Category: Ocean Beach

From SOHO

We have some very good news to share: Monday, September 14, 2026, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2576 into law!

This is an important victory for historic preservation, and you helped make it happen.

Thank you to everyone who contacted the Governor, sent emails, shared our action alert, and spoke up in support of this important legislation. Your voices mattered.

AB 2576 closes an important gap in California’s new transit-oriented housing law, SB 79. It provides protections for qualifying contributing properties within historic districts listed in the California Historical Resources Inventory Database, as well as individually listed historic resources in the inventory, when designated before January 1, 2025.

By Claire Trageser / Axios San Diego / September 11, 2026

[Slightly edited for clarification]

AJ Miller has transformed his Ocean Beach apartment into a birthplace for what his legions of online followers are calling life-changing pizza. The pizza is crispy and extremely exclusive. He makes just 15 a week and sells out in under 30 seconds.

His pies have also become catnip for Gen Z and millennials. They’re rare, you have to be in the know to get one and he shares his pizza-making story on Instagram, where he has 114K followers.

“I think people do like what they can’t get, so the exclusivity does play into it a bit,” Miller said of his popularity.

It’s close to New York style, Miller told Axios, but his favorite is New Haven style “apizza,”

A body was found in the water off Ocean Beach shortly after midnight on Monday, September 14, authorities said.

San Diego police were called shortly after 12:30 a.m. after someone spotted a body in the water off Brighton Avenue, south of Lifeguard Tower 5.No information about the person found was released.

Authorities have not released the identity of the person found, and the case has been referred to the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office, which will determine both the cause of death and the person’s identity.

An Ocean Beach native by the name of Bryson is hospitalized after surviving a 45-foot fall from the top of a palm tree while trimming it at work Tuesday, Sept.8. He suffered more than 25 broken bones, including severe fractures to his femur, elbow, ankle, pelvis, wrist, nose and forehead, all on the right side of his body.

Bryson has already undergone three emergency surgeries, with another scheduled, and faces months of hospitalization and rehabilitation. His family launched a GoFundMe to help cover his medical care, physical therapy and living expenses while he is unable to work. As of this writing, over $15,000 has been raised. As an aside, he should be eligible for Workers Compensation as well.

Here is some of the text from the GoFundMe page:

On Tuesday, our brother Bryson fell roughly 45 feet (around four stories) from the top of a palm tree during work tree trimming.

The fact of him being alive is a miracle.

by Debbie L. Sklar / Times of San Diego / Sept. 10, 2026

Kate Sessions was already a nationally recognized horticulturist by the time she established the Pacific Beach nursery that became closely associated with her later years.[ Ed: She later became known as the Mother of Balboa Park.]

Sessions came to San Diego to teach at the Russ School. In 1885, she joined Solon and Clara Blaisdell in purchasing the San Diego Nursery. The partnership dissolved in 1887, and Sessions took over its operation. She later operated nurseries in Coronado, City Park, Mission Hills, and Pacific Beach, as well as a flower shop downtown.

Sessions’ downtown flower shop added another part to her horticultural business. She eventually sold the shop to Alice Rainford in 1909 so she could concentrate on her nursery work. Rainford had begun working for Sessions in 1898 and continued operating the shop after taking it over.

Claiming Democrats are “communists” is another fantasy crisis.

Bill Eddy / Substack / Aug 17, 2026

Remember the 2016 election campaign when Donald Trump repeatedly called Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” and the entire Republican Convention chanted “Lock Her Up”? Yes, she improperly used a personal server for her emails sometimes for government business—just like many Republicans in government did without consequence. She was not prosecuted for this, but less than two weeks before the election, the Director of the FBI, James Comey, notified Congress that they were investigating an unrelated laptop that suddenly showed up with some of her emails. This gave the bogus claim extra credibility at the worst time. Trump won the election and the issue promptly vanished. Trump’s con was highly effective and may have won him the Presidency.

Now It’s Communism?

In August, 2024, at a press conference while gearing up for the Presidential Election against Kamala Harris, Trump explained his strategy: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country.” He then branded her “comrade Kamala” as his favorite label throughout the campaign. Reports indicate that he used this term somewhere between 30 and 80 times in his speeches in the fall of 2024. And he won the election.

By Muir Avenue Ale

Amtrak has ruined my vacation, and I’m pissed.

For years, Amtrak has sold the California Rail Pass for $159. For the right kind of traveler and the right trip, it’s almost too good to be true. During a 21-day period, you can use the pass for seven days of nearly unlimited travel (four trips per day).

The pass includes these four train lines:

• Pacific Surfliner: San Diego to San Luis Obispo
• Gold Runner (my favorite): Bakersfield to Bay Area
• Capital Corridor: Bay Area
• Coast Starlight: Los Angeles to Dunsmuir

These trains are connected by a bunch of bus routes, which the pass covers. Two of these buses even take you into Nevada (Reno, Las Vegas) for no extra charge.

By Point Loma Observer

Last week, Voice of San Diego updated readers on Awaken Church and its “out there” pastor, Jurgen Matthesius, including a link to a recently posted supercut of clips from Matthesius’ sermons. The clips include his claims that he shrank a child’s inoperable tumor through prayer and that God called on him to pray for the tanks to stop during the Tiananmen Square massacre, prompting him to spontaneously speak in what the article characterizes as “Asian-tinged tongues.”

“Out there” is putting it mildly.

But Matthesius and Awaken Church are not simply a religious curiosity. As many Rag readers know, their influence extends into San Diego’s political arena.

In 2024, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Richard Bailey, now a candidate for San Diego City Council District 2, assisted members of the Awaken Church’s political arm, RMNNT, in their efforts to get elected to local office.

By Debbie L. Sklar / Special to the OB Rag

In 1855, a group of San Diegans began prospecting for coal on Point Loma.

The project was an ambitious one. The San Diego Coal Co. hoped to develop the deposit into a local source of fuel and a profitable business for its investors. A local coal supply also could have helped San Diego compete as a coaling station for steamships and potentially benefit from future railroad development.

The men behind the venture were associated with San Diego’s small Mormon community. Among them was Ephraim Green, a former member of the Mormon Battalion who later said he had noticed coal on Point Loma before leaving San Diego in 1847.

The story has acquired a mythology of its own. One version says the Mormon prospectors were acting on a “revelation” that coal could be found there. But the historical record tells a more complicated story.

Reports of possible coal deposits on Point Loma dated to at least 1849. In 1855, Green returned to California and told members of the Mormon colony at San Bernardino about the coal he remembered seeing on Point Loma. He eventually led interested men to the site.

The prospecting soon became a formal business.

The San Diego Coal Co. was formed in November 1855 by Green, H.C. Ladd, George Warren Sirrine and Seth Benjamin Tanner.

Contact Governor Newsom Immediately to Veto SB 344 -the Midway Rising Gut-and-Amend Bill

By Donna Frye

[Here’s Part 1]

If you’ve been following the Midway Rising development project for the past many years, you know how complicated it has become. The project being proposed includes a new sports arena and housing development in the Midway area that “was once part of the river bottom and alluvial flood plain area of the San Diego River.”

Most recently, state legislation (SB 344) was introduced at the very last minute and passed via a shameful gut-and-amend political maneuver by the state legislators.

It’s been difficult to watch this process play out and not feel disconnected from the elected officials who are supposed to represent us. But it’s no wonder especially when our representatives work so hard to shut us out of the process.

That being said, we still have to do something to try and stop SB 344 from being signed into law.

By Nicole Crosby, Candidate for San Diego City Council District 2

It’s no secret that many of us feel left behind by City Hall. It’s a sentiment I hear from and share with my neighbors every day. With costs on the rise, our infrastructure crumbling, and City leaders pushing half-baked solutions to complex issues, it’s easy to see why.

These were the issues on my mind when I decided to launch my campaign for City Council District 2, which covers the neighborhoods of Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, Point Loma, Clairemont, Midway, Old Town, and North Bay. These are the neighborhoods where I started my family, served as the President of the PTA and Clairemont Town Council, and am proud to be raising my daughter.

And as a working mom, I know this race isn’t about abstract ideas or numbers on a spreadsheet; it’s about real problems that impact real people’s lives. I have served the City Attorney’s office for over a decade, where I’ve stood up for victims of elder abuse, hate crimes, and gun crimes. Every day, I work to help ordinary people secure justice and dignity against those who try to exploit them. Now, I’m running to take that fight to City Hall on behalf of our neighborhoods and stand up against the corporate special interests that want us to stay quiet.

While serving in the community, I have seen firsthand the ways that the system is rigged against working San Diegans: whether it’s corporate short term vacation rentals turning affordable homes in our communities into unregulated hotels, a recreational airfield spreading pollution directly into our backyards, or a stunning lack of investment in basic infrastructure and services. What would fixing these issues and making City Hall actually work for us mean in our everyday lives?

Reporter Interviews Editordude and Cites His Study, “Death and Distress at Sunset Cliffs”

By Andrew J. Campa / The Los Angeles Times / September 8, 2026

SAN DIEGO — As dusk approached San Diego’s seaside enclave of Ocean Beach, its Sunset Cliffs bustled on a recent Friday evening. Two engaged couples posed for wedding photos in between joggers, dog walkers and sightseers who clamored around Osprey Street to enjoy the day’s majestic sunset.

It was a deceptively idyllic setting for what authorities say is continued lawbreaking and peril, which authorities just can’t seem to quash.

The lawbreakers were gathered this day on a cliff and a nearby arch, a crowd of around 50 young people — 14- to 20-year-olds, mostly males. Buoyed by a youthful sense of invincibility, they dared one another to leap, waiting for another to move, like emperor penguin chicks before a first arctic plunge. After a few minutes, there was a dive off the arch, followed by a cannonball from the next person, a backflip from a third and then other more spectacular and daring stunts from the flock. The cliff divers, drawn to the thrills of the illicit jumps amplified by social media, reveled in dozens of leaps.

No one was injured that day, but that hasn’t always been the case.