Business
The controversial Airport Connector, a tram that would connect BART to Oakland’s airport, could soon be under construction after a decades-long debate. “For the first time in the 25-year history of this project,” a BART spokesman says, “we may be seeing shovels hit the ground in the next month or two.”
The second annual Taste of Temescal, an event celebrating a smorgasbord of culinary delights, sold out to hundreds of attendees on Tuesday. For $30, locals sampled signature items from each of the 23 participating restaurants on Telegraph Avenue.
After years of contest, Acting Governor Abel Maldonado signed an agreement Tuesday to expedite the start of construction on the Oak to 9th land development project. Beginning as soon as 2011, the waterfront property along the estuary south of Jack London Square will be rebuilt over the next two decades.
The volunteer group Habitat for Humanity, which helps low-income working families buy homes by investing their own labor in the construction, invited neighbors and first-time homeowners on Saturday to the completion of Habitat’s Edes Avenue development in East Oakland.
Oakland’s Neldam’s Danish Bakery had been in business 81 years before it closed in July. Reopened last week as Taste of Denmark, the new bakery plans to expand its offerings to include Asian pastries, tres leches cakes, and other delicacies from the modern city’s many cultures.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the board in charge of channeling state transportation money to the Bay Area, voted 6-2 to allocate $20 million in state transportation improvement funds to the project.
Dozens of people participated in a different type of art walk along Telegraph Avenue on Friday. It was the launch of Invisible City Audio Tours, which has the goal of showing an alternative way of looking at Telegraph Avenue by bringing together Bay Area authors, visual artists and a composer to guide walkers on a tour from MacArthur Bart Station to the central hub of Art Murmur.
AC Transit, the transit district serving Oakland and surrounding portions of the East Bay, could reduce its weekend bus service by half, and make several additional cutbacks, if the district does not quickly resolve a dispute with its employees’ union.
Candidates, union leaders, and everyday workers took turns eating and campaigning along the Oakland waterfront to celebrate the spirit of the holiday and discuss the plight of California’s unemployed.