Security Bank and Trust Company Building

The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, along with numerous research centers and academic abroad centers. The system is the state's land-grant university.The University of California was founded on March 23, 1868, and operated in Oakland before moving to Berkeley in 1873. Over time, several branch locations and satellite programs were established. In March 1951, the University of California began to reorganize itself into something distinct from its campus in Berkeley, with UC President Robert Gordon Sproul staying in place as chief executive of the UC system, while Clark Kerr became the first chancellor of UC Berkeley and Raymond B. Allen became the first chancellor of UCLA. However, the 1951 reorganization was stalled by resistance from Sproul and his allies, and it was not until Kerr succeeded Sproul as UC President that UC was able to evolve into a university system from 1957 to 1960. At that time, chancellors were appointed for additional campuses and each was granted some degree of greater autonomy.The University of California currently has 10 campuses, a combined student body of 285,862 students, 24,400 faculty members, 143,200 staff members and over 2.0 million living alumni. Its newest campus in Merced opened in fall 2005. Nine campuses enroll both undergraduate and graduate students; one campus, UC San Francisco, enrolls only graduate and professional students in the medical and health sciences. In addition, the UC Hastings College of the Law, located in San Francisco, is legally affiliated with UC, but other than sharing its name is entirely autonomous from the rest of the system. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-system public higher education plan, which also includes the California State University system and the California Community Colleges system. UC is governed by a Board of Regents whose autonomy from the rest of the state government is protected by the state constitution. The University of California also manages or co-manages three national laboratories for the U.S. Department of Energy: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).Major publications generally rank most UC campuses as being among the best universities in the world. Eight of the campuses, Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Santa Cruz, and Riverside, are considered Public Ivies, making California the state with the most universities in the nation to hold the title. UC campuses have large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every academic discipline, with UC faculty and researchers having won 71 Nobel Prizes as of 2021.

The Bank of America Building, also called Oakland Bank Building and Oakland Bank of Savings, is a 69 m (226 ft) high-rise located in downtown Oakland, California. The building was originally constructed with nine floors, and the 18-story tower was annexed later. It was built as a headquarters for the Oakland Bank, which was acquired by Bank of America in 1929.

The Clorox Building is a 24-story, 100.6 m (330 ft) High-rise building in the City Center complex of downtown Oakland, California. The building was completed in 1976, and designed by Cesar Pelli when he worked with Gruen Associates now based in Los Angeles. The Oakland-based Clorox Company is headquartered in the building.

12th Street/Oakland City Center station is an underground Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station located under Broadway between 12th Street and 14th Street in Downtown Oakland, adjacent to the Oakland City Center. It is the second-busiest BART station in both Oakland and the East Bay (just after 19th Street Oakland), and the 6th busiest BART station overall, with a daily ridership of approximately 13,900 in February 2020.The station has three underground levels, with tracks on the second and third levels. It is served by the Richmond–Millbrae+SFO line, Berryessa/​North San José–Richmond line, and Antioch–SFO+Millbrae line, as well as by AC Transit buses on the surface. Oakland City Center/12th Street station opened in 1972 as part of the first section of BART. In 1980–1986, the KE Track project added the third track to the station. From 1992 to 2002, and 2004 to 2010, it was the timed transfer point between northbound trains. Tempo bus rapid transit service began in 2020.

The Tribune Tower is a 305-ft. (93 m), 22-story building located in downtown Oakland, California. Built in 1906, tower erected in 1923, the 89,251 sq.-ft. (8,291 sq.-m.) building was the tallest building in Oakland constructed in the 1920s. It is currently the 11th tallest building in Oakland. The architecture of the tower, much like The Campanile on the UC Berkeley campus (officially the Sather Tower), was inspired by St Mark's Campanile in Venice, Italy. The building was opened by Joseph R. Knowland on January 1, 1924, as the home of the Oakland Tribune newspaper, and is a symbol of both the Tribune and the city of Oakland.

10th Street Market, also known as the Swan's Market, Oakland Free Market or the Sanitary Free Market, was a commercial market district in Oakland, California. 10th Street Market was built in 1917 and expanded in 1926. It was named to the National Register of Historic Places on August 3, 2001. It is now known as Swan's Marketplaces, a mixed-use commercial and residential area. In 2001 Swan's Marketplace was awarded the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence silver medal.

The Oakland Wye is an underground flying wye junction in downtown Oakland, California which serves the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. Trains can switch between (a) the northbound Richmond or Antioch lines (first station: 12th Street Oakland City Center, underground), (b) the westbound San Francisco lines (first station: West Oakland, elevated), and (c) the southbound Berryessa or Dublin/Pleasanton lines (first station: Lake Merritt, underground).: 45–46  The Oakland Wye is the center of the BART system (all mileposts measure distance from the wye), and is a bottleneck for the whole system because every regularly scheduled BART train (except for the Oakland Airport Connector and eBART) passes through it.

The Oakland Asian Cultural Center, also referred to as the OACC, is an Oakland-based nonprofit cultural center that carries out Asian and Pacific Islander American arts and culture programs. It is located in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza in Oakland Chinatown, residing three blocks away from the 12th Street Civic Center BART station on Broadway. In the early 1980s, a community coalition asked for a space for a pan-Asian Cultural Center and the Asian Library, expressing a desire for an artistic and cultural space in the Chinatown area of Oakland. Historian Eve Ma notes that the Oakland Asian Cultural Center started in December 1984 as the East Bay Chinese Culture Center. In 1987, as it began acquiring help from the city government and recognizing that Chinatown's composition had changed, the Center changed its name, broadening its aim to include all Asian cultures."Since opening its own facility in 1996 Oakland’s Chinatown district, the OACC has offered cultural programs including performances, workshops, festivals, school tours, classes, and exhibitions.

Oakland City Center is an office, shopping and hotel complex in Downtown Oakland, Oakland, California. The complex is the product of a redevelopment project begun in the late 1950s. It covers twelve city blocks between Broadway on the east, Martin Luther King Jr. Way on the west, Frank H. Ogawa Plaza on 14th Street on the north side of the complex and the Oakland Convention Center and Marriott Hotel extend south to 10th Street. An hourly parking garage is located beneath the complex's shopping mall. The mall features an upscale fitness and racquet club, in addition to numerous take-out restaurants and other stores. The complex is served by the 12th Street/Oakland City Center BART station.

The College of California was a private college in Oakland, California. It is the predecessor of the University of California public university system.

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (stylized as The MADE) is an Oakland, California, museum dedicated to digital art and gaming, with fully playable gaming exhibits. Its mission is to collect and curate video games, digital media concept art, and gaming systems, to teach the public about digital art and the process of gaming creation. The Board of Directors and Board of Advisors are composed largely of veterans of the gaming industry, journalists, experts, and historians of the field. The museum's director is the internationally published technology journalist Alex Handy, with Dr. Henry Lowood, Curator of Stanford University History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections serving on the board of directors. In September 2015, the museum launched a Kickstarter campaign to acquire a venue in San Francisco, California, across the bay.In June 2022, after being closed for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum reopened in a new location in downtown Oakland.

Old Oakland is a historic district in downtown Oakland, California. The area is located on the northwest side of Broadway, between the City Center complex and the Jack London Square district, and across Broadway from Chinatown. The Old Oakland district was the "original" downtown Oakland during the 1860s after Central Pacific Railroad constructed a terminus on 7th Street. By the 1870s, elegant brick Victorian hotels were being built in the blocks surrounding the railroad station to accommodate travelers. The ground floor of the hotels were designed as series of narrow shops so that pedestrians would pass by many of them just walking down the block. The architectural styles of the time featured tall, cast-iron columns and large plate-glass windows. The downtown began its decline after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, when the shopping district began moving to the blocks north of 14th. In the 1970s and 1980s developers carefully rehabilitated and restored a block along 9th Street between Washington Street and Broadway, known as "Victorian Row". Notable structures on Victorian Row include the 1878 Nicholl Block building. In its early days, the Oakland Tribune rented a small office on 9th Street. A sign for the Tribune office can still be seen hanging outside the building today (2007). A farmer's market is also held every Friday on the same stretch of 9th Street. As of 2008, the neighborhood continues to gentrify as a 'downtown lifestyle' district, more bistros and boutiques have cropped-up, as more market-rate condominiums have been constructed nearby, and as transit-oriented development retail and housing become more and more in demand. Swan's Market for example is an indoor-outdoor market and popular gather place for lunch.