Big day with Mapp, preparations for Sunday Streets and Mission Mission reports police busy busting the Mission’s ambulates cafes. What next?

Well, it didn’t seem  tonight like much of anything bad would happen.  The weather finally turned warmer, the wind died  and the Mission felt lovely  on the walk through the  Mapp sites filled with music, poetry and art.

Paul Flores tried out his new one-man show on the Mission’s transformation, folks  Flores wrote about ate icecream at Humphry Slocombe’s new parlor on Harrison Street and a man with a large tattoo on his back sat upstairs in his second floor apartment hardly noticing what was going on below.  It was all good.

But especially wonderful was the backyard at 1369 York Street, El Jardin York.  There, Mareni Orduna and Carlos Disdier hosted an evening that made one feel that Flores was wrong; that Latin America is very much alive in the Mission and at its best with artists like the singer Mamacoatlt and the Flamenco dancers with Gypsy Tease and others.  It was a  garden where the men were all good looking,  the women beautiful and the bartender French.  It was hard to leave.

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.

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