signs: the Print Shop

Print Shop

Along San Pablo Ave. is this dated-looking sign for the Print Shop. I can't find any business listing at the location of the sign, but it's not connected with PSPrint on Mandela Parkway. (Thanks for the info, Jennifer! See her comment for more info.)

blog pulse: Ghost Town Farm

Ghost Town Farm

Ifirst wrote about Ghost Town Farm a couple of years ago. Novella Carpenter is a celebrity in urban farming, in no small part because of her book Farm City and her connection with food author and journalism professor Michael Pollan. Not everyone is a fan, some because she raises animals for food, others because she's self-promoting. (BTW, the book is more about the story of her learning, and not really a how-to.) But you can't deny that she's helped popularize the idea of urban farming and the local food movement, and has made people in and around Oakland more aware of where their food comes from.

So it was a little surprising when I saw a blog posting "Farmstand Canceled Due to... the City of Oakland". At first it seemed like she was over-reacting. Maybe she needed conditional use permits and licenses and things to sell produce, but surely she couldn't need those things just to grow it? Well, turns out she does, at least according to current city of Oakland rules. As a result, there's been an uproar in the blogosphere and the dead-tree press, and not just here in Oakland. People are mobilizing to help her get things changed. And even if you don't believe in her approach personally, urban farming is back, and the city shouldn't make it harder for people to raise food locally. Check out this post on Pluck and Feather about the general movement to get the city up to speed, and sign the petition.

East Bay Express
Oakland North
Root Simple
Bay Citizen
SFist
SFGate
Oakland Tribune
NBC Bay Area
SF Weekly
Grub Street
KQED blog
American Thinker
Chip Johnson
ABC 7
Ella Baker Center

my Oakland map

Finishing off map week is the most accurate but least useful map: how I visualize Oakland. It's by definition 100% accurate because it's how I think of things, but it's not terribly useful outside of telling people how I think of our fair city.

View my Oakland map in a larger map
It's kind of like a single data point in the Mapping Oakland project. Not nearly as useful as a bunch of maps like this aggregated together.

Some good news is that I heard back from Robert, the researcher behind the Mapping Oakland project. Although the web page hasn't been updated, he's still working on things:

I am actually finishing up the analysis for Temescal and Fruitvale districts... I hope to have the maps up on the web page sometime by mid April. I'm presenting the results in April, so after I complete my presentation I will have a bit of time to start uploading the maps to the net.

Back to my map. You may be wondering why some large areas are a single district, while a few small neighborhoods get labeled. In no particular order:

• Hiller Highlands - this is known (at least by name) to most residents of the Oakland hills, because it's where the 1991 Oakland firestorm started
• Sobrante Park - this neighborhood at the far south end of Oakland is where I've been volunteering to help build houses with Habitat for Humanity East Bay for the last several years (and an older development 10+ years ago, too)
• Village Bottoms - I first heard of Village Bottoms because of a workshop at West Coast Green last year
• Ghosttown - I heard about Ghosttown because of Ghost Town Farm, Novella Carpenter's urban farm. It got a big jump in publicity when she published Farm City, a book about her experiences with urban farming.

The rest of my map is much more arbitrary, depending on how much time I've spent in different parts of Oakland and their proximity to different landmarks like Lake Merritt or the zoo.

All in all, not a particularly useful map. It'd be great to be able to compare other people's similar maps, though not very practical because of the difficulty in creating them.

Ghost Town Farm

a young fan

Before I headed over to Jack London for the Eat Real festival, I spent a few hours on Saturday helping out at Ghost Town Farm. It's a small farm in the middle of the Ghost Town / Hoover-Foster neighborhood, with bees, rabbits, chickens, goats and all sorts of fruits and vegetables. It's run by Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. This isn't some one-time stunt to ride the green wave; Novella has been urban farming for over 10 years. In conjunction with the Eat Real festival, Novella had an open house...er...open farm, including a workshop on chicken slaughtering, and another on taking care of goats.

Grandma's cobbler

There was a lot of interest in learning more about what she's doing, but there's not much parking on her street. So she encouraged people to bike there if possible, but as many people were coming from out of town, that wasn't a good option for them. I directed parking for a while: bikes at the back fence; cars, well, your best bet is along MLK. There were also people there to sell Goat Town t-shirts and copies of Novella's book, and provide refreshments. One of her neighbors, Grandma, made an awesome peach cobbler.

removing the innards

I did get to see part of one of the chicken slaughtering demonstrations. I wasn't particularly interested in that, as (a) we don't have any chickens (yet) and (b) I'm a vegetarian, but it was still interesting to see. Sort of like what I remember from high school biology, though nothing I remember dissecting ever had organs that looked as readily identifiable as what came out of the chicken.

After the Eat Real festival, my wife and I stopped by so she could see the farm. It's pretty amazing what a variety of food is produced in a small area. Currently we grow some potatoes, but have plans to plant a garden again once I finish the house remodel. Now I'm thinking bees and chickens (for the eggs) would be good, too.

what's in a name?

Oakland is not just a diverse city, it's geographically large. So it's no wonder there are a host of neighborhood names.

Names are wonderful things. They can give a sense of place, of history, of belonging. Of course, they can also be confusing if you don't know them. When I started driving in the Bay Area, I knew where the Nimitz Freeway was (it was part of CA-17 then), but Grove-Shafter? It makes traffic reports less useful if you have no idea what freeways they're talking about. I've learned many of them over the years. Fortunately traffic reports don't rely solely on names anymore -- which is good, otherwise you'd have to know that I-580 is the MacArthur, the John T. Knox, the Eastshore, the Arthur H. Breed Jr., and the William Elton "Brownie" Brown, depending on which section you're talking about. (Of course, if it were in southern California, it would be "the 580".)

Similarly, there are a bunch of Oakland neighborhoods that I don't know the names of. So I was delighted when Google Maps added neighborhood names. It's not perfect, as neighborhood boundaries are even more confusing and less well-defined than city boundaries, but it is a big help. It's very handy when you're looking for a restaurant or type of shop in a particular neighborhood. Yahoo! Maps goes one better, and has nice color-coded regions on the map to show the neighborhoods.

Then there's the issue of nicknames. The Hoover/Foster neighborhood is probably more widely known as Ghost Town (or Ghosttown). There are several theories on the origin of the name, from the presence of multiple casket companies to highway 24 the Grove-Shafter I-980 splitting the neighborhood and leaving it a virtual ghost town. The name also brings up the issue of spelling and punctuation. Is it Ghost Town? Ghosttown? Hoover/Foster? Foster Hoover Historic District? Foster? Hoover? (Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?) Google Maps shows it has Hoover/Foster. Yahoo! Maps shows it as Hoover (though you can search on Foster, too.) My recent sign posting suggests Foster.

So what happens when a business includes the neighborhood as part of its name? People tend to feel it's more a part of the neighborhood, more a local business, and lets people know where to find it. Unless you move, like Pill Hill Printing on San Pablo must have. It's either in Oakland, Berkeley or Emeryville, depending on which map you look at, and it's either in the Golden Gate or Paradise Park neighborhood. But it's no where near Pill Hill.

Finally, there's the question of what do the residents themselves think. I live in the Montclair neighborhood, but when people ask where I live I say Oakland. Partly because people elsewhere don't know where Montclair is, but largely out of a sense of pride in and connection to Oakland in general. (The usual chain is Oakland, near highway 13, Montclair, near where Snake and Colton cross.) Maybe I don't feel a strong connection to the neighborhood (though I love living here) because I couldn't afford it these days. But lots of people have a strong connection to their neighborhood, sometimes even after they don't live there anymore.

So what are the name(s) of your neighborhood? Do you identify with it or with Oakland more strongly?

signs: Foster Printing

Foster Printing

On MLK in the Hoover/Foster neighborhood is the Foster Printing sign. It appears to be defunct, and Google Maps didn't show any listings at that address, but there are several other printing places nearby so maybe it moved and changed names.