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Behind the doors of many buildings in downtown Oakland and beyond, there’s a story waiting to be told. Liam O’Donoghue, who produces the East Bay Yesterday podcast, makes it his business to tell such tales. When he’s not in the Main library’s history room, O’Donoghue can be seen all around town, leading walking tours, or boat tours of the East Bay’s waterfront.

He’ll tell you how Bruce Lee once taught cha-cha dancing lessons at the Leamington Hotel at Franklin and 19th streets, in the same building where Amelia Earhart had an office before her doomed flight around the world. As a student of local history, he records the lives of East Bay locals, some he meets on the street; others approach him at speaking events.

This news organization sat down with O’Donoghue to talk about his tours, and how the East Bay’s past sometimes looks very familiar.

Q: Your podcast is called East Bay Yesterday. What do you consider the East Bay to be?

A: For the purposes of the podcast, I consider it Alameda and Contra Costa — anything in either of those counties, primarily Oakland-based. I’ve done a couple stories about Berkeley, Emeryville, Richmond and I’ve occasionally ventured farther. I did an episode in Martinez when John Muir’s gravesite finally became open to the public. But there’s so many Oakland stories and I live in Oakland and Oakland is closest to my heart, so that’s where most of it is focused.

Q: Where do you look for history?

A: I try to see history everywhere. When I walk around Lake Merritt, which I do multiple times each week, I’m always thinking about what this used to look like or what used to be here.

Q: You do a walking tour of downtown Oakland, what’s on it?

A: There’s so much there — I try to cover old history and new history. An example of newer history would be the corner of Broadway and 17th which is where Tupac Shakur was famously arrested (for jaywalking) by the OPD. I try to talk about that to connect these longer stories to things that happened more recently and are still ongoing today. I think it’s important for people to realize this isn’t a new thing. Oakland was the first city to have an outside agency come and review their police force due to complaints in the late 40s when a lot of shipyard workers were complaining about getting shaken down by OPD. Sacramento sent a commission to investigate complaints which was unprecedented at the time. (OPD) would wait until people would come out of the bar, arrest them for public drunkenness and take their money. The cops would wait until payday.

Q: It’s no secret we are in the midst of a housing crisis. What does history tell us about housing in the East Bay?

A: I have so many thoughts about this. One thing I was really surprised by was this current shortage of affordable housing that we are having now isn’t a new phenomenon. A big example of this was during World War II, there was this huge flood of people coming to work in the shipyards. If you read contemporary accounts, there was a massive housing shortage where people were sleeping in bathtubs. This is when a lot of the Victorians in West Oakland got split into different units, people were sleeping in cars and people were sleeping in parks. A big result of that shortage was not only that it takes a while to build housing, but also there was a huge amount of resistance from people who lived in Oakland and Richmond and Berkeley to accommodating the newcomers for racial reasons, for class reasons. What’s called NIMBYism now, in the 40s, NIMBYs were like, ‘No we don’t want to build affordable housing for all these people coming to work in the factories.’ The more things change, right?

Q: Cranes currently dot downtown. What are your thoughts on Oakland’s changing skyline?

A: There’s all these new residential condo/apartment towers going up. The people who are moving to Oakland for the first time, that’s the only Oakland they’ll know, this new Oakland with all these sleek buildings. I did this map last year, the “Long Lost Oakland” map. I was having a lot of anxiety about all the changes that were happening, trying to wrap my mind around how to process all these changes. I spend a lot of time walking and riding my bike around and I would see an old building and all of a sudden it would be gone, and there would be a hole in the ground, and a new building would go up. I was starting to forget what used to be there. I try to pay attention and I was getting historical amnesia. I wanted to do a project to grapple with that feeling of confusion and disorientation.

Q: What did you learn in your research before producing the map?

A: There’s been so many other times Oakland has gone through these rapid transitions. In the Gold Rush era, it went from being a ranch to this boomtown; in one generation they cut down basically every old-growth redwood. During World War II massive changes — Oakland’s black population quintupled in a decade. There’s been these moments where there’s been this big rupture, the changes we are going through now is part of that cycle. Every generation or two, there’s a period when Oakland shifts really rapidly. There’s no going back — it’s building on the past but Oakland is never going to be the same. That is scary but it’s inevitable. Not to say we should feel powerless. We do need to fight to keep people from being displaced. We shouldn’t let the market run wild, but no matter where you live change happens.

Q: What is a stop on your boat tour?

A: It takes off in Emeryville marina. The urban legend about how it was drawn to be a town without churches is true. It was the Vegas of the East Bay. It had a racetrack, all these gambling parlors and brothels. The politicians were in on this industry — they didn’t want to be annexed by Oakland and have do-gooders zoning all their sinful establishments out of existence. Earl Warren, when he was the district attorney of Alameda County, called Emeryville the ‘rottenest city on the Pacific Coast.’ It was his nemesis. When he worked with the feds to raid the Emeryville PD, they found over 500 gallons of booze in the police station’s cars because it was essentially a liquor fleet. The cops were running the bootlegging industry during the Prohibition Era.

Q: How do you do what you do? What resources do you use?

A: My favorite source is people. One of the reasons I love doing events is people come up to me. I get a lot of ideas from folks I meet. I love finding out old inside jokes. Old school people will call AC Transit ‘Aunt Clara.’ I love how different expressions and slang comes and goes. In the ‘70s one of the nicknames for Oakland was ‘Bump City.’ No one ever calls it that anymore. I can see that coming back.

Q: As a local historian, what’s your biggest fear?

A: One of the things that’s really scary is losing people’s stories before I can get to them. I do feel like it’s a race against time. It’s important to capture these stories. Once they are gone, they are gone.

Who is Liam O’Donoghue

Position: Producer & host, East Bay Yesterday

Age: 39

Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio (but he only lived there for two years).

Residence: Oakland

Education: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Family: Wife, Elizabeth and “too many Irish relatives to count”

Five things about Liam O’Donoghue

1. He got interested in Oakland history while exploring abandoned buildings.2. He once got paid in beer to give a talk about East Bay beer history at a brewery.3. His greatest fear is falling into Lake Merritt.4. He once threw an Oakland warehouse party that featured a fountain of ranch dressing.5. He won’t tell you the name of his favorite taqueria because the line is already too long (and you’ll never find it on a “best of” list).