The Facade at Esther’s Orbit Room Is in Mortar Peril

A few years ago, Noni Session kept losing her keys. "Over and over again, in really astonishing ways," she says.

She'd come to work in the morning at Esther's Orbit Room — a former jazz club and restaurant that Session and her team is trying to preserve and restore along Seventh Street in West Oakland — and over the course of the day it was as if the construction site would find new, surprising ways to make her keys disappear. Eventually, Session offered up a deal with the space: She made a copy of the keys for the venue’s original owner Esther, and placed them on an altar she had set up to honor the woman's legacy.

"We haven't lost keys since," Session says.

Today, Esther's Orbit Room is the crown jewel of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative’s (EB PREC) Cooperative Cultural Corridor Revitalization Plan (a mouthful, Session recognizes). The most recent challenge they face is unexpected: the building’s iconic stone facade.

A few weeks ago, EB PREC posted a plea to Instagram: "Our construction company and other builders insist that conserving or reproducing the current rock facade is either impossible or cost prohibitive due to a decline in skilled craftsmanship in our country." Session tells me that the contractors they've asked so far wouldn't even give her a quote for saving the wall. Tear it down, they said, seeing no point in trying to save it.

But Session and the EB PREC are not willing to part with the facade that has marked Esther's Orbit Room for so many decades. And their attempt to preserve this wall offers a lens into not just the challenges of historic preservation for important sites of Black history, but also a suite of philosophical questions about what it means to respect and preserve a place with a complicated history.