In 2016, plywood partitions in Oakland warehouses toppled. Rehearsal and performance spaces quieted, and screen-printing presses stilled. Landlords toured hastily-vacated galleries with county sheriffs, and artists rushed to decipher municipal zoning rules in attempts to save their workspace and housing. Collaborative trash sculptures belatedly landed at the dump. Realtors posted advertisements to mural-strewn rollup doors, and chain-link fences enclosed the charred frames of more than one improvised home.
These scenes marked eviction, destruction and death at many key nodes of Oakland’s cultural landscape. In January of that year, city officials condemned 1919 Market Street, a West Oakland live-work complex that’d housed underground venues including Liminal, Grandma’s House and the Living Room Project. The residents of Ghost Town Gallery, a former creamery with a recording studio and venue, were evicted in June. Weeks later, the tenants of Lobot, another venue and exhibition space, were displaced after a series of dramatic rent increases.
Jeffrey Cheung, the Unity Queer Skateboarding co-founder and Oakland artist known for his paintings of joyous androgynes, developed his large-scale canvas style and launched the published Unity Press while renting workspace at Lobot. His rock group, also called Unity, played Lobot’s farewell show along with Squadda B of rap duo Main Attrakionz. “2016 was definitely a turning point,” Cheung says. “Everyone became more desperate for spaces, and trying to make smaller places work—cafes, bookstores. There were new DIY spaces, but they’ve closed, too.”
Jeff Cheung (back right) and others prepare for a group show at Lobot Gallery, an unpermitted live-work space in West Oakland that was evicted in 2016. (Raphael Villet)
Also that year, Bay Area 51, a former bus depot in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, expired as a beacon of the city’s waning underground electronic music scene. The eviction of Telegraph Beach represented the decline of East Bay punk houses amenable to the ambient chaos of living-room gigs and home recording. Adjacent West Oakland live-work warehouses containing the radical publisher AK Press and an experimental music hub sold to a developer known for building tech dorms and evicting seniors following a deadly fire the year before.
Then, on Dec. 3, 2016, another fire ignited on the bottom level of the East Oakland warehouse known as Ghost Ship. Dozens of people upstairs at an electronic music event inhaled dense, caustic smoke; days later, the death toll settled at 36. Many of the victims were arts community pillars, and the tragedy spurred a protracted, wrenching period of grief—tributes, posthumous albums and lyrics like, “I’m a walking mausoleum,” as Hether Fortune of Wax Idols sang. For subcultures aiming to provide safe spaces for self-expression, it was spiritually crushing.
The fire led to unresolved criminal and civil litigation, stirring debate about responsibility for a blaze with no officially determined cause. It also preceded a wave of displacement: Property owners, already beginning to market warehouses to more affluent renters, grew leery of liability. City officials compiled lists of unpermitted residences and venues and instructed owners to “discontinue residential use,” effectively ordering dozens of tenants’ displacement. The chain of unwritten agreements between tenants, landlords and city officials seemed to break overnight.
Ghost Ship’s effects will continue into the next decade. Safer DIY Spaces, a live-work advocacy organization formed after the fire, has assisted tenants of more than 120 residences and art spaces with code-compliance and safety improvements since 2017, according to director David Keenan. Some are currently in delicate permitting processes. At least 20 have been evicted. And despite claims to the contrary, Keenan says city bureaucracy remains generally adversarial.
“Inspectors have told me they’d rather see people outside in tents than in warehouses,” he says.
A memorial outside the Oakland warehouse venue Ghost Ship after a fire killed 36 people on Dec. 3, 2016. (Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
Tenants of the Church, a West Oakland warehouse targeted by city officials after the fire, were displaced this summer after more than two years of uncertainty. The Church hosted more than 200 installments of the mononymous filmmaker Tooth’s screening series, Black Hole, between 2011 and 2019, all of them free and often featuring experimental work by visiting international artists. The series also led to the film festival Light Field. A shrine to Joey Casio, an artist and former Church resident who died in the fire, sprawled along a wall until the day of the eviction.
Tooth, who now lives in New York, made Black Hole a free event in order to counter art world gatekeeping, and to encourage people to attend even when they didn’t recognize the programming—a range of canonical art-house and non-narrative abstraction. (Also a hit: Saturday morning cartoons and mimosas.) “It wouldn’t have been financially possible at a space where I didn’t also live,” he says. He also incorporated the Church’s architecture into his sound art practice: at the Church’s last event, Tooth used a bow to elicit a thrumming drone from the structure itself.
The decline of affordable live-work space, hastened also by cannabis cultivators after California voters legalized recreational use in 2016, has reshaped the volume and variety of artistic production in the Bay Area. The aforementioned places accommodated large-scale works such as murals, sculptures and ostentatiously loud music. They fostered unlikely collaborations through social events that eroded boundaries between artistic disciplines. Importantly, they were also cheap enough to relieve artists of financial pressures, allowing them to pursue ephemeral or immaterial formats rather than making safer, more commercial work.
Similarly flexible, spacious places for artists to live and work have not disappeared completely. But it’s telling that underground dance events are lately occurring outdoors. Cheung, trying to recapture Lobot’s collective spirit through skateboarding, ended up spending more time outside, too.
Punk and experimental shows, not long ago found largely in discrete spaces, now gravitate to established venues. Some clubs can approximate the atmosphere of an underground show, but even the most accommodating ones have bottom lines that seem to buffer against creative risk.
Friends of the artists who passed away in the Ghost Ship fire remember them at a vigil in 2017. (Kelly Whalen)
Since 2016, local music scene figures have also gained more awareness of how underground art spaces contribute to gentrification—thereby hastening their own displacement. Politicians, conspicuously Jerry Brown during his 1999–2007 mayoral tenure, promoted the creative reuse of commercial properties on the premise that an arts reputation would attract investor capital to Oakland. The underground venues that figures such as Brown tacitly condoned enticed transplants to depressed neighborhoods, speeding the turnover of longtime residents.
Recognizing the more pernicious elements of this legacy, artists and activists holding space in Oakland today tend to center communities most susceptible to displacement, and also stress the need to insulate real-estate from the uncertainty of the speculative market. The Oakland Community Land Trust, for example, in 2017 acquired an East Oakland building containing affordable apartments and people of color-led nonprofit storefronts. There and in other remaining communal live-work spaces, collectivizing ownership is on the chore wheel.
Brontez Purnell, the musician, writer and dancer, lived in Oakland warehouses for more than a decade until 2014, when he was evicted from Ghost Town Gallery neighbor Sugar Mountain. At Sugar Mountain, where his rent hovered around $460 a month, Purnell wrote his first book and created several records and music videos for his group, The Younger Lovers. He also convened large, experimental dance ensembles, yielding the internationally exhibited 8mm film Free Jazz.
“I was interested in total- or anti-dance,” he says. “So I thought I’d structure my dance company like a punk band—bring dancers and non-dancers to this warehouse and practice.” Purnell, who now lives in a shared home in Oakland, and who in 2018 was called a key contemporary black writer in The New York Times, groans to remember the dozen-plus roommates and lack of privacy at Sugar Mountain, but describes it as a platform for his career’s second act. “Those were pivotal years,” Purnell says. “The space was instrumental to all of my work today.”
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