Oakland

As I was stuffing my sleeping bag into its sack hoping to be off by seven Luke came knocking at my door and announced that he had decided to call in sick so he could accompany me on my ride around Oakland visiting its six Carnegies.  That was great news.  It is always a joy when someone makes a pronouncement of freedom, and I was equally joyed to have Luke’s companionship.  He had his Surly touring bike with racks front and back he’d recently bought on Craig’s List ready to go along with an Ortlieb bag, a set of which front and back, that he’d also recently acquired used.  He was genuinely serious about becoming a touring cyclist.

Luke had never taken BART across the Bay, so we’d both be trying to figure it out.  I had already scouted out the process the day before, thinking it might be easier with a loaded bike to take a ferry, but a guy by the ferry terminal renting bikes and leading bike tours over the Golden Gate Bridge assured me the train was much faster and easier and that there were no restrictions on when one could take a bike on the train, unlike Chicago, where it is verboten during the rush hour.  The guy said there would be more passengers coming from Oakland in the morning anyway, and not that many headed in that direction, so there’d be plenty of room for bikes.

It was nice to take one last ride down Geary, four miles to the BART station on Market Street. We had to lug out bikes down a set of stairs, then figure out how to purchase a ticket. I put four dollars into a machine, but it refused to give me a ticket.  A clerk came over and said the machine was jammed and ran the process for me on the next one over.  

We had to descend another floor to the trains, but we could take an elevator for this descent.  We were told either the Antioch or Richmond train would take us to Oakland. The first train through went to Hayes.  The next said Pleasantville, but Luke inadvertently boarded.  Before he could escape the train door closed as he was shoving his arm in it and he was gone.  Two minutes later an Antioch train arrived.  I boarded, hoping we could reconnect in Oakland at one of the Carnegies.  As the train rapidly plunged for its descent under the Bay, my bike went flying before I could grab it.  With hardly any one aboard it didn’t cause any harm.  

I exited the train at the second Oakland stop just a few blocks from the Main Library.  I was able to use it’s WIFI to let Luke know my whereabouts.  He replied almost instantly, saying he’d soon be there.  And he was.  He had exited the train he took and got on the next one a few minutes later going the correct direction, right behind me, so there was no loss of time or complications reconnecting.  From the Main Library it was ten blocks through the quiet downtown to the Carnegie that had been the Main Library.  It was now the African American Museum and Library.  

It lacked the palatial majesty of San Francisco’s Main Library or even any of its branches, but it was still a monumental building, though in need of a good wash or sand blast.  It preceded the San Francisco Carnegies by two years, receiving its grant in 1899.  San Francisco may have wanted to outdo Oakland,  a recurring impression we had as we hopped from one Branch library to another, as they all paled in comparison to those across the bay.  

Three of San Francisco’s libraries had authors inscribed on its exterior.  So did this one with Shakespeare given the position of prominence over the entry.  Homer, Virgil, Dante, Bacon, Milton and Lowell were the other honorees.  High above below the roof Oratory, Discourse, Science, Philosophy and Ethics were endorsed. On one side of the building Scvlptvre, Architecture and Painting were recognized.  On the other side it was Poetry, Literature and Prose. 

The Miller Branch was the first of the four branches we sought out.  But it was no more, having been torn down two months ago and replaced by eighteen one-room pre-fab shelters, the latest development in providing for the homeless.  They crammed next to one another like a tribal village. They had neither water or gas, just a communal spigot and port-a-potty. They were all occupied.  It was fenced in and off-limits to other than those living there. Luke was prevented from using the port-a-potty, though the person in charge was friendly about it

We took a slight detour to Alemada before the next branch to visit the Carnegie on the small island.  Luke said the last time he’d been on the island was when he was a teen repairing mimeograph machines.  His boss charged $60 to send Luke, for which he was paid ten dollars an hour.  He got so good at it, it could fix and clean a machine in five minutes, but his boss told him not to be so fast.  

The Alameda Carnegie outshone all those in Oakland.  A plaque said it was the third built in California and was one of 3,500 built in the US, getting the number wrong as happens from time to time, as it is actually 1,679,  though that refers to public libraries, as he also funded more than 100 academic libraries.  A chain and lock was wrapped around the inside of the front door.  Peering in we could see stacks of boxes, not particularly well-organized.  It didn’t look like it was more than a huge storage locker.

We left the island on a different bridge than what we had ridden over on as we headed to the Melrose Branch on Foothill Drive. It was finely designed to fit on a slice-of-pie sliver of land between roads.  A terra cotta owl was perched on an open book over the door.  “Oakland Free Library” was high above.  Alameda likewise called itself a “Free Library” as did all the other Oakland branches.  They all dated to the earliest of Carnegie’s giving when free libraries were a rarity in the US, so these wished to emphasize it.  Later “public” was enough, though sometimes “free” was even added to “public.”

We proceeded to Mills College, an all-girls school founded in 1852, the first west of the Rockies.  It achieved another first in 2014 when it became the first single-gender college to accept transgender students.  Luke, a man with two daughters and no son, to his disappointment, pointed out that all we were seeing were women on the campus.  We had to circle around it to gain entry, as it was encircled by a high fence save one entrance.  The tattooed young women at the sentry box was very welcoming, asking if we wanted to cycle around the quiet, wooded campus.  We told her we had come to see the old Carnegie library, though we knew it no longer served as a library.  She gave us directions to Carnegie Hall.  It was more complicated than the left and the right turns she gave us, but we eventually found it.  Like most Carnegies on college campuses, it fit in with the campus architecture and didn’t distinguish itself, as the public libraries do.  

It was a long ride back on hilly MacArthur Boulevard, though not as steep as the streets of San Francisco, to a pair of Carnegies in Emeryville, the northern tier of Oakland.  We passed several schools with striking teachers on their first day of picketing.  The Temescal and Golden Gate Branches were both statuesque red-brick buildings with high ceilings and “Oakland Free Library” in large letters.

Golden Gate, like Melrose, allowed patrons to borrow a kryptonite lock if they came by bike and didn’t have a lock.

Luke was craving a Subway Vegetarian Delight sandwich, as it was after one and he was so spontaneous about going for a ride with me hadn’t had breakfast. Our GPS revealed a Subway six blocks away across the street from the Emeryville Amtrak station, the end of the line for the California Zephr that I came out on.  It was a small, quiet station, serving a handful of trains a day, including the train that services the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego.  Luke is already plotting to take it to Seattle with his bike and riding back. 

After our pause for lunch we biked two miles to the REI in Berkeley, where the legendary outdoor equipment company got its start.   It had the tent identical to what had been stolen from me, but not the duffle.  All its duffles were a much upgraded and much more expensive version to what I had bought at REI ten years ago, and without the same capacity, the most crucial thing. One came close, but its frills made it too costly, so I will take my search elsewhere.

Luke stayed outside to guard my bike, but mostly not to go inside and be tempted to buy things he didn’t need. We’d biked over thirty miles, the most he’d done in a while. He hoped his legs had enough energy the next day to ride the velodrome in San Jose, as he had been planning.  We bade each other farewell, fully confident there’d be more rides together in the future.

I’d had another farewell the night before with Doug, that was more of a “see you in a few months in Telluride” than a goodbye, as we go back over twenty years of spending several weeks together in the high mountains of southeast Colorado working for the Telluride Film Festival.  Doug was able to take a few hours from his Uber-driving to see a movie and have dinner. We met at the old-time single-screen Clay Theatre on Fillmore, part of the Landmark chain, to see one of the five Oscar nominees for best foreign picture, “Never Look Away,” a German epic spanning three decades of an artist’s life from his youth in Hitler’s time to his escape from East Germany, where he was an accomplished artist and had his acclaimed murals painted over after he fled the country.  It was good, but is no threat to Roma.  I enjoyed sitting in this historic theater with lush red curtains lining its side almost as much as the movie.  It is keeping alive “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” phenomenon with a screening on the last Saturday of every month.  

Doug was happy to see the film as he and his partner Tim, a college professor of film, will be attending a cinema conference in Hamburg this June and continuing on to Berlin.  It was nice to see Tim as well, as his teaching has kept him from Telluride the last few years. I had hoped I might spend the day with Doug in his front seat pretending I was an apprentice, really getting to know the city and fully catching up with him, but that is not allowed.

Instead I had a leisurely day visiting the three Carnegies I had missed the day before.  Two were branches just a mile apart—Noe Valley and Mission.  I unwisely approached Noe Valley on Castro, up and over an insanely steep three-block climb.  It is no wonder that one sees an occasional sign on the back of cars warning “Stick Shift, Roll Back, Stay Away.”  The climb at least earned me a gradual descent to Mission. 

 Mission celebrated a handful of authors on its frontside including Dickens, Tolstoi, Hugo, Poe, Twain and Eliot, the last two the only ones with first names included, though Eliot’s was an abbreviated Geo.  But the best part of its exterior was a vinyl banner proclaiming “Life, Liberty, Libraries.”

The former Main Library was also adorned with the names of authors, probably puzzling those who knew the buildings now as the Asia Art Museum.  It’s original identity had been entirely erased other than these non-Asian authors.  It was a Versailles of a building filling a full block right across from the even bigger new library and several other spectacular municipal buildings around a huge open square.  It was very grand and very European.  I returned to the Golden Gate Branch, near the Clay Theatre, to read before meeting up with Doug and Tim for our matinee.  A movie, some biking, a few Carnegies and seeing old friends—an optimum day.