Our Fair City

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/us/03bcemeryville.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=bukowski&st=cse

I've probably made a few obscure comments over the years about the nature of our city Emeryville, the link above is to a story in the local section of the NYTimes about our councilman, Ken Bukowski. Ken's a meth-head who rode into office on a wave of reform twenty-five years ago and now lives on his city salary of $1,100 a month, a hell of a welfare system. He killed a pedestrian with his car on his way home from a council meeting a couple years ago.

This place has a checkered history, for sure, in "The Maltese Falcon," Sam Spade is clunked on the head and wakes up in a waterfront shack, that's Emeryville. A gambling mecca, originally founded as the site for the Golden Gate fields racetrack. In the 70s and early 80s the place was the personal domain of the corrupt sheriff, John LaCoste, who ran things out of the bar known as "The Townhouse." That was when the big buildings were put up, construction kickbacks, the card rooms were going strong. Later, in the 90s offshore money from Hong Kong flooded into the gambling houses, starting a brief wave of violent crime between asian gangs.

Of course our small houses do resemble the old man's in "UP," which was made here in Emeryville by Pixar. When we moved to town we would look up when a vehicle came by on our street, Peralta, now 5,000 a day pass, it's now difficult to back out of the dirveway, they've been killing our cats. For years I would walk regularly in the surreal open space of an abandoned industrial base, miles of empty loading docks, pampas grass sprouting from the concrete cracks, steel mills and paint factories, a Del Monte cannery still operating. Now this city is a retail destination, Trader Joe's, IKEA, a Home Depot. Phase II filled all empty space with apartments and condominiums, the dot-com and pharma booms fueled a big commercial building spree. And of course there are the still officially blessed plans to put in the massive 5-story low-income housing project next to our property.