In its heyday, West Oakland’s Seventh Street was the hub of a thriving Black neighborhood. Today, there’s a move to revive it through one of its most iconic nightclubs.
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It’s about 9am on a Friday morning, and there aren’t very many other people around on Seventh Street. Things are pretty quiet — if you don’t count the regular sound of BART trains directly above us going in and out of the West Oakland station.
Sheryl: Hi, I'm sorry I'm a little late.
Noni: Oh, that’s okay. I did a little trash pick up while I was waiting.
That’s Noni Session. This morning, she’s wearing a black sweater to guard against the chill, and her long black braids spill out of a gray knit hat. She’s one of a network of neighborhood leaders committed to rebuilding Seventh Street—and that includes the occasional trash pick-up.
We’re meeting in front of a squat two-story building that looks like it was abandoned a while ago. The white facade is painted gray in places, and decorated with a few large graffiti tags in black and red. An empty sign holder juts out from a metal grill high above the door.
But when Noni opens the metal door and we go inside, it has a completely different feeling — like whoever had been running this place just stepped out for a minute. There’s a dark wooden bar that stretches along the entire wall to the right, with a row of red leather bar stools. Behind the bar, next to the cash register, Noni shows me a small black and white photo in a silver frame. It’s a mid-century portrait of a young Black woman, glamorous with make-up and hair done, gazing dreamily at the camera.
This is Esther as a young woman. Lookin’ all fancy.
The picture is of Esther Mabry. In her day, she was known as “the Grand Lady of Seventh Street.”
And THIS is Esther’s Orbit Room. It’s a key piece of West Oakland’s history—and its future.
And when Esther first came to Oakland, Seventh Street was a very different place.
West Oakland had been an industrial center since the late 19th century, when it became the last stop on the transcontinental railroad.
And what changed really dramatically in 1940 was the Second World War.
That’s Mitchell Schwarzer. He’s an architectural historian and the author of the book, Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption.
Tremendous buildup of industries supplying the American military with ships and airplanes and ordnance, all sorts of things. And because of all the jobs, there's a big migration of people from the American South, white and black.
That’s when Noni Session’s family came. She’s a third generation West Oaklander, with deep roots in the neighborhood. Here she is again:
My grandparents migrated in the 1940s. My grandmother was a nurse and my grandfather worked on the railroad.
And that period is also when Esther moved to West Oakland. She was in her early 20s then, and came from Palestine, Texas. Here she is in a 2002 oral history interview from the Oakland Public Library’s African American Museum and Library, talking about why she moved west:
Well, during the war, you know, everybody was coming up North. And it—the war was going on and everybody was making good money, and they was talking about how much money they was making.
All the clubs and everything was going good and everybody was having a good time.
Because it was a great place to live and the money was good, and the army base and the naval supply—we was connected with all of them.
Esther got a job as a waitress at Slim Jenkins Supper Club. It was the fanciest of the nightclubs that lined Seventh Street during its heyday as the hub of a thriving Black neighborhood—alongside John Singer’s, the Kit Kat, the House of Joy, the Rex Club, the Main Event.
By 1950, she had saved enough working at Slim Jenkins to open her own place on Seventh Street, which she called Esther’s Breakfast Room. But it wasn’t just breakfast.
Here’s Esther again, talking about the food she loved to cook:
Greens and stews and oxtails and peach cobblers, chicken in dressing, turkey in dressing, ham, pork chops, fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, cornbread, chitlins. It kept me in business, chitlins. Nobody had chitlins but me. I started everybody having chitlins.
Everyone knew that Esther’s stayed open late, including the man who would become Esther’s husband, William Mabry:
He was hungry. He was looking for something to eat, and every place was closed. That's how we met.
Even as Esther’s Breakfast Room thrived, trouble was beginning for West Oakland.
It started slowly. Military supply industries shut down after the war. Then, with the rise of the automobile in the 1950s, the railroad industry shrank, and factories started to move out of West Oakland. All of this meant fewer jobs available in the neighborhood.
Mitchell Schwarzer explains what came next, beginning in the mid-1950s:
For a period of about 20 years, West Oakland undergoes the most tumultuous and destructive set of actions aimed at remaking it of anywhere in Oakland. And those actions are not aimed at helping the people who live in West Oakland, who by 1960 are largely black, and largely poor.
First, was the freeway, a double-decker giant that was finished in 1958.
That freeway cut just carves into West Oakland, you know, in a brutal way and takes out a big chunk of West Oakland and divides West Oakland into two separated by a concrete wall.
Then, under the banner of “urban renewal,” the government demolished more than 6,000 buildings in West Oakland. They called it “slum clearance,” to make way for new urban development projects.
And in 1963, the US Postal Service decided to build a huge regional distribution center along the south side of the Seventh Street Corridor.
They plan 18 block demolition, some of which are on seventh.
So first the freeway, then the urban renewal, and now the post office takes out more blocks, 18 more blocks. Just total demolition.
But Esther Mabry weathered all of it. In the early 1960s, Esther and William were able to buy the Esther’s Breakfast Room building, and they expanded it to have space for live music. And when that building was seized by eminent domain for the new post office, they moved to the other side of Seventh Street—where the building stands today.
They called their new club Esther’s Orbit Room, as a nod to the space race that had grabbed public attention at the time.
And the music stayed on Seventh Street, too. Big-name artists who were selling out their shows at top venues — the Fillmore Auditorium, the Avalon Ballroom, Oakland Auditorium — would come to Esther’s afterwards.
Here’s Esther again:
Because we stayed open all night, they would leave there and come and eat. All of them would come, they’d all meet up. I don’t care where they were, whatever club, whatever affairs was going on, they was going to come there, and eat.
Eddie Gibson and Lou Rawls and Al Green, Al King, Z.Z Hill, Big Mama Thornton, T-Bone Walker, and almost all the big entertainers—B.B. King.
Esther also made sure to hire local talent.
One of my first gigs in 1967 was at Esther’s Orbit Room.
That’s the blues guitarist Ronnie Stewart. He grew up in West Oakland about a block from Seventh Street.
I was at Fremont High School. I had to be 16 or 17. Esther was so nice, she would always give us young kids a chance.
Ronnie Stewart is now the executive director of the West Coast Blues Society and leads the group’s Caravan of All Stars.
As a blues historian, he’s dedicated to preserving the history of the Oakland Blues, which took root at the clubs on Seventh Street. And he sees Esther Mabry at the heart of this history.
He says she gave him the name for the tune that became his group’s theme song, when they were playing at Esther’s Orbit Room:
Miss Esther walked by and then, uh, the bass started playing and then she said, ‘Whew, that's walking down Seventh Street.’ And she done like that.
We’d forget the name sometimes, and one of the guys in the band said, “Ronnie, remember Miss Esther said this is like walking down Seventh Street?” I said, oh yeah, I said, it's “Walking down Seventh Street.” (laughs)
But in 1974, the next piece of urban infrastructure to hit West Oakland was built directly overhead.
BART makes a decision in Oakland. You know, unlike in San Francisco, downtown, or Oakland, downtown where BART is underground, or the Mission District where it's underground, or Berkeley, in West Oakland, it's not underground, it's above ground. And in order for it to be above ground, they demolish the entire side of Seventh Street. One side.
Back at Esther’s Orbit Room today, I ask Noni Session if living in West Oakland, you get used to the regular sound of BART. Thinking about that brought her to reflect on what life was like in the neighborhood before she was born:
It is part of the soundscape, but it wasn't there. Clearly, there were birds and children playing before about 1969. And at that point, this corridor supported over 250,000 black folks with entertainment, essential businesses, cobblers, tax accountants, dry cleaners, restaurants.
She remembers what it was like to grow up in the neighborhood in the 1970s and 80s, years after the freeway went in:
Our grocery store, our house, our home, our playground stood in the shadow of that freeway.
She says the freeway really did function like a concrete wall through the neighborhood, because it was filled in underneath—
dirt rock, hundreds of feet of dirt, rock and cyclone fence for three miles. So you had to walk like three blocks to get through an underpass and then run under it really quickly. But it wasn't like it was a few feet. It was like 500 feet. You had to run to not be plowed over by the Mack trucks.
She also remembers when the Cypress freeway collapsed many years later, during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.
It was nighttime until I was 14 years old. And then when it fell. The sun came out.
After that tragic event, the community fought to keep another freeway from being built in its place.
And Esther Mabry never gave up on West Oakland. Here’s what she said in that 2002 oral history interview.
It's my greatest ambition to see it come back like it was before.
She kept the Orbit Room open as long as she lived. It didn’t close until 2011, a year after she passed away.
And now, back at Esther’s Orbit Room, Noni Session is showing me how she and others are continuing to fight for the future of West Oakland. As the executive director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, or EB PREC, Noni is leading a community effort to bring Esther’s Orbit Room back to life as a Black cultural center, to serve as the hub of a reimagined Seventh street corridor.
And that makes perfect sense, because Esther’s has always been more than a nightclub or a place to get a late-night bite. At its heart, Esther’s has always functioned as a kind of community center.
When you first walk in to Esther’s Orbit Room today, your eyes are immediately drawn upward to the low, dark ceiling that sparkles with gold glitter.
Sheryl: Wow, that ceiling. Is that original?
Noni: Yeah. Everybody loves the glitter ceiling. When they come and see the bar sort of still living the way it lived historically, their first question is, are you guys going to keep the glitter ceiling?
It's pretty early in the morning, so we didn't run into people yet, but it's hard for me to even do my trash pickup or interviews because to the person, there's a person with a deep, meaningful story to tell either about food, companionship, their memories of Esther, and you can see the like glint in their eye when they tell it.
People were like, “You're opening my home again.” And I’m like, yeah, clearly that’s what we’re doing.
The new vision for Esther’s is that it will have food, indoor and outdoor spaces for performances, gallery space, community space, and arts residencies. As Noni points out, it’s nothing new:
Esther's Orbit Room served as a community center, as a food hub, and as an art space for five decades.
So what music will be played in this Esther’s of the future? What will walking down Seventh street sound like?
Well, I'm told by all the old people that there must be jazz and blues. It's a given. So the happy hours we've done so far have been strictly jazz and blues, but there is a lot of traditions that have come out of jazz and blues. Funk and soul have come out of jazz and blues. Hip hop has come out of jazz and blues. Spoken word.
I ask Noni if there is any particular soundscape that she imagines when she thinks about the future Esther’s Orbit Room.
Fantastic Negrito would be one of those soundscapes that that comes across for Esther's.
I think that’s who stands out to me first and foremost.
Esther's Orbit Room is hosting 7th Street Thrives Black Earth Day this Saturday.
African American Museum and Library at Oakland
Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption
That story aired in the April 16, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
