Top 10 Things that Irritate Me about Oakland by Leal Charonnat

10. That absolute drivel of a sign 'Welcome to Oakland' next to the EBMUD facility as you head to 580 from the Bay Bridge, with a portable generator and spotlight and the now obligatory American flag. OK - have a welcome to Oakland but this is just crazy. It's bad, bad, bad. Who designed this? The city manager?

9. Ad on the Portís Bay Bridge sign (viewed from the East Bay side) for the Westminster Theater. Talk about unimaginative graphics, signage, etc. Bad, bad, bad.

8a. Broadway Auto Row banners. Put up only a few years ago, half of these banners are torn, shredded, or even half missing. Welcome to Broadway Auto Row - home of a trashy area.

8b. (Through no fault of the city) The signs of all the automobile show rooms along Broadway Auto Row. No character, no zip, no nothing. AND the city doles out money to dealers who keep boarded up buildings boarded up, just to gouge the city for money.

7. Trees in front of the Yoshiís neon sign. It's bad enough to locate a jazz (soft music) club under a garage and next to the west coast main rail line for freight and Amtrak (blow you whistle at every intersection, including next to the jazz club) but the city/ port don't trim the trees to see the sign. Either move the sign or the trees. [This isn't the first

time the city has done this. Look below the right hand marquee of the Paramount Theater, you will see a square patch in the fancy terrazzo paving ñ the patch that took twenty years to make - because that's how long it took the former Paramount manager to get the city to cut the tree the city planted in front of the marquee.]

7b. Speaking of trees, in a city that previously had 60 gardeners, now has three. But wait, that's the good news! The bad news is that two thirds of their time is devoted to picking up trash from rec centers. So, all told, the city of Oakland has ONE gardener on staff.

7c. Those cast iron tree grates around trees are designed to be cut out as a tree grows. The trees at the 41st street plaza are now growing into the grates.

6a. Other ads for Oakland on the Bay Bridge sign. All boring with mediocre graphics.

6b. Graphics for the Chabot Science Center - poorly done and poorly legible. Even the zippy brochures are dorky.

6c. The sign for the Oakland Zoo viewed from 580 - looks like some temporary exhibit rather than the zoo that serves the entire East Bay.

5a. The Oakland Museumís cute little exhibit space in the lobby of the APL building. Why? For whom? This is the dumbest idea yet. If the museum is going to have exhibit space under its name in downtown Oakland, it is to be in a place with windows viewable from Broadway.

5b. The new gallery space in the alley behind the Broadway (the flatiron at 14th Street) building. Invisible from either the street or even the plaza. Money poorly spent. (see last comment in 5a.)

5c. The money spent on exhibits by the Oakland Cultural and Arts department in the state and federal building lobbies. Why? Why? Why? Who is kidding who? You have 10,000+ workers in these buildings, don't you want to get them out on a city street during lunch time? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. (see last comment in 5b.)

4a. Street flags that take a year or two to get designed, put around the various neighborhoods. After these banners are up, there is no way to announce special events, festivals, etc. Keeps the city cultural arts employees busy interviewing and working on these banners, which then cost way to much for a banner. Go to LA and see how to use street banners. Bad for any self-promotion. And limiting. Only one artist gets to do a banner that then stays up for who knows how long. If the city did banners to

announce/celebrate festivals, etc., then three or four artists in each neighborhood would get work each year. Simple knuckle-headed approach.

4b. The banners hung over the Oakland City Hall front door. What? Is Oakland going out of business? What's with the total lack of respect for such a building. After spending millions on a plaza, no one had the foresight to develop a system of announcing city wide events? And besides,the banners used are hideous. You want to see banners, buy a ticket to NYC and check out the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Avenue. Oh right, this

isn't New York, this is Oakland. I get it.

3. Artship! Artship? Where is the Artship? A uniquely Oakland happening yet who would know. A flag. A hundred flags! A banner. A hundred banners. Something, anything to let people know. With no current support for this wonderful institution, it's hard to imagine there will be much support in any 9th Avenue redevelopment plan.

2. The boarded-up Fox theater windows - boarded up like after a riot. The city has owned this building for almost a decade. CEDA can find the money to pay for $100k plus administrators but can find the number of a glass company in the phone book. Actually this can't be for lack of money. This is simply passive-resistive behavior by the city - it's on purpose and not an accident. The redux of the sign does not make up for the boarded-up windows. It's trashy and trashes Oakland. Why indeed does Oakland have a hard time seeing any interest in developing downtown Oakland. We know if any city council member or the city manager were to sell their home, they wouldn't have boarded up windows on their house for the Sunday open house. Why do they permit this? To keep their jobs. The citizens of Oakland are so compliant that they believe the lies told by the council and city staff that these windows can't be fixed. As long as those windows are boarded up, there will be work/jobs and much hand-ringing in city hall over having trouble getting developers to come to Oakland.

1. The absolute most obnoxious thing the city of Oakland does is to, advertise, promote and support the 'City Center.'