Old Oakland is a

historic district A historic district or heritage district is a section of a city which contains historic building, older buildings considered valuable for historical or architectural reasons. In some countries or jurisdictions, historic districts receive legal p ...

in downtown

Oakland, California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

. The area is located on the northwest side of Broadway, between the

City Center A city centre, also known as an urban core, is the commercial, cultural and often the historical, political, and geographic heart of a city. The term "city centre" is primarily used in British English, and closely equivalent terms that exist in ...

complex and the

Jack London Square Jack London Square is a neighborhood on the waterfront of Oakland, California, United States. Named after the author Jack London and owned by the Port of Oakland, it is the home of stores, restaurants, hotels, Amtrak's Jack London Square st ...

district, and across Broadway from

Chinatown Chinatown ( zh, t=唐人街) is the catch-all name for an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside Greater China, most often in an urban setting. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa, O ...

. The Old Oakland district was the original downtown Oakland during the 1860s after

Central Pacific Railroad The Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) was a rail company chartered by U.S. Congress in 1862 to build a railroad eastwards from Sacramento, California, to complete most of the western part of the "First transcontinental railroad" in North Americ ...

constructed a terminus on 7th Street. By the 1870s, elegant brick Victorian hotels were being built in the blocks surrounding the railroad station to accommodate travelers. The ground floor of the hotels were designed as series of narrow shops so that pedestrians would pass by many of them just walking down the block. The architectural styles of the time featured tall, cast-iron columns and large plate-glass windows. The downtown began its decline after the

1906 San Francisco earthquake At 05:12 AM Pacific Time Zone, Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated Moment magnitude scale, moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli inte ...

, when the shopping district began moving to the blocks north of 14th. In the 1970s and 1980s developers carefully rehabilitated and restored a block along 9th Street between Washington Street and Broadway, known as Victorian Row. Notable structures on Victorian Row include the 1878 Nicholl Block building. In its early days, the

Oakland Tribune The ''Oakland Tribune'' was a daily newspaper published in Oakland, California, and a predecessor of the '' East Bay Times''. It was published by the Bay Area News Group (BANG), a subsidiary of MediaNews Group. Founded in 1874, the ''Tribune'' ...

rented a small office on 9th Street. A sign for the Tribune office can still be seen hanging outside the building today. A

farmer's market A farmers' market (or farmers market according to the AP stylebook, also farmer's market in the Cambridge Dictionary) is a physical retail marketplace intended to sell foods directly by farmers to consumers. Farmers' markets may be indoors or ...

is also held every Friday on the same stretch of 9th Street. As of 2008, the neighborhood continues to gentrify as a downtown lifestyle district, more bistros and boutiques have cropped up, as more market-rate condominiums have been constructed nearby, and as

transit-oriented development In urban planning, transit-oriented development (TOD) is a type of Real estate development, urban development that maximizes the amount of Residential area, residential, business and leisure space within Pedestrian, walking distance of public t ...

retail and housing become more and more in demand. Swan's Market for example is an indoor-outdoor market and popular gather place for lunch.

References

External links

Old Oakland Historic District Business Association

SOBU - Sustainable Furniture & Design
Neighborhoods in Oakland, California Historic districts in California {{AlamedaCountyCA-geo-stub

See also

References

External links