City Center, Oakland, CA

City Center is the commercial heart of downtown Oakland, a roughly twelve-block stretch between Broadway and Martin Luther King Jr. Way that runs from Frank Ogawa Plaza down toward the Convention Center. This is office Oakland: Class A towers, a privately owned open-air shopping mall at its core, and the 12th Street BART station feeding it from underground. It is built for the workday more than for living, with housing mostly at the edges where it blends into Old Oakland and Uptown. The appeal is pure access. The 12th Street station puts the entire BART map a staircase away, Ogawa Plaza hosts a farmers market and the city's civic events, and the restaurants and cafes of Old Oakland, Chinatown, and Uptown are all within a few flat blocks. The pedestrian core keeps cars out of the central lanes, though the streets quiet down sharply after office hours and on weekends, and the public realm is plazas and concourses rather than parks or yards. City Center is less a traditional neighborhood than a transit-anchored downtown district. For anyone who wants to step out the door onto BART and into a wall-to-wall lineup of lunch spots, it delivers; what it does not offer is greenery, evening street life, or much of a residential feel once the towers empty out.