I live in the City Heights neighborhood of Teralta East, the long thin sliver of flat land wedged between the busy major thoroughfares of University Avenue and El Cajon Boulevard on the south and north and Fairmount and Euclid avenues on the west and east. There is not much in the way of open space in the area and the canyons are cut off from Teralta East by those same surface roads. Nevertheless, a coyote was recently spotted in Fairmount Village. My little section of 45th street, in fact my house, is home to opossums and skunks and a raccoon has even passed through.

The opossums have been around the longest. They seem to have adapted easily to urban living. During the early years here, they feasted upon the snails and slugs that abounded in the yard. After wiping out all of the snails and slugs, they came to rely more and more upon the cat food which we set out for the abandoned outdoor cats that have also taken up residence with us. It is an understatement to say that a mature opossum is not exactly the classical beauty of the wild kingdom. There’s the rat like tail, the scroungy fur and the close set eyes and long narrow face that fall woefully short on the intelligence and cuteness scale.   [Read more…]

The City Heights Farmer’s Market recently celebrated its fourth anniversary. This market offers fresh fruits, vegetables and good food that speaks to the varying tastes of our diverse community. Here in City Heights we are also growing our own food in community gardens. Do you remember when First Lady Michelle Obama visited the Crawford New Roots Community Garden in 2010?

Community gardens offer something different than gardening in your own back yard or shopping for fresh produce at a farmer’s market. Community gardens are where the power of nature meet the power of people. Community gardens grow relationships, they grow community as much as vegetables and fruit.   [Read more…]

Street of Dreams Spoken Word Concert
7:00 pm Friday July 13
Seville Theater San Diego City College
1450 C Street San Diego CA 92101
Donation at door

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives—the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it at times—truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. Salman Rushdie, novelist

City Heights resident Teresa Gunn is a songwriter, a singer and an activist. She knows about the power of stories to connect us to each other and to lost and hidden parts of ourselves. Above all, she knows that our stories can heal us.   [Read more…]

San Diego seems to be in love with dogs. We have dog parks for big dogs and dog parks for small dogs. Dog owners, complete strangers to each other, stand on street corners in North Park with their pets and discuss the details of life with a shar pei or bichon frise while said animals enthusiastically explore each others nether portions. One acquaintance in Bankers Hill launched into a discourse on her mastiff’s lineage when I innocently asked, “Tell me something about your dog!” Perhaps I am only imagining that the very long account stretched back to the signing of the Magna Carta.

Here on my street in City Heights we only have two kinds of dogs- big dogs and little yippi dogs. And then there are the Chihuahuas which are more attitude than dog. They act as if they are really big dogs trapped by some cruel cosmic joke in the wrong size fur package. The little yippi dogs come in two styles– white fluffy and wiener. The fact that the little guys have won the popularity contest here is a subtle yet significant shift from the past.   [Read more…]

The number 7 bus is
The Tower of Babel turned on its side
The Tower of Babble with wheels
It’s articulated in the middle
For maneuvering corners
Although most of the maneuvering
Happens on the inside
& it’s not easy

The number 7 bus stops on every corner
Picks up everybody, everybody being
The passenger who searches her purse his pockets her bags
For the correct change
& comes up a quarter short
The elderly white woman struggling up the steps
Her shopping cart half -filled with her Social Security check’s munificence
Twelve rolls of generic toilet paper
Single ply   [Read more…]

It probably should come as no surprise that the diverse community of City Heights delivers up equally diverse coffee drinking experiences. The one unifying quality to the coffee here is a certain “robustness–” this is City Heights after all. If you love the smell of coffee, the taste of coffee and the experience of drinking coffee in unpretentious cafes and restaurants, City Heights delivers on all counts.

I began my week with a hot Vietnamese coffee, pâté chaud and sharing a Vietnamese Special sandwich with my husband at Café Doré, so hot Vietnamese coffee with espresso and condensed milk it is for this week’s coffee column. The cafe is located in a strip mall off of University Avenue that includes a busy laundromat, a couple of Asian markets and a check cashing store.   [Read more…]

The home my husband and I bought in City Heights over two decades ago is a four mile straight shot along University Avenue from the little house we had rented in North Park for six years. Despite the short distance, the trips east to our new home were initially disorienting. Yes, there were the same low buildings constructed between the 20’s and 40’s lining University Avenue and the uninterrupted march of billboards knitted the two communities together seamlessly with their visual blight.

But North Park, even though it was in the throes of urban decay, still had a palpable urban energy and a diverse concentration of businesses in the area of 30th Street from University to El Cajon. There were small specialty shops, thrift stores and restaurants, and even a JCPenny, all of which attracted a diverse segment of the population in the area. City Heights on the other hand lacked an identifiable destination with a similar broad appeal. In City Heights, circa 1987, there was no there there.   [Read more…]

Author’s note: This is the first post of my new weekly SDFP column City Heights Up Close & Personal. It is the distillation of my experiences and observations of the confounding, sometimes dazzling and always changing urban landscape that I call home.

“We are children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.” Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“We’re not in Kansas anymore Toto.” Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz

For the past twenty five years My Beloved and I have lived in a postage stamp size home that we own in City Heights. Our street is in constant motion with pedestrians and cars moving between the wide thoroughfares of University Avenue and El Cajon Boulevard. Two of the most common sounds are the trash trucks in the alley and moms calling out apúrate (hurry up!) to their kids lingering on the sidewalk. There is very little that is unified or uniform about the physical landscape or the people who live here. That is what I love about City Heights. That is what I also hate about City Heights.   [Read more…]