Introduction
Gertrude Stein coined the famous phrase "There is no there, there" as a reference to Oakland in the early 1900s. These days most people living in the Bay Area might say that Stein's comment more aptly fits Emeryville, a square mile town nestled between the cities of Oakland and Berkley. At one point Emeryville was coined the "Armpit of Northern California" and "Rotten City" for its gambling, burlesque houses, speakeasies, and steel mills. Today, Emeryville is known for its strip malls, movie theaters and Pixar; a modern revival of its recreational and corporate past. If you visit Emeryville you may not see any signs of uniqueness or individuality in its numerous shopping centers. Although Emeryville is quite welcoming to corporations it is also a distinct community with a rich and interesting history that is rarely told.
Emeryville was a Wild West town. Officially established in 1896, it was designed to be a center of industry and pleasure. Its original founders re-drew the boundaries several times until there were no churches in its borders, "Emeryville became the antithesis of the picturesque suburban community. Be it stockyards, gambling, or steel mills, the city cultivated activities proscribed or shunned elsewhere." 1 However it wasn't until Edward Wiard opened his Shell Mound Park in 1877 that Emeryville really began to make a name for its own. The park, built on an ancient Ohlone Indian burial ground, was an entertainment complex that included a race track, two dance pavilions, gambling, rifle range, and park all with an exquisite view of the San Francisco Bay. Although this was all strictly legal, underground business quickly began to grow in Emeryville. Organized crime flocked to the gambling, and speakeasies soon set up shop. On the site of our abandoned middle school county sheriffs once raided a speakeasy, taking pictures of their captured loot. Emeryville was a haven for vice and people flocked their from Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco. Sometimes I imagine Emeryville to have been like a mini Las Vegas, whatever happened in Emeryville, stayed in Emeryville. Eventually some people did stay in Emeryville a small community of African-Americans, French, Portuguese, and British settled in its boarders and made it home. By 1886 Emeryville built it's first school and it's stockyards began to flourish. However, this growth wouldn't last long. Emeryville went from boom town to ghost town in about 60 years. Shell Mound Park did not make it through prohibition and after the Great Depression, and the loss of steel mill jobs in the 70's and 80's Emeryville was a devastated and devastating place to live. A local gang even named their territory "ghost town" after the abandoned buildings and streets of Emeryville and North Oakland. A civic plan is in place, however, and over the past 10 years or so Emeryville has seen a dramatic change. The city council is trying to evoke Emeryville's past as a pleasure center, this time with shopping malls and movie theaters that sport giant pictures of the once famed Shell Mound Park. They even have a small exhibit of Ohlone artifacts from an archeological dig of the area, which I found by accident one day when I took a wrong turn down a narrow hallway on the ground floor of a mall. The abandoned steel mill factories also made an ideal new home for the new technology and biotech industries that now flourish in the small city. With so many parallels to its past it, is obvious that Emeryville is calling on its history to create its future. At a time like this, it is particularly valuable to learn about Emeryville's past from those who lived it and this curriculum unit is designed to do just that.
Initially, I envisioned a grand biographical undertaking of Emeryville. Students would map out the entire city, find people to interview that represent different sectors of the town, interview them, and write down their stories. As I began to give the project more thought, I realized that I was taking on way more than was possible in one school year, let alone one unit. I then came up with the idea of having students write oral histories of different sectors of the community. For this year, students will write an oral history of our school, Emery Secondary, founded in 1923. Students will interview different members of the school community both past and present, write their biographies, and create a final presentation. Although I've designed this curriculum for my 11th grade English class, it can easily be adapted for other grade levels, and subject areas.
This project is dependent upon the interest and drive of my students, which is why I chose a topic that is so personal to them. It requires students to do a lot of independent research and problem-solving. For example, students will need to figure out who should be interviewed, how to get those interviews, what questions to ask, and how to present their findings. All of these tasks provide ample opportunities for discovery in which the students are at the center of their own learning. By the end of the project, students will be able to prove that in fact there is a "there" in Emeryville.
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