Blog Archives

Emeryville Wins Fight for Bike/Ped Bridge

May 11, 2013
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Emeryville Wins Fight for Bike/Ped Bridge

Text reprinted from Council Member Jennifer West’s blog: Yesterday (Thursday, May 9), the City of Emeryville had a real victory! We won our litigation against the State of California, which had denied our use of Redevelopment funds to pay for the South Bayfront Pedestrian/Bicycle Bridge and Horton Landing Park, after the dissolution of Redevelopment. It is a long and complicated story, but the short version for now is that the Department of Finance, which  insisted on us turning over funds set aside for the Bike Ped bridge connecting Stanford and 53rd St. (east of the railroad tracks) with Bay St. (west of the tracks), lost, and the City of Emeryville, the residents of Emeryville, have won! This is a wonderful decision that came on a day of celebrating bikes and connectivity with Bike to Work Day, May 9, 2013. The Bridge had been planned over the past 10 years or so, and was ready to go to bid for construction 2 years ago when redevelopment was ended by the state. I hope that with this decision the city can move quickly on getting the project over the train tracks moving again. Having a better connection with Bay St. will be a

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Letter(s) to the Editor: The Degreening of Temescal Creek Park

May 9, 2013
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Letter(s) to the Editor: The Degreening of Temescal Creek Park

  (RE Oct. 16, 2012 Letter to the Editor from Eric Gascoyne: Cut Spending, Save the Trees at Temescal Creek Park) To the Editor: Thanks (to Eric Gascoyne) for writing his letter. I went to the City Council meeting and spoke on behalf of the trees and the hawks. I’m glad we have saved them for now. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the park project has made a park with lots of potential into an ugly “inner city”-looking park. They paved over the entire grassy area, giving ample room for vandals to break glass, urinate, and tag on the abundant hard surfaces. If you urinate on grass or on a tree, nature will deal with it, this is not the case for man-made materials. Will Emeryville parents really want their kids riding trikes through busted glass and human urine, passing by swear words tagged all over the play structures? Do you remember who actually hung out on the former play structures? Usually they were not children. This combined with Emeryville taking over the Oakland school on Adeline and 53rd Street, sending waves of high schoolers up 53rd – littering, loitering, selling drugs and even trying to steal my cell phone, has

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Crimewatch: Robbery Near W. Oakland BART

May 8, 2013
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Crimewatch: Robbery Near W. Oakland BART

This was recently posted on Nextdoor Emeryville, a local social networking site. The incident occurred about a week ago. “K and I were riding our bikes along Mandela from WO BART a bit after 7:00 this evening, more or less side-by-side in the bike lane with me on the traffic side. Just before 14th Ave. there were two young men on the sidewalk a few yards away, and at about the time K noticed one had a gun he lunged at her and knocked her to the ground. I saw the gun pointed at me when I turned back, and handed him my phone and her bag as he directed. All this as cars were passing! The gun guy headed up 14th with our stuff, two OPD officers arrived, and half an hour later when the reports were finished we found the bag, minus only cash and phone, a block away. The business in front of which it happened has a security camera, so perhaps we’ll even have pictures of the guys — assuming a robbery where nobody was hurt rates any of a detective’s time. I bet most of the cyclists who passed thought we were being given a

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Children Matter: New Family Resource Center, and What’s New at Emeryville Child Development Center

May 2, 2013
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Children Matter: New Family Resource Center, and What’s New at Emeryville Child Development Center

New Family Resource and Wellness Center! Several years ago, John Sugiyama, interim superintendent of Emery Unified School District, put together a small working group to look at services in Emeryville for children birth to 5 and their families.  There were many gaps in services and families looked to Berkeley and Oakland for support.  Using information prepared by the working group, Superintendent Sugiyama wrote a federal grant to bring resources to these families and fill the service gaps.  Emeryville USD received a federal grant of $250,000 to open a Family Resource Center and alleviate some of the difficulties families faced. The grant’s main purpose is to provide a “rainbow of services” targeted at children and families of all ages.  This grant provides funding to set up the Family Resource Center and implement a unique city-wide, birth to 5 project—”The 5 Bold Initiatives”—that encompasses (1) search and serve, (2) promoting  school readiness, (3) building community capacity to access services, (4) a coordinated network of service providers, and (5) early screening, identification and referral. The Family Resource and Wellness Center opened on March 26th at the city’s recreational building, 4300 San Pablo Ave.  The 5 Bold Initiatives Project has been incorporated into EUSD’s

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An Emeryville Retrospective: Sneaking into an Oaks Game in 1949

April 29, 2013
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An Emeryville Retrospective: Sneaking into an Oaks Game in 1949

I was thinking the other day about my first time in Emeryville, not driving past the city but putting feet on the ground in it.  The attraction was an Oakland Oaks ball game against the San Diego Padres in the summer of 1949, an encounter between two Pacific Coast League teams in the era before major league baseball came to the Bay Area.  Two friends and I, all teenagers with no money to speak of, heard from an acquaintance that you could sneak into an Oaks game through a loose board along the 45th Street wall of the stadium, the wall along the first-base foul line. Off we went in a borrowed car from our homes in Concord to mysterious Emeryville, found the loose board, and made it into the stadium. (I still feel guilty about our modest larceny.) We had hoped to see Ralph “Pine Tar” Buxton pitch for the Oaks, famous (or infamous) for loading the ball with pine tar hidden in his mitt.  The illegal stuff gave Buxton, a right-handed pitcher, a wicked “screwball” that broke back over the plate from outside on right-handed batters or in over the plate to lefties.  To our disappointment, Buxton didn’t

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