In its heyday, Esther’s Orbit Room was a hopping blues and jazz club in the heart of West Oakland’s thriving Black business and entertainment strip, where people gathered to hear Etta James, B.B. King and other greats. Today, all that’s left of the historic club is a faded sign above a street full of vacant storefronts.
But it may not be long before passersby can once again hear music spilling from Esther’s doors, as part of a grand plan by The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative to turn the defunct venue near the West Oakland BART station into a community arts and concert space, a cafe and affordable housing for at least seven artists.
With its purchase of Esther’s, the co-op has become the latest grass-roots group to attempt a novel solution to the Bay Area’s housing crisis — creating affordable living and commercial space by eschewing traditional landlords in favor of community ownership. It raised the $1.5 million needed to buy the building and two adjacent parcels through donations and local investors, some of whom gave as little as $1,000 each.
If all goes according to plan, Esther’s could be the first step toward revitalizing the entire 7th Street corridor and bringing resources to an underserved area of West Oakland, said Noni Session, director of the cooperative.
“When you mention the purchase of Esther’s, people have a story for you,” she said. “It looms really large in the psycho-geographic landscape of not just old Oaklanders, but new Oaklanders. So we mean this as a first step toward building a vital Black economy that’s strong and interconnected and not dependent on the whims of external actors.”
Session’s ambitious plan for the property — which includes Esther’s, the vacant storefront next door and a parking lot in the back — envisions Black-owned businesses on the first floor and affordable housing upstairs. The commercial space may include a bar and event venue, a cafe and an art gallery, expected to open by the end of 2023. Each residential unit, which will contain between three and four bedrooms to be shared by artist collectives, would rent for about $3,500.
In the parking lot, Session hopes to start a farmer’s market.
In all, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative has raised about $4.2 million to buy the property, perform extensive renovations and support the launch of new businesses there, Session said. She estimates the co-op needs about $600,000 more to make its vision a reality.
The cooperative raised $450,000 in grants, including one from San Francisco’s popular Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. Another $1.5 million came from a direct public offering in which investors bought shares in the co-op for $1,000 each, and can expect a 1.5% annual or biannual return on their investment after five years. The rest of the funding came from low-interest loans and other investors.
Residents and businesses that move into the new Esther’s will be considered part-owners — the space will be theirs for life, and they will make decisions about repairs and other property issues together, Session said. The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative already has acquired two other residential properties in Oakland and Berkeley using this model.
The co-op was inspired by the emergence in Oakland and throughout the Bay Area of community land trusts — nonprofits that help tenants buy the homes, apartments and commercial spaces where they live and work.
“I think that not only is it catching hold in Oakland, but it’s catching hold nationwide,” Session said of the community ownership model, “because people are looking for solutions to this crisis we have of space, of stability.”
Esther’s Orbit Room was founded by Esther Mabry, a waitress who moved to Oakland from Texas at the age of 22. She opened Esther’s Breakfast Room in 1950, and by 1959 she and her husband, William, bought the building — expanding to cocktails and live music, and becoming the Orbit Room.
But in 1973, construction started on the massive 7th Street post office, and Esther’s had to move to the other side of the street. That disruption, coupled with the arrival of the Cypress Freeway cutting through the neighborhood (the freeway would collapse in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake), and BART trains roaring by overhead on their way to and from the newly opened West Oakland station, pushed many surrounding businesses to close.
Esther’s remained open as a dive bar, run by Mabry’s nephew, until 2009. Mabry died in 2010, bringing to an end the last physical connection to West Oakland’s heyday as the “Harlem of the West Coast.” Today, the faded “Esther’s Orbit Room” sign, complete with an orange rocket, still hangs above the empty storefront. Inside, the black ceiling is flecked with glitter and adorned with a disco ball. A price list on the wall advertises domestic beer for $3.50.
It’s vital to preserve Esther’s and other vestiges of the region’s Black history, said Cheryl Fabio, an Oakland native and director of the documentary “Evolutionary Blues…West Oakland’s Music Legacy.” Oakland has been losing its Black population for decades. In 1980, about 47% of Oakland residents were Black, according to the census. Today, it’s 24%.
“We have to be able to identify our own history and put our own value to it,” Fabio said. “And every place we can, every piece of property, every article, every photograph, every piece of our history that we can hold onto is a benefit to some child 20 years down the road.”
