A Walk through Mediterranean Oakland

Our relationships to places are funny things. It can be hard to pin down why we love or hate a place and often it depends on memories and nebulous vibes more than a place’s actual virtues or defects. Furthermore, they are unrequited relationships. Places do not love us back; they are indifferent to our feelings towards them, whether good or bad. Whereas on our end, when we fall in love with a place, that relationship can profoundly shape our lives.

I moved to Oakland seven years ago almost to the day, and I would still characterize our relationship as “undefined.” My theory is that by the time I got here, I had already fallen in love with too many other places and didn’t have room in my heart for another. Which is really too bad, because Oakland is a place worth loving.

But if I can’t call it love, I will say I have a deep respect for Oakland, and like many Oaklanders I often find myself in the position of defending this town. The proximity and comparison to San Francisco across the bay, inarguably a more famous and iconic city, does not help. For what it’s worth, I would much rather live here than San Francisco. Oakland is a graceful, complicated place with a rich, important history.^[1] Also, the warmer weather is much better for gardening.

In that unusually warm spring of 2020, when the Bay Area went into lockdown at the beginning of what would become the pandemic, like many people, my husband and I started taking long walks. In a strange, short-lived emotional state between overwhelming anxiety and grief and the childlike elation of staying home from school, we wandered the streets of Oakland for hours.

Sometimes we explored the affluent heights, following Longridge Avenue up into Crocker Highlands, marveling at the fairytale mansions. From there we could head east into Trestle Glen and cross Park Boulevard into Dimond, or continue the ascent into Piedmont where the mansions got even bigger. Other days we traversed the flats, veering east at the lake and zig-zagging through Cleveland Heights and Clinton, all the way to the waterfront and then north to Jack London Square.

My husband is Italian; his family is from Puglia and he grew up in Milan. His parents visited us in Oakland shortly after we were married, and to this day we still repeat his mom’s favorite refrain during her stay: “È come la Puglia!/It’s like Puglia!” Because it’s true, and we witnessed it often during our walks: Oakland is kind of like Puglia.

You have stucco homes, churches, and civic monuments kept in varying states, from crumbling decay to old world glamor. You have monumental palms, fig trees, and prickly pears lining the sidewalks. You have a gritty, bustling port and bucolic winding country roads.

In 1973, a man named Roger F. Urban had a similar revelation and set out to capture Oakland’s Mediterranean character in photographs. The resulting book, Oakland, a Mediterranean City, graced the front window of a local bookstore that my husband and I passed on one of our walks. We were delighted that someone besides us and my mother-in-law had noticed the affinity. 

On that occasion, we continued walking and didn’t buy the book, but just a couple of weeks ago I remembered it and ordered a copy on eBay as a Valentine’s Day gift. As I anticipated, it contains photographs of sites and buildings in the neighborhoods we explored, as they were in the mid-70s: Lake Merritt, Jack London Square, the Morcom Rose Garden, the Chapel of the Chimes.

Through his photographs, captions, and a brief note at the end, Urban hypothesizes that Oakland is as beautiful and cultured as any Mediterranean port. It’s an interesting argument to make in the 1970s during the completion of ambitious freeway and transit projects that displaced thousands of residents, demolished hundreds of businesses, and worsened historic inequities among Oakland neighborhoods, effectively rendering impossible the kind of communal civic life found in actual Mediterranean countries.^[2]On our urban adventures, my husband and I were regularly thwarted by the dead ends and unwalkable stretches left in the wake of freeway construction.

In fact, perhaps Oakland did not live up to Urban’s initial infatuation, for by the time the book was published in 1976, he and his family had moved to St. Louis. The flap copy claims that “the purpose of the photographic project was to change people’s attitudes about Oakland.” The bio informs us that Urban is an “entrepreneur” with a background in “marketing and advertising.” He financed the book on his own, thanks to his “experience in sales and business management.” He graduated from Dartmouth and Stanford Business School. 

So basically, a highly educated businessman alighted in Oakland for a few years, decided it needed a rebranding, and set out to do so by comparing it to places in Europe. A bit problematic, I will admit.

And yet, as evidenced by my Italian mother-in-law’s exclamations, there are undeniable resonances. The comparable climate allows similar vegetation to thrive in both places despite being 6,000 miles apart and inspired a whimsical interpretation of Southern European architecture on the modest and grand scale throughout the early 20^th century. 

I am particularly charmed by Urban’s realization on page 48 that Oakland literally is a Mediterranean city:

“Only recently, I became aware of the scientific basis on which Oakland is designated as a Mediterranean city. The climate, vegetation and terrain of Oakland are distinctly Mediterranean. In fact, Oakland lies in the heart of one of the world’s five Mediterranean regions. The other four are in central Chile, southwestern Australia, the Cape Region of South Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea basin itself… This Mediterranean climate has produced vegetation of similar appearance in each region. It consists of many bulbous plants, a high proportion of annual plants, and evergreen trees or shrubs with hard leathery leaves… It was exciting to learn about the meteorological and botanical similarities between Oakland and the other Mediterranean regions of the world. These factors combine with the city’s Southern European architecture, cultural and ethnic influences to provide convincing support that Oakland really is a Mediterranean city.”

Of course, they have a lot of things in Puglia that we don’t have here in Oakland, like ancient white-washed cities perched upon hilltops and pristine beaches and places selling focaccia for one euro a slice and my husband’s warm, funny, loving extended family. I fell hard for Italy when I lived there in my 20s, and I guess my theory about Oakland is flawed because when I finally got acquainted with Puglia through my husband in recent years, my hard heart softened. Oakland deserves to be appreciated on its own terms for its own distinctive qualities, but what can I say? The heart wants what it wants. 

And in those dreamlike early pandemic walks when we didn’t know how or when we would get to Italy again, there was nothing so comforting as rounding a corner to encounter a sunbaked Mediterranean bungalow ensconced in cacti, succulents, and palms and sighing out, “è come la Puglia!”

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^[1] There are many great books written about Oakland history, but one I have at home and strongly recommend is Hella Town by Mitchell Schwarzer (University of California Press, 2021). 

^[2] In Hella Town, the chapter “The Promise and Reality of Freeways and Bart” (169-199) provides a comprehensive history and analysis of the impacts of these infrastructure projects.