First Friday - Photo Credit: Daniel Arauz
Oakland First Fridays may be in danger of shutting down, which would be a shame because the event has become one of the city's favorite scapegoats.
Somehow, First Fridays has achieved a feat usually reserved for Satan, violent video games, and rap music in the 1990s: it gets blamed for things that happen nowhere near it and hours after it's over.
If a meteor crashes into Lake Merritt at 3 a.m., there's a decent chance someone will find a way to connect it to First Fridays.
The event, which has spent the last two decades turning a stretch of Telegraph Avenue into a giant block party full of artists, food vendors, musicians, families, and people selling things made out of recycled bicycle parts, is suddenly fighting for its life. Sponsors are backing away, finances are shaky, and organizers warn the festival could disappear entirely.
The reasoning is strange.
Several violent incidents that generated headlines this year occurred downtown, in nightlife districts, or hours after First Fridays had ended. Yet the festival's name often found its way into the coverage anyway. It's the journalistic equivalent of blaming the Oakland A's for a DUI that happens after a Raiders game.
Oakland certainly has public safety problems. Anyone pretending otherwise is either lying or trying to sell a condo. But Oakland's problems did not begin with First Fridays, and they won't disappear if the event goes away.
In fact, shutting down First Fridays would be a lot like responding to a leaky roof by setting the house on fire.
The festival is one of the few events in Oakland that consistently gets thousands of people out of their homes and into public space for something other than work, consumption, or doomscrolling. On any given First Friday you'll find old Oakland, new Oakland, people who moved here last week, people who complain about those people, families pushing strollers, teenagers trying to look cool, and at least one guy who appears to make his entire living selling incense.
That's not a public safety problem. That's called a city.
What's happening after midnight in entertainment districts is a different conversation entirely. Lumping everything together because it occurs on the same date makes about as much sense as blaming Thanksgiving for Black Friday fistfights at Walmart.
The real irony is that people constantly complain that Oakland is losing its culture, losing its artists, losing its weirdness, losing the things that make it Oakland. Then one of the biggest cultural events in the city starts struggling and the response is essentially, "Well, maybe we should get rid of that too."
Brilliant strategy.
If Oakland wants to be more than a collection of apartment buildings, breweries, and nostalgic memories, it needs institutions like First Fridays. The city should be figuring out how to support it, not how to bury it.
Because once you kill something that actually brings people together, replacing it is a lot harder than blaming it.
