OB Rag

By Brian Clulow

Most of the OB Rag readers with families already know that the area around Ocean Beach and Point Loma has few playgrounds for kids.

This fits with a broader city trend as there have been numerous articles and studies over the years regarding park deficient communities in San Diego.

One highlight for our local communities of the Peninsula has been that for years the families around Silver Gate Elementary have been able to take their kids to the playground area there after-hours and on weekends, a great boon for parents with small children.

It turns out the Target Express potentially coming to Ocean Beach is not just some chance encounter between the corporate giant and a small, seaside community.

Corporate Target has been having a difficult time lately and has been putting into play its plans to turn its business around. It was just in February at the end of that quarter Target reported its profits plummeted 43% as sales at its stores sagged due to “the mass migration by its customers online and elsewhere.”

It’s been really tough for malls and traditional retailers as they compete against Amazon and other online retailers as shoppers hit the keyboards instead of the aisles.

San Diego involved in new study which tells the story of craft beer’s astonishing rise and geographic clustering

By Richard Florida / City Lab / Aug. 15, 2017

I enjoy living in Canada for many reasons, but one downside has been my distance from my home country’s craft beer revival. Since Canada’s outmoded liquor laws prevent much of the good stuff from flowing across the border, I’m reduced to hauling cases back to Toronto from Michigan, where my wife’s family live.

While Canada has experienced a craft beer boom of its own, it’s impossible to compete with the sheer variety of brews being produced in America these days.

Restaurant Review

Kaiserhof Restaurant & Biergarten
2253 Sunset Cliffs Blvd.
San Diego, CA 92107
619-224-0606

It’s been almost 30 years since I have had a meal at Kaiserhof. The last time I did they were still located in the Mission Valley/State College area.

When my friend Barbara suggested that we go to lunch at Kaiserhof I jumped at the chance. My background has German/Hungarian heritage and I thought it would be nice to see how authentic Bavarian food would taste compared to what I make in the kitchen.

Although there is a parking lot in the back of the building, there were no available parking spaces

As I enter my thirtieth year as a professor at a public college of one kind or another, I’m used to the constant political fray that comes with being in the middle of funding battles, debates about education reform, and the culture wars, but this may be the first time in my long career that I have begun a new semester with the knowledge that a large number of Americans no longer see higher education as a public good.

Over the summer, the Pew Research Center released an interesting poll that helps explain where we are at this political and cultural moment in America. The survey revealed that most Republicans now believe that institutions of higher education have an adverse effect on the United States.

OB Planning Board’s Project Review Committee Meeting

By Brett Warnke

The OB Planning Board’s Project Review Committee on August 16 included only three agenda items but turned lively as locals pushed back on a proposed plan for redevelopment.

The builders and architect presented drawings of a trendy modern design — a style popular for vacation rentals and in the changing neighborhoods along the coast. In the design, there are two three-story single-family residences on a .15 acre site at 4719 Bermuda Avenue. The plans, which call for four-bedrooms and 3.5 bath, in the builder’s words, maximize their profits as well as the space of the two narrow lots.

By any measure, last night’s fundraiser for the Ocean Beach Woman’s Club was a definite success.

Held at The Holding Company bar and music venue on Newport Avenue, the big draw was the San Diego reggae band, Big Mountain.

A small business feels the heat in OB’s changing landscape

By Brett Warnke

Maryanne Hsu does not stop moving.

Her restaurant, The Little Chef on Newport Avenue, is a busy reef of patrons. There are a few tables occupied as I entered and a teenager wearing an Ohio shirt who flung a fortune cookie to his friend. Both quit their tables with stray grains of fried rice lying on dirty plates, as empty as he left the tip jar. Maryanne quickly tidied up.

Her Little Chef is little bigger than a Point Loma heiress’s closet, but it is a delicious local spot where she has spent roughly 65 hours of each of the 7 days a week she works since she immigrated to San Diego in 1990.

Originally posted in 2017.
Ocean Beach does have its own history of a KKK – or Klan – presence, and the presence of other white supremacists over the years.
And within OB’s well known laid-back character and tolerance for alternative lifestyles – which has allowed artists, musicians, bohemians, gays and lesbians, along with bikers and skin heads, to reside within the dense neighborhoods of the community – there’s also been a fiercely, anti-racist attitude among the more liberal and radical residents, at least since the late 1960s.

All summer the OB Rag has been collecting memories of those who lived through the 1967 “Summer of Love” in Ocean Beach and San Diego – asking our readers to send us their experiences so we can share them.

So, this is the LAST CALL for Summer of Love memories wherever our readers gathered them.

You’ve probably seen Ray Blavatt’s cartoon drawings around town at the local coffee houses, but didn’t know he has been the animator for a special program for adult literacy.

Now, in fact, Ray is part of a team that is a semifinalist in a national adult literacy project called X Prize. He is the team’s animator and has created their titles that have taught over 1 million students.

Ray is part of another team – the team of locals who keep the Ocean Beach Historical Society going. Often working quietly in the background, he provides tech support to the OBHS during their monthly presentations.

By Anna Daniels

The response to Trump’s total moral failure to reckon with what happened in Charlottesville last Saturday prompted an immediate response from citizens all over the country. Over 700 rallies and marches were held in the aftermath, including here in San Diego.

Also in San Diego, the Horton Plaza pavement plaque commemorating the Confederacy was removed–quickly. According to the petition that was circulated yesterday