Thank you to the very cool OaklandGoods for showing me the way to the wonderful online Oakland Collection at the Oakland Museum of California's website. The Oakland collection includes over 7,000 objects, from as large as a fire engine to as small as a stone marble, and some amazing photographs of Oakland’s past, some dating back
to the 19th century. I love vintage photographs and I lost myself for over an hour learning more about Oakland's colorful history through sepia photographs, blue-tinted portraits, and cloudy black-and-white images. The website also gave me a brief account of the birth of Oakland and my little neighborhood (aka No Sleep Til Brooklyn):
Oakland, as a city, was founded 150 years ago, in 1852. Initially it was a small village along what is now Broadway. In the following decades, the village grew to become a commercial center, especially after it became the western terminus of the first transcontinental railroad (1869). It grew still larger by annexation of Brooklyn (1872), Vernon Heights (1891), the area north to Berkeley (1897), and the area south to San Leandro (1909). In 1910, the visionary Mayor Mott founded the city’s first municipal museum, the Oakland Public Museum. As a cutting edge museum in 1910, it began to acquire the California Collections, which now, over 90 years later, number more than one million objects.
Fashion model posing with a 1935 Packard 12 automobile
at the Lake Merritt Bandstand
Lake Merritt fireworks, Golden Gate International Exposition (1939)
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