The EastSide Cultural Center on International Boulevard in Oakland's San Antonio district opened New Year's Eve 2006 with a $249,000 city loan and hasn't stopped — workshops, open mics, a bookstore, affordable housing, and the Malcolm X Jazz Arts Festival, all on the same block.

The EastSide Arts Alliance spent ten years moving through four rental spaces in a five-block radius before the Oakland City Council voted unanimously in 2006 to approve a $249,000 loan and the organization finally put its name on a building. The EastSide Cultural Center opened at 2277 International Blvd on New Year's Eve that year — the celebration included a concert by tenor saxophonist David Murray and marked former Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale's 70th birthday — and it has occupied the same corner of Oakland's San Antonio district ever since.

The 6,000-square-foot building, painted in bright colors, runs the kind of calendar that creates what the original Reddit thread-author was actually asking about: a consistent place to go, with familiar faces. Dance, theater, and art-making workshops for young people. Concerts and town hall forums on the building's stage. Bandung Books and the Community Archives and Research Project operate from the space. The annual Malcolm X Jazz Arts Festival — organized by the alliance for more than two decades — draws Oakland's broader community to nearby San Antonio Park each year.

The alliance was founded in 1999 by community organizers and artists of color in East Oakland. Its advisory board includes Emory Douglas, former Black Panther Party Minister of Culture, Angela Davis, and Seale. The building also contains sixteen units of affordable housing and two live/work storefronts — a structure organizers have described as a self-sufficiency model for an economically pressured stretch of International.

"It's a natural entity that needs to be here to bring the community together," Elena Serrano, a member of the alliance, said at the 2006 opening. "There's a lot of tension between Black and brown and old and young and we need to provide a gathering place to build a healthier and stronger community."

Across the Oakland city line, La Peña Cultural Center at 3105 Shattuck Ave in Berkeley has held the same address since 1975, when Latin American and Bay Area organizers founded it in the wake of the 1973 Chilean coup. Fifty years on, it continues programming for Latinx, Caribbean, and Indigenous diasporic communities. The two institutions are not the same kind of place, but they share the condition that matters most on a block: they were there last year, and they'll be there next year.

The colors on the building at 2277 International are visible from the street before anything else. The Malcolm X Jazz Arts Festival returns to San Antonio Park again this summer.