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As locals know but visitors are so often surprised to find out, SFO isn’t in San Francisco, either. The airport of the city that is seven miles in either dimension is a solid twelve miles from that city’s nearest edge, in an area of San Mateo County so remote that the land is unincorporated. For that reason alone, San Francisco’s insistence that it and only it could ever use the phrase “San Francisco”—let alone the phrase “San Francisco Bay”—was legalistic without being grounded in reality. In that sense, it was also only the latest attempt to undermine OAK’s geographic advantage with some chintzy bullshit. 

San Francisco boosters may laugh at it, but in its earliest days, OAK was one of the most important and most advanced airports in the world. The history isn’t irrelevant to the current strife. At a time when air travel was new, and one could still shock people by saying that it was on its way to becoming a daily affair, Oakland Airport positioned itself to take advantage of the new era. Blessed with weather so perfect that flying was reliably safe for all but five days of the year, the airport added features like long, tarred runways and flood lights so that planes could land at night. By 1931, the 845-acre Oakland airport was the largest facility in America, and the busiest in the world, handling more than a million passengers per year. Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, then the busiest airport in Europe, took in slightly more than 650,000. 

Across the Bay, aviators derided Mills Field, the bucolic airport named after the cow pasture it was leased from that would become SFO. As one flight attendant of the era put it, the whole place was a “mudhole.”

"The uptick in Yemeni—or more broadly Arabic—coffee shops is something new, but perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise. Gus Anan, head of operations at Sana’a Cafe, reminded me that Oakland in particular is a hub for Yemeni Americans—“the second capital of Yemen.” It’s an exaggeration, but only slightly: Roughly one in ten Yemeni Americans nationwide live right here in Oakland, with peripheral hot spots in surrounding Bay Area neighborhoods like the Tenderloin. Yemeni children also represent one of the largest immigrant groups in Oakland’s public schools. But even if a demographic upswing helps explain who is behind Oakland’s Yemeni coffee renaissance, it doesn’t explain the timing. So, why now?"

"The early evening sunlight is orange, coming over San Pablo Avenue and through the windows of the Hana Gardens Senior Center at a perfect 60 degree angle. It’s 6:34PM on a clear Tuesday night in El Cerrito, California, and we’re willing to bet money that our children (almost two and just four years old, respectively) are the youngest people in the building by at least three decades. We’ve brought our toddlers out after dinner because we’re going to watch The Great El Cerrito Library Tax Non-Debate, a 90-minute discussion of municipal Measure C, hosted by the El Cerrito Democratic Club...."