History of Oakland, California
The history of Oakland, a city in the county of Alameda, California, can be traced back to the founding of a settlement by Horace Carpentier, Edson Adams, and Andrew Moon in the 19th century.
The area now known as Oakland had seen human occupation for thousands of years, but significant growth in the settlements that are now incorporated into the city did not occur until the Industrial Revolution.
Shellmounds, man-made mounds of earth and organic matter built up by humans over thousands of years, were often used as burial locations and/or centers of community life for the local Indigenous population.
[5] The Peralta ranch included a stand of oak trees that stretched from the land that is today Oakland's downtown area to the adjacent part of Alameda, then a peninsula.
After an export market developed in the 1830s, cutting rose to levels that alarmed the Peralta family, who owned the forest but had permitted non-commercial exploitation by outsiders.
Although the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that concluded the Mexican-American war had supported existing Mexican legal arrangements, the Peraltas lost control of the forest.
[10] As part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo following the Mexican–American War, the Mexican government ceded 525,000 square miles (1,360,000 km2); 55%[11] of its pre-war territory (excluding Texas) to the US in exchange for $15 million.
[6] In 1853, John Coffee "Jack" Hays, a famous Texas Ranger, was one of the first to establish residence in Oakland while performing his duties as sheriff of San Francisco.
The various streetcar companies operating in Oakland were acquired by Francis "Borax" Smith and consolidated into what eventually became known as the Key System, the predecessor of today's publicly owned AC Transit.
[16] The original extent of Oakland, upon its incorporation, lay south of today's major intersection of San Pablo Avenue, Broadway, and Fourteenth Street.
Oakland's rise to industrial prominence, and its subsequent need for a seaport, led to the digging of a shipping and tidal channel in 1902, which created an island of nearby town Alameda.
In 1916, General Motors opened a major Chevrolet automobile factory in East Oakland, making cars and then trucks until 1963, when it was moved to Fremont in southern Alameda County.
On St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1937, Earhart and her crew, Paul Mantz, Harry Manning and Fred Noonan, flew the first leg of her attempt to circumnavigate the globe, from Oakland to Honolulu, Hawaii.
Sited at both a major rail terminus and an important sea port, Oakland was a natural location for food processing plants, whose preserved products fed domestic, foreign, and military consumers.
The influx of black and white shipyard workers from the deep South brought Jim Crow attitudes to a part of the country that largely had been free of segregationist sentiment.
[42] Trader Vic's was chosen by the State Department as the official entertainment center for foreign dignitaries attending United Nations meetings in San Francisco.
In the 1948 federal case United States v. National City Lines Inc., the defendants were found guilty on a count of conspiring to monopolize the provision of parts and supplies to their subsidiary companies.
[47] Many of the city's more affluent residents, both black and white, left the city after the war, moving to neighboring Alameda, Berkeley, Albany and El Cerrito to the north; to San Leandro, Hayward, Castro Valley and Fremont in Southern Alameda County; and to the newly developing East Bay suburbs in Contra Costa County, Orinda, Lafayette, Pleasant Hill, Walnut Creek and Concord.
[citation needed] During the 1960s, the city was home to an innovative funk music scene that produced well-known bands like Sly and the Family Stone, Graham Central Station, Tower of Power, Cold Blood, Azteca, and the Headhunters.
During the 1970s, Oakland began to experience serious problems with gang-controlled dealing of heroin and cocaine when drug kingpin Felix Mitchell created the nation's first large-scale operation of this kind.
[47] In late 1973, the Symbionese Liberation Army assassinated Oakland's superintendent of schools, Dr. Marcus Foster, and badly wounded his deputy, Robert Blackburn.
It always had a concentration of Latino residents, businesses and institutions, and increased immigration, continuing into the 21st century, has added greater numbers in Fruitvale and throughout East Oakland.
The Alameda County district attorney later dropped the case for lack of evidence, and in 2004 the FBI and the City of Oakland agreed to a $4 million settlement of a lawsuit brought by Bari's estate, and her friend, over their false arrest.
The rupture was related to the San Andreas fault system and effected all Bay Area counties with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent).
The 10K plan and other redevelopment projects were controversial due to potential rent increases and gentrification, which would displace lower-income residents from downtown Oakland into outlying neighborhoods and cities.
A deal announced in 2006 to build a new park in Fremont, to be called Cisco Field was halted three years later as a result of opposition from businesses and local residents.
[75] The following year, founder Ronn Guidi announced the revival of the Ballet under new director Graham Lustig, and the program continues to perform at the Laney College Theater.
After a thorough restoration, seismic retrofit, and many other improvements following years of severe neglect (including a fire as recently as 2004),[82] the historic landmark theater started drawing patrons from all over the Bay Area.
[92] Oakland Police raided and dismantled the two protest sites at Frank Ogawa Plaza and Snow Park early in the morning on October 25.
[97] Throughout the 2010s, the city's Oakland Medical Center, the first HMO and first Kaiser Permanente hospital, underwent a $2 billion retrofit including numerous new buildings.
