Dangerous or Endangered?: Race and the Politics of Youth in Urban America

4. Cruising down the Boulevard

| 153 4 Cruising down the Boulevard One spring day in 2003, as I took pictures along MacArthur Boulevard in the Laurel district, a fifteen-year-old African American girl asked me what I was doing. When I told her I was writing a book about youth in Oakland , she asked if I knew that they were trying to move the bus stops from the corner of 35th and MacArthur. She added in a matter-of-fact voice, “They don’t want youth in this neighborhood.” Every school day at 2:30 in the afternoon , a trickle of students wearing backpacks and holding bus passes turned into a flood, filling the bus stops along the MacArthur corridor. Some came down the hill from Skyline High School or from nearby Bret Harte Middle School. Others waited to transfer buses as they trekked home to North or East Oakland. Black, Tongan, Chinese, Latino, and some white students filled the sidewalks, sometimes spilled into the streets, or roamed down the boulevard in search of food and fun. Some kids listened quietly to music on headsets ; others were more boisterous, play-fighting with their friends, throwing nutshells, or tossing insults and shouting across the streets to friends. On occasion, the crowd gathered in a circle to watch the excitement of a fight. Two Oakland police cars often sat near busy bus stops casually monitoring the corner for signs of trouble—accepted as a natural, normal part of the Oakland street scene. Two years earlier, on a clear, cold day in January 2001, I walked down the boulevard with Jackie Patterson, an African American mother of a thirteenyear -old and the neighborhood services coordinator, and Pat Jackson, a spry older white woman who served as the NCPC youth coordinator. The Laurel Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council led a broad effort to clear kids off this commercial corridor starting in the late 1990s. They campaigned for more police, hired private security, tried to move the bus stops, and developed after-school programs to keep kids off the street. As we walked, they identified individual businesses that either helped or hurt the neighborhood. They pointed to World Ground café and Farmer Joe’s organic marketplace as signs of neighborhood revitalization, but complained that one Chinese 154 | Cruising down the Boulevard restaurant needed to be closed because it drew crowds after school with its hand-written signs advertising one-dollar meals. We stopped at small grocery stores, liquor stores, and beauty salons where Jackie explained to merchants that students had been “warned to stay away from here after school. They were told to go straight home, or they don’t have to go home, but they have to leave here. They can’t loiter.” Pat Jackson most clearly framed the problem when she explained to the owner of a nail salon, “People don’t want to come and shop here if there are crazy kids everywhere.” Youth seemed to stand in the way of the fragile revitalization of this commercial corridor, which had struggled for decades as waves of urban restructuring washed over the city. The history of MacArthur Boulevard traces Oakland’s fitful, and certainly incomplete, transformation from a landscape of production to a landscape of consumption—and the contradictory role young people have played in the process. Moving east along MacArthur Boulevard through the Laurel district into Elmhurst, you can see the ways Oakland’s urban landscape has been made and remade by successive redevelopment efforts. Small commercial districts with art deco storefronts and abandoned movie theaters dot MacArFigure 12. Map of Macarthur Boulevard. (Mark Kumler and Diana Sinton, University of Redlands) Cruising down the Boulevard | 155 thur Boulevard, evidence of the village centers built up along the Key System streetcar routes in the 1920s and ‘30s to serve the expanding industrial garden suburbs that had sprouted up in East Oakland’s lower hills and flatlands. Motels, hot dog stands, burger drive-throughs, auto-repair shops, and abandoned gas stations mark the street’s development in the 1940s and early ‘50s as the main highway which led an increasingly mobile and car-loving population to the heart of downtown Oakland and San Francisco. Now rundown motels highlight Oakland’s deepening economic inequalities. Covered with “no loitering signs” and the logos of private security companies, they serve as informal low-income housing and homeless shelters where a mix of families, prostitutes, and drug addicts live week to...