BART says no, it "is expected" to be up and running on September 17th. Photo by Lola M. Chávez

I got off BART last night, strode through the gates and looked to see the wonders of the 24th Street BART escalator working. I don’t even generally take the escalator, but the site of the moving stairs made me giddy. It works, I thought.

And then, I realized that I was simply at the wrong station—I had gotten off at 16th Street.

Back on the platform the wait was a full 10 minutes. At 24th Street, the escalator was still encased.

A sign posted on the plywood encasement has been warning us all that it will be out until May 2015. A rider’s black humor.

BART said in early July that it would be out “at least until the first week of August.” We noted then the “at least.”

Now a date has been set. “The escalator is expected to reopen September 17,” wrote James K. Allison from BART. Yes, we note the hedge.

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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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