Press
Op-Ed by Mitchell Schwarzer, Gordon Douglas, and Ben Matlaw
The story of East Oakland is in no small part the story of a transportation hub at what is now 13th Avenue at East Eighth Street. At one time, horse-drawn streetcars cruised down the avenue, passing by clapboard stables, saloons and dry goods stores as they gently descended toward the wharf and the masts of sailing ships crowding the harbor.
Nowadays, nothing of this Old West San Antonio remains. Instead, a small and bedraggled park sits at this intersection, overlooking an unapproachable wall of BART, Amtrak and Union Pacific railroad tracks, and eight lanes of grid-locked Interstate 880 traffic.
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by Jose Fermoso
The far end of 14th Avenue in East Oakland, where the street meets East 8th between an old Burger King restaurant and the BART train tracks, is largely devoid of people. Most skip it altogether, enclosed in their transit bubbles, toggling through phones while riding in cars, trains, and buses. Occasionally, you’ll see a cyclist or motorcyclist, and a couple blocks away you might find a bus rider waiting for the BRT that comes by every 15 minutes. For the most part, though, this is a place for passing through.
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by Roger Rudick
San Antonio in Oakland is one of the densest neighborhoods in the Bay Area, with about 16,000 people per square mile. It has a BART line—trains going from San Francisco and downtown Oakland to Berryessa and Dublin/Pleasant shoot right through. But while residents of San Antonio and the surrounding communities can see and hear BART, they can't easily take it.
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by Madeline Taub
It’s usually not hard to find seating on a Thursday evening at Philomena in the San Antonio neighborhood of East Oakland. But by 6 p.m. on the first Thursday of June, the place was packed with at least 50 people filling every seat and many more standing around with glasses of beer or kombucha and a slice of pizza in their hands.
People were there for a San Antonio Station Alliance (SASA) meet-up.
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by Benjamin Schneider
Midcentury transit systems often skipped over dense urban neighborhoods like San Antonio in Oakland. It's time to fix that mistake.
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