Clawson

Clawson is a poor neighborhood to the southeast of the junction of the MacArthur and the Nimitz Freeway. The average household income in Clawson is only $30K.

The area on the eastern edge of the neighborhood is filled with worn out looking walk-up bungalows, many, obviously in need of repairs. It is not unsual to see debris scattered about the street in this area and barbed wire atop fences. Front lawns are generally sectioned off with metal fencing and it is not unusual to come across empty cement covered lots on residential streets. The streets themselves often feature cracked asphalt, while blue tarps are scene throughout the neighborhood on roofs where leaks have developed (even sometimes over the tops of campers and cars). Everywhere one has a sense of homes and businesses being fortified against possible invasion or theft.

On the western edge of the neighborhood you come across waste disposal companies, quarries, the detritus of the ports, and some of the round houses of intermodal companies that switch cargo from rail and ship and train. This has long been one of the major stops of the Union-Pacific (Oakland is actually the end of the line for that historic rail and you can still see the remains of it here) along with the towering cranes that pick the stacked containers off ships from Asia and South American.

Running right through the middle of this ugly industrial area where only tractors and forklifts really look at home, is Mandela Parkway, which at this point has a beautifully manicured green space in its meridian. The odd juxtaposition of the memorial to the great political activist and this most unwelcoming environment is either a terrible joke, or oddly appropriate given the stark realities that the man went through on Robin Island just off the coast of South Africa. Either way, if makes for a compelling visual space.

I suppose someone with an artistic eye also might find it ironic that just across the street from the monument on this southerly facing parkway should be one of the new fangled gentrified condominium complexes that were part of Jerry Brown’s plans to transform Oakland. This complex is particularly interesting because the dark shaded pastel buildings are designed in a post-modern form of architecture that employs cubic projections from the upper floors and stark metallic balconies to look out over Mandela Pkwy towards the bay.

Of course, like everything else around here, the complex is guarded by high metal walls and heavily reinforced doors of the kind that look like they could take a good half-hour beating from a battering ram without giving.

So we have a new apartheid right in northwest Oakland, where the well off can separate themselves from the poor that surround them in a walled city of their own. This is a very strange space indeed.