3
I BE ALL OVER
From behind the blue donut case in George's diner, Mike introduces me to David K. one afternoon after school. A soft-spoken, enthusiastic teenager, David agrees to take me for a walk around his neighborhood. We head out the door and onto Vanderbilt Avenue, turning up Saint Marks Avenue. We walk past the brick storefront on the corner which houses the Baptist church his family attends, past the community garden, past the rows of low buildings with small stoops and iron fences. Some of these are set far back from the sidewalk with front gardens; one has small stone lions guarding its stoop, painted so many times they look like they're melting in the rain. On the left we pass an open expanse of flat tarmac—the playground of the elementary school—and turn again toward Underhill Park, the most important place in the neighborhood for him. As David described the neighborhood and what was important, it was clear that all the ways he moved through it physically, all the places he'd explored with his friends, all the places to play, all the places from behind or under which he'd retrieved a ball, were central to the story. Once we arrived at the park, David told me of his handball prowess, but mostly told me about how the park had changed as he enumerated every thing that “never used to be like this.” Every physical experience of this place was writ large in David's description of it. Arriving at the park, I could easily imagine his movements as David explained, “See, the handball courts used to be over here where the grass is, and they changed it and put it over there and separated it into two. But when it was over here, it was a gate, so if the ball went out, you had to go through the gate and get the ball wherever it went. But now they put it there, so if you hit the ball over, you gotta climb over the wall.”
David knew that park in his body; there was nothing dispassionate about the way he spoke, and each change held meaning, loss, and potential. Every single spot in that park had been significant and now all the new ones were becoming important. Central to everything was the handball court, which hadn't changed, although now the ball went out of the park less often.
His stories about the park had a great deal to do with his understanding of the changing place and neighborhood over the time he'd been there. But what stood out to me was his confidence in himself, in his abilities, and the stature that this confidence gave him, all of which seemed deeply rooted in his body's freedom of movement in this park. The park was all about his own conception of himself as a teenager, an athlete, and a champion.
Those spaces which David knew in his muscles, in his bones, with his friends, did not simply happen to exist. They were imagined, shaped, and then reshaped. In Robin's story, told during the Intersection | Prospect Heights oral history recordings twelve years after my walk with David, she explained her first experience of the park in 1968—long before David was born—when she first moved to the neighborhood.1 She described what the 1940s era playground had become by then, as “a place for drug sales and use, boom boxes late into the night, shootings . . . It was not considered safe, especially for children.” And because this was not a space in which children's bodies could feel free, she would go on to form a park cleanup committee, which eventually changed the space in bigger ways:
I wrote to several nearby colleges to propose . . . a collaboration. Pratt Institute . . . took on this project of creating a new playground. . . . Students visited the site, interviewed parents and designed individual plans for the playground. . . . The students presented their plans at Duryea Church to a large community turnout. [The] head of the Parks Department . . . was so impressed with the research, the designs, and the community involvement that he promised that the Parks Department would fund a final plan. Needless to say, the process took time and endless meetings and hearings. However, we had a ribbon-cutting ceremony in 1987 with great fanfare.2
It was this 1987 version of the playground that David had first loved. By 2015, the playground had been renovated two more times—once in the late 1990s (the changes that David noticed) and again in 2006. The third renovation focused on the needs of younger children due to the many new families in the area; kids even left their old riding toys at the park for others to use. But with this success, allowing young children a cherished freedom of movement, what happens to the freedom that this place once afforded teenagers like David? He had noted the shift even in the earlier renovation, telling me, “They used to have the flat big kids’ swings, but the kids used to take them and flip them over, so they put the baby swings, ’cause they don't want the big kids on it.” Seventeen years later, twenty-year neighborhood resident Gina would tell me that this restricted freedom—or the trade-off in freedom from big kids to little ones—weighed on her: “I would love for the teenagers to have a safe place to go. The Underhill Park used to be for everyone, big and small. We used to live on Prospect by that handball court and the ball would always break the window—so we just left it; it was more important that the kids had a place to play.”
It isn't just David; we all feel space in our bodies; where our bodies can move teaches us about our world. Can't you feel, for example, that at some point in the journey back to your house, you are nearing home? We all feel distinctions in the streets we do not cross, the distances we stray from our houses, the shadier side of the street, even the familiar feel of our foot on our rough or smooth front step.3 As abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore insists, getting free “starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place.” 4 That place is made, Gilmore argues, when we “combine resources, ingenuity, and commitment to produce the conditions in which life is precious for all.” 5 How our bodies are allowed to move through everyday spaces significantly contributes to whether we feel our lives are precious. How places enable physical freedom is one part of how they do the placework of supporting our selves; freedom is in both our bodies and our minds.
Identifying the important placework that lets bodies feel free even in something as simple as a park is not to be taken lightly—especially as the control of bodies, and the resistance needed to free them, is embedded in both Brooklyn and Oakland—as it is in cities and towns across America.
Traveling to the opposite coast, and back in time, we find that people have lived in what is now called the Bay Area for over fourteen thousand years. The people who lived in present-day Oakland were the Chochenyo-speaking Lisjan people of the territory of Huchiun, one of the largest of around fifty small independent groups, often known collectively as Ohlone.6 Lisjan Huchiun culture had craft, political, and secret societies; Coyote and his grandson, the falcon Kaknu, grounded their storytelling tradition.7 Their land was full of salt marshes, grizzlies, condors, and sea lions. In winter, people lived by the bay; in summer, they went up to the hills.8
Huchiun shellmounds of earth and organic matter shaped the landscape. Corrina Gould, tribal spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan and co-director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, describes these thousands of years old places as “ceremonial places and as burial sites,” as well as places where people “would trade with each other, and . . . would have ceremony at the top of these mounds.” 9 One of the largest shellmounds was in what is now the small city of Emeryville, just a few blocks west on Fortieth Street from this book's bit of Oakland. More than three stories high and 350 feet in diameter, this site that once held at least seven hundred graves is now flattened and marked only by the IKEA on Shellmound Street, around the corner from Ohlone Way.10
Thousands of years of bodily freedom and cultural agency in the Bay Area ended in 1775—the year before the American revolution. The San Carlos sailed into San Francisco Bay to expand Spanish colonial rule into “Alta California” and was met by Sumu and Jausos, with Supitacse, Tilacse, Mutuc, Logeacse, Guecpostole, and Xacacse—a diplomatic delegation of Huchiun people.11 Fewer than twenty years later, Supitacse, Guecpostole, Mutuc, and hundreds of other Huchiun people would be living at Mission Dolores, part of a system of military presidios and Franciscan missions where Native people were forced to live, convert, and labor, and were rounded up by landowners and soldiers if they escaped. It was a cultural demolition archaeologist Randall Milliken has described as a process of “religious conversion/psychological disintegration.” 12
Yet in 1795, people of the Huchiun territory at Mission Dolores resisted and escaped back to their lands in the East Bay. Two years later, the Spanish military raided the Huchiun villages, in present-day Richmond, forcing the people back to Mission Dolores and punishing resistance leaders at the San Francisco Presidio.13 By the summer of 1806, all the Huchiun villages were empty; by 1820, twenty thousand Native people were held within the California mission system, their bodily freedom almost nil.14
That same year, Pablo de Sola, the last Spanish governor of Alta California, gave a land grant of forty-five thousand acres of Huchiun territory to Spanish soldier Luis Maria Peralta—land that would become Oakland (including our little neighborhood of Mosswood), Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, Emeryville, Piedmont, and part of San Leandro.15
Mexico (and its Alta California) won independence from Spain in 1821, but the mission system was not ended until 1834.16 While the land of the missions had supposedly been held in trust by the Franciscans for Native people, and the 1833 law that secularized the missions implied that every “mission community would become a town with its own government,” almost no Native people gained land from the disbanding of the missions.17 Most mission lands were given away as rancho land grants to white Californians or recently arrived, well-connected Mexican citizens; as the only option for survival, many Native people ended up in servitude to the rancho landowners.18 By then, sixty-five years of exposure to Europeans had reduced the number of California's Native peoples by half; just as on the East Coast two hundred years earlier, thousands of people had died in epidemics of diseases like measles that the Europeans had brought with them. Yet Ohlone people have persisted in the Bay Area: after so many years, in 2022, Oakland returned five acres of Joaquin Miller Park to the East Bay Ohlone people, a space which will do untold placework.19
Back East, it was Native people who created what would become one of Prospect Heights’ boundaries. Flatbush Avenue began life as a main Canarsie trail, stretching across Brooklyn, as it does still. By 1827, it was the “road to Flatbush,” and when shifted to the west in 1852, it became the avenue we now know.20 The Canarsie people lived in this place now called Brooklyn for thousands of years—and by the 1500s, their Brooklyn had a vast network of trails and villages.21 The Canarsie—meaning “grassy place” or “fenced-in place”—were one of the thirteen Algonquian tribes of Long Island, and in the 1500s, there were over fifteen thousand Algonquian people in the area that would become New York City. The Canarsie—part of the Lenni Lenape—were the main traders of the area, with trading routes stretching south to the Gulf of Mexico (and beyond) and northwest to Lake Superior, an expansive freedom of movement and relationship building.22 In 1635, the Dutch made incursions to lay out a few villages in Canarsie territory, and within a few years, disease epidemics from the Dutch occupation had killed much of the Canarsie population; those who survived moved to the lands that would later be New Jersey and Long Island.23 By 1640, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, Willem Kieft, had begun a bloody war against all the Lenni Lenape peoples—including the Canarsie—and the governor who inherited Kieft's War, John Underhill, deepened the brutality of that war. By 1644, Underhill—the leader of several massacres—had driven the Canarsie out of their Brooklyn homeland completely; within twenty-six years, the Canarsie land of Brooklyn was ceded to the British.24 In 1985, a playground in Prospect Heights would be named for John Underhill, after the street it sits on, and a boy we know would come to love it—as a site, it would embody both freedom and unspeakable oppression.25
The large Dutch and British farms that took Canarsie land had much in common with plantations all over the colonies; slavery was an essential element of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Brooklyn and New York. By the late 1700s, nowhere in New York State had more slaves per capita than Brooklyn; Black people made up a full one third of Brooklyn's population and the vast majority were enslaved.26 In 1799, the enactment of New York State's Gradual Manumission Act meant that all children of enslaved women born after July 4, 1799, would be free at age twenty-five or age twenty-eight (for women and men, respectively).27 This was a slow walk to abolition, which was finally made law in New York State in 1827—just when those male children born in 1799 would have been freed. This history makes the free Black communities founded in Brooklyn in the present-day neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant (usually called Bed-Stuy)—including, among others, Weeksville (the earliest, founded in 1838) and Crow Hill, which may have abutted Prospect Heights—even more significant. These Black communities reshaping Brooklyn in pre-Civil War, post-emancipation New York State had been made by African American investors getting together to buy land to create intentional communities, which would provide them the voting rights of full citizens through landownership.28 Brooklyn was also a major destination for people escaping slavery from the South—as houses across Brooklyn, and the women who ran them, became an important part of the hidden network of the Underground Railroad. As historian of Brooklyn's abolition movements Prithi Kanakamedala writes, “Though the archives might be silent on their contributions, women were at the center of the anti-slavery movement.” 29 In both Oakland and Brooklyn, making space for oneself to be free has been no small thing.
ALL OVER, REALLY
Back in the twenty-first century, those Brooklyn streets around David K.'s playground did an important placework of embodied freedom for another one of my tour guides; no one I spoke with made his place in the world more through his body's movement than Ulysses.30 And no one I had spoken to made more clear the power of this freedom of movement than Ulysses. Mike had introduced Ulysses and me, so it made sense for us to start our walk from in front of the diner one afternoon in 2002. Having lived and worked in the neighborhood for almost thirty years, doing itinerant construction and cleaning jobs, he had a unique perspective on the place. Later, I would be strongly reminded of his walk when I read writer and walker Raja Shehadeh's remembrance of his grandfather's need to go on a sarha, “to roam freely, at will, without restraint. . . . not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself.” 31
Ulysses talks with a soft southern drawl—so softly that I have to work to catch what he's saying. He starts off, but chokes on his words. “Agh . . . This is the first time, you know, I've been . . .” It's the first time he's been interviewed. He explains that he had come to Brooklyn from South Carolina twenty-seven years earlier in the mid-1970s because “the jobs up here were more easy to get than down there,” taking part in the tail end of the Great Migration of Black people leaving the American South for Northern cities.32
As we meander down Vanderbilt Avenue, our conversation moves like a leaf on water, this way and that, gently touching on where Ulysses had lived, worked, and walked in the neighborhood. I get the sense, as we ramble, that this is what Ulysses does; there aren't destinations, there are journeys. He doesn't have places he goes to regularly; he doesn't have just one fixed routine as an itinerant worker. We walk past bars and places where bars had been, and Ulysses explains the difference between a bar and a social club. “They sell drinks, you know, like, dancing—a social club. . . . It's a lot different [from a bar]; they can't have no liquor on the shelf.”
Although walking the streets of Prospect Heights seems to be the place he's been most, on our walk I keep asking about more specific places, and he tries to come up with something he thinks I am looking for. He offers: “Well, I mean . . . where I be? Or where I go? Well, round in here—I work . . . Barbershop there. I go in there. Or, the liquor store, that's right there.”
Further up the block, a little stupidly, I ask again, “Where do you go most around in this area?” “Like, where do I go, where I be at?” Ulysses asks, thinking. “Well, just hanging around, in this area here, by the park up there, standing out here—talking to friends, people . . . Around here, these places, mostly. I be all over, really. Yeah, walking around, looking . . .”
At some point, probably to appease me, Ulysses tells me he'll take me to his favorite place, and I ask if that's where we're walking to, or are we “just walking around?” Ulysses's reply expresses how complex the answer to that question is: he talks about a place, at which we never actually arrive, and describes the feeling of that place so reverently that I think he may have experienced it only once or twice. “Well, by the park up there—I go up there because on Sunday, you know, they come with the truck, they be selling stuff up there. . . . I just like to walk though, all over, sit out on a bench, you know.” And when I press and press again for his “favorite place,” I finally see how wrong this is for Ulysses's conception of the place. He says, simply but profoundly, “I like this neighborhood. It's nice.”
I realize there and then that this—the whole neighborhood—is the place that does the crucial work of letting him feel free, because of the way that he is free to walk, unconstrained, at home, secure in belonging, his right to be in these streets unchallenged. I think back to both Shehadeh's grandfather's soul-nourishing wanderings, and Garnette Cadogan's writing on what it is to walk while Black. This freedom that Ulysses has here is what helps him be, what helps him be himself. What would it be like for Ulysses twenty years later, in the greatly gentrified neighborhood this area has become? Is there a space that still allows him this peripatetic freedom, this unproductive, unsanctioned movement?
WE COULD PLAY FOOTBALL IN THE STREET
In Oakland one afternoon, Marty and I drive through the dark of the freeway underpass to come out on Thirty-Fourth Street, the Walgreens sign rising up on the left and the tall orange sign of Neldam's Bakery on the right. Slowing, Marty tells me, “I'm sixty-two, and my first birthday cake came from here. That's a good place!” We pull over and go in to meet his neighbor and childhood friend Lois, who works here.33 He begins to tell me about her with a story about when they would play games in the street and “hit the plum trees” near Telegraph Avenue. “Everyone wanted to choose Lois first, because Lois was a better athlete than most of the boys,” Marty explains. Lois nods and starts to talk with me: “I loved to play with the boys. I was a real tomboy.” She continues, “We could play football in the street, but now they'd run you over and not even stop.” Quickly, Marty has his own muscle memory: “Actually truth just came . . . we were coming from the grocery store, and I was running from her, and I fell down in front of Gandy's house across the street.” Later, Marty drives me past this house, close to the corner of Thirty-Fourth and West, reprising, “This is Gandy's house, where there was the plum tree where I broke my tooth.”
Marty recalls how as a young African American boy in the early 1960s he ranged, unconstrained by physical or gender barriers, across swaths of the neighborhood. As we drive up Telegraph, Marty traces his childhood walks and neighborhood boundaries, and the centrality of Mosswood Park in his sense of place: “We'd walk straight up Telegraph, because we felt that the neighborhood border was Fortieth Street. . . . Mosswood was the gathering place for the young Black boys, or Negro boys, of my generation. We'd all meet up there from the different schools in the neighborhood and . . . we'd play football all day long, or baseball—whatever sport was in session.”
By contrast, Lois remembers that her world was a bit more constrained. “I was allowed to go up to MacArthur that way, and as far as Twenty-Eighth that way, but I couldn't go further. . . . Telegraph was too far. I couldn't walk to Neldam's on [Telegraph]. No, uh-uh.” There is a pause and she considers Neldam's Bakery, where she now works, and then thinks about this neighborhood as it once was for herself as an African American little girl. “You know, back in that day, they didn't hire Black people?!” She is almost shocked herself as she says this quietly. But then she jumps back into the present, laughing as she remembers taking a recent trip over to Mosswood. “Oh, we used to love Mosswood Park! All the kids played at Mosswood. . . . Now I go there and it seems so tiny! When I was little, it was just the biggest thing ever!”
One sunny afternoon, I walk into the rec center next to the large Victorian house in the middle of Mosswood Park to ask if they know about the park's history. An older gentleman rifles through a filing cabinet and pulls out a many-times photocopied sheet with a flourish. He tells me in his lilting voice, “OK, this is what we have about that piece right there.” I read, “J. Mora Moss, a pioneer resident of Oakland, must have been an early advocate of women's rights when he married Julia Wood in the 1860's. He bowed to her wishes that their estate located ‘way out’ on Broadway be named Mosswood.” As I read this, I realize I'm standing at what was once the edge of the city of Oakland. Everything north of Thirty-Sixth Street, including the Mosswood estate, was considered “Temescal.” The name overlaid one colonized place on another—the Spanish people of what was Peralta's land grant had given a Hispanicized version of the Nahuatl word temazcalli, or sweathouse, to the Ohlone structures across the area.34
Before he became the wealthy businessman who established this estate in Temescal, Joseph Moravia Moss had arrived in California from Philadelphia in 1850, at the end of three momentous years for the Bay Area.35 In 1847, the United States had won the war to seize California from Mexico, a war that white Americans entering California had pressed for. In 1848, gold was discovered in California and soon a whole new population rushed in. And, the same year Moss arrived in San Francisco, Horace W. Carpentier, Edson Adams, and Andrew J. Moon founded the city of Oakland. These founders had, like other gold rush settlers from the East Coast, squatted on the land the Spanish had taken from the Huchiun territory and given to Luis Peralta in 1820, which Vincente Peralta later inherited. Carpentier, Adams, and Moon subdivided portions of the Peralta land into lots along new avenues modeled on the propriety of East Coast towns and European cities; they stole the land through real estate deals—selling off the lots they'd drawn on a map—and a new city was founded.36 By the late 1850s, the Alta Telegraph Company installed a portion of the first telegraph line between San Francisco and Sacramento on one of Oakland's new avenues, near the future Mosswood estate, and the new technology lent its name to the street.
Forty-seven years after Oakland's beginning, in 1897 Temescal would be annexed into the city of Oakland (one year before Brooklyn would be incorporated into New York City). Joseph Moss died in 1880 and Julia Wood in 1904, and community advocacy resulted in the estate being opened in 1912 as a public park, with Julia and Joseph's house at the center.37 The road forming another side of the park, intersecting Telegraph, was called Moss Avenue until World War II, when it was renamed a boulevard in honor of General MacArthur and was a main thoroughfare for soldiers and army vehicles leaving for the war.38
One night in 2016, a fire would rip through the community center in Mosswood Park, destroying a dance studio, a computer lab, a kitchen, a preschool, an afterschool, and the filing cabinet from which that gentleman had pulled out the notes about the park's history for me with such a flourish. In the wake of that tragedy, it was clear that it wasn't just my tour guides who found freedom in that park, whose bodies needed it; interviewed on ABC7 News after the fire, neighbor Janice Johnson declared, “You have to have Mosswood. Like you have to have water in your body.” 39
Land theft and displacement have a long history in our neighborhoods, as we've seen, and have been one of the many things that challenge how freely our bodies can move, challenging the capacity of everyday places to do the crucial placework of helping us feel free. This is by no means relegated to times before living memory. In their stories, Lois and Marty remember an intact Black neighborhood before the freeways were built; yet the places that did the essential placework of affording them such highly prized freedom are no longer. That demolition of a highly functional Black neighborhood has its roots in the deep American history of controlling Black people's bodies, leading to a continuous discontinuity of place, what psychologist Mindy Fullilove calls trying to build community across an “archipelago.” 40
Twentieth-century planning decisions played a clear role in this discontinuity. From 1935 to 1940, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), created by the New Deal legislation to provide emergency loans to homeowners at risk of losing homes during the Depression, had a significant impact on how bodies could feel free. The HOLC's “security maps” were made to advise banks on investment risks, and graded residential areas of American cities from 1 to 4, or A to D. By essentially ensuring or denying investment, these maps solidified spatial segregation and systematized disinvestment.41 Colored green, first-grade or A-rated areas encouraged lending; the map key described them as racially “homogenous” with room for growth. Blue second-grade or B-rated areas were judged to be completely developed. Yellow-colored third-grade or C-rated neighborhoods were described as older and “obsolete,” with an “infiltration of lower grade populations.” Finally, colored red on the map, the fourth-grade or D-rated neighborhoods were deemed to have poorer-condition housing and an “undesirable population.” 42 Perhaps it will come as no surprise that race was a major predictor of what grade a neighborhood would get; scholar Amy Hillier has shown that African American neighborhoods always received grade 4 or D ratings, and tracts with a higher percentage of immigrants and Jews also garnered grades of 3 or 4 (C or D).43 Of course, where banks were advised not to lend were often places where emergency loans were most needed; based on race, people were systematically denied access to the lending that would have allowed them to take out mortgages to become homeowners or to take out loans against their properties for necessary upkeep, closing a major pathway to building generational wealth.
Mosswood and surrounding area on a 1938 map, before the freeways were built. Added dark lines show where the freeways were built in the late 1960s, and the streets they removed. Added red lines show the “buffer zone” of the Telegraph Avenue/Broadway corridor. Base map: H. M. Gousha, Street Map of East Bay Cities, prepared for Standard Oil Company of California (Chicago: H. M. Gousha Company, 1938). Map courtesy of Earth Sciences and Map Library, University of California, Berkeley.
The HOLC was not unique; from the 1920s onward, government officials, real estate industries, community groups, and individual residents organized to “protect” middle-class white neighborhoods by placing racial restrictions on Black and immigrant renters and buyers. For example, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which provided mortgage insurance, called for “restrictive covenants” in their 1938 manual, to prohibit “the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended.” 44 Even earlier, the 1924 Code of Ethics of the National Association of Real Estate Boards—which would be adopted by local boards in both Brooklyn and Oakland—stated in part: “A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” 45
All of these rules are the origins of what's called the redlining of American cities—red lines drawn on real estate maps, following the borders of those earlier D-graded neighborhoods—in which financial investment via mortgage lending was denied to neighborhoods based on their racial and ethnic composition. In Prospect Heights and Mosswood, the effects of these graded areas are clear. Although neither neighborhood was itself fully graded D, they were both at the intersection of D-, C-, and B-graded neighborhoods; indeed, Oakland historian Robert O. Self has described Mosswood as being designed as a “buffer zone” among the red lines.46
IT WAS NEVER PUT TO A VOTE
The years of systematic disinvestment from neighborhoods made it possible for the urban renewal of the 1960s to argue that these neighborhoods were blighted and that, for example, the construction of freeways in Oakland could cut broad swaths into neighborhoods like Mosswood. Thousands of homes were bulldozed in the long period of constructing two intersecting freeways—the MacArthur Freeway, or 580, which opened in 1966, and the six-mile Grove-Shafter Freeway (the 980 and the 24), begun in 1964 and only completed in 1985—as well as by the BART suburban commuter train that now connects San Francisco to cities and suburbs around the bay. The enormous structures were in essence the HOLC and FHA red lines built in concrete, tearing through the community fabric and the Telegraph Avenue and Grove Street business districts.
The racial aspect of this development is not only visible in hindsight, but was perfectly clear at the time, as spelled out in the Oakland Tribune coverage on July 24, 1969:
The first section of the Grove-Shafter Freeway through north Oakland was opened yesterday with appropriate ceremonies—and the blessing of the Italian-Americans who live along its route. Alameda County Supervisor Emanuel P. Razeto, who represents north Oakland and is a native of Genoa, Italy, suggested during a lunch, following 11 a.m. ribbon-cutting ceremonies, that the freeway be named for some distinguished “Italian-American.” . . . “The Grove-Shafter cuts through an Italian community,” Razeto said. “America was named after an Italian.” Oakland City Councilman J. R. Rose, a Negro, good-naturedly told Razeto the freeway “also passes through a good black neighborhood.” 47
It wasn't a mystery to residents at the time, either. Marty recalled his father's views on the subject of the 580 freeway, “which white folks thought was progress,” explaining, “My dad was a progressive, a leftist, he was an ex-communist and a socialist, so he recognized . . . that this would destroy the base of the Black community, the business community. Somehow, Berkeley voted to keep BART underground, and in Oakland it was never put to a vote. My dad voted against BART, because . . . [he] said that the BART would not improve rail transportation in this area, and it didn't! It brought people from the suburbs here.” 48
BART was never meant to serve people who lived around those stations, and the parking lots—like the enormous one around our neighborhood's MacArthur BART station—would isolate the stations from their surrounding neighborhoods.49 Driving through Mosswood, as we pass through the vast no-man's-land swath of the intersecting overpasses of freeways 580 and 24, Marty gestures out the car window. “It was a lot more prosperous commercially because there were houses in here,” he says, and I see where whole city blocks of houses were razed between Telegraph Avenue and Grove Street.50 The Louisiana and East Texas people of these now-gone blocks come alive as Marty continues: “There were people here. Right here . . . I babysat for my friend who was a Malveaux Bell, Creole, from Lake Charles, her mom was born in Mamou, and her father's East Texas. And her brother-in-law was Pete Escovedo. So, I would babysit for all the kids here, just as they would babysit for me. So in this block here, you had all these people, the Garcias, the Escovedos.” 51
The construction changed even the area's names. While it had once been considered part of North Oakland, now it was West Oakland; the freeways split this old neighborhood of Hoover Durant into Mosswood Annex and what came to be called Ghost Town because, as Marty says, “the freeways depopulated this neighborhood.” 52
Another afternoon, Lois drives me across Forty-Second Street, underneath the freeway overpass that now dominates the street, and recalls her walk to high school in 1966: “I used to walk down this street; you know [Oakland] Tech is right there on Forty-Second and Broadway. . . . That was after the freeway was built, when it was fairly new.” She gestures at where the pylons sit under the soaring concrete mass of the 580 freeway, and the intersecting roads fly above us: “All this used to be houses over here. Mm-hmm. Small streets.” Just a few blocks south, driving across Thirty-Third Street, she mutters again, “All down here we used to know.” In her voice, I can hear the depth of emotion that emphasizes the truth behind psychologist Marc Fried's research showing that forced displacements are among “the most serious forms of . . . psychosocial disruptions and discontinuities.” 53
I ask if Lois remembers when this freeway was built, and she nods emphatically. “Yes! Cause when they tore down the houses, I had friends who lived all in here. But when they tore it down, it was just a dirt lot. And we'd play in the dirt lot before and while they were building. We used to run wild all through there, playing in the lots, climbing trees.” As she recalls this place of demolition and child-hood play, I understand that there were two places from which she and her childhood community were displaced, two places in which her body felt free that are no longer: her friends’ homes reduced to rubble, and then the odd world of a construction site that became their own unorthodox play area through the tactics of childhood exploration. Neither of these remains in the concrete maze that now dwarfs all the surrounding buildings.
Later, looking at photographs of the freeway arching over and cutting through, her neighborhood, Lois saw only the neighborhood of her childhood that had been demolished. “I don't want those freeway pictures,” she said, pushing them away.