• 16th Street Train Station
• Mandela Parkway
• Interstate 880 corridor
• West Oakland BART Station
• Adeline Street
• Cypress Freeway Memorial

Lower Bottoms is the colloquial and now established name for the lowest-lying section of West Oakland, its terrain reclaimed from the marshy bay-edge environment that characterized this part of the shoreline before Oakland's industrial development transformed it. Formed circa 1869 alongside the transcontinental railroad boom that made Oakland the Pacific terminus of the Central Pacific Railroad, the neighborhood drew the port workers, rail laborers, and new arrivals who built West Oakland's earliest working-class communities. The 16th Street Train Station — the Beaux-Arts civic monument completed in 1912 by architect Jarvis Hunt and listed on the National Register of Historic Places — stands as the neighborhood's most significant architectural landmark, currently undergoing restoration as a cultural and community facility. The construction of Interstate 880 in the postwar decades cut through the neighborhood's urban fabric, displacing hundreds of households and severing street connections that had defined the community for generations — a wound documented in the California Department of Transportation's own historical records. Mandela Parkway — built on the former Cypress Freeway structure that collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake — now serves as the neighborhood's primary green corridor. That history of labor, displacement, and persistent community is the foundation of the MY-NHD Lower Bottoms collection.