Neighborhoods
The school district’s recently-approved Central Kitchen, Instructional Farm and Education Center Project is an effort to improve the quality of school meals in Oakland by creating a modern facility equipped to prepare thousands of nutritious meals every day. It will be located at the Marcus Foster school site in West Oakland, which formerly housed the Marcus Foster Middle School and later offices for the Programs for Exceptional Children. In addition to being better-equipped to serve fresher and healthier foods for students, the new site will offer educational programs and even a farm for students to help grow the food that may one day end up on their plates.
Born in East Oakland and raised in the Bay Area, Imara is an astronomer and a researcher at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, holding the prestigious title of a Harvard-MIT Future Faculty Leader Postdoctoral Fellow. Not only was she was the first African American woman to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics from UC Berkeley, but she is also a self-taught painter.
Oaklanders get together weekly for a boozy drawing party at The New Parkway.
In her first appearance as Oakland’s mayor-elect, Libby Schaaf held a press conference wearing a striking red dress, a necklace of the Oakland tree, a bamboo earrings and riding — unforgettably — in a fire-snorting snail-shaped chariot. All of these were made in Oakland, and all of them had a story.
A parade slowly danced its way through the downtown on Tuesday, Feb. 17, monopolizing the streets with music and joy.
The lines started early. One man asks if this is the queue for ticket holders, hoping that he is in the wrong one. To his disappointment, it’s the right line, so he waits, his anticipation growing to get a glimpse of the trophies inside. This is the 48th California International Antiquarian Book Fair. For three days, the Marriott Convention Center in downtown Oakland is transforming itself into a treasure trove for some of the most rare books in the world….
Sacred Wheel, an unpretentious cheese shop in Temescal, offers a funky menu featuring Pabst Blue Ribbon tomato soup, pickled eggs, and a Sriracha-infused sloppy Joe on what the menu calls “the trashiest bun we could find.” The eclectic menu is mirrored in the décor (a toy dinosaur with a chunk of cheese in its jaws presides over the cheese counter), and the staff (nearly all employees have a caricature of themselves on the wall, and the staff are decorated with…
The American Planning Association recognized Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood as one of the “Great Places in America” in a ceremony yesterday. In the warm afternoon sun, APA Board of Directors member Kurt Christiansen and Hing H. Wong, president-elect of the organization’s California chapter, lauded the neighborhood’s homegrown artistry, entrepreneurialism and diversity. They also praised its revitalizing planning efforts, which have been 15 years in the making. “As a teenager, I lived less than a mile from this location and have seen…
Beloved Rockridge bookstore Diesel turns 25 this week. It celebrates its past and looks to the future.