Why There’s a There There

Fred Bancalari is 77 years old, the son of Italian immigrants and a native of Oakland. In World War II, he earned a Silver Star, holding his ground, alone, in the woods of France against a fierce German attack. Today, the retired house painter and Tommy Lasorda look-alike sits on the porch of his tidy bungalow, alone, watching his east Oakland neighborhood decay.

Drug dealers control this once blue-collar enclave. They swagger up and down the street, absolutely fearless, counting out fat rolls of cash, cursing anyone who gives them a second look. There is no fighting it.

“A week ago,” Bancalari said, “some guy over in that gray apartment house told one of them, ‘Why don’t you take your cotton-picking, drug-selling ass somewhere else.’ You know what he got? He got five bullets in the back.”

At night, Bancalari will move inside and watch the street action through his window. He stopped going outdoors after dark years ago, but still refuses to padlock his gate, or mount bars across his windows, or move. “You have to draw the line somewhere, and I’m not moving. I’m stubborn.”

Bancalari is not offered here as anecdotal evidence of Oakland’s decline. This city of 360,000 hardly holds the patent on urban crime; bad neighborhoods can be found in any big city. No, what pushed him to the top of this column was his unhesitating response when asked--given all that he’s seen from his porch stoop--what he now thinks of his native city.

“Hey,” he said, smiling broadly, “I love Oakland! I’ve been to Little Rock, Naples, Florence, Paris, London, you name it. And I wouldn’t trade any of them for this place. I think it is the best city in the whole world!”

And there, I submit, you have Oakland.

Certainly no city in California has taken a greater pounding lately than this one. I know. My wife grew up here and she keeps track. Every few months she will pick up the paper and read about another calamity, and each time her reaction is the same: “Poor Oakland.” An earthquake cripples downtown. Poor Oakland. The Trib, its only newspaper, is on the ropes. Poor Oakland. Al Davis abandons a deal to return his Raiders. Poor Oakland. Fire levels whole blocks of its finest neighborhoods. Poor Oakland. And now, a record spate of murders. Poor, poor Oakland.

Oakland always has endured literary cheap shots. There was Gertrude Stein’s famous, though out of context, observation that “there is no there there,” and Bret Harte’s response to the news Oakland had survived the 1906 quake: “There are some things the Earth cannot swallow.” Sometimes, though, it seems to ask for it. Last month, on the morning after an especially vicious round of killing dropped seven more victims, the mayor summoned the press. His purpose: to show off a new “Welcome to Oakland” sign. The public relations disaster inspired a San Francisco Examiner editorial entitled: “Welcome to Murdersville.”

There is no question that Oakland is in crisis. It has too many people out of work, too many kids out of school, too many government programs out of money. It hasn’t rebuilt from the earthquake, or the fire, and is on pace this year to become one of the nation’s most murderous cities. What separates Oakland from other troubled cities, though, is an almost perverse civic pride in its ability to absorb great blows. This is the Timex of California cities: It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

To visit Oakland, even in the bleakest of times, is to be dragged along by Oaklanders on a succession of impromptu tours. There is no escape. They take you to see the wealthy homes in the hills, counterweight to the poverty of the flatlands, or to taste warm goat cheese in the latest yuppie restaurant. They tell you more than you want to know about ethnic diversity, and climate, and downtown construction. The message is always the same: Life in Oakland is not all bullets and Red Cross work; the city, somehow, will survive.

“Oakland,” said City Manager Henry L. Gardner, “is the only true phoenix in the United States. There is an absolute refusal to quit. . . . Oakland is a city that will make it. It has great problems, but it believes in itself.”

That belief, of course, can’t be measured by statistics, and it won’t bring any of the murder victims back to life. But I don’t doubt it is authentic. There is too much of it around to be dismissed as manufactured civic hyperbole. You hear it in homes in the hills, in waterfront coffee shops, on the front porch where Fred Bancalari watches drug dealers roar by in their banged up sedans. No, however incongruous, the city’s belief in itself is real. And it is also infectious. It is what puts the there there, in poor Oakland.