OAKLAND, Calif. -- At the very end of Oakland's dead end streets where railroad tracks, freeways and ultimately the hard industrial shoreline of San Francisco Bay won't let matters go much farther, is this troubled city's bottomland.

"Lower Bottom," says rapper Mac Reem as he stands at a quiet, worn-down street corner. "It's like the bottom of West Oakland." Oakland's Lower Bottom neighborhood is home to much hip hop music such as Mac Reem's and owes its new-found celebrity to the lyrics of the popular music. But many of his parent's and grandparents' generation who came up in the century-and-half old neighborhood are having trouble adjusting to the new name -- and notoriety.

"I don't care for it," says Betty Johnson, who has been known in neighborhood as Miss Betty since she moved there in 1962. "The youngsters started calling it Lower Bottom. That's their lifestyle, not mine."

Miss Betty, like to so many older residents in America's older rundown urban communities, stands watch over her street and her corner. She and her fellow sentinels pay careful attention to who stops on her block, if someone appears to be selling something they shouldn't or otherwise needs to be shooed away.

"I don't intend to go no place," the retired nurse's assistant declares. "I bought property around here and if anybody's gonna leave, it'll be them."

Marcus Johnson, no relation to Miss Betty, is a businessman in the neighborhood. He grew up on its streets and has raised his own family there.

"When I hear the term Lower Bottom now I understand that it's an artistic term," Johnson says as he strolls through a massive old cannery now transforming into condominiums. But his understanding is not to be confused with compliance.

"I think the term lower and bottom, the combination, to me implies that it's a sub-area, that there's sort of a sub-group of people and that maybe these sort of people that aren't worthy," Johnson remarks.

He prefers to use the historic name of Oakland Point or Prescott neighborhood.

"From being brought up on the Oakland Point-Prescott area it was about blues, it was about rhythm & blues and now things are more hip-hop. But I think our media age is 29 so there is a sort of natural evolution.

"It's sort of unfortunate that the history of the Prescott-Oakland Point neighborhood is somewhat lost with the new generation. When I talk about the blues and so forth, there was B.B. King, there was even Sly & the Family Stone that evolved out of here. Slim Jenkins Club on 7th Street was huge."

Today, one of the last standing of those nightspots -- the Continental Club -- has been revived, sort of. Special events are held there, but no regular music. For example, neighborhood folks held a big party at the old blues club on the last presidential election night.

Whatever you call it - Oakland Point, Prescott, Lower Bottom or even the Boondocks as it was briefly called 20 years ago by local kids - it is the kind of inner city area that attracts trouble.

Its roughly 10,000 residents spread across a square mile have an per capita income of about $12,000 a year, according to the latest figures available though the US Census Bureau. That's about half of the average for the rest of the city in the same time frame.

It wasn't always like that.

The fertile farmland of the area began transforming into a residential neighborhood in the 1860s when the railroads began to come through.

A landmark railroad station built just before World War I at 16th and Woods streets remains as the primary artifact of the area, although it went dark after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Since then vandals have destroyed much of the Beaux Arts beauty and developer plans to revive it have remained just that: plans.

Ending the transcontinental railroad in what is today West Oakland made the area one of the first neighborhoods of the storied west coast city. Military bases along the waterfront created thousands of jobs, almost all of which have slowly disappeared with vanishing steel factories, canneries and other rusty industries during the years since World War II.

Left, are some of the magnificent homes of the early 20th century along housing projects of the last part of the 1900s.

Other parts of the sprawling West Oakland area have been cut up, redeveloped and fleeced by everything from well-meaning government plans to brutal gang warfare that intimidates even some hardened Oakland police.

Names such as Lower Bottom are joined by adjacent parts of West Oakland that are also celebrated in hip hop, Ghost Town and Dog Town being best known and referred to by well-known rappers such as Bavgate.

"The whole appeal to the young fans of rap and hip hop is to try the culture on, to play with it," said Benjamin Bowser, Ph.D., chairman of Cal State East Bay's Sociology Department and the author of upcoming book about gangsta rap. (

"They are safe, electronic vicarious thrills."

Bowser notes the hip hop coming out of places such as Lower Bottom comes down to two major themes: "The historic struggle for political justice and the general degradation that comes from drug dealing, prostitution, that sort of thing."

For recent arrivals to the neighborhood such as Clay Wilder, the name Lower Bottom totally works.

"I'm not sure what it's derived from. It makes sense though," he says as he walks into Sharif Market at 11th and Willow Streets. "Cause it's the very end, the very bottom of Oakland."

Wilder quickly says he has pride in the neighborhood, despite the name.

"The neighborhood is improving all the time. We have beautiful Victorian houses, and good people. Every city's got its problems."

"It does have a kind of negative vibe to it, you know, Lower Bottom," acknowledges even more proud rapper Mac Reem.

"The Lower Bottom and music, it's like we come from nothing, you know, that's the image Oakland has portrayed over the years, we come from nothing. But it's not true."

The hip-hop artist has his own upbeat way of looking at the new name:

"It's just the music, you know, we spill our soul and our soul comes from the bottom." The young man smiles, a friend watching Mac Reem talk hugs him. Their youthful laughter dances down the aging streets.