Economy
It was standing room only at City Hall Wednesday night as Oakland Athletics fans packed a planning commission meeting to cheer a proposal for a new baseball stadium near Jack London Square.
A week before Thanksgiving, Spice Monkey Café and Restaurant co-owner Kanitha Matoury had been worried that food donations would fall short of her 1,000 pound goal. The restaurant, located at 1628 Webster Street, hosts one of several food drives in downtown Oakland aimed at stocking the food pantries, soup kitchens, and senior centers served by the Alameda County Community Food Bank.
By 5 am Friday, David Martinez and Derrick Love, both Oakland residents, had spent nearly 48 hours stationed outside the Best Buy on the city’s Mandela Parkway. The first night, they slept in a borrowed tent. On Thursday they ate Thanksgiving dinner—turkey on paper plates—under the streetlights as the line circling the building formed behind them. “It’s totally worth it,” said Love, who had locked his target on one of the store’s ten $349 laptops that usually sell for $600….
Ebbett’s Good to Go is one of the newest food trucks cruising the East Bay to hawk gourmet fare. Its chefs focus on specialty sandwiches made from organic and local ingredients.
It’s the little things Joseph Riley remembers, like his mother’s homemade rocky road candy, when another holiday season takes the stage. The candy remains a distant taste of childhood, Riley’s more recent holiday memories are composed of long lines out a shelter door, paper plates filled with turkey and trimmings, and finally Riley returning home, wherever home is that year, alone.
For nearly 20 years, the Oakland Museum of California has operated under a public-private partnership with the City of Oakland and the nonprofit Oakland Museum of California Foundation, sharing the $15 million annual budget and control of operations. But now city officials may remove themselves from that partnership, leaving the nonprofit foundation to run the 41-year-old cultural institution.
In anticipation of the extra traffic that comes with the holiday season, last week Oakland North posed a question: what’s the fastest way to get to Oakland International Airport? To find the answer, on November 18 we pitted four of our most daring reporters against each other in a contest we call the Race to the Airport. Who won? Find out now.
Four three-foot high barrels resembling oversized soup cans sit at Spice Monkey Café and Restaurant in downtown Oakland. Each is emblazoned with photos of smiling children and has “Donate Food Here!” stamped across the black and red label. One barrel is filled with nonperishable canned goodies. Another is half full. And two are completely empty.
Fredrick Pugh has a good problem. The president of the East Bay Warriors Pop Warner football and cheerleading program is trying to figure out how to get up to 178 little football players and cheerleaders to Orlando, Florida, next month for the Pop Warner national championships. It’s a good thing, Pugh said, to have so many children to accommodate because it means the Warriors program has had a successful season.