Check Out These Old VHS Tapes of Festival at the Lake

Festival at the Lake, held annually in Oakland from 1982–1997, holds warm memories for many longtime Oakland residents. Unfortunately, not much footage from the festival exists.

So it was like digging up gold to find, on the website of the archival organization California Revealed, a page titled “Festival at the Lake: Tapes 1-8.”

The VHS footage, contributed by the Oakland History Center at the Oakland Public Library, shows hosts, performers, vendors and event attendees. It contains performances by clown-faced kids from Prescott Elementary School and adult dancers and drummers performing world music.

All eight tapes of Festival at the Lake can be viewed here.

There’s also some familiar faces. About 18 minutes into the first video, the president of the board of the Festival at the Lake, Wes Coolidge, is introduced by Barbara Schaaf, mother of former Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Coolidge says, addressing the crowd, “you may not believe this, but the Festival at the Lake is the largest urban fair in California. And one of the largest fairs of its kind in the United States of America.”

And while the unknown camera operator has a bit of a wandering eye, with choppy footage and sometimes audio-free filming, the approach uniquely captures the era in ways that other footage of Festival at the Lake — by TV news cameras or music video directors — simply doesn’t.

The fashion and glasses, hairstyles and headwear. The old logos of event sponsors like the Lucky grocery store and 7-UP. Nostalgia sinks in at the sight of the mock fire helmets that the Oakland Fire Department often passed out to kids.

Also seen is the architecture around Lake Merritt. Adjacent to Fairyland, near Lake Merritt’s bandstand, glimpses of downtown Oakland’s old skyline appear, before the construction of new office buildings and high-rise apartments.

This “wandering eye” creates an un-curated archive vastly different than the videos that proliferate social media after major events nowadays. Access to technology and our appetite for storytelling mean that footage is almost always filtered or edited to fit into shareable clips.

Last weekend’s Black Joy Parade in Oakland is a prime example.

In the midst of musicians and dancers, fly fashionistas and cute kids, artistic attendees took to the streets and documented the gathering in regal manner. I double-tapped Instagram posts to show my appreciation of images from Amir Abdul-Shakur and Stephanie J. Alcazar, as well as Brandon Robinson, Kvn Alln and Sabrina Sellers.

To take life as we see it and frame it in a way that succinctly tells the story is a magnificent talent. It takes patience, focus and imagination. It’s an art that’s taken for granted, because it happens so often.

At the same time, as shown in the tapes of Festival by the Lake, there’s some value to the uncle who shows up to the event, turns on the camera and lets the tape run. It’s an aimless approach that doesn’t play well in the social media era. It’s almost like, get to the point: why are you showing me all this?

But when you realize how fast the world changes, you gain an appreciation for seeing “all of this.”

The day after Black Joy Parade, as photographers and influencers paired songs with their image reels and added filters to their videos, the 6th Annual LakeFest was announced, set for June 21, 2025 — Juneteenth weekend. As one of the many annual events held on the shores of Oakland’s crown jewel, Lakefest is directly inspired by the legacy of Festival at the Lake.

I imagine, 40 years from now, we’ll all be pulling up old social media posts of LakeFest to be transported back to what things were like in 2025.

And while the curated images should live in museums, or at least be preserved in readily available internet archives, I also hope there’s surviving footage from someone’s uncle who simply turned their camera on and did a 360-degree turn to capture the world around him.

Archival tapes of Festival at the Lake can be viewed here. LakeFest Oakland takes place Saturday, June 21, on the north shore of Lake Merritt in Oakland; details here.