Gathered on a cold December morning at the far western end of 7th Street in West Oakland, they sang. They reminisced and rejoiced. They poured out one for the ancestors.
Then, with nothing but hammers and chisels, they carefully disassembled the stonework first-floor facade of the historic Esther’s Orbit Room. They removed around 300 stone pieces and put them safely into storage, to be reincorporated back into a redesigned facade after gut rehabbing the rest of the structure.
Masons and architects didn’t see the value. “They told us, ‘it doesn’t matter, it’s ugly, get rid of it,’” said Christina Kenney, culture and community co-manager at East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC). The cooperative is reviving the former jazz and blues club as the anchor for 7th Street Thrives, a cultural revival plan for West Oakland’s historic but long-neglected 7th Street Corridor.
EB PREC’s leaders know those details matter to West Oakland residents – and they’re counting on them to help deliver economic returns. As a real estate cooperative with some 400 investor-owners, EB PREC raises capital from community members willing to accept modest returns to advance long-term neighborhood control rather than speculative gain.
Read more: This Community-Controlled Real Estate Co-Op Is Proving Its Value
Preserving the historic stonework of Esther’s Orbit Room is part of a broader bet: that cultural authenticity can generate enough economic activity to repay lenders, return member investments and demonstrate that Black commercial corridors can finance their revival by relying on their history, culture and identity instead of sacrificing it for the sake of investor profits.
7th Street is just one of many historically Black commercial corridors or districts across the country that have been part of a recent uptick in interest and planning — and, in some cases, even investment. But these revitalization efforts all face a similar uphill battle. Institutional funders and financiers ranging from risk-averse to completely disconnected or unconcerned. Construction project landmines lurking beneath decades of neglect from both public and private property owners. The weight of skepticism from would-be tenants and patrons who believe, based on countless failed attempts in the past, that Black neighborhoods are forever doomed to failure.
“We’re saving what’s old — but also giving space to build a new generation of arts and culture on 7th Street,” Kenney declared at EB PREC’s “rock breaking” ceremony for Esther’s Orbit Room. Neither the brisk December weather nor the incessant howl of the nearby elevated BART line could deflate the joy and anticipation emanating from the crowd of local residents, artists, business owners and real estate cooperative member-owners.
“We’re saying revival for a purpose,” Kenney told the crowd. “Preservation means you hold what’s old…but nobody can use it. If you say revitalization, what that really means is we’re going to demolish everything and put something new and then probably put a plaque on the ground to honor the fact that it was there. This is a staple. This is a site. This is what people know to be the front of Esther’s. That’s what we call revival.”
Building on local efforts
Like all real estate in a market economy, Black commercial corridors and districts tend to have their boom and bust cycles. The booms are rarely as high as in other neighborhoods, while the busts tend to be much deeper and last much longer.
The 1970s and 1980s saw a wave of cities electing their first Black mayors: Atlanta’s Maynard Jackson, Los Angeles’ Tom Bradley, Detroit’s Coleman Young and Chicago’s Harold Washington. Their political rise coincided with interest in repairing the harms done to Black neighborhoods under earlier decades of urban renewal — a.k.a. “Negro removal.”
But even during what might be considered boom times for Black commercial corridors and districts, locally-driven revitalization efforts have been “chronically under-resourced,” says Elijah Davis, co-founder of the Historic African American Neighborhood Districts Summit.
Davis traces the recent uptick in Black commercial corridor and district work to several coinciding factors, including a small but not insignificant increase in broader awareness of their plight due to Black Lives Matter and the 2020 racial reckonings, as well as the 100th anniversary of the 1921 racial massacre of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street.
“Increased mainstream awareness of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, advances in the community development literature around race and place, and also federal programs such as the Reconnecting Communities Program have appeared to heighten the coverage of and inspire the creation of signature programs and initiatives nationwide,” Davis says.
Read more: Can Tulsa’s Black Wall Street Be Reborn as Black Tech Street?
The most promising of these initiatives build upon longstanding local efforts in Black neighborhoods, which have long gone unrecognized and unsupported, Davis says. “Any progress that has occurred, however slow or plodding, has always been about first and foremost the ingenuity and perseverance of practitioners on the ground in these communities.”
Back in 2006, in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, Malcolm Crawford took out a mortgage on his own family home. He used the cash to quietly acquire and renovate small commercial storefront properties along Chicago Avenue, beginning with a storefront for his wife’s African-centric gifts shop. Over the years he’s seen a trickle of local business owners doing the same along the corridor. As a general contractor himself, he’s acquired, renovated and sold some of those properties to other local businesses.
“I’ve been able to sell stuff I wanted to sell to the people I wanted to sell to,” says Crawford, now executive director of the Austin African American Business Networking Association. “I haven’t been able to keep everybody else out, but I’ve been able to help guide things. I don’t think we would have gotten as far as we could if we weren’t doing things quietly under the radar for so long.”
City and state governments have finally taken notice, making more recent complementary investments in the streetscape along Austin’s Chicago Avenue corridor. One of the first projects announced as part of the City of Chicago’s Invest South/West Initiative was the redevelopment of the long-vacant Laramie State Bank Building, a historically landmarked art deco structure at the eastern end of the Chicago Avenue corridor. The city chose a developer team led by a longtime community organizer who was born and raised in Austin. The whole corridor is now branded locally as the “Soul City Corridor.”
“People have just bought into the concept: a cultural corridor that leans heavy on African American culture in order to create economic development in a community and now a city,” Crawford says. “The whole thing is about reviving what was once an almost 90% Black community. Horizon West. The Blue Light Club. Eloise Lounge with Johnnie Taylor and Tyrone Davis. I remember coming up on Chicago Avenue and you would see all the people dressed and going to different clubs that lined the corridor.”
Culture at the center
In Birmingham, Alabama, Alycia Levels-Moore has spent the past few years working to revive the Woodlawn neighborhood as a Black commercial district. Right now, she’s focused on supporting local businesses, particularly food businesses, to fill up the large portion of vacant storefronts in Woodlawn.
“I look at economic displacement as the fastest form of cultural erasure,” says Levels-Moore, who leads Polaris, a co-working and business development hub that hosts an accelerator program for local entrepreneurs. “We focus on the economics of it because if people can’t afford to stay in a neighborhood, there’s nothing to preserve. Preservation is people, preserving people, preserving their dignity, preserving their confidence in what they can do and preserving their contribution. A lot of times people feel like what they have to add may not be valuable.”
Culture can drive economics. The buzz around working and living in Woodlawn has gained volume since the April 2024 opening of Jazz on 55th, a jazz bar and restaurant just down the street from her co-working space.
“The family who owns Jazz on 55th has been rooted in the neighborhood for decades,” Levels-Moore says. “Any night of the week people show up enjoying music, eating good food, getting excited about what’s happening here, creating that joy. It’s an ‘everybody knows my name’ kind of space. People come from all over.”
The same pattern is playing out in historically Black neighborhoods across the country. History can repeat itself in good ways, too.
On the Near East Side of Columbus, Ohio, the Lincoln Theater anchored the Long Street Corridor until it shut down in 1974. Since it reopened in 2009, it has once again helped attract several Black-owned restaurants to Long Street, which now also boasts the first new Black-led bank across the country in 20 years — kitty-corner from the theater and across Long Street from a recently relocated Black-owned restaurant.
In Pittsburgh, Centre Avenue was once a thriving commercial corridor for the Hill District, a cluster of historically Black neighborhoods just east of downtown. At the center of that corridor stands the New Granada Theater, designed by Louis Bellinger, one of only 60 Black architects in the United States in the 1930s. When it first opened in 1927, the theater served as the temple for the Colored Knights of Pythias, a fraternal order. Over the decades, the venue hosted Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne, among many other Black legends.
Urban renewal came for the Hill District in 1955, when the city demolished 100 acres of the Lower Hill District for a planned cultural district that eventually became a professional hockey arena and parking lots. Some 8,000 residents, mostly Black, lost their homes, and the stadium area effectively cut off the rest of the Hill District from downtown. Redlining by banks prevented locals from accessing the capital to purchase and maintain homes and commercial properties along Centre Avenue and other Hill District corridors.
As the physical buildings deteriorated, businesses and people left for greener pastures elsewhere. The New Granada Theater shut down in the 1970s. Many Hill District buildings landed in the lap of city ownership, which tended to doom them to demolition.
“Cities, particularly in northern states, they do a lot of demolition in the spring and summer because of the weather,” says Marimba Milliones, born and raised in the Hill District. “I remember toward the end of one season, maybe in the fall, the city was demolishing Eddie’s Restaurant and Ellis Hotel. We have all this vacancy because the city has been demolishing our community for decades. It was demolishing our future by destroying these historic buildings.”
By 2019, the City of Pittsburgh and its Urban Redevelopment Authority owned some 170 vacant commercial and mixed use parcels along the Centre Avenue corridor. It’s been a struggle to get those parcels back into use, even after the land bank reduced red tape for local developers back in 2019.
“Even just pre-development in neighborhoods like the Hill District is extremely difficult because there was a time when there was no regulation around how demolition occurred,” Milliones says. “So a lot of the properties still have buried structures and debris left behind that need to be dealt with before anything else can happen.”
Read more: In Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Development Starts With Healing
Founded in 1987, Hill Community Development Corporation acquired the New Granada Theater in the early 1990s. Years later, Milliones approached the organization back then with a pitch to turn the long-vacant theater into a tech-job training hub. Instead, the nonprofit recruited her to its board, and eventually hired her as executive director in 2011. Since then, she’s been working to revive the theater, in partnership with Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority.
“At first we were looking for a more experienced developer to partner with us but we ended up doing the development ourselves,” Milliones says. No viable options stepped up.
“It’s been very, very complex with regard to the architectural solutions, construction, approvals from the National Park Service as a landmarked structure,” says Milliones. “One of our key tenants is the University of Pittsburgh’s community engagement center, which comes with its specific high standards as an office of a university.”
The plan has always been for the New Granada Theater to serve as the cultural anchor for the revival of the Centre Avenue Corridor. Challenging as it was, it proved to be essential that Hill Community Development Corporation, led by someone born and raised in the neighborhood, was the final decision-maker on every decision and detail about the renovation. After spending $28 million in public and private dollars so far to renovate the theater and build a new mixed-use development on the same block, Milliones anticipates the ribbon cutting for the New Granada Theater this March.
“It’s a building that holds the collective memory and the story of the Hill as people remember it and think of it,” Milliones says. “The choices we’ve made were not always necessarily economical. Doing something a certain way may or may not be the most cost-efficient solution, but what we might need in that moment is to pay another $15,000 because that detail is important to our community, for the story.”
Investing in the story
The rock breaking for Esther’s Orbit Room has also been years in the making. And though it’s received no public funding whatsoever, the project has managed to inch ahead of the nearby Mandela Station development, which has backing from much deeper-pocketed developers and $18 million in municipal bond financing from the city
The Mandela Station — a transit-oriented development project just a few blocks east on 7th Street, surrounding the West Oakland BART station — is set for its groundbreaking later this month, more than two months after the December ceremony at Esther’s.
The project inadvertently helped inspire EB PREC’s vision for reviving Esther’s Orbit Room. Late in 2019, the city-selected developer team for Mandela Station engaged EB PREC and the nearby Mandela Grocery Cooperative to put together a plan for bringing local Black-owned businesses into the ground floor of the future Mandela Station development.
The effort went as far as producing a pro forma with profit and loss statements for a Black business and cultural hub at Mandela Station, but the developer team ultimately rejected the idea. According to EB PREC, it was because the Mandela Station team only wanted commercial tenants with at least 10 years of operating history.
Not long after Mandela Station walked away, EB PREC’s Executive Director Noni Session caught word via social media that Esther’s Orbit Room was on the market for sale.
Session was captivated as a seemingly endless stream of social media users posted a flood of comments on the news, sharing first-hand and second-hand stories from friends and family members about Esther’s Orbit Room and other former businesses along 7th Street. Session is a third-generation West Oaklander herself, whose father once owned and operated a grocery store along 7th Street.
While still feeling the sting of Mandela Station rejecting their Black cultural hub vision, Session had an epiphany. Instead of pulling all those Black businesses and cooperatives and artists into Mandela Station, EB PREC could enable them to re-populate the 7th Street Corridor and remake the “Harlem of the West.”
“We just started sketching out a prospectus based on our findings and we started shopping it around seeing what banks would be interested, what partners would be interested,” Session says. Over the course of a year, she “went through a list of probably about 26 organizations we shopped it around to and slowly we started to build a body of people, partners and foundations who were interested. ”
The concept and the story of 7th Street as a Black commercial corridor have always been at the center of those discussions.
As a co-op, EB PREC doesn’t fundraise for specific real estate projects or acquisitions. Instead, it pools dollars from a variety of different sources into a single fund it deploys as needed to move forward its real estate work.
Since incorporating in 2017, EB PREC has pooled together $4.2 million in grants, $8.1 million in below-market rate loans from philanthropy, and $5.8 million in investor-owner shares sold to nearly 400 investor-owners and counting — for a total of $18.2 million in the co-op’s real estate fund.
Read more: A New Kind of Cooperative in Oakland Fights Against Speculative Development
“In my experience, the story is the key,” Session says. “The overall interest rate we’re paying our investors is so low, it’s basically a retail bank account interest rate, 1.5%. It’s actually the story and the impact that stands in for the usual monetary return on investment. People are actually investing in the legacy. What drives our fundraising is how we make visible the story and the outcomes of the story.”
Of that $18.2 million, EB PREC spent $1.5 million to acquire the three buildings that make up Esther’s Orbit Room from a private seller in 2021. Leaders anticipate that the total cost of redeveloping Esther’s will come to about $9.1 million, including the original acquisition price.
The co-op also spent $700,000 to acquire the small, long-vacant commercial building directly west of Esther’s, known as the Barn, which is now slated to house a future 7th Street museum. They’re also under contract to pay $2 million to acquire the long-vacant 26,000 square-foot corner lot on the other side of the Barn, which the co-op plans to turn into a food forest and a light manufacturing space.
To return those investor owner dollars someday and repay its lenders, EB PREC needs to ensure the spaces it builds meet the high standards and expectations of its anticipated patrons, starting with the 22,000 or so West Oaklanders — particularly the 30% who are Black.
The co-op has already felt the heat over the last few years, Session says.
EB PREC is currently on its third rendering of the Esther’s Orbit Room facade. The first felt too generic. The second looked like what one community member called “a gentrifier’s facade,” with the sort of colors, textures and lines one would expect from a development by someone “looking to make their 11-22% return on investment,” Session says.
“One elder went so far as to call it cultural genocide, which at first I was super-pissed about, given all the energy and time we put in. But as I sat with it and looked at it as a West Oaklander and as an anthropologist, I realized you could not at all discern the story of West Oakland on that facade,” Session says. “People are looking to see their story reflected back through small sorts of spatial and textural and color signals, and we weren’t signaling anything that would harken back to West Oakland.”
If West Oaklanders are willing to come out to the revived Esther’s and the whole 7th Street Corridor, the real estate cooperative and all its funders, investors and partners are banking on that being the catalyst to draw regional, national and even international tourists.
Call it the Beyoncé model (or, alternatively, the Bad Bunny model) of cultural curation as economic driver. The more carefully curated and crafted the experience is, full of easter eggs and small nods indicative of a specific and deep cultural knowledge base, the more powerful and the more successful at drawing crowds — and the dollars they’re willing to spend — whether or not they understand every nuance and detail.
“Community in place is very specific, in a kind of unsettling way,” Session says. “As a West Oaklander, boy, are we persnickety about cultural authenticity. When West Oaklanders smell inauthenticity … they will essentially boycott you. It tastes bad in their mouth. I know it was a very crazy thing to do the rock breaking, but that’s why it just felt so pivotal to signal to our community that we are not disappearing them. It felt make or break.”
Oscar Perry Abello is Next City’s senior economic justice correspondent and author of “The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy“ (Island Press). He also writes Next City’s free economic justice newsletter, The Bottom Line.
Since 2011, Oscar has covered community development finance, impact investing, economic development, housing and more for media outlets such as Shelterforce, Impact Alpha, Yes! Magazine, City & State New York, The Philadelphia Inquirer, B Magazine and Fast Company. Oscar is a child of immigrants descended from the former colonial subjects of the Spanish and U.S. imperial regimes in the Philippines. He was born in New York City and raised in the inner-ring suburbs of Philadelphia. Reach Oscar anytime at oscar@nextcity.org or follow him on your favorite social media platform at @oscarthinks.