DOWNTOWN ENTERTAINMENT
Opportunities either mishandled or
long left neglected during the Jerry Brown Administration are now rapidly catching
up with the mayor, threatening to give him a rocky send-off on his way out of Oakland’s
door. (If you don’t get the pun, ask somebody.)
One of these mishandled opportunities is a downtown entertainment district, which
Mr. Brown has said was one of his administrative goals.
When Mr. Brown took office in January of 1999, he was presented with a great chance
to solidify an already-existing downtown entertainment center. Starting with Sweet
Jimmy’s on 17th and San Pablo, there was a string of popular nightclubs within walking
distance to Lake Merritt, running down 14th Street from Geoffrey’s Inner Circle to
the old Club Caribé to several Southeast Asian clubs down around the Oak Street
area. That is in addition to the city-run Alice Street Center (later renamed the
Malonga Casquelord Center), which was regularly holding Friday and Saturday night
cultural programs in its theater. San Pablo Avenue/14th Street at the turn of 2000
was nothing like the legendary 7th Street during the war years, but it was a solid
start, a multicultural scene that had started to get the feel of New Orleans to it,
certainly in keeping with what Mr. Brown has always said he wanted to prevent the
downtown area from being “dead” after dark. Entrepreneurs had done most of this on
their own. All they needed was a little city help for it to take off.
Why that San Pablo Avenue/14th Street downtown entertainment district never fully
materialized is a story too long to tell in a single column. Some have suggested
race (the San Pablo Avenue/14th Street venues all attracted a darker clientele into
the downtown area); some said it was that in his drive to create a “legacy” in Oakland
on which he could run for statewide or national office again, Mr. Brown generally
promoted things that he could say he initiated on his own, rather than supporting
things which Oaklanders had already developed. But it was always clear that for whatever
reason, the Brown Administration never warmed up to the concept of an entertainment
center along lower San Pablo and 14th Street, and so a partnership between the city
and the entertainment business owners in that area never seemed to develop. Instead,
we have seen an adversarial relationship, in which the city has repeatedly criticized
the owners of those entertainment venues and sought to shut a number of them down,
rather than help them solve their problems. In addition, Mr. Brown once sought to
break up the successful Casquelord Center and replace it with his Arts School, a
maneuver which was opposed by cultural groups across the city, and eventually defeated
by City Council in one of its rare oppositions to the mayor’s proposals.
A snapshot look at how sour the relationship between the Brown Administration and
the San Pablo/14th Street entertainment business owners was evident in an Oakland
Tribune article two Sundays ago, which reported that police had to be called
to break up disturbances outside of Geoffrey’s Inner Circle. (For the purpose of
full disclosure, Geoffrey Pete is my cousin.)
“A sideshow was reported around midnight Sunday morning at Club Planet Soule at 14th
and Franklin streets,” the Tribune article reported. (Club Planet Soule is
a venue inside Geoffrey’s Inner Circle.) “Police said Oakland-based rapper Too Short
was performing at the venue, and his act attracted a crowd of at least 550 people.
Several hundred others were standing outside the club and surrounding areas when
the sideshows started. All of the city's sideshow units were needed to silence the
crowd, stop the reckless driving and lighten up traffic in the area. Shortly after
the nightclub closed, sideshow activity resumed in the area.” The article reported
that “sideshow activity” later spread to the Jack London Square area, and then out
to High Street in East Oakland.
But according to Mr. Pete, there was no “sideshow activity” outside of his club during
the Too Short concert.
In an open letter released in the week after the Tribune article appeared,
Mr. Pete wrote that “the entire Too Short concert … was totally without incident.
When capacity was reached at approximately 11:30, there was a line that numbered
a maximum of 100 people who were informed that we had reached capacity and were no
longer allowing entry. Within 15 minutes of said announcement approximately 70 percent
of the individuals waiting in line dispersed while the other 30 percent lingered
in hope of being admitted. There were not 200 people loitering outside. … There was
no sideshow at anytime during the course of the evening. … If everything is a sideshow,
then nothing is a sideshow, thus nullifying the very definition and accuracy of what
a sideshow is. Any correlation between Geoffrey’s Inner Circle and sideshows is preposterous.”
Mr. Pete has always been notoriously fussy about decorum and security at his club,
which is a regularly stopping ground for entertainers and sports figures when they
come to Oakland, the modern replacement for the legendary Slim Jenkins’ club (one
popular story—who knows how true it is—is that his security personnel once turned
away a white guy who showed up at the club with a posse of enormous black men because
the white guy had on sneakers and khaki pants; according to the story, Mr. Pete had
to later explain to his security that the next time then-Warriors coach Don Nelson
showed up at the door with team members, they should be allowed in regardless of
how the coach’s attire violated the club’s dress code; apparently, the security men
had not recognized Mr. Nelson).
One would think, therefore, that both Mr. Pete and the Brown Administration would
have a common interest in a solution to the problems of holding violence-free downtown
entertainment events.
But maybe the problem is that Mr. Brown doesn’t really want these particular clubs
in this particular area, and so has done little to help them out.
This week, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier & Ross political columnists
reported on an incident with the mayor outside of @17, a club near Telegraph Avenue
not far from Sweet Jimmy’s (both @17 and Jimmy’s, just like Geoffrey’s Inner Circle,
attract a predominantly African-American clientele). Mr. Brown had gone to the area
of the club, apparently, to see what happened when the club let out for the night,
and got there just after a disturbance had occurred. According to the Chronicle
columnists, Mr. Brown reportedly remarked to a woman who had been injured in the
disturbance “that is what happens when you come to a place like this.” When a friend
of the injured woman said she asked the mayor "You really think that an innocent
bystander who comes to a club deserves to get hit?'', the friend says Mr. Brown replied,
"What do you want us to do when you people come to a place like this?"
It is not clear what Mr. Brown may have meant by “a place like this.”
A Brown spokesperson denied in the column that this is the way the conversation went,
but the column did not offer the mayor’s version of what was said.
There has been trouble outside of downtown entertainment venues. But because of confused
reports coming out of Tribune articles and the police department and the mayor’s
office, it’s often hard to tell how much trouble is actually going on, how much of
the actual trouble is the fault of the entertainment venues themselves, and how much
of it is completely out of their control.
Sorting all of that out is going to be one of the (many) unfinished tasks left by
Mr. Brown for the new mayor to tackle.