Longfellow

We've lived in Longfellow since 2003 and have watched the neighborhood change tremendously over the years (including the name Longfellow being re-instituted; when we moved here this was simply "North Oakland"). The recent housing bust has allowed more folks from SF to buy houses in the area, which has had such a positive impact.

We now have a Facebook page where people easily organize park cleanups, seed-bombings, and ask each other advice. The streets are starting to fill out with the trees we've all been planting. The bike lanes on Market and West are filled, all day, with commuters and joy-riders. And most importantly, we are all getting to know each other better - we talk to each other, compare notes on crime and blight issues, and work *together* in order to make our neighborhood great.

While Longfellow doesn't have it's own commercial strip (though I would give money to any Kickstarter campaign that went towards opening a coffee shop on Market) we are but three long blocks to Telegraph, with its restaurants, coffee shops, yarn store, bike store, gaming store... closer than some spots in Temescal. And should you need to make that Target/Home Depot/Ikea run, the wonder that is Emeryville is but a block away.

The F bus runs down Market. The Macarthur BART is a quick 10 minute walk away (and if you commute, more and more people are walking West from Macarthur to get home at the end of the day). The bike ride to the ferry is a near straight shot down Telegraph/Broadway. I regularly ride my Xtracycle to Berkeley Bowl West through the Emeryville Greenway to go shopping.

To be fair, there are things we don't like about Longfellow. There is crime, in the form of break-ins and stolen cars, but no more than in Rockridge or Temescal. And there are shootings, which seem to take place in spurts depending in if there is some turf war happening. The shootings are a real drag - the fact that we are no longer shocked when we hear of a shooting is sad - it it the thing we like the least about Longfellow. They tend to take place late at night, and seem to be personal beefs rather than robberies gone awry.

But the positive energy of the neighbors is what sustains us. The folks walking their dogs, and more and more, their kids, down the block. Beautiful gardens popping up. Block parties, organized greening events, neighbors offering to help neighbors. Truly wonderful stuff happening here.

If you want a decent sized house with a fairly big yard, with great, eclectic neighbors, amenities all around, and lots of public transportation options, Longfellow is for you.

Longfellow is a working class neighborhood stretching to the northwest of the junction between Highway 25 and 580. This is a neighborhood frozen in time since WWII. Less than one in ten of the homes here were built in my lifetime. That means that you can get a real sense of what this area of the Bay looked like at the mid point in the previous century. The majority of homes in this neighborhood are walk-ups with bay windows. Some of them are Victorians—though not really of the same style as those in most neighborhoods across the Bay as far as I can tell.

Many of the homes are really unusual in terms of architecture. I am really not sure what these types of homes are called. For example, some of them have a pointy front roofed façade at a sharp angle and then give way to a more gently sloping roof behind that. Many of the homes are also brightly painted in greens or blues. They are mostly built on tiny lots of the kind popular during and before the War; and many have unkept front lawns or thick bushes that curtain passersby from seeing to the front door.

Six thousand plus people live here. There have been four murders so far this year, three shootings and one stabbing. (There have been 124 murders in Oakland to this point this year.) The four victims were young persons of color, two young men and two young women. A sad state of affairs. Other kinds of crime are also high in this neighborhood, especially at its southern edge.

In many ways, the neighborhood suffers from urban blight. You can see the signs of this as you pass by on the freeway. The homes closest to the freeway tend to have boarded up windows and missing roofing. The southwest corner of the neighborhood seems definitely to have the worst of it. The housing is particularly ramshackle in this section.

That said, there are a few signs of hope that go beyond the liquor stores and the tattered asphalt of the streets. Back when our new governor, Mr. Brown was mayor of Oakland, he helped to inaugurate the Oakland Military Institute. The idea behind the school is to take middle schoolers from the Oakland area and insert them into a rigorous military school style education program that will teach them discipline and leadership skills that will help them to better themselves, their families and their neighborhoods. The charter program did come under some criticism as most such programs do, but when Brown finished his tenure as mayor it was touted as one of his successes.

Despite these more sobering facts about living in Longfellow, the neighborhood also has at least one compelling draw on the watering hole front. Café Biere is one odd little place that outsiders love to visit—it offers a French Bistro style beer hall where the beer slinging wait staff wear low cut French village pub type attire while serving California cuisine and German draft beers in tall glasses. Quite the sloshy experience.