking for a place to kind of hone your craft and find a scene, I don't know if the Bay Area is really the place to do that anymore, just because it's so expensive and there's just limited opportunities. I mean, some people still are doing it, but in terms of kind of where's the next generation of culture coming from, I'm not sure you know, and it's just also we live in a different era now where it's not. Like you know, the dream is to be a rock star. The dream now is to be like a TikTok creator, right, so it's just like it's a different, very like atomized. You know, we're just living in a different cultural landscape right now. So, I mean, the one thing I'll say is that there are people doing things. It's not like we live in a cultural wasteland.

Liam O'Donoghue:

There's people who are launching projects all the time wasteland. There's people who are launching projects all the time. Some of them come and go, but I'm on a signal chat of like kind of underground shows and there's shows every weekend. There's shows constantly happening. They're a lot smaller than they were. You know, like back in the day you would go to some of these. You know warehouse parties and there'd be hundreds of people there, and now maybe there's tens of people there, dozens of people there, maybe less than that. So the scale is smaller, but I would still say you know people are, are. There's still definitely a weirdo creative, you know freaky trend of like artists and creators and and fun happening in the Bay Area. It's just smaller and harder to find. Yeah, you know what?

Declan:

what I want to do, though, is let's just smaller and harder to find. Yeah, you know. What I want to do, though, is let's just talk a little bit about the other stuff you do, so people are aware. Oh sure, especially your boat tours, because those are fabulous, thank you. Tell us all about how that works.

Liam O'Donoghue:

I've been doing that for about I don't know like six, seven years now. Take people out on boats. We leave from the Emeryville Marina. I've got two different tours. One is more oakland, alameda oriented, the other one goes north. So we, but along the way of course we're hitting some famous local landmarks, like the, the albany bulb, you know, like the richmond harbor, etc. And just yeah, they're about three hour cruises. Talking about history, very intimate. I bring them out about 30 people at a time, okay, and those are a lot of fun.

Declan:

So tell everybody and I'll put it in the show notes. But where people could perhaps look for tickets, let's give people your website.

Liam O'Donoghue:

The best way to find out about when the new tours go on sale is I have a sub stack, so just East Bay Yesterday sub stack, send it out about once a month and I announce the new tour dates. And then, of course also I'm on Instagram and okay, you know X and all that stuff. You're on X barely. I mean a lot less than I used to be, I guess. I mean, I think that's maybe the first time I've ever called it X. Okay, I'm like still thinking of it. In my mind is Twitter, even though it's not anymore and I mean it was always kind of bad, but it's's worse than ever now.

Declan:

And people are yeah, no, I don't even go on there, I canceled everything.

Liam O'Donoghue:

I wish I could it still is. You know, I just whatever, let's move on, let's move on.

Declan:

I'll put all the links in the show notes and then Patreon is how you're.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Yeah, I've got Patreon subscribers. Thank you all if you're listening and you subscribe to the Patreon. Every little tiny donation helps. People can. Also, the sub stack is free but people can pay for it if they want to to support the show. I do a lot of speaking gigs. I've got side hustles. I'm a wedding DJ, I DJ other stuff on the side Wine bars in San Francisco, etc. You name it. You know, Always, always, always hustling, freelancing, et cetera.

Declan:

Liam, it's just been great. Thank you so much for taking the time to come over here. Liam, thank you very much for your time. I won't take it up anymore.

Liam O'Donoghue:

Thank you, Declan. It was a pleasure to be back here.

Declan:

And thanks everybody for coming in here. And thanks everybody for coming in. Well, now that I have my first studio audience podcast in the bag, I'm looking forward to doing more. So if you have any ideas for guests you'd like me to speak with in front of a studio audience, please just text me at 415-446-8591. All right, this episode was edited by me, with original music by Chuck Lindo and graphics by Lisa Mazur. This episode of the podcast was sponsored by Evelyn Freitas at Guaranteed Rate. Thank you, evelyn. Also brought to you by the Home Factor Realtors, thehomefactorcom. Catch up on the latest news from the East Bay Market in their weekly sub stack published every Saturday. Go to thehomefactorcom to subscribe Now. If you'd like to reach out to me, as I said, suggestions for the show, that kind of thing, again, you can just text me at 415-446-8591. Catch you on the next podcast, everybody.

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