Economy
Say you’re at the Rockridge BART station and you’re planning to ride your bike to downtown Oakland. You get on Shafter Avenue—the main through street with the least amount of traffic—and begin riding. The Webster/Shafter corridor, as bike route is called, is one of the several dozen projects the City of Oakland’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Program will be working on in 2011.
Typically when people think of scones, they think of the muffin’s inferior pastry sibling—a dry, crumbly thing that tastes like flour. But Remedy Coffee is serving up scones that are not typical. With flavors like huckleberry cream, cheddar scallion and blood orange along with a texture that’s buttery and flaky, they melt in your mouth more easily than a cupcake.
About 30 teachers gathered Thursday to demonstrate in front of three banks at the Rockridge shopping center at 51st Street and Broadway. McClymonds Teacher Craig Gordon explained the group was there to “demand that schools and public services be bailed out” the same way that banks were bailed out during the mortgage crisis.
Four charter schools presented petitions to renew their charters at the Oakland Unified School District board meeting last night. Students, teachers and parents from the Oakland schools crowded the boardroom and took turns asking the board to let their schools continue to operate for five more years.
As activists and residents lined up to make dozens of complaints Tuesday, city leaders promised to schedule a review of Oakland’s gang injunctions. About 60 of people showed up at the city’s public safety committee meeting, many with signs that read “Stop the injunctions now” in English and Spanish. “We are here to ask Oakland to re-prioritize its efforts,” said Aurra Lopez, who called the gang injunctions “ineffective and actually counter-productive.”
The San Francisco 49ers officially announced the hiring of highly sought after candidate Jim Harbaugh, formerly of Stanford University, as their new head coach on Friday afternoon.
“It’s the perfect, competitive opportunity for me and the rest of the San Francisco organization to be a part of a team,” said Harbaugh at the midday press conference.
Every morning Ronald Robles gets up and hand-grinds different kinds of fresh pepper—white, Sichuan and black. He also hand-makes three types of mayonnaise; there’s garlic-flavored, chili and regular. Robles is the owner and chef of Fiveten Burger, one of the newest food trucks to come out of Oakland, and he’s dishing out what he calls “America’s favorite food”—the burger.
2010 was a tumultuous year for Oakland as both the city and state faced a heated election season, the courts weighed the validity of controversial measures passed during previous elections, and the effects of the 2008 financial collapse continued to reverberate throughout the local economy, but it was also a year of new beginnings. Oakland North presents a guide to the year’s top stories.
Plans to open a sex boutique in downtown Oakland near a school and several youth program offices have caused some mixed reactions among neighboring businesses, although opponents seem unlikely to appeal a recent decision by the Oakland City Planning Commission allowing the shop to operate within close proximity to a school.