Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Photo: Ben Margot, Associated Press Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

For years, the logo for the city of Oakland was just a tree — a dated and amorphous-looking design that city workers derisively called the broccoli.

It was one more knock on Oakland in the early 1970s, when it was perceived as a town with rising violent crime rates and racial tensions, a place the middle class left on the way to the suburbs.

Then a pair of cuff links arrived in Oakland, brought in by Jim Price, the mayor’s chief of staff at the time. On their faces was a more memorable and stylized serpentine oak tree.

“I don’t know how he received” the jewelry, says George Dini, 94, who worked for the city for a quarter century before retiring in the 1980s as deputy city manager. But he remembers the impression the image made.

“Wally Carroll, who was our new public information officer at the time, looked at it and thought we should adopt it as the new city logo.”

It was a rebranding that gave the logo a more modern feel, Dini says, and it was arguably the catalyst for an intense wave of regional pride that continues to this day.

“I love that our city’s symbol is a living thing,” says Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, wearing cookie-size oak tree earrings that swing as she talks. “… There’s something about the oak tree that has made sense for our city, through all these different periods of change.”

The striking logo, with branches built from four swirling lines, became a ubiquitous symbol in the turbulent 1970s. It was a fixture on T-shirts, bags and laptops in the 2000s and 2010s, during an era of struggle and rapid change in the city.

Now the stylized oak tree is being used as an overture by the Golden State Warriors. They debuted a tree-emblazoned “The Town” jersey not long after announcing their planned move back across the bay, a play off their classic 1970s “The City” jersey and the dueling nicknames of Oakland and San Francisco. The team will wear the Town and the tree for the second time on Saturday during a home game against the Denver Nuggets.

But long before oak tree cuff links and T-shirts, there were oaks in Oakland.

The land was thickly forested through the 1800s, with live oaks in the flats and redwood trees in the hills. The local Costanoan Indian diet was rich in acorn flour, and Spaniards who settled in the area called it Encinal, which means oak grove.

The trees were eventually cut down to supply the Bay Area’s first housing boom and to make way for Oakland’s streets. Still, the oak remained in the city’s collective consciousness.

When novelist Jack London died, city leaders transplanted an oak from nearby Mosswood Park to the plaza in front of City Hall, designating it the Jack London Tree. It replaced another oak that had stood in the plaza for a century. (The second tree, now more than 50 feet tall and with a trunk 4 feet in diameter, is still revered. In 1997, a contractor was fined $300,000 for “recklessly endangering” it during construction.)

After a citywide contest in 1952, a tree also appeared on the Oakland flag, serving as a model for the “broccoli” logo, which, at its worst, looked like an ink splash by a negligent printer.

Price, a chief of staff who worked under mayors John Houlihan and John Reading, brought the cuff links into City Hall. Carroll, Price and Dini formed the team that modernized the tree.

At his home in San Leandro, Dini remains a big fan of oak trees; he recently planted nine in his thriving backyard garden from acorns that he brought back from a trip to Italy.

At home he lays out mementos from the time the logo was upgraded, including an Oakland-tree-logo necktie. Originally, he says, the logo was exclusively presented in an electric “green apple” color, and used on everything from letterhead to city vehicles.

Carroll, who died in 2008, has been credited in some corners of the Internet with designing the new logo, and he certainly had a hand in it. But while Carroll, who moonlighted as an artist, was a driving force behind the campaign, Dini says the cuff link design was adopted virtually unchanged; it’s the same tree used on city signs and the Warriors jerseys today.

“We stole somebody else’s idea, I guess,” Dini says.

Carroll’s team never trademarked the tree, which allowed it to filter into city culture over the years as Oakland became a gathering place for artistic minds. Once mostly seen on street signs and trash cans, it has been stretched, squashed and otherwise altered for use on clothing, murals and other artwork celebrating Oakland.

“I have seen a lot of oak tree tattoos in my day,” Schaaf says. “That’s commitment.”

For the past decade and a half, the tree has been closely associated with clothing maker Oaklandish.

The original Oaklandish logo was created by co-founder Jeff Hull and his childhood friend Fred Macondray, who built a sort of vertical symmetry by adding roots to their design.

Oaklandish maintains a fervent following in the East Bay, and CEO and Creative Director Angela Tsay says the tree is so ubiquitous — it’s on hats, signs, the parking meter tokens at the garage near City Hall — that it has become subconsciously infused into Oakland life.

She sees the city’s complex evolution in the oak life cycle. “It’s an apt metaphor for change in Oakland,” Tsay says of the logo. “Part of living and growing is incorporating new things and shedding some old things.”

For the Warriors, the tree is a promise and a gesture of goodwill to East Bay fans who filled Oracle Arena through many lean years, but as early as 2019 will have to travel to the team’s new arena in San Francisco to watch games.

Warriors chief marketing officer Chip Bowers says the team started the logo change process three years ago but was slowed down when the NBA switched apparel sponsors. Ultimately, Portland-based Nike designed the jersey.

The jersey and the “Town” merchandise have already been a huge financial success, outselling the Warriors’ other merchandise on the weekend after Thanksgiving, Bowers reports. The Stephen Curry “The Town” jersey was the top-selling item in the NBA store on Cyber Monday. Even after they move to the Chase Center, the team will continue wearing “The Town” jerseys and will roll out occasional Town-themed court branding.

Bowers says other symbols were considered — port cranes were an obvious candidate suggested by fans — but the oak tree prevailed.

“The roots of the tree mean a lot to us, in terms of us keeping roots planted here in the East Bay,” Bowers says.

When Dini learned that the Warriors had adopted his oak tree on a jersey, he was elated (he suggests they play with it on their chests during every game). The retired public servant is proud of his mostly unknown role in this story, and still feels the same way he did when he first laid eyes on the logo.

“Right away,” Dini says, “I see Oakland.”

Alissa Greenberg is a freelance writer in Berkeley. Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub