Headed to Fans’ Fest this weekend?

Sure, you can drive. Or bike or scooter. And you can definitely take AC Transit’s 29 bus from West Oakland BART. But if you walk from the station, or if you take a little time in the neighborhood that surrounds, you’re treating yourself a remarkable tour of history, activism, earthquakes, movie sets, illegal gardens and…Mumford and Sons?

Up Center Street from the station is the most direct route. Just across 7th, the long-suffering 7th Street Corridor, once a “Harlem of the West,” the shuttered and fenced 7th Street Center building features portraits of West Oakland blues figures like Lowell Fulson, whose music inspired and was sampled by generations of musicians (oh, and he launched B.B. King's career and hired a young Ray Charles) and Sugar Pie DeSanto, who duetted with Etta James and sang with the Johnny Otis and James Brown revues and just died in December.

(And a side-quest, if you’re interested: a ways down 7th, just beyond Willow, is Esther’s Orbit Room. While it’s a shadow of a shadow of its former self, the blues club played home to Billie Holiday and Al Green as well as Sugar Pie and Lowell’s friends Etta James and B. B. King. Organizations like the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative are hoping to revitalize the spot, and the blue mosaic mural of namesake Esther Mabry by Refa One is an eye-catching start. While here, don’t forget to look down and see the footsteps of the Oakland Walk of Fame, They Played on 7th Street. Though some plaques were recently stolen, others remain in the blocks surrounding BART.)

Back on Center, just ahead at 9th and Dr. Huey P. Newton Way, is the incredible “Hello, Caution for Children” mural by artist José Figueroa. The expansive history—featuring imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement, George Floyd, Stonewall Riots, the “I Am a Man” campaign from the Memphis Sanitation Strike, the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program, and ending with a joyful ballroom scene led by the Pointer Sisters, who grew up in the area—is Figueroa’s illustration of the “historical arc of radical Black queer resistance, from the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966 to present-day movements for liberation, culminating in an imagined future of joy and empowerment.”

Figueroa told me, “…I invited ongoing engagement from those depicted—welcoming dialogue with neighbors and passersby while deepening my understanding of a history beyond my own…This mural, painted on a neighbor’s fence near the site where Dr. Huey P. Newton was murdered in 1989, serves as both a tribute and a living testament to Oakland’s legacy of resistance. As part of an ongoing effort to extend this history beyond its physical site, I transcribed the mural into a 14-foot mixed media piece—allowing its message to travel and continue educating viewers about Oakland’s crucial role in movements for social change…”

Also at Center and 9th, on the southwest corner, is a “mini-museum” honoring the women of the Black Panther Party. Outside, you can see a blue wall of names and huge portraits of the People’s Free Food Program, medical clinics, and the protest mantra that “We’ve come too far to turn back now.” Inside, there’s a 1,000-square-foot museum and gift shop in Jilchristina Vest’s residence that depicts the contributions of women—who, by the early 1970s, made up almost 70 percent of membership—to the cause. Visiting inside is by appointment seven days a week on a $12-25 sliding scale; to know more or schedule, you can text (646) 306-7175.

Now zip over one block east to join a section of the Bay Trail in the middle of Mandela Parkway. Dana King’s four-year-old sculpture of Black Panthers co-founder Huey P. Newton stands in the plaza at 9th Street. The majestic bronze bust pairs well with the AeroSoul’s “urban hieroglyphic” of a blue and black panther electrical box on the east side of the street at 8th reminding passersby to Serve the People. For me, at least, this incredible block is reminder of the many different threads of revolutionary and service history that intertwine in West Oakland, and in particular how the Black Panther story is twisted: a legacy often seen solely as violence or conflict (or male!) rather than its diversity of membership, social programs, and cultural uplift. And this isn’t just idealism stuck in the past. Back on 7th Street, The Black Panther affordable housing apartment complex opened in 2024 with 79 units for low-income, unhoused, and formerly incarcerated residents.

Keep going on Mandela, and between 13th and 14th, you’ll find the Cypress Freeway Memorial Park memorializing the collapse of the double-decker Cypress Street Viaduct portion of 880 during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The tangled girders, wrapping together ladderlike and rising more than thirty feet above the ground (just a bit shorter than the stand of redwoods behind them) recall the brief but terrible shaking that took 42 lives. Many of the first responders were local residents who brought their own ladders and ropes to help, and a number of quotes from the day circle the center spires on the ground underfoot. Mandela Parkway itself replaced the Cypress Freeway, which had not only displaced Black residents during its construction but for decades infamously divided and segregated West Oakland. (And, fittingly, there’s a Bay Wheels station with rentable bikes in the median nearby to take a few more cars off the road.)

But this walk isn’t just a history of hardship. All along the center green of Mandela (especially between 16th and 20th, and throughout the Prescott neighborhood) you’ll find the scattered trees and plants of wandering naturalist Joey Santore’s “illegal garden” that have survived fights with the city and a blood feud with a local realtor. Watch his irreverent, hilarious, and insightful journey back through his old neighborhood, complete with stories of found feet in recycling centers, purloined seeds from UC Berkeley gardens and “a nearby big box store,” and tripping on mushrooms on rooftops watching fog roll in as part of his celebrated Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t series.

Find your way back to Center, and at 15th look up and you’ll see the restored Rossi Cigar Company sign atop the white and red brick building. The space is now live/work lofts, but in the 1930s it was a thriving factory for many of the Italian immigrants to San Francisco who had been displaced by that other quake, in 1906, and then moved to the East Bay.

As Peralta and Center begin to merge, at 14th and Peralta you’ll find the filming location for the Starz series Blindspotting, which serves as a sequel of sorts to the superb 2018 film starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. This intersection hosted a lavishly shot sideshow in the series’ first episode, and just up the street, at 1633 Peralta, you’ll see the Victorian used as the exterior for main characters Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and Rainey (Helen Hunt)’s house. Several other sequences were filmed nearby, including Earl (Bay Area native and multi-hyphenate-artist Benjamin Earl Turner)’s epic run back from a Port of West Oakland job interview to get home before his ankle monitor beeps him out breaking curfew.

(And there’s a good spot from the film around here too, if you want another side-quest: backtracking and heading west to Wood Street between 9th and Chase, at 862 and 864 Wood, you’ll see two Baran Studio houses sharing a towering palm tree and sandwiched between two Victorians. This exterior, used when Casal and Diggs visit a hipster transplant’s party with disastrous results, masterfully shows the new and old Oakland side by side.)

Up at 16th and Peralta, look for the “West Side is the Best Side” mural. Originally commissioned by a shipping company in 2014, the freight train draws its imagery from West Oakland’s locomotive and logistic history and its title, of course, from Tupac. The artists, Vogue (Norman Chuck) and Bam (Mike Tyau) of the TDK art collective (the “family” mentioned on the side of the train’s engine) and many moonlighting others have hidden caricatures of some of the train’s creators throughout.

The TDK series circles the entire block, including sunset illustrations of massive container ships and Oakland’s famous cranes. On 16th, there’s a depiction of 16th Street Station with a direct line to the actual station a few blocks ahead. So, imagine you’re on that train and walk your track west on 16th to its end, and look through the fence here. Another victim of the ’89 quake, this Beaux Arts Southern Pacific and trans-Bay hub from 1912 is rich in history. It was a depot for the transcontinental railroad and was a headquarters of the first Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Former Oakland mayor Ron Dellums called it “Ellis Island for the African American community.” In 1994, it was deemed structurally unsound and fully closed. It has since hosted “weddings, raves, and even an opera,” and Liam O’Donoghue’s staple podcast East Bay Yesterday has some fantastic future what-ifs: maybe the elevated train tracks behind the station could serve as Oakland’s own NYC-styled High Line? The Boxcar Flower Farm out front shows what’s possible at the site. And, for two very contrasting looks inside, check out the music videos for E-40’s “Tell Me When to Go” and Mumford and Son’s "Babel.” Though the station’s future has been long-debated and grandly promised (sound familiar, A’s fans?), in hot-off-the-press good news, through advocacy from the Oakland Heritage Alliance, the station was just added to the National Register of Historic Places, a move that helps its long-term restoration.

At this point, you’re so close you might be able to hear the starting lineups being announced on game day or the crowds from the farmers’ market on Sundays. For Fans’ Fest, you’re hearing the music, eyeing some merch, and smelling the food trucks. Keep going past the Raimondi gates to take in the stunning mural partnership between Skinner, Ryan Pawn Rhodes, and Max Ehrman just across from the West Oakland/Prescott Farmer’s Market on 18th between Peralta and Campbell. Where else are you going to see giant insects, an otherworldly grayscale human profile and hand, and a colorful monstrous face with a dreamlike, almost cosmic vibe? (This is one of my four-year-old son’s favorites.)

Ehrman says, “This vibrant mural, created by @maxehrman (eon75), @theartofskinner, and @pawnpaint, expresses a thought-provoking message about self-perception in the digital age. The central theme revolves around how we often view ourselves as monstrous due to the distorted expectations set by social media, yet in reality, we possess innate beauty. The hybrid creatures flanking the composition represent the strangeness of the world, highlighting how little seems to make sense. The black-and-white face and hands symbolize the mistaken belief that the world is purely black and white, underscoring the complexity of human emotions and societal influences. The fusion of realistic and surreal elements creates a stark contrast, reinforcing the message of beauty in a chaotic world.”

Now you’re here, fully ready for Fans’ Fest. And remember, like so much of West Oakland’s rich past, determined present, and hopeful future, it’s the people who cared who made it happen.

Big thanks to the indispensable Easy Bay Yesterday podcast, José Figueroa, Max Ehrman, Ryan Rhodes, Skinner, and Jilchristina Vest for their time and help.

This walk will continue to be updated throughout the Ballers’ season. Write me and let me know what I’m missing!

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