Results tagged “westoakland”

Apparently if you weren't at this enormous grand opening party/fundraiser at the American Steel warehouse in West Oakland on Saturday, then you missed something pretty huge and fun. We, alas, were not, and therefore we, like many of you, must live vicariously through these pictures via Laughing Squid. They had 200 tons of sand dumped into the warehouse to set up their very own Burning-Man-in-the-City, beach party extravaganza, and many a hip kid danced to DJ sets and frolicked in one of five above-ground pools. Economic hard times breed creativity, so we look forward to catching wind of future happenings at this awesome looking art collective.

-- Fallout from yesterday's tiger-ian death of 17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr. continues. [CBS 5, SFGate, Spotswood, FCJ, SF MetBlog, Peta (cuckoo!)]

It's just gotten easier to travel -ist to -ist on the West Coast -- British cheapo bus service Megabus is starting up next week between the Bay Area and LA. Megabus is already in Chicago too.

We arrived at 9 p.m., parked at the West Oakland BART station and walked the block or so to the Fire Arts Festival. A gathering of local neighbors stood just outside the fence, watching. Giant hand-wrought metal sculptures — spiders, dragons, machines from the future/past — viewable from that distance, and from the BART trains passing by above, thumped and shook and spewed balls of fire high into the air.

Today's news in refuse:

--Our sources report that only like four non-media people showed up for the anti-Jerry Falwell protest (picture above, and two more pictures after the jump).

Sorry this update is late -- we were stuck in the tunnel ourselves! Due to mechanical problems on an SFO/Millbrae bound train around 8 this morning, BART got about 30-45 minutes behind on the morning commute schedule in both directions. The jam should be cleared by now, anyways.

So those stories out there saying the commute this morning wasn't so bad didn’t quite tell the whole story . Turns out there were some problem spots out there, just not throughout the entire maze and a blogger reports that BART was a lot more crowded than it was yesterday.

If you were wondering why your BART train was thirty minutes late today, it was because of, well, just for old time sake, those motherf------ snakes on the motherf------ train. One wonders what all those people who made the fake trailers and fanfic for that movie are doing now now that the movie came and went. Maybe doing their homework. Or curing cancer. Who knows. And wouldn't you know it, somebody actually did a Snakes on a Train.

Like we've always said, when you come into the BART station and you see a line of asterisks on the announcement board, it never has anything good to report. Unidentified debris on the tracks at the Bay Fair station has managed to completely snarl all the lines -- in particular, Dublin/Pleasanton service into SF, and service to the airport (though all the lines looked pretty screwed up from our vantage point this morning.) On the bright side, we are totally caught up on our our alt-weekly reading. Chris Daly got the Bay Guardian endorsement.

A former San Carlos mayor is filing an appeal of his conviction for defrauding the Belmont-San Carlos Fire Department out of $13,000, by using public funds to pay for a political consultant who failed to win a campaign back in 2003.

--Arrrr. It's Talk Like A Pirate Day. Annoy your boss!

Besides the homicide rate, Oakland residents' quality of life continues to be impaired by wasteful immigrants flocking to the shores of Lake Merritt - the Canada geese, also causing trouble in Richmond, as reported recently by the East Bay Express. The Lake Merritt geese population produces an estimated ton of fecal matter a day. The geese have also been sighted exhibiting aggressive pedestrian behavior not unlike that of Oakland's human residents, known for holding up vehicular traffic by slowly crossing major thoroughfares in the middle of the street.

Bad news to report -- in two unrelated incidents, two people were found on the BART tracks this afternoon. One is dead, and the other uninjured (but in for a psych evaluation).

Just an update on today's service outages. Elevators are out at West Oakland.... no wait, sorry, we meant SFist's service outages (and we just made that up, the elevators at West Oakland are probably fine.): Team Gothamist continues to try to fix our server, but delays seem longer today than yesterday (i.e., that comment from Cedichou was posted around 9:45 and didn't go live until about 11:15).

Bummer! The organizers for this weekend's Bay To Breakers race have announced that it's banning "large quantities" of alcohol. Organizers assured participants that "It's OK if people want to bring a personal supply,” but kegs, big collections of bottles at checkpoints, and the running tiki bar are out. Organizers claim it has nothing to do with policing your life, it's just that the cops say that the drinking slows down the race and by gum, they're going to have the streets reopened to general traffic by noon on Sunday. They mean it, too: If you're not past the "Footstock" site by 11:30, you're going to be sent to the Polo Fields and not permitted to finish the race this year.

Last week's winner, the East Bay Express: A letter-writer urges the food critic to open his heart to the magic and love that is Cafe Gratitude. Typos in Ellen Corbett's mailers. Open relationships, without using the word "polyamory" ("I hate that word. It's so '70s.") Cover: going wireless in West Oakland (and other East Bay cities). Steak in Danville. New music guy on Neil Young, and Sick Of It All about the lead singer's back pain. And SFist Eve's horoscope: digest and metabolize jolts of insight!

We're just trying to spare you some panic tomorrow morning, folks -- if you hear bells and sirens at 5:12 a.m., no need to wonder about the cosmic coincidence of an earthquake striking exactly 100 years after the big one of 1906 -- it's just Gavin Newsom, who's ordered that all fire stations and churches ring their bells and sirens after the moment of silence at Lotta's Fountain that traditionally commemorates the 1906 quake. (We must confess, though, that we're now wondering what'll happen if, by some weird cosmic coincidence, an earthquake does strike exactly 100 years later.) If the thought of an early morning alarm clock gets you so irritated that you're just not going to sleep at all, you might as well head on down to the intersection of Kearny, Market, and Geary, to attend the centennial celebration in person. The party starts at 4:30 a.m., and MUNI will run free shuttle buses from St. Francis Circle (you know, where the K, L, and M emerge from the ground) starting at 3:00 a.m., allowing themselves two hours to get you there 30 minutes late. MUNI will run free trains all day Tuesday as well, and all stations (except Civic Center) will open early. We feel bad for the eager early morning people who miss that message and are pounding futilely on the metal grates at UN Plaza. And finally, MUNI, always forward-thinking, warns you of "likely delays" crossing Market Street at 9:30 a.m. due to the centennial parade. BART will run a Centennial Train from West Oakland into SF at 4:15, and the regular 4:09 Daly City train to Pittsburg will run as well. They also use this opportunity to remind you that they're working on retrofitting the Transbay Tube.

For once, a BART delay not caused by "switching problems" at Millbrae -- those of you trying to cross the Bay this morning probably heard the repeated announcements about "police activity" at the West Oakland station, and the subsequent crawling-rate of the trains as a result. (We had a weekly with us through the stop-and-go, so tomorrow's We Read The Weeklies will be unusually thorough as a result.)

. Then we got an email from SFist Karen, asking if anyone had heard about a fire around Stockton Street. We checked the breaking news and it turns out there was a track fire on the BART between the Embarcadero and Montgomery Street stops. Witnesses (including SFist Karen) report seeing a black plume of smoke from street vents in the area. That means BART hasn't yet named a new pope, right?

Saturday: SFist Jackson just about lost his s**t when he heard about MOB: the ArtFag Mafia Premiere Event. Starting at around 9 p.m., there'll be "Fighting Robots, Fire Art, DJs and bands". It's all happening at the NIMBY warehouse (28th St. and Mandela Parkway, in West Oakland).

Uh-oh, there's drama between The Daly and The Gavster once again -- GavvyGav brings his veto hammer, but Chris throws the recent reconcilliation speech back at him. Speaking of real estate, an Oakland developer wants to mix light industrial and residential in a new West Oakland construction. Google can't avoid politics anymore, turning away FBI requests for information on the one hand and defending their book search against angry publishers on the other.

Over the last week in Oakland, shops have been laid waste, a store has burned to the ground, and a controversial religious organization has been implicated but denied its involvement. While our headline could be all too common, our personal experience makes the recent crimes all the more troubling.

With the baseball season over, we are now faced with this big question: now what do we do with ourselves? -Bay Area bound refugees from Hurricane Katrina are discovering something about the Bay Area: it's friggin expensive here. FEMA gives families a little over $2000 a month to get by until they get resettled either elsewhere or back in New Orleans and as we all know, $2000 a month in the Bay Area doesn't get you very far. Especially if you have a family. And that's not the only problem. In a quote we find awfully scary for various reasons, one of the evacuees said he was looking at a place in West Oakland, but didn't want to move there because, among other things, the "schools weren’t good." Considering Louisiana is well known as a poor, backwards-ass state, what does that say about the schools in Oakland? -In response to the increasingly controversial controversy over TIC conversions and Ellis Act evictions, Gavin has announced that he will form a task force to look into it and got Aaron Peskin to help out. We're not experts on housing policy, but we think we can save a whole bunch of time and money with this solution to the issue: build more housing.

....and waiting.... and waiting.... and there's still no word on whether we're having a BART strike or not. Even we're getting bored of hitting "refresh" on the sfgate.com window, and as you guys have probably guessed, that's our time-wasting activity of choice these days! ABC 7 is reporting that the workers are now distributing flyers warning commuters to find another way to work tomorrow, while everyone else reports nothing more than "continuing talks." Seems like management's playing hardball -- the BART website announces that you can use BART parking lots for carpools if a strike is called, they're setting up BART charter buses from West Oakland to the Embarcadero, and -- get this -- it also lists vacation packages they've negotiated for you if you decide just to take the week off. In any event, public sentiment seems to be vaguely resentful of the fairly-well-paid BART workers, which is notable in a town that's usually very union-friendly. Must've been the fare hikes. Meanwhile, the Chron continues its cutting-edge journalism with the article: "If BART strikes, gridlock will follow." Mind like a steel trap over there!

After two hours of debate, BART voted to raise its fares again, starting in January 2006, upping the minimum fare from $1.25 to $1.40. South Bay fares are going up an additional 10 cents, since South Bay residents don't pay additional taxes to the BART transit district (the classic free-rider problem), the disabled discount is going from 75% off to 62.5% off, and $1 parking fees are going into effect in various popular East Bay stops, with West Oakland going to $5. BART's trying to close its $51 million deficit This is an interim proposal, to be revisited in July after BART renegotiates its labor contracts. First Caltrain, then MUNI, then this. It's enough to make man-of-the-ghetto Jake McGoldrick cry out, "Sheriff!"

Bay area crime roundup

More artists - Keba Konte open studio in Oakland.