Oakland is a city on the East Bay section of the San Francisco Bay in California.
Oakland is often described as "The City Across the Bay", "The Town", and various other names comparing it as to be basically San Francisco's younger brother. Oakland is most well-known for being the home of Major League Baseball's Athleticsnote , high crime rate, and for being the ending-point of the Transcontinental Railroad.
The population currently stands at 420,000, making Oakland the 45th-largest city in America. It is a major West Coast port, in fact one of the five most important ports in the country.
Media set in Oakland
Film
- The opening and closing scenes of Black Panther take place in Oakland, in reference to the political party of the same name that was founded there (and the fact that it's director Ryan Coogler's hometown).
- Moneyball is about the Oakland A's and their efforts to remain competitive with a fraction of the budget that their better-funded competitors have.
- Sorry to Bother You entirely takes place here.
- Blindspotting is also entirely set here, complete with slang and the commentary on the city's rapidly increasing rate of gentrification, with the leads/writers hailing from the city.
Live-Action TV
- The later seasons of Sons of Anarchy are often set in Oakland away from the eponymous motorcycle gang's homebase of Charming (a fictional town located 50 miles from Oakland).
Music
- "iii. Telegraph Ave ("Oakland" by Lloyd)" by Childish Gambino is about The Boy, the main character of because the internet, driving from Los Angeles to Oakland to visit his ex-girlfriend while the fictional song "Oakland" plays on the radio.
Video Games
- Watch_Dogs 2 features Oakland as part of its Bay Area setting, where it is also the hometown of the game's protagonist.
Web Original
- Takotsubo: The story of a superhero on HitRECord is a Deconstruction of the Superhero Origin that follows Cord Cai, an Asian-American gangster who lives there. Oakland's unfortunate reputation as a Wretched Hive features heavily, since the twenty-something Cord spent his life trying to get out of the streets, only to start a gang in despair after his fiance dies. Word of God says that Cord is a superhero but can't acknowledge it due to Internalized Categorism, and the tagline states that "Despite his own beliefs, he is in fact a hero."
People from Oakland
- Mahershala Ali (born in Oakland, raised nearby in Hayward)
- Jerry Brown (born and raised in San Francisco, but moved to Oakland in the early '90s and served as mayor from 1999–2007)
- David Carradine (born in Los Angeles, raised mostly in the northeast US, but graduated from high school in Oakland)
- Ryan Coogler (born in Oakland, raised nearby in Richmond)
- Clint Eastwood (born in San Francisco; mostly raised in Piedmont, a small city completely surrounded by Oakland, but graduated from a high school in The Town proper)
- G-Eazy (born in Oakland; spent early childhood in Fresno before moving to Berkeley and then back to Oakland)
- Cary Fukunaga (born in Oakland; raised in multiple Bay Area cities)
- Mark Hamill (born in Oakland as a Navy brat, which led him to move numerous times while growing up)
- MC Hammer (born and raised; even served as a batboy for the A's during his teen years)
- Kamala Harris (born in Oakland;' raised in the Midwest, Berkeley, and Montreal; launched her political career in the Bay Area)
- Brandon Lee (born in Oakland; shuttled between Hong Kong and California as a child due to his father's acting career)
- Bruce Lee (briefly lived in Oakland in the late 1960s, during which time Brandon was born)
- Bill Russell (born and raised)
- Zendaya (born and raised)
