Taking a trip to another campus? Here’s where faculty and staff who live there will recommend you go first.
Northeastern Global News reporter Kate Rix is a Bay Area lifer. Born and raised in Oakland’s Montclair neighborhood, she attended the University of Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley and has spent her journalism career covering Northern California.
Before joining Northeastern, she worked at a small weekly paper in Marin County, a wire service in the Bay Area and the Sacramento Bee. Though she knows the whole region inside out, her top Oakland recommendation is more or less in her own backyard.
“I live down by Lake Merritt, which is this big lake right in the middle of Oakland,” Rix says.
She likes to take visitors on a walking tour of the neighborhood, which is about a 10-minute drive from the Oakland campus and full of 1930s-era architectural charm. At the narrow tip of the lake is the Grand Lake Theatre, an old movie palace in operation since 1926. You can visit a huge farmers market on Saturdays and stop by Walden Pond Books, an independent bookseller where a pair of Samoyeds — Amos and Kip — roam the stacks.
Up the street is a French wine bar, Ordinaire, that serves natural wines with a “funky, farmyard taste,” according to Rix, and appetizers like tinned fish and cheese. For dinner, she recommends Almond and Oak, a converted warehouse with a New American menu and huge windows.
To walk off all that wine and food, there’s a well-kept 3-mile trail around Lake Merritt itself, fed by the San Antonio Creek. The lake is also the oldest bird sanctuary in North America, with egrets, ducks and pelicans nesting on small islands in the middle.
“You can take a loop and have all of your needs met,” Rix says. “Get your books, get your wine, get your dinner, see a movie, walk home around the lake. That’ll be our evening.”