OAKLAND HOTELS BLOG!

The Key's investors (incorporated as the "Realty Syndicate") also established two large hotels in Oakland, one of which survives as the Claremont Resort. The other, which burned down in the early 1930s, was the Key Route Inn, located at what is now West Grand and Broadway. From 1904 to 1929, the Realty Syndicate also operated a major amusement park in north Oakland called Idora Park.

The original extent of Oakland upon its incorporation lay south of today's major intersection of San Pablo Avenue, Broadway and 14th Street. The city gradually annexed farmlands and settlements to the east and north. Oakland's rise to industrial prominence and its subsequent need for a seaport led to the digging of a shipping and tidal channel in 1902, creating the "island" of nearby town Alameda.

Oakland City Center is an office and shopping complex in downtown Oakland, California. It covers twelve city blocks between Broadway and Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 14th Street abuts the northeast side of the complex and the Oakland Convention Center and Marriott Hotel extend southwest to 10th Street.

A large section of ornate Victorian and Italianate style apartment buildings, with ground-floor retail shops in the center of Downtown Oakland, was appropriated by the city through the force of eminent domain and demolished to make way for what was originally proposed to be an enclosed shopping mall, high-rise office buildings, a hotel, and an aboveground parking structure. In the draft Central District Plan, the Oakland Redevelopment Agency originally had an ambitious goal of razing 70 city blocks, but neighborhood residents and the Downtown Property Owner's Association objected, and the plan was scaled back to only 12 blocks between 10th and 14th Streets on the west side of Broadway.