On a recent trip to New York, I was walking around the lower East Side and saw Hengst at 70 First Street, a sliver of a store. Inside was Susan Hengst, who for years was on Valencia Street.
She says hello to the Mission. What I remember most about the House of Hengst — the windows. I loved this one especially, on a night when Hengst showed silent movies to no one in particular.
I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. 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 here.
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.
As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.
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