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Work by Precita Mural artists has been going on for the new mural at Philz Coffee on 24th Street.
It’s lovely.
The new mural replaces an iconic mural from the last dot.com boom in 2001 that was tagged several times and finally could not be saved.
It was “Materialistic Displacement,” by Fredericko Alvarado and Manuel Sanchez.
More recently the mural was tagged and the the bottom half completely destroyed.
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.
More by Lydia Chávez
