“No one's trying to get famous”: Oakland Underground, part 1
In Oakland on any given weekend in the early 2000s there might’ve been be a punk show in an old Victorian happening down the block from a wa...
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East Bay Yesterday
East Bay history podcast that gathers, shares & celebrate stories from Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and other towns throughout Alameda and Contra Costa Counties.
Episodes
20 of 148 episodes
“Berkeley was heaven” until it wasn’t: 1970s feminist explosion
On the night that 18-year-old Joan Gelfand moved to Berkeley in 1972, she experienced her first riot, as protesters infuriated by President...
From Jim Crow to Oscar Grant: Walter Riley shares lessons from a lifetime of organizing
Walter Riley first got involved with political organizing when he was a 12-year-old boy protesting against Jim Crow-era segregation laws in...
“Fishing kept us out of trouble”: Memories of the Berkeley waterfront
Berkeley’s waterfront has undergone many transformations. For millennia, the shoreline was dotted with Ohlone village sites, thriving amidst...
“No casual experiments”: Inside a legendary psychedelics lab
In a small, bunker-like laboratory in the East Bay hills, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin created some of the world’s most powerful psychedelic dr...
Covering the counterculture: How a rebellious era shaped journalism
During the 1960s, America’s Cold War era monoculture was shattered by the arrival of birth control pills, civil rights protests, anti-war ri...
“I felt burning in my throat”: Preparing for nuclear war in Livermore
In February, America’s nuclear arms treaty with Russia expired, ushering in “a global rush for new weapons,” according to New York Times. Mu...
Welcome to "the floating city": How the Hornet dodged destruction
The USS Hornet fought in some of the biggest naval battles in world history, picked up astronauts returning from the first moon landing, and...
“That’s where my power came from”: Betty Reid Soskin's century of chaos and hope
On December 21st, 2025, the Bay Area lost one of its oldest and most distinguished residents: The legendary Betty Reid Soskin passed away at...
How to save a house: Meet the people maintaining some of the Bay’s oldest homes
Historic houses offer a tangible connection to a city’s past, but maintaining them is difficult and expensive. Some of Oakland’s most unique...
“He wanted people to take risks”: An underdog movement’s astonishing rise
If you were born after 1990, it might be easy to think that the world has always had wheelchair ramps, closed captions, and bathroom stalls...
“My neighborhood looks the same as it did 50 years ago”: What needs protection – and what needs to change?
Everyone has opinions on the Bay Area’s problems with housing, transit and public infrastructure, but Darrell Owens digs deep into the histo...
“The ballroom communist”: How a radical aristocrat changed Oakland
How did Jessica Mitford go from being an elite British debutante to fighting on the front lines of America’s early civil rights struggles? W...
“We let everybody throw it away”: How garbage worked before corporations took over
In recent years, volunteer-led groups like Urban Compassion Project have struggled to deal with illegal dumping in Oakland. Despite removing...
Fighting fascism can be fun: La Peña celebrates 50 years of creative struggle
In 1973, Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende was toppled by a right-wing military coup led by General August...
“Respect the patch”: How Oakland’s oldest Black motorcycle club survived more than 60 years
Tobie Gene Levingston left behind his life as a Louisiana sharecropper in the mid-1950s to work at an Oakland metal foundry. Within a few ye...
“Not on the wealth corridor”: Why older neighborhoods get left behind
There’s an area southeast of Lake Merritt that’s lined with abandoned buildings, boarded up storefronts, vacant lots, and decrepit warehouse...
Industry makes and breaks the Bay Area: A crash course with Richard Walker
From the gold rush to the tech boom, this region has been shaped by successive waves of business growth and decline. Every generation, new i...
People of the Pacific Circuit: Oakland’s place in the global economy
On March 25, I interviewed Alexis Madrigal and Noni Session in front of a sold out crowd at Spire in West Oakland. Madrigal is the author of...
“Crockett became Italy”: How a sugar factory created an immigrant enclave
On the western outskirts of Crockett, on the bluffs overlooking the Carquinez strait, there’s a small unincorporated neighborhood called Val...