Last week's Ask Curbed SF post on the architects of the Brutalist USPS Distribution Center in Oakland got some interesting responses. The one that most piqued our curiosity was from commenter Mark Pritchard:
No man, that post office was a redevelopment project that started in the late 1960s, was a huge cause célèbre for radicals and lefties in the East Bay because it knocked down tens of blocks of West Oakland houses and forced out thousands of residentsThe interwebs were only slightly cooperative, so we got on the phone and got a super-helpful intern at the Oakland Planning Department, who quickly found out the facility was built between 1965 and 1967 and designed by the firm of Stone, Malloy, Marracini & Patterson. Which neatly fits the "brutalist" timeline. He then turned us over to the estimable Betty Marvin, the Planning Department's historian, who keeps a watchful eye on Oakland's historic resources and supplied the demolition images.
To sum up a few decades in a few words: West Oakland was a poor but thriving black community that suffered three calamitous events- the Cypress Freeway in 1957, which cut the neighborhood in half, then the elevated BART along 7th Street, wiping out the main retail stretch along with the jazz clubs, and the Post Office, where the parking lot and facility replaced almost five hundred homes. Much of the demolition on the twenty-acre site was done with a WWII surplus tank. Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panthers in Oakland in 1966, ostensibly to fight police brutality, but that we don't imagine that tank brightened the mood, much.
· Ask Curbed SF: Brutalist Post Office Drive-by In Oakland [Curbed SF Archives]
· Eminent Domain in West Oakland: A Controversial Legacy [Public Health Policy & Law]
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