Business
Oakland Co-op Buys Historic Esther’s Orbit Room Space
The revitalization of Esther’s, and EB PREC’s mission, has a deep personal connection for Session, EB PREC’s executive director and a Black, third generation West Oaklander who has struggled to keep her childhood home.
“It’s like life just stopped here,” said Noni Session, as we stood inside a large dusty room on Seventh street in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland on Indigenous People’s Day. The black, sparkly ceiling emitted a celestial vibe. Rows of liquor bottles sat partially full behind a 20-foot wooden bar while vinyl ’70s style stools rested in front. Gentle yellow light was omnipresent. A calendar opened to May 2010 hung in front of a mirror.
Words on a colorful but faded sign out front showed this place was once “Esther’s Orbit Room,” a vibrant cultural hub for Black Oaklanders that stayed open for about 50 years before it shuttered its doors shortly after its owner, Esther Mabry, died at age 90 in 2010. On September 30, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) closed on purchasing this space. They plan to revitalize it as an extension of their overall mission to help Black, Indigenous and people of color remain and thrive in the East Bay.
The revitalization of Esther’s, and EB PREC’s mission, has a deep personal connection for Session, EB PREC’s executive director and a Black, third generation West Oaklander who has struggled to keep her childhood home. In the ’80s she and her father stopped at Esther’s regularly before they would go fishing at a nearby pier. At that time, it wasn’t just a bar and restaurant but also a shop where her father could buy bait and she could get a treat.
Memories of Esther’s Orbit Room are still alive in the neighborhood. As Session and I talked, we were fortuitously interrupted two separate times by Black, long-term residents who just happened to be passing by and noticed the open door. They both briefly shared fond recollections of the place, and excitedly asked about the reopening. One of these people was 60 year old Pamela Brown.
“[Esther’s] was a happy place,” Brown said. “There were not that many places Blacks could go and be comfortable, but that was one of those places.”
Brown remembers Esther’s always being packed in the ’70s and ’80s and that “the vibe was just awesome and friendly.” She loved the southern comfort food they served: greens, pork chops, black eyed peas and hamburgers. Brown’s uncle, Nathaniel Harrison, remembers it being a great place to socialize around that time and that people were always dancing to the jukebox. Although Brown and Harrison were too young to experience it, legendary musicians like BB King, T-Bone Walker and Ike & Tina Turner performed at Esther’s in the 60s.
As I asked Session about what EB PREC’s revitalization project could look like, she told me about dreams she’s been having lately that place her inside Esther’s and wake her in the night to visions of “old school, Black church mixed with afro-futuristic aesthetics.” While several specific design ideas interest her, like installing colorful stained glass window art and putting a mural up of Maasai people walking across planets, she is excited that there is still a lot of uncertainty about the space. That uncertainty exists because its re-creation will be a massive collaboration involving many people who aren’t even in the EB PREC collective yet.
How EB PREC Works
Session is just one cog in a wheel that keeps EB PREC spinning. Well over 400 people currently form the collective in a complex process of communal ownership. While Esther’s will be EB PREC’s first commercial business, it’s not their first project. In 2019, and 2020, they purchased two East Bay homes that currently house 13 resident collective members, almost all of whom are BIPOC.
These residents all pay less than $900 per month toward costs required to secure and maintain the homes. At the end of the year, residents can get paid back any surplus if their payments exceed these costs. It’s all part of EB PREC’s process of replacing landlords with communal ownership and permanently taking housing and land off the speculative market in order to keep it affordable.
“There’s no supply and demand issue when it comes to housing; the demand comes from the demand for investment assets,” said Ojan Mobedshahi, EB PREC’s Finance Director. “Our move is to de-commodify land and we never consider putting it back on the market to profit from it.”
One way EB PREC has raised the capital to make these affordable homes accessible and the Esther project possible is by also including community owners in the collective who live in the area and each pay $10 a week, a year, or a month, depending on what they can afford. The community owners offer feedback and guidance on EB PREC’s projects and also have a direct role in electing some of EB PREC’s board members.
Individual investors also play a crucial role in EB PREC by buying shares of the collective for $1,000 each. None of them will strike it rich. EB PREC offers these people a targeted 1.5% yearly return on shares, about what one would expect to secure from a savings account and much lower than what one would expect from a typical real estate investment.
The collective’s website stresses that a key boon in becoming a shareholder is the ability to “feel good about your money being invested in community.” But unlike community owners, investors don’t share an active role in decision making. EB PREC also gets loans from foundations that are aligned with their vision and offer low to no interest loans.
The work and/or money of EB PREC’s five-member staff, 13 owner residents, and hundreds of community owners and investors has made it possible to secure two Bay Area homes and start revitalizing Esther’s, a project they see costing around $5 million. To finish the Esther’s project though, EB PREC needs a new classification of people to join them called commercial co-owners. They see the large indoor spaces hosting a bar and café that they hope will have music performances as well as a healing arts center while the backyard will host a farmers’ market. They’re seeking BIPOC people with expertise in those areas to run and take communal ownership of those spaces with EB PREC.
“Even in my dreams many of the walls are just prepped for art instead of having art on them,” Session said, pointing around to the spaces in Esther’s. “It’s not like how can we cover all the walls with our ideas but how can we prepare a palette that holds our mission and also holds space for other people’s creativity and control?”
Session sees the symbol of the palette in her dreams as the space that commercial co-owners and the community can help to fill. She has many questions like: What kind of cafe will be in the place? What kind of plants can the backspace have? What kind of music will be played in the space? What kind of healing arts practitioners will come? What kind of food will be served?
“We know we can’t be totally clear on what this space will be until it has its humans,” Session said. “Right now, we’re sort of its steward humans.”
As EB PREC searches for BIPOC commercial co-owners, they’re again seeking more resident collective members as the Esther’s property also has residential units that can house at least six people. They hope to build a community of BIPOC business owners and residents to bring vibrant life to Esther’s once again.
Building from Seventh street’s vibrant Black past
To look back at how the original Esther’s Orbit Room was founded in the early ’60s could likely read as a fairy tale to the modern reader as the economic conditions, particularly for Black people, were radically different at that time. Esther Mabry, a Black woman who came to West Oakland from Palestine, Texas at age 22, in 1942, worked as a waitress at Slim Jenkins Supper Club, a legendary Seventh Street jazz and blues club, and was able to save enough from tips to start her own restaurant in 1950.
She named it Esther’s Breakfast Room. By the early ’60s, just around the time Slim Jenkins Supper Club and other similar establishments were closing, Esther and her husband William, a worker at the now closed Alameda Naval Air Station, had enough capital to buy a new space and open Esther’s Orbit Room.
Esther’s and William’s ability to open their business was likely aided by World War II and its subsequent postwar economic boom of the ’40s and ’50s that brought decent paying jobs, disposable income and homeownership to much of West Oakland’s Black population. Seventh Street was lively at that time and full of Black-owned businesses, including dozens of Black-owned jazz and blues clubs.
“It was the place to be,” Mabry said in an interview from 2002. “They used to have music playing and the hot tamale man. They would have shows and dances and theaters. You could just go from one club right to another. But no one’s there anymore.”
Writer Jennifer Soliman briefly and poignantly shows much of the complex reasons for the demise of these economic and social conditions in her historical essay “The Rise and Fall of Seventh Street.” They included federal urban renewal projects and the creation of BART, both of which lead to the destruction of Black-owned homes and the displacement of much of the Black population. In the same 2002 interview, Mabry lamented that there were no longer Black business owners in that location and said, “I’m the only one that’s left.”
These days, starting a successful business on Seventh Street based solely on the capital two people earn who don’t have deep generational wealth may seem like a pipe dream. But in one instance, a cooperative model has worked. The BlPOC worker owned Mandala Grocery Cooperative, which sits across from West Oakland’s BART station, employs seven people and has been open over a decade.
Session hopes EB PREC’s new collective project will help bring some of the vibrant Black life Seventh street once had back to the area by creating an economic and artistic anchor point around Esther’s. For that to happen, Session said she realized more than just housing was needed for BIPOC people, but an economy that they co-create. She hopes the Esther’s project can contribute to that and serve as a model for others.
In the meantime, Pamela Brown eagerly awaits what’s to come from the rebirth of a place that brought her so much joy decades ago.
“This is such a good idea,” Brown said. “It’s a great place to be revitalized.”
The Oakland Post’s coverage of local news in Alameda County is supported by the Ethnic Media Sustainability Initiative, a program created by California Black Media and Ethnic Media Services to support community newspapers across California.
Black History
Listening as a Lifeline: A Doula’s Witness to Black Maternal Health
OAKLAND POST — Maternal mortality and pregnancy-related mortality use different time frames and methods and are not interchangeable. Finalized 2024 CDC data recorded 649 maternal deaths nationally. The overall rate was 17.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, but for non-Hispanic Black women it was 44.8, compared with 14.2 for White women and 12.1 for Hispanic women.
Word Count: 1058
Note: Client A, B & C, names are withheld for privacy; these accounts reflect my recollections as their Doula.
Client A rocked her hips on a birthing ball, surrounded by pale wood and warm textiles in a softly lit Scandinavian-style office. I was her doula through a Southern California maternal health company combining nurse-led care, technology, and wraparound support.
She was a healthy Black woman in her thirties. Her baby girl was doing well; her partner took notes as we discussed labor and advocacy.
Then we turned to their chosen hospital. I knew it well—and remembered a phrase from another client’s experience: “Policy of Sovereignty.”
Client B had been told she needed a repeat cesarean as a precaution, though the reasoning was unclear. Her obstetrician, who performed her first cesarean two years earlier, had assured her throughout pregnancy that she was healthy, healed, and ready for a vaginal birth. We asked staff to review her chart, consult her obstetrician, and reconsider immediate surgery. Instead, they invoked the “Policy of Sovereignty.”
The physician on duty, we were told, had final authority, regardless of her established care plan. I asked whether an ultrasound or reassessing the baby’s position could offer clarity. Cesareans can be lifesaving. But were Client B’s history, informed consent, and circumstances guiding this decision—or was routine overriding individualized care? We kept asking for her obstetrician. Beneath every request was a deeper question: Was she being heard?
The Numbers Behind the Stories
Statistics arrive in clean columns. The experiences behind them do not.
Maternal mortality and pregnancy-related mortality use different time frames and methods and are not interchangeable. Finalized 2024 CDC data recorded 649 maternal deaths nationally. The overall rate was 17.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, but for non-Hispanic Black women it was 44.8, compared with 14.2 for White women and 12.1 for Hispanic women.
In California, Black birthing people experienced 56.5 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births during 2020–2022—3.8 times the White rate and four times the Asian rate.
As a doula serving Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties, I see faces behind those numbers. I remember concerns raised softly, then firmly, then desperately. I am tired of watching Black families enter spaces meant to protect them, only to discover they must defend themselves while laboring, bleeding, trembling, or recovering.
Returning to Client A
Client A’s labor stretched nearly 48 hours. As her condition worsened, she, her partner, and I asked whether a cesarean should happen sooner. A provider questioned my place as a doula, then said she was next.
Six more hours passed.
She entered surgery visibly ill with a serious uterine infection, her baby malpositioned and stuck. Her partner later recalled the provider saying, “This baby would never have made it through the birth canal.”
Those words landed like a blow. Our urgency had been treated as ignorance. With Client B, we questioned why surgery was inevitable. With Client A, why it was delayed. Doula advocacy is not about one kind of birth. It is about informed consent, individualized care, and timely action. Hospital routine should never outweigh the person carrying the risk.
Survival Cannot Be the Standard
The Black maternal health crisis includes unequal care, untreated conditions, racial bias, delayed referrals, poor communication, and inadequate postpartum support. It is about birth plans respected only until a hospital becomes less busy and postpartum care that asks whether a mother survived, not whether she has what she needs to recover.
Survival cannot be the standard. Technology can support care, but it cannot replace human connection. An algorithm cannot detect fear in a patient’s eyes, and a mission statement alone cannot ensure adequate staffing or culturally responsive care.
The Story of Client C
Before I arrived, I heard the chaos through Client C’s phone. Staff struggled to locate her baby’s heartbeat on an external monitor as her fear and blood pressure rose. I pleaded for an internal electrode before surgery.
“There’s not enough time,” a nurse said.
“I would like to wait for my doula,” Client C called out.
But she was medicated, hurried through consent, and wheeled away while I listened.
In the operating room, after a shift change, another nurse placed an internal electrode and said, “The previous monitor wasn’t working.”
No one responded.
According to her father, the obstetrician avoided eye contact: “We need to move forward.”
Surgery may still have been necessary; that was not mine to determine. But if faulty equipment helped create the emergency, the family deserved acknowledgment and explanation—not silence. No family should have to wonder whether major surgery followed an unavoidable crisis or a machine failure no one recognized in time.
From Prevention to Accountability
After supporting nearly 100 families, I have learned that danger often begins before admission. I have urged clients to seek care—and heard why they feared returning: dismissed pain, harsh words, shame for asking questions.
Care cannot be holistic where Black families do not feel safe enough to speak or return. Representation matters, but providers of color cannot repair inequity alone. They need adequate staffing, mentorship, culturally responsive training, reliable equipment, and colleagues that are reflective of all the aforementioned. It’s not the Black providers job to care for just the Black patients, everyone should have the same goal.
The Momnibus Act, California’s Medi-Cal doula benefit, the Transforming Maternal Health Model and the Perinatal Equity Initiative require more than promises; they need sustained funding, reliable reimbursement and accountable implementation.
Birth should be sacred. Yet too many Black birthing people arrive carrying the burden of proving their pain is real. A doula can listen, educate, comfort, and advocate—but cannot repair a system that refuses to listen. The true measure of progress is what happens when a Black birthing person says, “Something is wrong.”
Are they believed? When equipment fails, is that failure acknowledged? Do families leave not merely alive, but safe, respected, supported, and whole?
Until those answers are consistently yes, California’s maternal health success story remains unfinished.
About the Author
Antoinette Stewart-Eneh is a mother of two, holistic maternal wellness advocate, and birth and postpartum doula who has supported families since 2019. She serves as program operations coordinator for Frontline Doulas, a volunteer client coordinator with the Joy in Birthing Foundation and a childbirth educator in South Los Angeles. She is studying to become a midwife and lactation educator.
Activism
Oakland Post: Week of September 30 – October 6, 2026
The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of September 30 – October 6, 2026
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Business
From Historic Memories to New Possibilities: Oakland Celebrates Coliseum 60
More than 75 people gathered at Youth UpRising in East Oakland on Friday, September 18, for Coliseum 60, an event marking six decades of sports, entertainment, employment, and community memories at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Complex. Held 60 years to the day after the Coliseum first opened, the celebration featured cultural performances and a mini-documentary highlighting its history. Speakers reflected on the venue’s significant role in the community and its future possibilities. Read more to learn about the individuals and stories honored during this special event.
More than 75 people gathered at Youth UpRising in East Oakland on Friday, Sept. 18, for Coliseum 60, a celebration honoring six decades of sports, entertainment, employment and community memories connected to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Complex.
Held 60 years to the day after the Coliseum opened, the event carried the theme, “One Community. One Legacy. One Future. Forward Together.”
The celebration opened with the national anthem performed by sisters Anese Jade, Amina Benjamin and Zaza Benjamin. Diamano Coura West African Dance Company contributed African dance and drumming, bringing movement, rhythm and cultural expression to the program.
A mini documentary highlighted the Coliseum’s sports history and its broader role as an entertainment destination. Archival material recalled performances by Prince and Tina Turner, along with memorable games featuring the Warriors, Oakland A’s and Raiders.
“The Coliseum 60 is about much more than celebrating a building or looking back at 60 years of history,” said event organizer Quixote Atkins of VillageGIVE.
“It’s about the people who made that history possible: the families, workers, athletes, artists, community leaders, fans and generations who gathered there and created memories together.”
A panel exploring that history featured author, historian and former Black Panther Party member Tareka Lewis; stagehand and union representative Keith Brown; and Ray Bobbitt, president of the African American Sports and Entertainment Group AASEG. Lewis described her family as fourth-generation Bay Area pioneers.
“My family and Black families who arrived even earlier helped build the Bay Area, grew businesses and established culture here,” Lewis said. “This should be taught in the public schools.”
Lewis recalled Oakland’s influence on sports, music and literature, from the Raiders’ beginnings at Laney College to stars such as The Pointer Sisters and Rickey Henderson who attended Oakland public schools. She also advocated for school museums, historical timelines, entrepreneurship training and investments benefiting corridors such as Bancroft Avenue and High Street.
Keith Brown, a member of Local 107 of the International Alliance of Theater and Stage Employees (IATSE) who began working at the Coliseum in 2011, remembered the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the Ice Capades, baseball bat giveaways and Nelson Mandela’s 1990 appearance.
“The special events are amazing, but it’s the workers that make the memories real for everyone,” Brown said. “They make the magic happen at the Coliseum.”
The program recognized longtime workers, including beer-stand manager Robert Preston, who served for 40 years, and Kenyatta Gentry, who worked as a vendor for 24 years and used her earnings to purchase her first apartment. Union workers Jose Gonzales and Carmen Sandoval were also honored. Speakers emphasized that Coliseum employment provided generations of residents with union wages and benefits.
Dr. Denise Saddler, the superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) was also honored. Saddler shared her family’s history of working at the Coliseum.
District 7 Oakland City Councilmember Ken Houston discussed the complex ownership arrangements involving the city, county and private interests.
“This was the most complex deal of its kind in the country,” Houston said.
Prior to moving from the East Coast, Alameda County Supervisor and Coliseum Joint Powers Authority Chair Nate Miley recalled learning about Oakland through its three professional sports teams. As an elected official and public servant, Miley fought hard to keep the Golden State Warriors, Oakland As, and the Raiders, but he is hopeful for the future.
“The story is not over for the Coliseum,” Miley said. “We’re entering a new chapter.”
Bobbitt said the departure of three teams had once seemed unimaginable, but he maintained that Oakland’s future remains bright.
“Oakland is a cultural superpower worldwide,” Bobbitt said. “We’re going to write the future where we participate and drive the redevelopment.”
Bobbitt highlighted AASEG’s four-year partnership with Castlemont High School’s architecture program, which engages students in reimagining and creating redevelopment concepts for the Coliseum property. “The youth will always move us forward. They are the future.”
In closing, Atkins said, “September 18 is the celebration, but what we build together afterward is the legacy.”
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