Virtually Seventh Street: A team at the CNM is developing an Internet program that takes users back 60 years to when Oakland's Seventh Street was a swinging, gambling, thriving district. Courtesy of Center for New Media

THE YEAR IS 1946. THE PLACE IS SEVENTH STREET IN West Oakland. Some call it "hell's half acre." Others call it the "Harlem of the East Bay." Jazz, swing, and blues surround you. Within a few blocks of Seventh, near Chester and Wood streets, there are more than 30 clubs, record stores, and recording studios. First you pass Pacific Records, a recording studio started by Texas migrant Ivory Joe Hunter, where he recorded "Seventh Street Boogie" in 1946. Next you pass Slim Jenkins's nightclub, where, in a few years, a young Aretha Franklin will open for blues legend B. B. King. Keep going and you pass Esther's Orbit Room, locatedwhere the post office stands today. With luck, you will run into Charles "Raincoat" Jones, one of the most successful black gambling operators in town. He got his nickname from the all-weather coat he was noted for wearing, or, as other sources had it, from a shady incident that took place when he was a young prospector in Klondike, Alaska.

In a few months, you will be able to tour Seventh Street- virtually-via a Web portal at Berkeley's nascent Center for New Media (CNM). Paul Grabowicz, assistant dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, and Yehuda Kalay, a professor of architecture and director of CNM, are teaming up to create a virtual reality version of historic West Oakland. Grabowicz, who worked for the Oakland Tribune for more than 25 years, has been haunted by a "nagging curiosity" about West Oakland. "I wished I could have experienced it," he says. Instead, in his lifetime, urban planning, housing projects, freeways, Bart stations, and earthquakes have destroyed the old West Oakland.

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