Community

Community photo of the week: Church on the lake

Every week, Oakland North will publish a photo submitted by one of our readers. This week’s photo is by Mark Gartland. He writes, “Here’s an image I took this weekend walking the lake … it’s at Christ the Light Church and a bit futuristic.” If you’d like to contribute to “community photo of the week,” just send a favorite photograph taken in Oakland to staff@oaklandnorth.net with the subject: PHOTO. Please make all photographs large-sized and in jpeg format. Oakland North cannot pay…

Homes in Need: A look at foster care in the East Bay

Every holiday season Nancy DeWeese and her husband, Gary, host a Christmas party. But it’s not your average family gathering, because this is not your average family. At these parties, three dozen children from all walks of life, including the couple’s four biological kids, gather to share in a common experience: Each child has spent part of their lives growing up at the DeWeese family home in Moraga. “They see each other and they’re like, ‘Oh, we started out as…

Oakland celebrates Lunar New Year

The Oakland Asian Cultural Center welcomed the Year of the Snake at its annual Lunar New Year event in downtown Oakland on Saturday. The 2013 festival showcased dance and musical performances from groups throughout the Bay Area’s Asian community, including the Rising Dragon Culture Center Lion Dance Troupe, who opened the show with dragons prancing around.  Students of Seibi Lee, the center’s artist-in-residence preformed Kathak, a classical dance from India, while Winnie Wong and Diana Rowan played the harp and the piano. Throughout…

Love and sex at the Oakland Zoo

“How would you like to have husbands who have testicles that weigh 14 percent of their body weight?” asked Harry Santi to a handful of women at the Oakland Zoo on Friday.

He isn’t talking about any sort of terrifying medical anomaly here. Santi, 81, a docent at the Oakland Zoo, is referring to the tuberous bushcricket, a type of tiny katydid, and one of dozens of animals with unusual, peculiar, or fascinating sex lives that were highlighted at Oakland Zoo’s annual Animal Amore this Valentine’s Day.

Oakland by the ZIP code: Photos from the 94601

Welcome to the debut photo gallery for The Pulse of Oakland. Oakland North reporters will be taking photographs documenting each of the ZIP codes in Oakland over the next few months. Every neighborhood is diverse and different, and we want to capture that. This week’s featured ZIP code is 94601 in East Oakland. The area includes Fruitvale, Peralta Hacienda and other neighborhoods. Of course, we can’t see everything in Oakland ourselves. So we also want to know how you view this…