Community
About 200 people braved the chilly summer evening and brought their lawn chairs, dogs and sleeping bags to 49th and Telegraph on Thursday night, for the kick-off of the second annual opening of the Temescal Street Cinema series. The event started off small. At 8 p.m. several empty plastic chairs were set up facing a brick wall and the popcorn popper wasn’t working properly. A couple, draped in blankets, ate take-out Mexican food and waited patiently for the sky to…
With 400 artists to choose from and more than a few in North Oakland, it was difficult to decide which studios to drop by on the last Saturday of this event. I didn’t want to waste my time driving around – it’s not often that you get the opportunity to chit-chat in your artist-neighbor’s living room or garden while eating cheese with toothpicks and checking out their ultra-private oeuvre. I chose to comb over a small square of the crowded…
By STEVE SALDIVAR Commuters said Friday that the BART and AC Transit increases that will go into effect on July 1 are unfair and unaffordable. “We need to get more help from the government, not less of it,” said Mahvash Nasehi. “Most people who use BART are low income people, they can’t afford to buy cars. They’re losing their jobs and now an increase in BART? It’s just not fair,” said the Brentwood resident. Nasehi uses the BART sparingly but…
Across the street from the City Center where professionals work purposefully on laptops and Blackberries, a different scramble unfolds inside the Old Oakland Bank building. There, a portion of Alameda County’s 80,100 who are unemployed—10.3 percent, in April compared to 5 percent at the same time last year—shuffle through literature on how to sharpen resumes and and interviewing skills.
Gilbert De Jesus remembers where he was when he heard last week’s news that the California Supreme Court upheld the proposition that changed the state constitution to outlaw gay marriage. The general manager of the White Horse Inn – established in 1932 and serving as one of the oldest gay and lesbian bars in the United States—was in the back office. “I’m really disgusted,” said De Jesus, who is among the 18,000 couples married after the California court upheld gay…
At the age of eight, Adrienne Wander is already a food connoisseur. “As far as quality goes, Ici is the best, Tara’s vanilla is great,” said the elementary school foodie licking her favorite Dreyer’s Fudge Track. She knows her ice cream, in part a result of living near creamery row on College Avenue. The commercial corridor is home to Dreyer’s, which created Rocky Road in 1929 after the stock market crash, Ici Ice Cream, the hip and gourmet parlor, which …
Salsa lovers in the Bay Area on Sunday gathered in at the Splash Pad Park for the 3rd annual Salsa by the Lake. More than 250 people, from toddlers to elderly enjoyed salsa and the hot rhythm played by Rumbache.
Dominic De Vincenzi remembers early mornings in the 1950s, when the intersection of 51st Street and Telegraph Avenue was the heart of Oakland’s Italian community. Long lines of customers formed as soon as 7 a.m. at Genova Deli—then a cramped, 600-square-foot store owned by his father-in-law—as workers poured in to buy their lunches or treat themselves after working the graveyard shift. Appetites were beastly and it was common for customers to bicker over their place in line, so in the…