Historic West Oakland Blues Club’s Restoration Reveals Layers of Hidden History

When Noni Session first imagined reopening Esther’s Orbit Room, she saw a gleaming new building that would serve as an anchor for a reinvigorated cultural and commercial corridor.

For Session, who was born and raised in West Oakland and is the executive director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, or EBPREC, renovating Esther’s was a chance at a fresh start.

The former blues club had been a staple of the historic Seventh Street district, called the “Harlem of the West,” serving as the center of Black life in West Oakland for roughly half a century. While a series of policy decisions decimated the strip, with dozens of businesses and thousands of homes razed, Esther’s had remained the lone holdout, keeping its doors open until 2011.

The building had sat vacant for around a decade by the time it came to EBPREC’s attention. But the decision to reopen it as a performance venue, bar and eatery seemed self-evident, Session said. She and her team at the developer co-op purchased the building and planned contemporary additions, including a wellness studio, working and living spaces for artists and an outdoor patio.

They released renderings of the proposed upgrades: new balconies, murals, and a bold new sign replacing the rough faux-stone facade in favor of a fresh, modern aesthetic.

“We thought we were doing West Oakland a favor by getting rid of the sniff of the trauma and the lack of resources, right? You know, new facade, new bar, new vibe, new day,” Session said.

And then came the outcry.

“Some of the old men in the neighborhood — on public record — were like, ‘That’s cultural genocide,’” Session recalled.

She and her colleagues at EBPREC were already having some misgivings about the proposed design and had resolved to change it. But the criticism still threw Session for a loop.

“And then after some time sitting with it, looking at it, we realized you couldn’t really see West Oakland in that rendering,” she said. “It was only really then that I understood what they meant by cultural genocide, that they could not see their story on the surfaces of these buildings that we were calling assets, but not treating like assets.”

Now, instead of a ground-breaking ceremony, planned for later this year, there will be a rock-breaking ceremony. With help from professional masons, volunteers will painstakingly remove the building’s original fabricated stones from the exterior so they can be reconstructed when the restoration is complete.

For some of West Oakland’s older generation, who experienced Seventh Street in its heyday, the decision to restore — rather than remodel — is one step toward repairing what was lost.

“It is sort of a love letter to a legacy,” said Cheryl Fabio, whose documentary film, Evolutionary Blues: West Oakland’s Music Legacy, recounts the area’s musical history. “It is some repair — not enough repair — but some repair for what was stolen in places like Seventh Street.”

Inside, Session said EBPREC plans to repurpose the building’s original wooden walls, painted yellow and orange and long hidden beneath a layer of sheetrock, to use as a decorative backing for the bar and stage. The bar’s antique safe, rolltop desks and other furniture will feature prominently. “So that everywhere you turn, you see the authentic textures of this historical space.”

In a true act of serendipity, Session said, they uncovered Esther’s original stage lights, hidden behind an artificial wall and perfectly positioned where a new stage had already been planned. Standing inside the blackened room with only a headlamp to see by, Session pointed to the conical spotlight covers, their bulbs removed, nestled into the ceiling.

“We were just dumbfounded,” she said. “What we’ve realized we need to do is, in some ways — this is a made-up word — but that we need to museumize the whole space.”

‘The place to be’

At its height in the middle of the 20th Century, Seventh Street was not only a prime entertainment district drawing national acts — such as B.B. King, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Big Mama Thornton and other blues greats — but the locus of civic and community life. There were banks and lawyers’ offices, barber shops and grocery stores, a record store and recording studio, pharmacies, clothing stores, a bowling alley, theaters, and plenty of eateries.

Esther Mabry, the Orbit Room’s namesake, founder and operator for more than a half-century, first came to Seventh Street during WWII, drawn from her hometown of Palestine, Texas, by the promise of good pay, she said in a 2002 interview with the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, or AAMLO.

“Everybody was making good money, and they were talking about how much money they were making,” she said.

By that time, West Oakland, the terminus of the transcontinental railroad, had already become a magnet for working-class people of all ethnicities, said Mitchell Schwarzer, an architectural historian and author of the book, Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption. But, he said, it had a particular pull for Black transplants as the West Coast headquarters of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a large and influential union representing Black workers.

“The Porters became the genesis of a larger black community. They were kind of the foundation because they had decent-paying jobs at the time,” Schwarzer said. “And for Black people, this was probably one of the best jobs you could get until the war industries.”

Mabry herself worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad when she first arrived in West Oakland, she told AAMLO.

“I sold tickets and made sandwiches — they had boxed lunches — and just did it all,” she said. “It was the place to be.”

And Mabry was at the center of it. She told AAMLO she first opened Esther’s Breakfast Club, located across the street from the Orbit Room’s current location, in 1950.

By then, Schwarzer said West Oakland was well on its way to becoming a majority Black neighborhood, in part because racial covenants prevented Black residents from owning property in other parts of the city, and the federal government’s policy of redlining made buying and improving properties in most Black neighborhoods very difficult. So, working-class residents mingled with their wealthier neighbors in West Oakland, providing a diverse economic base that allowed businesses to thrive.

And they all frequented Esther’s. “The pimps and prostitutes, they’d be up all night, and they would be ready to come in and eat and drink,” Mabry told AAMLO, adding that Sunday dinners were a different crowd, “All the attorneys and the judges and doctors, they all came.”

“All walks of life,” she said.

She and her husband, William Mabry, bought the building in 1959 and expanded it to include cocktails and live music in 1961, according to the East Bay Times. In 1963, the couple opened Esther’s Orbit Room, at 1753 Seventh St., with a dance hall that could host some 300 guests and Harry “Daddy O” Gibson and Jay Payton headlining, according to a notice in the Oakland Tribune.

Patrons came as much for the performers as for her down-home Southern food.

“Chitlins,” Mabry told AAMLO. “That was my thing that kept me in business was chitlins. Nobody had chitlins but me; I started everybody having chitlins.”

But Mabry did more than serve food. She often connected her patrons in need of work with available jobs or served as the conduit between employers and their employees.

She told AAMLO, “They’d come there to look for somebody, and I’d find them for them. I knew just about where to get in contact with somebody, where they’d be playing cards or something, and go and tell them that they’ve got a job for them this evening. That would work out real good.”

And Esther’s served a civic function, hosting meetings for the East Bay Democratic Club, political forums and city council candidates’ fundraisers; it was even visited by Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy, on a tour of West Oakland in 1970.

‘We always come back’

By then, massive developments were well underway, Schwarzer said. And a series of governmental policy decisions had, over several decades, hastened the hollowing out of Seventh Street.

The first was the construction, during the mid-1950s, of the Cypress Street Viaduct, a freeway that tore through the middle of West Oakland, along with the city’s Chinatown, Japantown and Mexican communities, uprooting some 600 families and dozens of businesses.

“So you have a freeway that takes its route through the primary minority communities in Oakland, and disrupts them dramatically,” he said. “That’s the first big change. This was called the Cypress Viaduct, and it went right through the middle of West Oakland — a two-level concrete structure.”

Then came what politicians called “slum clearing” for the Acorn Urban Renewal Plan, Schwarzer said, and a new Oakland Main Post Office and distribution center. Demolition for that began in 1960, when a contractor used a surplus WWII Sherman Tank to plow through hundreds of homes. “The elapsed time from the first resounding snap to the last dusty roar was 10 minutes,” an Oakland Tribune article from the time stated. But despite the expediency of demolition, construction was slow, and the new post office didn’t open until 1969.

Esther’s Orbit Room, which was located next to the new post office, eventually had to move to make way for its parking lot, and Mabry relocated across the street to its current location.

But the real death knell for Seventh Street, said Ronnie Stewart, executive director of the Bay Area Blues Society, was the construction of the West Oakland BART Station, with its elevated tracks running down the middle of the street. To accommodate them, businesses along one side of the street were leveled. For those that remained, there were years of construction to contend with, Stewart said.

“During the process … they parked bulldozers and tractors and earth-moving equipment. They put that in front of all the different clubs. Cars couldn’t park. You couldn’t even hardly go down Seventh Street,” Stewart said. “And so consequently, that destroyed it.”

Esther’s and a neighboring restaurant, The Barn, which also served Southern cuisine, continued operating in large part because they received patrons from the post office, Stewart said. But many of the other businesses “just died on the vine.” And while Esther’s still had live music, the rumble of passing BART trains would interrupt it, shaking the walls, rattling glassware and setting lights to flicker, he said.

Residents displaced by the redevelopment or who left voluntarily moved to North Oakland and West Berkeley, to the Oakland hills if they could afford it, and to East Oakland, Schwarzer said.

“So there’s a segmentation which hadn’t been present as much before 1960 because the community was so jammed into West Oakland,” he said. “Dispersal of the Black community into segmental class groups starts to weaken the older commercial districts.”

But Fabio said that mass displacement had a deeper, psychological impact on the people who lived it.

“So all of those homes they took out also removed all of those voices, right?” she said. “The impact is devastating.”

By 1985, when the Oakland Tribune profiled Esther and her Orbit Room, West Oakland featured “mostly boarded-up shops, liquor stores, vacant lots and a fried chicken outlet.” Still, Mabry remained, serving as “a sort of neighborhood update service, a place where people who used to live around Seventh Street go to look up old pals who are still there.”

Customer Betty Johnson commented to the Tribune, “It seems like, regardless of where we go, we always come back to Esther’s.”

‘Back like it was before’

Mabry’s business persisted past the turn of the century as the “Grand Lady of Seventh Street” and the last remaining testament to the storied strip. When Mabry’s health began to fail, her nephew took over operations. Mabry died in 2010, and the bar closed the following year.

To Stewart, it’s vital the building — and Mabry’s legacy — is preserved, and he’s grateful EBPREC listened to his and other community members’ feedback, urging them to keep that history alive.

“[Seventh Street] was the center of Black life. And we think it’s very important to have that remembrance,” Stewart said, “And we feel that the community should have some sort of an iconic symbol of where it used to be.”

The building next to Esther’s, which held The Barn and where EBPREC now has its headquarters, will house a new museum to recount the story of Seventh Street, complete with oral histories, archival photos and other memorabilia, Session said. Some of Esther’s original furniture, gambling gear, signage, a clock — even one of Mabry’s hats — will be housed inside the Orbit Room.

EBPREC hopes the roughly $9 million restoration will become the cornerstone of a plan to revitalize the entire 13 blocks of the historic stretch in an initiative called 7th Street Thrives, which includes a coalition of other area residents, business and property owners and city officials.

The vision is to have “every commercial space leased up, the lights turned back on, the trash picked up regularly, and foot traffic and business at increasing levels,” Session said.

But more than that, she said it’s also about retaining community control of the corridor’s future and ensuring existing and returning residents can benefit from it.

“People don’t want something new,” Session said. “They want to recover what was lost.”

To her dying day, that’s what Mabry wanted, too, Stewart said. In her 2002 conversation with AAMLO, Mabry told her interviewers it was her “greatest ambition” to see Seventh Street, and all of West Oakland, revitalized.

After all, she told the Tribune in 1985, “This is where people’s roots are. We just try to take care of ‘em.”