Exhibition Label: "Scene in Oakland", Oakland Museum of California March 9 - August 25, 2002 60. Bernard von Eichman (1899-1970) West Oakland, 1928 Watercolor on paper Gift of the artist Beginning in the late 1870s, with railroad and dockworkers who settled there, West Oakland was home to California's earliest middle-class black community. During World War I West Oakland shipbuilding drew large numbers of African Americans who contributed to an already strong working class neighborhood where they were the most prominent ethnic group. Bernard von Eichman's 1928 watercolor captured something of the character along Oakland's West Seventh Street, the main street of African American social and cultural life, a district that jazz musician Horace Silver once referred to as "the Harlem in California.