West Oakland’s Summertime Blues
UC Students Create a Virtual Seventh Street
Some songs refer to West Oakland as “Ghost Town,” but half a century ago, the neighborhood lived and breathed for the blues. In a lively business district, venues up and down Seventh Street hosted performers like Billie Holiday, John Lee Hooker and Ike and Tina Turner. Blues artists who came through town could cut a record and promote and perform their repertoire all on the same block. The neighborhood so teemed with talented artists that one night at Esther’s Orbit Room a young Aretha Franklin stepped on B.B. King’s toes. West Oakland was anything but haunted. Instead, it flourished with its own brand of blues. The neighborhood has seen many changes since then, however. Today, on a walk down Seventh Street, one doesn’t hear the warm chords of an electric guitar but rather the wail of a BART train passing by on elevated tracks. The piercing sound ricochets off the walls of the Post Office and its fleet of trucks. Everywhere one looks there’s a reminder of the forces that silenced this “Harlem of the West.”
But beginning this summer, anyone with an Internet connection can hear West Oakland blues in its heyday. Remembering 7th Street is a video game created by the journalism and architecture students at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they have created a game that presents a virtual Seventh Street that looks, talks and sounds like it did back in the 1940s and ’50s, when sailors docked here and Southern-staters took the Transcontinental Railroad to the western end of the line. In the game, players are musicians in search of a record deal. Game play begins when players adopt avatars, or characters, and pick out some new duds at Burton’s Clothing store. Players can simply wander the streets and check out the replications of venues like Slim Jenkins’ Club (whose headliner acts and fine dining made it the classiest joint on the block) or engage in a series of quests. The main quests of the game involve players getting their music recorded, distributed, financed and performed on Seventh Street. Players complete quests by speaking with the neighborhood characters and exploring a historical landscape not found in any textbook. Each interaction that takes place within the game’s boundaries of Peralta and Pine streets advances game play and gives players a clearer understanding of what transpired on this six-block stretch of city history.
The game is a reproduction of West Oakland that’s been three years in the making and began with journalism professor Paul Grabowicz. He became curious about the neighborhood while working as a reporter for the Oakland Tribune. A search at the newspaper yielded very little in the way of archives, so he started his own research into its history. Then he learned of a technology used by faculty and students at UC Berkeley’s architecture department to simulate structures of various kinds. From drawings and written documents, students could begin to assemble digital blueprints like the ones they’ve produced of an ancient Cambodian temple. Captivated, Grabowicz asked architecture professor Yehuda Kalay to help him recreate the West Oakland landscape in 3-D. The resulting collabora-tion has yielded a new kind of digital gaming that combines education with entertainment. Grabowicz hopes that Oakland players in the game will enjoy discovering part of the city’s history. “Part of it is civic pride,” he says, “to go back and try to understand how such a community existed and how it had the successes it had. Then you can try to help communities revitalize themselves.”
A picture of the Seventh Street community has materialized from every photograph, municipal record and interview collected by the journalism students. This information has fleshed out characters like Harold (aka Slim) Jenkins, who’d always appear with an unlit cigar in his mouth that he’d roll from side to side. Other Seventh Street characters—each with their personalities webbed together in the game’s several quests—have also taken the game’s stage. They include “Tamale Man” (who’d sell hot tamales from his pushcart), blues artist Saunders King (whose first hit was “S.K. Blues” and whose son-in-law was Carlos Santana) and C.L. Dellums (who co-founded the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters). Players who befriend Dellums will gain the help of the porters to distribute their record by train—a common practice that carried Oakland blues across the country.
All this research has amassed an impressive archive, so students are considering a place to store it in Remembering 7th Street, perhaps an online storefront.
For every quest the journalism students have written, the architecture students have spread them out on the city map like signposts. To animate the landscape, they’ve used a game engine that allows users to navigate the city as if it’s made of real brick and mortar. Professor Kalay says, however, that their efforts “aren’t just technical, but about telling a story.” To this effect, they’ve coded the game to include features such as atmospheric music spilling out of the clubs and a jukebox that plays hit songs from the period. They’ve also implemented the game’s capacity for dialogue. Players can approach characters who have green conversation icons hovering over their heads like halos. Dialogues happen when players choose from a set of coded responses, and are dependent on the player completing each quest. The dialogues are canned conversations, but the blues can be heard everywhere—on the street, in the clubs and even following the weather report on a pawnshop radio. Together they make for a compelling and interactive diorama of Seventh Street.
Though available to players this summer, Remembering 7th Street is still a work in progress. Internet users can see the game in its latest stages by logging on to http: //7thstreet.org and registering to get a username and password. The horizon beyond Seventh Street, for example, is incomplete. The buildings after Wood Street—where the block opens onto Interstate 880 South—fade out in black and white with the blue bay waters just beyond. In high demand are photographs that show what West Oaklanders once viewed in the distance. “We have this problem we call ‘end of the world’ because we haven’t modeled all of Oakland,” says Kalay. “What do you see when there’s no model?”
When not filling in the blanks, the architecture students are editing out aspects of the game that would be inappropriate for children who’d play the game in classrooms. (Gambling and prostitution, therefore, won’t leave the drawing board.) Then there’s the issue of interactivity. Since players logged in from multiple computers can play the game at any one time, a line of avatars forms waiting to jam with the band at Slim’s. And when one player purchases a one-of-a-kind guitar from the Buy & Sell pawnshop, the game has to replenish its stock for the next player. But these issues are merely fissures in the brick and mortar of virtual Seventh Street; for the most part, the game is historically sound and plausible.
Players more accustomed to streamlined, high-powered video games can still revel in the stories presented on 7th Street. Take the unique guitar from the pawnshop. It was originally owned by Bob Geddins, a blues producer who played a significant role in shaping Oakland blues. Originally from Texas, Geddins had said he moved to West Oakland because, “there must’ve been 3,000 people walking on the street.” Geddins was also attracted to the local blues scene, so he put his technical and musical talents into producing blues artists he met. He discovered Lowell Fulson when the musician came by his TV and radio repair shop and asked if he could play a beat-up, white guitar. Geddins was so impressed that he recorded him in a studio he had in the back of the store. His son, Bob Geddins Jr., played at a few of these recording sessions. Sometimes he’d play piano for Fulson’s band or help his dad write musical arrangements for the many artists who dropped by. Of his father’s influence on Oakland blues, he says, “That was all him. He would write the lyrics for the band, and then he’d coach them on how each song should be delivered. Many people don’t know how many artists have covered his songs.” You can meet the digitized Bob Geddins in Remembering 7th Street. He’s the man dressed in a black suit and a pair of spectacles. Players will seek his help in recording their music, just as he did for a relatively unknown piano player with Lowell Fulson’s band: His name was Ray Charles.
The creators of Remembering 7th Street hope to do more than simply connect West Oakland’s past with its present. One idea still under discussion would be to write corollary quests for players that would send them to the neighborhood in search of clues, or have them organize the virtual community to fight real-world, ill-fated urban development projects. Another goal of the game is to encourage multiple generations to play—not just young people (such as the McClymonds High School students whose teachers will incorporate Remembering 7th Street lessons into classroom curriculum), but also seniors who lived here before the Cypress Freeway drove the blues out of town. These Seventh Street veterans, in future incarnations of the prototype launched this summer, may have special conversation halos to encourage unscripted dialogue about the neighborhood’s past.
UC Berkeley’s efforts to preserve West Oakland’s blues history have attracted Bob Geddins Jr. to Remembering 7th Street. He’s leading the word-of-mouth efforts in the neighborhood, appealing to residents who knew of Slim Jenkins’ Club before it became a housing project. “This game shows where the music came from before people like James Brown made it famous,” he says. “It should be not just in Oakland schools, but also all over the nation. If kids learn about it, they’ll realize that 90 percent of the music on the market comes from blues—soul, pop, country, hip-hop, you name it.” Along the way, they will learn the lessons of Seventh Street, where the only “Haunted House” was the widely recorded novelty hit written by Bob Geddins.
—By Patsy K. Eagan
—Courtesy of UC Berkeley
