Category — chinatown

On this second Friday of the month, sunny downtown Oakland may not be hosting a big art walk or a restaurant opening, but there is much to read about the DTO on this beautiful day.

Dashe and JC Cellars, local urban wineries, are profiled in AppellationAmerica.com. Taste their wines at their shared warehouse, or at next week’s Oakland Indie Awards.

Bloggers, contributors, commenters and readers enjoyed meeting each other at one of Uptown’s hottest spots last week. Read Zennie’s take on the party, and the neighborhood.

A Chronicle food critic blogs that “it’s happening in Oakland,” about the recent spate of high-quality restaurant openings. Four of his favorites are downtown. OaklandGoods visits a new favorite, Pican, and an old favorite, the Paramount Movie Classics.

Many activists are quite pleased that the City Council gave public art a crack at using a prominent Uptown lot instead of car parking. Stay up to date on the two-week process by keeping an eye on the blogs.

Walk Oakland Bike Oakland posts the progress on Lake Merritt improvements as reported by Councilmember Pat Kernighan. Now that the rainy season is ending, the long-promised paths and bike lanes around our crown jewel are ready to be poured!

The Chronicle profiles Anthony Holdsworth, chronicler of a changing downtown in pastel. See his triptych of 14th and Broadway in the lobby of Oakland’s City Administration Building, 250 Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Nice to know, the reader may think, but what am I doing tonight? Three downtown events stand out tonight, Friday May 8. The Franklin Square Wine Bar is hosting one-dollar tasting flights of Italian wines on their lovely plaza. With two weeks until their cabaret license may be suspended, tonight at Oasis may be a last chance to dance to reggae, dancehall, and techno. And at Café Van Kleef tonight, West Oakland horns-driven outfit Damon and the Heathens will perform danceable funk with plenty of local references. But with Uptown, Old Oakland and Chinatown all offering a variety of walkable dining and entertainment options, it’s easy to come downtown without a plan! See you on the sidewalk.

Wall Street might be all doom and gloom, but Washington Street has more than its share of good news. As big businesses in big cities seize up, local businesses in the DTO announce ambitious plans for expansion.

601 City Center started construction with a groundbreaking party this week, to which the neighbors were rudely disinvited. But starting construction brings completing construction closer!

The very successful Trappist Belgian beer salon is expanding their gorgeous but cramped bar in Old Oakland. Also in the Old O, Levende Lounge’s partners are looking to open another bar nearby, and an art gallery has taken up temporary residence (just on First Fridays) between arty furniture gallery FiveTen Studio and Verse, seller of psychedelic sneakers.

Life is returning to the alley that was once 13th Street between Jefferson and MLK. The large condo project is under construction once again, and a café has returned to the City Cup space across from the Federal Building. The owner of City Cup plans to build a bar and grill next door to open early next year, eventually to be open on the weekends once the condos are complete.

An automated, multilingual low-cost pharmacy opens to great fanfare in Chinatown.

Have I told you guys yet that Bakesale Betty leased the old Broadway Grand sales office on Franklin Square across from Luka’s? They totally did. According to Mr. Betty, the new location will allow an expanded selection of baked goods and more space for customers in the original Temescal locale.

Numerous downtown residents and interested parties have complained that the Downtown Zoning Update has featured a remarkably poor public input process. First, councilmembers Nancy Nadel and Pat Kernighan, who represent downtown, convened two meetings to get input on zoning around Lake Merritt. Both of the meetings were held outside of downtown as defined by the General Plan. Then the city staff, with the assistance of Councilmember Nadel, held two meetings specifically on the downtown Zoning Update, again outside of downtown. After members of the public (and a City Council candidate) complained that “nobody downtown knows about this process,” the Planning Commission ordered the planning staff to hold one more public input meeting, actually inside downtown this time. While nothing has been added to the official Zoning Update page or the Yahoo! Group created by Councilmember Nadel, I have learned that there is in fact a meeting scheduled.

On Monday April 7 Councilmembers Chang and Kernighan and the planning staff are holding an outreach meeting, starting at 6p, a Restaurant Peony in Chinatown. The forum is organized by the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. This was revealed only by a neighborhood services coordinator who spotted the email on the “Asians in Oakland Government” group and then shared it with her neighborhood group.

Though Old Oakland, SOBO, Uptown and Downtown Lake Merritt don’t seem to merit the notice of city planners or Councilmembers, at least there will be one meeting on the downtown zoning update that’s actually inside the affected area. Too bad few people will know about it.

Tonight, the Planning Department will present the final of their four public input meetings regarding proposed zoning for the Central Business District. This final meeting will not be downtown, but in Adam’s Point, at the Sailboat House (which is poorly served by public transit) at 6:30. To be discussed are use restrictions, separate residential and commercial zones, and strict design guidelines. For a thorough explanation of what exactly the new zoning proposes, see A Better Oakland’s post, Zoning From Mars.

The proposal will be presented to the Zoning Update Committee of the Planning Commission on Wednesday, at City Hall, which is actually downtown. And near several different transit lines.

Also, I’d like to thank the Oakland Museum for throwing one of the DTO’s best parties ever. Make Me, Hottub, DJs, exhibits, and free beer – I can’t remember so many people ever having so much fun at our beautiful museum.

After looking at maps of downtown Oakland created by the Downtown Lake Merritt Neighborhood Group and Old Oakland Neighbors, I’ve revised my DTO map to have slightly different neighborhood boundaries. Several questions are raised by this map: is Jack London Square downtown? With high-density housing pushing up Broadway, is downtown expanding northward? Are there more downtown neighborhoods, and are these boundaries correct? How does this map relate to the city’s proposal to impose height limits throughout downtown, for the first time in Oakland’s history?

The underlying map is from the Oakland Convention and Vistors’ Bureau, and contains major errors but is pretty. I will look for another base map for the next update.

Running from Broadway to Lake Merritt, downtown Oakland’s Thirteenth Street has many personalities. The block from Broadway to Franklin, home to the landmark Tribune Tower and one of downtown’s two usable taxi stands, includes a popular nightclub, a cafe, restaurants, and a large vertical parking structure disguised as a nondescript office building. From Webster to Harrison and beyond, Asian and other small businesses occupy subsidized housing towers and Art Deco storefronts. Serving as the transition from Chinatown to SOBO, 13th has recently become home to three beautifully restored mid-rise buildings: The Mash Building at Broadway, the former Will Rogers Hotel at Franklin, and the Golden Bridge Lofts at Harrison. All three combine restored historic facades with contemporary, feminine color schemes. Photos and descriptions after the break.

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Next Tuesday, the City Council will hear a report (PDF) on the progress of most of the city’s redevelopment areas. Here are some highlights from the downtown report (which is the Central District), on the last three fiscal years:

• The UCOP’s parking garage cost the RDA $3.9m, and gross revenue fell 13% despite the removal of downtown parking for new development. The city expects the garage to operate without public subsidy in the future.
• All downtown residential projects that had public subsidy included affordable units.
• The DTO’s Façade Improvement Program is winding down, a victim of its own success.
• A very small amount of discretionary money to aid commercial ventures was distributed to the At-large and District 2 councilmembers.
• A new program is a $3m fund for site acquisition for redevelopment of small sites in “targeted areas.”
• Lincoln Recreation Center and the adjoining park are being upgraded. There are no other park projects downtown, aside from Measure DD, which is not a redevelopment project.
• $29.7m was generated from the housing set-aside in the last three years alone.
• The state forced us to give up $9.1m to the schools and other agencies, to balance their budget.
• Of $66.5m spent on projects, $51.9m (78%) went to the Uptown district, primarily to Forest City and the Fox Theater.
• The Central District map is downtown up to 27^th Street (including 48% of the area slated for retail redevelopment), the Jack London Square area above Embarcadero, and some very suspicious holes carved out around the Kaiser Center and Lake Merritt BART station.

With the opening of Whole Foods on 27th and Harrison, observers have commented that the new store is “a stone’s throw from downtown.” So, where, exactly, is downtown Oakland?

Uniquely for a city of its size, Oakland has a very large downtown that includes several distinct districts. Traditionally, downtown is bordered by 980 to the West, Lake Merritt to the East, Grand Ave to the North and 880 to the South. That does not include Jack London Square, Auto Row, or the up-and-coming arts district centered at 23rd and Telegraph. The 10k Plan’s area includes Jack London Square and areas north to 27th Street (including the Whole Foods and Mayor Brown’s former residence at 27th and Telegraph).

Within downtown, neighborhoods are characterized by unique land-use patterns (such as high-rise office in Center Center and high-rise residential in the Lake Merritt Apartment District), different types of retail (ethnic goods and services in Chinatown, or specialty shops in SOBO), and distinctive architecture (Art Deco in Uptown, Victoriana in Old Oakland). I created a map of the districts, based on a downtown map from the Oakland Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.

Already, newish neighborhood groups are focused on their districts, like Old Oakland Neighbors, Downtown Lake Merritt Apartment Neighborhood Group, and the SOBO (South Of Broadway Oakland) merchants’ association. Visitors to the DTO are often confused by downtown’s size and the utter lack of city wayfinding. This map is a start toward identifying those districts and placing them in context.

So, I ask the reader – what do you think? Are these borders correct? With Jack London Square approaching the high-density mixed-use character of downtown, should it remain separate? If the Conley Report’s goal of transforming Auto Row happens, should that be considered downtown? Is there a historic name for the area I call West DTO?

NovoMetro.com today posted an excellent grocery-shopping guide for downtown. It focused on Chinatown’s markets, which are concentrated around eight and ninth streets between Broadway and Webster, immediately across from Old Oakland. Old Oakland also has more mainstream grocery shopping options, as well as often-ample parking. Is the lower DTO a gourmet destination, as NovoMetro food writer Kevin Cook suggests? There’s certainly adequate grocery shopping, despite what downtown naysayers claim.