Community
Though Saturday ended with rainfall, the early afternoon hours were sunny and the perfect weather for this year’s annual Old Fashioned Egg Hunt & Games at Dunsmuir Hellman Historic Estate. Children of all ages roamed the meadow in search of Easter eggs (which they later traded in for Pixy Stix and chocolate), had their face painted, and took a ride on the ponies.
The official Earth Day is today, April 22, but Oaklanders got started with hikes, clean-ups and plantings last weekend. Check out our slideshow of community-submitted photos. It’s not to late to send in your own photos! Just email them to lillian.mongeau@oaklandnorth.net.
Just under a hundred people marched through the streets of Oakland Wednesday afternoon to demonstrate against human trafficking, holding signs and shouting, “every child is too valuable to be bought and sold.”
Over the past seven weeks, the stretch of Broadway between MacArthur Boulevard and Piedmont Avenue was closed on weeknights because of construction for the Kaiser Permanente Hospital replacement project. The closures were expected to last through April 15. However, due to weather delays construction activities have been extended.
With no public libraries of its own, Piedmont depends on Oakland for its books—not to mention its groceries, and access to the outside world. But the most recent contract granting Piedmonters access to Oakland’s libraries expired in 2008, and representatives of the two cities have been negotiating a new contract ever since. Though a long-term agreement is still far off, this week officials did manage to settle on one thing: a price for last year’s service
Much to many Oakland’s residents’ chagrin, over the past few months the CVS superstore on Broadway and Pleasant Valley has been packing up its wares. This colossal neighborhood general store, which has been around since the 1960s, carries everything from motor oil to shoe racks to extensive gardening equipment. The shopping center’s master leaseholder, Safeway, notified CVS in 2009 that it would not renew its lease in order to make way for a shopping center redesign. The mega-drugstore was initially slated to close this June.
Oakland North is continuing with our new feature–every Wednesday, we will publish a community photo. This week’s photo is by Oakland North’s Dara Kerr.
If you go to the California Department of Water Resources’ drought Web page, you’ll only find this message: “The DWR Drought Web site has been shutdown due to no longer being in an official drought.” Water supply has always been a tough issue in California and residents have long been warned to conserve. But this year has been one of the biggest years of precipitation since 1970, according to the Department of Water Resources.
Volunteers from all over the Bay Area kicked off Earth Day weekend by participating in a Habitat for Humanity East Bay Build-a-thon. By the end of the four-day event, eight new homes in the Tassafaronga Village on 81st Avenue in East Oakland will be framed.