The Grand Tour (Recession version!) continues as we make our way along the East Bay. Picking up where we left off in Alameda, this leg takes us through parts of 5 East bay cities, Oakland , Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, and El Cerrito.. I got there and back on BART, starting at the 19th BART Station, finishing at El Cerrito. Here’s the longish 11 mile route:

Barb-B-Q and Religion
We begin our tour in Oakland, hiking one block over to pay a visit to the marvelous new Christ The Light Cathedral at Lake Merritt. This is an exquisite building, designed by Skidmore ,Owings, & Merrill, in my humble opinion, one of the best pieces of recent religious architecture (It deserves its own post). The design particularly works wonderfully at the scale of urban design, commanding its corner with its truncated elliptical shape. The interior is a wood slatted shell within the outer glazed shell, which gives rise to a soothing level of natural light. The building comes to the ground gracefully, unlike so many modern religious buildings whose towering sculptural tops land on squat little rectangular bases. My only quibble with this building is more a question, how could the diocese afford it?


At any rate, this part of Oakland is rebounding. In addition to the cathedral, there is a sparkling new Whole Foods and the newly refurbished Fox Theater nearby. There is also the new Uptown Broadway development, and while the buildings are nothing to shout about, the ensemble has pointed to a new, more promising future for the area.
Just beyond Uptown, we travel down San Pablo, on our way to Emeryville, and the neighborhood declines quickly. Wedged between Uptown and Emeryville, this stretch is littered with boarded up shops, tattered apartments, and the periodic fast food joint, often on a second or third life, in this case, as a bar-b-q joint.
Read More…