Remembering 7th Street
The Oakland Jazz & Blues Clubs Virtual Reality Project

During the 1940s and 1950s, Oakland's 7th Street was a vibrant stretch of jazz and blues clubs, a cultural mecca that drew musicians and music lovers from all over the country.

Famous blues and jazz musicians Lowell Fulson, Saunders King, Sugar Pie DeSanto and many others played at hotspots like Slim Jenkins Place, Esther's Orbit Room, John Singer's and Harvey's Rex Club.

Railroad workers, especially members of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation's first black union that had an office on 7th Street, would distribute records cut by black musicians across the country.

It was a remarkable part of the city's history that today has been all but lost to urban redevelopment and urban decay.

Now the area is being brought back to life in a joint project of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and School of Architecture that is using a video game program to let people experience again what the clubs were like and learn the story of Oakland's jazz and blues scene.

An six-block stretch of 7th Street is being recreated as a virtual world, which people can access over the Internet and adopt avatar figures to walk up and down the streets, enter the clubs, hear the music of the era and interact with other people logged onto the site.

The VR program used in the class was developed by the Architecture Department to recreate ancient cities like Cairo. Architecture students now are doing the modeling of the buildings and characters for the video game recreation of 7th Street.

Journalism School classes in Spring 2006, Fall 2006, Spring 2007, Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 sent students out to report on and research the old jazz and blues scene on 7th Street to provide the content for the VR world. Graduate and undergraduate students from other departments, such as African American Diaspora Studies and Public Policy, participated in the classes.

Students are working on the recreation of famous nightspots like Slim Jenkins' Place and Esther's Orbit Room and getting digital recordings of the music played in the clubs.

You can view a QuickTime video of the game world (it's an early, rough version).

They're also bringing back to life the musicians, club owners and other characters who frequented the area - people like Charles "Raincoat" Jones, the unofficial mayor of 7th Street and a patron of the clubs, Harold "Slim" Jenkins, owner of the most famed 7th Street club, Bob Geddins, a local record producer who recorded many of the 7th Street musicians, and C. L. Dellums, one of the founders of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the uncle of Oakland's current mayor-elect, Ron Dellums.

The class is telling the story of the clubs and the history of the area using video game interactive narratives. Video game consultant Jeannie Novak came to talk to students about the game design, and video game writer Lee Sheldon visited the class to work with students on developing the narratives.

In the game, a player will be able to compose a piece of music and then is challenged to get his or her music played at the clubs such as Slim Jenkins' Place, recorded by local record producer Bob Geddins, financed by Raincoat Jones and distributed by the Sleeping Car Porters. In subsequent levels of the game, the player will help organize the community to stop the redevelopment projects that destroyed the area.

The project will try to reconnect the Oakland community with this fascinating part of its cultural heritage, in hopes that the vibrancy of the era can be recaptured in real life in the city today.

The project is being co-sponsored by the Oakland Post, the African American community newspaper in Oakland.

The Post is running a series of articles on 7th Street, including photographs and first-person stories from people who remember the 7th Street scene.

Those photographs and stories and others sent in by people who remember the area, along with other materials gathered by students working on the project, will be archived on this Web site and then integrated into the VR recreation of 7th Street.

Stories about the project have appeared in a number of publications and Weblogs, including National Pubilc Radio, California magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, PC World, O'Reilly Radar, Diablo Magazine, the Daily Californian and E-Media Tidbits.

For a more detailed description of how the project evolved and what we're learning about digital narratives and the use of virtual reality and video games for storytelling, you can read a paper about the project written by Architecture Prof. Yehuda Kalay and Journalism Adjunct Prof. Paul Grabowicz for the 3D Visualisation in the Arts Network Bulletin.

Paul Grabowicz also is blogging about the progress of the project at the Idea Lab weblog.

We're grateful to the many people and institutions that have provided funding for the project, including the Knight Foundation, which awarded us a $60,000 news challeng grant.

The project is sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for New Media, which brings together faculty and students from different departments on campus to collaborate on digital technology research and teaching initiatives.

For more information contact the instructors in the class:

Photograph of Slim Jenkins Place above courtesy of the African American Museum & Library at Oakland. Special thanks to the African American Museum & Library at Oakland for providing us with access to their photographic collections on Slim Jenkins Place, the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and others. To visit the library and museum and view their exhibits and collections, check the schedule on their Web site.

Special thanks also to Ronnie Stewart and the Bay Area Blues Society, Paul Cobb and the Oakland Post, Betty Marvin and the Oakland Planning Department, Marie Dunlap and The Oakland Tribune, Christine Saed and the West Oakland Library, Steve Lavoie and others at the Oakland Library, and the oral history project at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library for their assistance on the project, as well as the many residents of West Oakland too numerous to list here who have graciously taken the time to share with us their memories of 7th Street and otherwise provided invaluable help to us.