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Excavating Golden Hill: The Mansion on the Hill

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By Jim Miller

Coming up Broadway from downtown, it’s the one thing you can’t miss: the Quartermass/Wilde house, the Xanadu of Golden Hill. In the heart of a district of historic homes, this one serves as a monument to the elite status of Golden Hill in the beginning of the last century. One of the biggest of the remaining Victorian mansions in the city, it is also one of San Diego’s most spectacular historic structures.

With its marvelous rococo towers, Doric columns, and stunning domed cupola, the Quartermass/Wilde House looms atop the hill. This gorgeous Queen Anne Victorian mixes in elements of classical revival style as it sits above the street on stone retaining walls amidst a beautifully landscaped yard featuring a huge Star Pine. When one approaches the house from the intersection of Broadway and 24th, the stairway of the unique corner entrance beckons like Gatsby with the promise of unspeakable wonder.

Once inside, one is greeted by an ornately carved stairwell, walls covered with wood paneling and elaborate tapestries, stained glass windows on the landing, a wine cellar, and 8800 square feet of elegant domestic space. Built in 1897 by department store owner Ruben Quartermass, this mansion spoke the status that was the elite enclave of Golden Hill.   [Read more…]

The “Self Appointed Mayor of Golden Hill” Holds Court in the Big Kitchen

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By Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew

Judy Forman is a Golden Hill institution. Her restaurant, the Big Kitchen Café, has served as a center of community life and activism for many years. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the neighborhood without her or her place. I first went to the Big Kitchen myself in the eighties when I met with folks involved in the protest movement against Reagan Administration policies in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

More recently, Judy helped Kelly and me out by playing the role of Emma Goldman in the 100-year Anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight when local labor and Occupy folks took over the intersection of 5th and E downtown. Over the years Forman has been active in LGBT politics, helped out with fundraisers for the Center on Policy Initiative’s Students for Economic Justice Internship program, started the New Play Café (a company devoted to helping playwrights develop their work), and offered up her “kitchen,” as she likes to say, to far too many people to name here.

Thus, to make a long story short, Forman has had her hand in much local activism over the past thirty some odd years and the Big Kitchen has always been one of the progressive hubs of San Diego and the heart of the neighborhood. It was our pleasure to interview her for this Golden Hill series.   [Read more…]

The Golden Hill Vibe: Over Forty Years of Grit, Grace, and Gentrification

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By Jim Miller

This week I move from interviewing a recent arrival to Golden Hill to a longtime resident.

Peter Zschiesche and his wife Pam Clark have lived in the Greater Golden Hill community since 1971 and have seen the neighborhood change quite a bit over the years. Peter was involved in anti-war movement politics in the early seventies and later became a leader in the Machinists Union and played a key part in the strikes at NASSCO in the 1980s. He is the Founding Director of the Employee Rights Center, which began in 1999, and he currently serves as Vice President of the Board of Trustees for the San Diego Community College District. Thus most of Peter’s adult life has been spent fighting for social justice in the service of workers, students, immigrants, and others in Golden Hill and San Diego at large.   [Read more…]

The Greater Golden Hill Community Development Corporation: Striving to Emphasize Community over Corporation

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By Jim Miller

When we at the San Diego Free Press decided to turn our focus to the community of Golden Hill, one of the first people I thought it would be good to talk to was my friend, neighbor, union brother, and colleague Judd Curran.  Judd and his wife Victoria both teach at Grossmont College, live in Golden Hill, and sit on the board of the Greater Golden Hill Community Development Corporation Board  and are quite active in the community.  I know Judd and his wife as smart, progressive, compassionate people who want the best for their community.  Thus Judd is uniquely suited to speak to the issues of community identity, gentrification, and the past, present, and future of Golden Hill.    [Read more…]

Golden Hill: “Tis a Picture Worth Seeing”

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By Jim Miller

May is Golden Hill month here at the San Diego Free Press where we will do our collective best to spotlight one of San Diego’s oldest and most dynamic communities. 

A particularly interesting question we will be engaging is how the imagined community of Greater Golden Hill that is shared by many long time residents as well as entities such as the Golden Hill Community Development Corporation conflicts with the official separation of Golden Hill from South Park.

The more narrow designation of Golden Hill’s boundaries sets Interstate 5 as the western border and 34th Street where A, B, and C Streets end as its easternmost limit.  To the south, the Martin Luther King Jr. freeway separates Golden Hill from its neighbors in ShermanHeights and Grant Hill while Russ Boulevard and A Street mark its northern border.   [Read more…]

Labor Bashing and Lincoln Club Love in San Diego Elections

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The Last Refuge for Losers and Scoundrels in Local Democratic Politics in Assembly District 80 and Council District 4

By Jim Miller

In the race to replace Ben Hueso in the 80th it shouldn’t be shocking that Lorena Gonzalez’s opponent has attacked her for being a “union boss” except for the fact that that charge was hurled at her not from a Republican but from fellow Democrat, Steve Castaneda.  Indeed, Mr. Castaneda, who would surely have taken labor’s endorsement if offered, was far too quick to turn to cartoon like right-wing anti-union stereotypes.  This should tell us all we need to know about this variety of Democrat.

Sadly, he is one of a growing number of Democrats who can blithely turn on labor when it is convenient for their own political ambitions or pocket books.   [Read more…]

Corporate Education Reform Goes to College Despite Flunking Out in the K-12 System

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By Jim Miller

Things haven’t been going too well for the corporate education reform forces lately.  In Chicago there is great controversy surrounding and parent resistance to school closings as a result of the efforts of over zealous reformers. This shameful turn of events puts yet another black mark on former Obama Administration chief of staff and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s heavy-handed reign of error over his city’s schools.

  [Read more…]

Happy Tax Day—For Some More Than Others

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Prop 30 passed, the truth is that the poor still pay a heftier share of their income in taxes than the wealthy.  Last week, the California Budget Project (CBP) released their annual report “Who Pays Taxes on California?”,  and it appears that the post Proposition 30 landscape is far from apocalyptic for the top 1%.

By the broadest measure of revenue collection, “Taxafornia,” despite its largely progressive tax system, ranks 15th in the country in total “own source” revenue, and the poorest among us pay the highest share of their family income in taxes.

Indeed, as the CBP report outlines, “California’s lowest-income families pay the most in taxes, when measured as a share of family income.  This is true even after accounting for Proposition 30’s temporary personal income tax increases for very wealthy Californians, which took effect in 2012.   [Read more…]

The San Diego Nine Walk in the Footsteps of Martin Luther King

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The San Diego Nine picked the perfect week for a hunger strike.  They may not have known it, but the ghosts of Memphis were haunting the Mission Valley Hilton.  What’s the connection?

Last week was the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was murdered in Memphis where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers.  As I noted in my column for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in January, the real MLK is frequently neglected in favor of a distorted picture of a vanilla saint who just wanted us all to get along.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Indeed, King was a provocateur who wanted to disturb us about America’s hypocritical racial inequality AND its shameful class divide.  King died fighting for the rights of poor workers of color because he thought nothing was a better example of what he wanted the Poor People’s Campaign to be than the sanitation workers’ strike.  Their fight was a call not just for legal civil rights for black people, but a cry for economic justice for all.   [Read more…]

Manchester Buys Baseball’s Padres, Changes Name

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After having purchased and transformed the San Diego Union Tribune into America’s greatest newspaper in the Finest City in the World’s Best Darn Country, Doug Manchester is at it again. This time he has set his sights on the nation’s pastime and is aiming to put it back on the map for good by bringing an even more super American brand of baseball to the place where happy happens.
Change of course, is not just what will be left in your pocket after the Socialist in Chief leaves the White House, it’s the order of the day at Manchester Park, home of the San Diego Robber Barons. Swap out the statue of Tony Gwyn for one of the Lord Manchester himself and toss the swinging friar down the memory hole and replace him with that plucky little Carl DeMaio who will rove the stands passing out complementary reports on the inefficiency of local government and the scourge of pubic sector unionism.   [Read more…]

Help Bob Filner Stand Up to Business as Usual: Vote for Myrtle Cole in District 4

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Tomorrow is Election Day in District 4, and it matters.  While this City Council race has garnered very little attention in San Diego as a whole and will certainly be a low turnout affair, the stakes are actually quite high.  Indeed, the direction of the city is on the line.

As Doug Porter noted last week, outside money has been pouring into District 4 attacking Myrtle Cole. Why?  Because Cole is the only candidate who will stand firmly behind Bob Filner’s agenda and buck the powerful moneyed interests that are bent on subverting the mayor.

Who’s behind the attacks?  San Diego County Voters for Progress and Reform, a shadowy group that has been funded by the usual suspects: developers, downtown business groups, and the Lincoln Club.  Those same folks are backing Cole’s opponent, Barry Pollard, and even fellow progressive Dwayne Crenshaw has taken money from Robert Gleason of Atlas Hotels (and a key figure in the TMD struggle against Filner) as well as Rural/Metro Corporation whose contract with San Diego for paramedic services will soon come up for renewal.  In addition to this, sources close to the campaign tell me that Cole is the only candidate that has not met with the Lincoln Club, which should tell you all you need to know.   [Read more…]

Should We Be Outsourcing Public Higher Education in California?

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Suggesting we drop existing standards for the wild west of market based online education will do for education what deregulation did for banks and the stock market.  

Last week State Senator Darrell Steinberg proposed what he thinks of as a bold new way to reshape higher education in California and to deal with the bottleneck of students who have trouble getting into “gateway” classes in our community colleges and universities.  What is Steinberg’s answer to our access ills?  Sadly, it is outsourcing higher education to the corporate interests who have long been aggressively lobbying to get a piece of the publically funded pie that is California’s public education system.   [Read more…]

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