• California Hotel
• MacArthur BART Station
• M. Robinson Baker YMCA
• Black Liberation Walking Tour

Hoover-Foster is a West Oakland neighborhood named after two schools that served the community for nearly a century — Hoover Junior High and Marcus Foster Middle School. The neighborhood drew generations of Black Southern migrants who came to the East Bay during and after World War II to work in Kaiser's shipyards and as Pullman Porters on the transcontinental railroad. They brought with them the music, cuisine, and organizing traditions of the Jim Crow South, making Hoover-Foster a center of Black cultural and civic life in Northern California.

The California Hotel on San Pablo Avenue stands as the neighborhood's most enduring landmark — its ground-floor Zanzibar Club hosted Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, and Pete Escovedo during the mid-century heyday when Hoover-Foster's commercial strip was one of the most vital Black business corridors on the West Coast. The construction of the 580, 980, and 24 freeways in the 1960s and 1970s displaced thousands of residents and businesses, but the neighborhood has sustained its identity through community-led efforts including the Black Liberation Walking Tour, which documents over a century of Black self-determination on these streets.

Hoover-Foster is Oakland history you carry with you. MY-NHD's tee is made for those who know that what was built on these blocks — in music, in activism, in community — shaped the city and the culture well beyond its borders.