Courtesy of the National Park Service

Gary Kamiya, the author of The Cool Grey City of Love writes today in the SF Chronicle about the star-crossed love affair between a Russian  officer and Dona Maria de Concecio Marcela Arguello in 1806 when San Francisco consisted of little else but Mission Dolores and the Presidio.

The 15-year old Arguello was “known to her family as Conchita” and  “was described by her brother as “the beauty of the two Californias.”

They fell in love, had an engagement party and he headed back to Russia to finish his mission and to then return, but the 42-year-old came down with pneumonia and never recovered. READ THE FULL STORY HERE

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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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