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September 20, 2020 by tomdalzell

The Signs of San Pablo Avenue – El Cerrito South

I have posted about the signs of San Pablo Avenue – signs in Berkeley and Albany and Emeryville and neon signs and a post about the bars on San Pablo in Berkeley. When I did my first post about San Pablo Avenue in 2014 (before Trump, before the pandemic, and before the fires), I wrote: […]
September 14, 2020 by tomdalzell

Fito – Ten Years Since his Transition

Newspapers reported that in the early morning  of September 12, 2010, Adolfo “Fito” Celedon Bravo died shortly after being shot on this spot at Emerson and Adeline during an armed robbery as he walked home with his fiancée Amber Daniela Nelson after a night of dancing at Ashkenaz on his birthday eve.  Nelson uses a different verb […]
September 9, 2020 by tomdalzell

The Home and Art of Peter Neufeld

This is about Peter Neufeld’s  cat, his house, and his art.  One could not make up a more daring, creative, against-the-current life than that which Neufeld has led.   This is Peter. He is a most young 80-something.  He has lived an extraordinary life, pure and true.  I asked him about his secret for longevity and […]
May 9, 2020 by tomdalzell

Susan Brooks …. again

Susan Brooks has her studio in the Sawtooth Building on Eighth Street between Dwight and Parker. It is also known as the Kawneer Building; it is a West Berkeley industrial building that is home to a variety of small buinesses – including artisans, craftspeople, tradespeople, engineers, consultants, designers, fine artists, small industries, performance groups, theathers […]
April 5, 2020 by tomdalzell

Who is that masked man?

He is roaming the streets of Berkeley. Our data points on him suggest that he has confined his roaming to North Berkeley. These two photos show what he is doing. What a rose that is in bloom on the trellis in the background of the lower photo, no? Rosa banksiae, common names Lady Banks’ rose, […]
March 30, 2020 by tomdalzell

The Enclave Apartments – Ken Sarachan’s “Moorish Tudor fever dream”

The corner for decades, the northeast corner of Telegraph and Haste was home to the Berkeley Inn, which I glorified in this post. It started life as an almost-elegant apartment house. It was advertised as having “100 rooms equipped in the most complete modern manner, beautifully furnished.” By the time fires ripped through it in […]
March 23, 2020 by tomdalzell

Our Dark, Satanic Mills, Tertiam Partem

These are times that try our souls. I am keeping up my Quirky Berkeley project in the belief that anything distracting or positive is more important and helpful now than ever. I was convinced of this when I got an email from Lenny Pitt. He sent a link to a 7-minute film he made using […]
March 15, 2020 by tomdalzell

Chocolate Club

Lenny Pitt has opened another quirky door for me – It meets every month in the cottage behind Leonard Pitt’s home in North Berkeley. You perhaps remember my post on Pitt from late 2015, in which we visited the cottage in question. And more recently Pitt took me to meet and see the perfume world […]
March 9, 2020 by tomdalzell

HELP WANTED: Quirky Restaurant Interiors

Ever since Dara closed (Shatuck and Cedar), Tuk Tuk at 2468 has been my go-to Thai restaurant. The formal name for a tuk-tuk is an auto rickshaw because it is a motorized development of the traditional pulled rickshaw or cycle rickshaw. “Rickshaw” originates from the Japanese word jinrikisha (人力車, 人 jin = human, 力 riki […]
February 22, 2020 by tomdalzell

Duke

My friend had told me this about Duke: “When we were young, we were kind of close to our cousin named Duke.   At least we thought he was our cousin.  Like us, he had a Norse god nickname – Ve.   Right after this Christmas photo (below) our aunt and uncle moved to the Upper Peninsula with […]
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