West Oakland's 16th Street Station Was Once A Community Anchor

Bay Curious

KQED

History, Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.9 • 999 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2022

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Listener Tadd Williams often sees the 16th Street Station from I-880. It's a huge, stately building in the Beaux-Arts style. It's looking a little rundown now, but it clearly was grand at one time. He wants to know about its past lives, and wow was this spot important to West Oakland's Black community and the Civil Rights Movement. Additional Reading How Oakland's 16th Street Station Helped Build West Oakland and the Modern Civil Rights Movement Legacy of the Pullman Car Porters Thanks to the Newberry Library in Chicago for use of archival audio from the Pullman Railroad Company Records.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From K-QED.
0:03.0	Bic curious listener Tad Williams often finds himself traveling on the 880 Freeway in West Oakland,
0:09.0	and there's this building that's visible from the road that he's always wondered about.
0:14.0	It seemed like such a beautiful structure. I guess that was the first thing that kind of caught my eye.
0:19.0	It looks like a train station, but there are no train tracks connected to it.
0:26.0	It's an impressive building in the Bowes Arts style that looks stately and European.
0:37.5	The front is dominated by three grand arched windows, positioned over the entrance. Everything is very symmetrical. But the outside is routinely covered with graffiti and this place is
0:46.3	surrounded by a perimeter of chain link fencing because it's been abandoned for
0:50.6	more than three decades.
0:52.9	Tad wanted to know why.
0:55.4	It's something I've always seen from the freeway
0:58.2	and I just wanted to understand more
1:01.2	about its background, its history, its purpose.
1:04.0	To ask a question was selected by you in our public voting round.
1:10.0	Today we're visiting the once glorious now derelict 16th Street train station in West
1:16.0	Oakland. I'll tell you this place has quite the resume so why is it empty today?
1:20.7	That's all just ahead on Bay Curious. I'm Olivia Ellen Price.
1:28.6	Support for Bay Curious is brought to you by Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. still family owned, operated, and argued over.
1:36.0	Explore their brews wherever fine beverages are sold and taste how trailblazing runs in the family.
1:42.4	Visit Sierra Nevada.com to find your new favorite beer today.
1:49.2	Question Asker Tad Williams sent us on a journey to learn about the impressive and neglected 16th Street
1:55.2	train station in West Oakland.
	...

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