Beast Blog

The Cleveland Cascade Needs You!

In a recent update sent to the Cleveland Cascade mailing list, Jim Ratliff writes:

save this date: evening of Monday, September 26. We will hold a public Open House at the Lakeview Branch Library to hear from the community their hopes, desires, and ideas for the restoration of the Cleveland Cascade. (Time is currently TBA, probably 6-ish.) This is a crucial part of the design process. Please come, bring your neighbors and all those good ideas you've had!

For more information about this cool historic landscape structure, or to get involved, go to the Cleveland Cascade website

A fountain pours in Oakland...

This sounds really great, and I'm happy to pass it along.

From my inbox:

Here's a cool happening thing in the East Bay that I wanted you folks to know about:

Right on the north east shore of Lake Merritt, Cleveland Cascade is a park that climbs steeply up the hill to Cleveland Street in the Haddon Hill and China Hill neighborhoods. In the 1920s, a noted landscape architect created an Italian-inspired water feature that cascaded down the hill, giving the park its "Cascade" name. Over the years, its maintenance was neglected, the water stopped flowing, and the Cascade was ultimately buried so that few knew what lay beneath the surface.

This May a neighborhood group launched a campaign to restore the Cleveland Cascade to its original state. We've already fully excavated the Cascade. We're working closely with a landscape architecture firm (PGA Design) that's donated tons of their time to develop a landscaping plan. And we're working with the City of Oakland, with an ultimate goal of combining some Measure DD money with privately raised money to fund the full restoration.

You can find out more about the Cascade and what the neighbors are up to at the web site:

http://clevelandcascade.org

You can see the photograph (from a 1931 landscape architecture journal) of the original Cascade that got us all inspired at

http://clevelandcascade.org/Photo.Cascade.1931.Gilkey.html

You can also read the 1923 SF Chron article written soon after the Cascade was built at

http://clevelandcascade.org/cited.1923.03.11.SFChronicle.html

You can find a map of exactly where the Cascade is at

http://clevelandcascade.org/where.html

If you have any questions, I'm a good person to ask!

Thanks!
Jim

--
Jim Ratliff
Friends of the Cleveland Cascade
jim [AT] clevelandcascade.org
http://clevelandcascade.org

Old School Oakland

First of all, I can’t believe the Kwik Way by the Grand Lake is in danger of becoming a McDonald’s. Yikes. Things change. I left the Bay Area in 1993, and have been living in New York City since then. Writing, living, teaching, editing—the stuff I do. I miss Oakland in a big way, though. I’m moving home next year.

I was raised in Oakland (though I went to high school in Los Angeles). Born right at Providence Hospital (it's no longer called that, right?), which is also where my great-grandfather died. More Like Wrestling is about Paige and Pinch—two sisters growing up in Oakland during the 1980s. Places like the Grand Lake figure prominently in my book. The city of Oakland is as much a character in MLW as Paige and Pinch and Maynard and Oscar and Jess and all the people who fill out my first novel. I think the SF Bay Guardian (where I used to work) said MLW is a “love letter” to my hometown, and I hope it is. I made every effort, though, to include the good, the bad, and the ugly. Like every long-distance love affair, mine with Oakland is intense. There are short, spirited, melancholy visits, and I’ve got high hopes for coming back to my love and watching the sun set over the Bay Bridge during my wise and wrinkled winter years. The longing is deep because I’m Oakland old school. Not Black Panther-era, but I remember when BART didn’t exist. I remember Swan’s Market, and I remember Rhode’s department store. I’ll be thirty-nine in June. All this said, I’m not a complete romantic. I see my town for what it was and what it is:

From Pinch's prologue to More Like Wrestling:

"But we’re from Oakland. And Oakland builds quality. Folks who creep but don’t crawl. Melt down, but don’t vaporize. I move around — Oakland, anyway. So I know the Bay Area creates righteous people who deal with splendor and sting, sham and certainty, gray velvet fog and lemon–glass sunshine — all while just getting from Point A to Point B.

I know this because I can see. I watch. And this place — with its indigo–green jewel of a lake and its underdog nature and dead downtown and Southern Negro mores and shiny liberal whiteness and slow–motion port and fifty–cent tacos and fern–cloaked hills and baby tunnels and beckoning bridges and Victorian crack–houses and modern manors from which you can see San Francisco twinkling and Marin sleeping and after that straight to God’s cool pacific pond — it had to be Oakland that pasted Paige and I together. It would be Oakland that pulled us apart.

Life, though, had a lot to do with it. And death, too."

***

The Kwik Way/Mickey D’s drama makes me think of my days around the Lake. I went to Lakeview Elementary, right there across the street from the theater. Is that closet-sized cigar shop still next door? It was when I was kid, and we’d go there to stock up on candy before the movie started. My sister and I saw a bunch of stuff at the Grand Lake: Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Apple Dumpling Gang, Pippi Longstocking, Sinbad and the Seven Seas. This was back when my sis and I would take the AC Transit No. 57—same bus, whether we were going to school, or to the movies. I also went to Luther Burbank Elementary (or it was called Luther Burbank back then) in East Oakland, where we lived. I spent a lot of time at Eastmont Mall (when it was new!)—going to Kress (I think it was Kress) and JC Penny with my great-grandmother. Going to Otis Spunkmeyer’s for hot chocolate chip cookies, going to H. Salt Fish & Chips (more vinegar, please) or Pizza Hut. There was a mini-branch of the public library in the mall back then, so I spent lots of time there. I read a thick, thick book about the Jim Jones cult/massacre/mass suicide from that branch when I was about twelve. My mom thought I was crazy, but she let me read it, and liked my verbal summaries and odd facts about the cult. I got my first library card from the Fruitvale Branch when I was about eight. When I was home just this past January, I noticed that the Fruitvale Branch (or was it called the Diamond Branch?) is no longer there, or is no longer where it was when I was a kid. I took bowling lessons at Diamond Bowl, which I guess is gone, too. I can still keep score by hand, which is a neat trick these days when bowling scores are done automatically and electronically. I had a K/Casper’s dog when I was home last, too. My mom got her hotdogs there when she was in high school (Fremont class of ’62). No tomatoes for me, just pickles and kraut and mustard. I like stuff sour, just like the Pixie Stix I used to get at the cigar shop by the Grand Lake.

Man, I miss Oakland. New York pizza is fine, but I could have a quarter chicken and fries from Kwik Way right now. Or at least a sloppy handful of meat and bread with grilled onions from Giant Burger.

I’m moving home next year. I know I’ve been saying that since 1993, but this time, I mean it.

I swear.

More later.

Grand Lake Theater Marquee Archive

Anyone who lives or drives in central Oakland near the lake has seen the indominable Grand Lake Theater Marquee. This terrific traditional grand old theater uses some of its prime advertising space for unabashedly political messages, some verging on the witty.

Musician and Grateful Dead historian David Gans has been keeping a Grand Lake Theater Marquee photo archive. Hurrah! I had been keeping my own, but he seems more disciplined about it. I've been living in Oakland on-and-off for almost six years; I don't remember these politics from my early days; I think the 2000 Bush v. Gore upset really ticked off someone at the good old Grand Lake. Outspoken business owners - makes me proud to live in Oakland.

Grand Avenue Focus

Twice now, I have needed a phone number for a business on Grand Avenue, and I've found Max's Planet Oakland page useful. It's focused almost entirely on Grand Lake and Lake Shore avenues, near Lake Merritt, and that's not a bad thing.

Films Noir At the Grand Lake!

Starting Friday, the Grand Lake theater will continue it's repertory experiment with a two-week film noir fest.