From Train Stations to Pot Dispensaries: Old Oakland Walking Tour is full of surprises
"I must warn you before we begin: I'm an unapologetic Oakland snob," said Don Tyler, a former Oakland High School history teacher, as we began the walking tour of Old Oakland. A group of twenty gathered for the City of Oakland walking tour at G.B. Ratto & Co. International Grocers , one of the oldest family-owned businesses in Oakland, California. Many of the tour attendees had lived in Oakland for quite some time, but wanted to learn more about what it was like before 1906 and when it was a frontier town. Tyler referred to San Francisco as the "West Bay" and preferred to call the East Bay by a more-fitting name: "the continental side of the Bay." The tour focused primarily on the architectural history of Oakland's oldest storefronts from the 1860s and 1870s. But far from being a tedious architectural tour, Tyler weaved in stories about the personalities of Oakland's early powerbrokers, some of whom had delusions of grandeur and Ka...