1.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Murphy de la Sucre
“Oakland is Brooklyn by the Bay”...hmm, how about Oakland is Newark by the Bay, generally, more precise?
2. "Perhaps skyline-wise, Oakland and Newark do share some similarities from certain angle(s)."
3. And since I've gone this far, I really consider Oakland and Newark are of w/e coast brotherhood.
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1. NOPE. Oakland shares much more in common with the self-aware literary, arts, DIY, and activist cultures with Brooklyn than it does Newark. While Newark was a transportation and industrial hub in the twentieth century, Oakland was these as well, but also a major port city–-as was Brooklyn on the Hudson until well into the twentieth century.
The only thing that perhaps "links" Newark and Oakland are the large African-American communities, which had fled the state-supported racial terrorism of the South by rail. But even here, Oakland differs substantially, in that its African diaspora communities were and remain far more diverse than Newark's, entailing Deep South, South-East, South-West, Caribbean, West African, East-African, and Euro-African (French, British, German, etc.) communities. Additionally, Oakland, which has one of the most diverse populations overall in the entire nation, has a great deal of culturally, racially mixed families (Asian, African, "white" European, Latinx, etc.) that has given rise to Oakland's exceptional and distinctive culinary, music, visual arts, film, activist, literary, fashion, Maker Faire, DIY, scenes, all of which parallel the Brooklyn-Manhattan cultural axis much closer than Newark's much more circumscribed urban culture.
2. Well, Oakland's skyline has radically changed in just over three years, given that the city is undergoing a radical combined gentrification and revival that has attracted international media attention (what the WSJ calls "hypergentrification") and inspired two Oakland-themed arthouse hits of 2018 (Sorry to Bother You and Blindspotting), a phenomenon that Newark has not yet undergone in anywhere near the intensity or specificity of Oakland. As of this writing, over twenty cranes stand in Downtown Oakland and parts nearby, as well over one billion dollars worth of new high-rise office towers and luxury/market-rate projects are underway. Another nearly two billion dollar shoreline neighborhood is under construction–-BROOKLYN BASIN––which complements the hundreds of millions of dollars in market-rate housing construction and the repurposing of foundries and warehouses into luxury bayside lofts continue apace in Jack London Square.
3. On a personal note: I lived for nearly thirty years in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I now live in San Francisco and work in Oakland. While I came of age in Britain, I was born in SF; my parents, however, met in Oakland. I'm biracial, as my father is a Northern Englishman and my mother is Latinx. My siblings and I, in a very real sense, are children of Oakland, exactly in keeping with that city's cosmopolitan ethos. As a child, I spent a good deal of time in both SF and Oakland.
I know both Newark and Oakland quite well, as I do NYC. Newark and Oakland took in the African-American diaspora in the twentieth century. Deindustrialization and white racist divestment shattered both cities in the mid-twentieth centuries. But Oakland has come roaring back, and this is due in no small part to the striking diversity of the city's population, the city's outsize ambitions and fierce sense of its history and legacies, which quite frankly, are astonishingly different than Newark's, that NYC neighbor's strengths and histories notwithstanding.
There is a reason why the NYTimes coined the meme, "Brooklyn by the Bay." Because when all is said and done, and however reductive or absurd the meme is, the meme holds largely true: Oakland is much closer to Brooklyn in attitudes,history, aspirations,evolution, economies, populations, etc. than it is to Newark.
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