Author: Staff

There’s limited seating at the upcoming talk and book-signing by Frank Gormlie on his new history, The May 1970 Rebellion.

It’s at 1 pm on Saturday, December 14, and the casual event will be in a back yard in northeast Ocean Beach. Wine and chips will be on hand.

People planning on attending are asked to RSVP to the Rag – obragblog@gmail.com and the address will be sent via email.

Also, Gormlie is putting this on himself and will not be able to handle credit or debit cards, but will be accepting checks and cash.

Here’s the formal announcement:

The body of an unidentified man was recovered from the ocean early Monday morning, December 9, by first responders.

They had responded to a 911 call at 5:00 a.m. Monday reporting a body face-down on the beach near the end of Bermuda Ave. getting carried out to sea by waves.

Early Thursday morning, December 5, a fire broke out in a two-story apartment on the 5000 block of Narragansett in OB and 2 people had to be hospitalized with at least one of them suffering burn-related injuries.

Responding firefighters helped numerous residents evacuate the fire that erupted just before 12:30 a.m, 10News reported, but two people were reportedly trapped inside and had to be rescued and rushed to the hospital.

By Geoff Page

The City of San Diego held its ribbon cutting ceremony for the Cañon Street Pocket Park Wednesday, November 27 at 10:00 a.m. The event was originally to take place 11:00 a.m. the previous Wednesday, November 20, but the city cancelled it at the last moment with little explanation.

Without a doubt, all the stories that have appeared, or will appear, about this park opening will be positive to a fault and will probably consist of the city’s announcement word for word. This account will not be one of those.

For starters, the time for this ceremony was a head scratcher. Most of the public would ordinarily be working at ten or eleven on a Wednesday morning. The re-scheduling was equally puzzling, holding the ceremony on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when most of the public was busy with the holiday.

But, after much experience with the City of San Diego, looking for common sense is a fool’s pursuit.

There was a small crowd of people at the opening. A good number of those people, however, were either city people, news media, Peninsula Community Planning Board members, and others not necessarily the “public.”

By Geoff Page

The Dog Beach fencing project, described here in The Rag four years ago, is finally underway. The work of drilling holes in the sand and placing 4×4 wood posts is almost complete.

The posts are four feet high and close together, perhaps ten feet apart. The existing “fence” was much shorter but ran along the same paths. The word “fence” is a bit confusing. There is an existing east/west path, on the south side of the Dog Beach dunes, that borders the wetland area.

Ah… the good life.

Frank Gormlie, editor here at OB Rag, is having a book-signing event with his new book, The May 1970 Rebellion, at La Playa Books in Point Loma on Saturday, November 23rd.

The book-signing will be from 2 to 4 pm at La Playa, located at 1026 Rosecrans Street, San Diego, CA 92106-3019 — their phone is (619) 226-2601. As it’s a weekend, parking should be relatively easy.

The book covers the May 1970 student upheaval caused by President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the subsequent repression. Currently, it’s in an ebook mode — and the paperback version Print on Demand (POD) is also available at Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. (The paperback is in two volumes.)

Barrio Logan Mid-Rise Planned

A four-story, 73-unit housing complex at 1864 National Avenue has won approval from the Barrio Logan Community Planning Group despite neighborhood pushback. The project will replace an industrial warehouse and take more than three years to complete.

On September 18, the planning group voted to recommend the project 6-2 with one abstention. According to an inewssource report, community members expressed concerns that parking problems along the busy street will grow worse. Minutes of the meeting by a documenter reported:

One feature that raised many questions was that the complex will only offer 13 parking spots. These spots will be located in an alley on the side of the building on a first-come, first-serve basis.

There were no satisfactory answers given to the questions, to some in the audience.

Residents to Demand Answers Why There Was No Community Input and More on “Footnote 7”

Encanto and Emerald Hills residents will turn out in force tomorrow, November 12th, at San Diego City Hall to stop a high-density housing project and demand detailed information about how residential zones in Southeast San Diego were up zoned with no input from the community planning group or neighbors.

“We’re identified as an environmental justice-affected community,” said Encanto resident Rob Campbell. “And so we don’t see how paving over what green space we have will increase our air quality or will decrease the heat island effect that we suffer from.”

The residents are appealing a multi-unit project made possible by a still-mysterious footnote in the city’s planning code that reduced the minimum lot size from 20,000 square feet to 5,000 square feet.

Election eve was a good night for San Diego’s incumbents, as they all won. Gloria, Lawson-Remer, Elo-Rivera, Whitburn — and even Ferbert if you consider her office an incumbency.

This trend also extended to the  state and House races. Here are the results so far for the County with 49.2% of votes counted.

Here are some candidates’ watch parties happening later tonight — candidates that the Rag supports.

These parties are generally from 6:30-9:30pm.

Turner watch party –

Tavern + Bowl, 930 Market Street, San Diego, CA 92101