Community
Three East Bay residents share their plans for commuting while the Bay Bridge is closed for construction from Thursday, September 3 through Tuesday, September 8.
With the Bay Bridge closed for Labor Day weekend, the 280,000 people who usually use the bridge to cross San Francisco Bay will have to find ways to travel under, around or above it instead. Some are choosing to stay home, but the rest will crowd into BART trains, on to local ferries, or be forced to draw up alternative routes across other area bridges. John McClelland, owner of San Francisco Helicopter Tours, said that so far nobody’s asked him…
The bold sign over the Greyhound station in Oakland says “BUS” in big letters, each bigger than a man. There are no windows, only doors to buses. The doors lead to terminals where the buses pull in and stop. During the day, the doors are the only source of sunlight. At 7 a.m. on a Wednesday, the station is already warm despite the emptiness. The security guard gets up from his stool. He waves a metal detector over my body…
When the Shotgun Players staged Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” about England’s bloody War of the Roses, they did it without Elizabethan costumes, stage props, elaborate sets, or even seats for the playgoers. Makeshift propane lamps lit the stage – a windy parking lot at King Middle School in North Berkeley. Audience members perched on plastic, five-gallon buckets or tried to get comfortable on the concrete for the nearly three-hour production. Actors wore a random assortment of street clothes, which the audience…
Dia De Los Muertos Rises From the Dead
Safeway supermarkets plans to demolish its Pleasant Valley shopping mall — which at 185,000 square feet is about half the area of the Great Pyramid at Giza — and replace it with one almost two-thirds larger. The new mall would be 304,000 square feet with 1,066 parking spaces, or 50 percent more spaces. Neighborhood critics say the new mall, which would include Long’s Drug and other retailers, would be too big, attract too much traffic and therefore endanger pedestrians accustomed…
By SHILANDA WOOLRIDGE It was rockin’ till the cops came knockin’.
When Mike Kim created the Oakland Facebook page, he didn’t think many people would pay attention to it. “I thought it would be, like, 30 or 40 of my friends,” said Kim. But that was before it went viral.
A number of Oakland artists are trying to pass down the tradition of screen printed posters to a younger generation – including its political history. Melanie Cervantes, Jesus Barraza and Favianna Rodriguez take on the challenge.