Oakland gets its name because the city is heavily populated with oak trees. Although often overshadowed by San Francisco, its beautiful and cosmopolitan neighbor lying directly to the west, Oakland has beautiful highlights of its own such as Lake Merritt, various theaters, and a zoo. Decades ago, former Oakland resident, writer Gertrude Stein, returned to visit her hometown of Oakland from which she left over twenty years ago. Upon her visit she found that her synagogue, a favorite park, her school, and the home in which she grew up no longer existed. An acquaintance, unaware that Stein had already visited the city, asked her if she planned to visit Oakland. Stein replied, "Why go to Oakland? There is no there there", as she was thinking of the fixtures of her childhood that had been demolished. Over many decades, some have taken this statement out of context to mean that there is nothing to see in Oakland.
But Oakland's visitors can find the "there" there most easily in the city's very affluent and beautiful hillside neighborhoods, its burgeoning culinary scene, its somewhat eccentric shopping districts, the parks, its sports teams, and its waterfront. Several distinct neighborhoods comprise Oakland, all of which host a heady mix of cultures and people.
In the 1960s, an era of social, cultural, racial, and political revolt throughout the Western world, Oakland became a hub of radical movements -- it is the birthplace of the Black Panther Party -- and numerous criminal organizations, such as the largely white Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, made the city their hub. Yet Oakland's history in the arts and entertainment, often overlooked by the city's detractors, always was and remains quite formidable. Oakland has nurtured or been a second home to novelists Gertrude Stein, Jack London, Amy Tan, and Maya Angelou; actors Mark Hamill, Bruce Lee, and Tom Hanks; architect Julia Morgan; classical conductor Calvin Simmons; rappers MC Hammer and Tupac Shakur, and many other notables in the liberal arts and sciences. Governor of California, Jerry Brown, and his wife maintain a large home in the affluent Montclair district, an Oakland neighborhood noted for its steep, wooded hillsides, and expansive homes and estates, many of which have stunning vistas of the city, the San Francisco Bay, and San Francisco and the Marin headlands beyond.
According to the 2000 Census, Oakland is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States (along with Long Beach, California), with over 150 languages spoken within the city's borders. Reflecting this, Oakland holds several annual cultural events, such as the Art & Soul Weekend (held on Labor day weekend), the Cinco de Mayo Fruitvale Festival Parade (early May), the Chinatown Streetfest (late August), and the Oakland Holiday Parade in December.
