The Henry J. Kaiser Con­ven­tion Cen­ter — a crum­bling, or­na­mented build­ing that once hosted Grate­ful Dead con­certs and housed vic­tims of the Span­ish flu — has long been a piece of lost his­tory in Oak­land.

Now it’s be­come a po­lit­i­cal bat­tle­front.

“If you don’t have roots here, you don’t un­der­stand why that build­ing is so im­por­tant,” said Ran­dolph Belle, vice pres­i­dent of Creative Devel­op­ment Part­ners, a group that’s vy­ing for rights to ren­o­vate and re­open the Kaiser cen­ter prop­erty. Belle, who is 47 and grew up in San Fran­cisco, rat­tled off all the mem­o­ries he had of Kaiser cen­ter events be­fore the build­ing

Shut­tered in 2005: Christ­mas pageants, bas­ket­ball games, an MC Ham­mer con­cert in 1987 that he de­scribed as “epic.”

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