Would be very handy if we had something similar in Alameda to this iPhone app:

Ask not what your city can do for you; ask what your iPhone can do for your city. Starting today, Pittsburgh became the first U.S. city with its very own iPhone application, iBurgh which allows Steel City residents to use their devices to snap pictures of civic embarrassments and hazards and upload them directly to municipal public administration.

If somebody does develop such an app, perhaps they won’t call it iMeda

Nah … this is not an India related travelogue

In a recent post, Lauren mentioned that an Indian restaurant would be opening up soon on Park St. As luck would have it, I had dinner with some friends at Flavors of India over the weekend … these are the very same folks who will soon be setting up shop in our fair town. If my experience (and that of others) is any indication, they could very well endup giving the other Indian place (on Buena Vista) a run for their business.

A marginal improvement from January!

Check out this mashup of the freeways that were planned in the 50s and 60s, but never built (thankfully!). Included among the plans was a southern crossing of the bay bridge that would connect SF  to 880 South via Alameda!

This would have been an additional crossing S of the Bay Bridge, terminating in Oakland (two approaches in Oakland: one along Alameda and one along Doolittle to the I-880/Hegenberger interchange). The history of the Southern Crossing goes back at least to 1948, when the state department of public works prepared a report on additional toll crossings of San Francisco Bay.

Great article in the Chronicle on the theater and the revival of Park St.

Perhaps this is a record for the most number of Alameda related articles in the Chronicle on a given day. 4 (FOUR!) articles in today’s paper. Inquiring mind wants to know … what do we owe this to and what took them so long?

Kite and wind surfing in Alameda

Alameda Restaurants

Alameda Victorians

(The piece de resistance) Alameda braces for change

The last article elicited the very predictable Pavlovian response (comment) from the usual suspect about some imaginary threat or the other. The bloke perhaps sees conspiracies lurking behind his own shadow, but I digress!

Before and after pics.

Paradise unpaved indeed!

We always knew Alameda was special (why else would we live here?). Here’s a new report appears to validate this and is hopefully is the start of a long term trend.

They’re the East Bay’s elite eight — cities where assessed property values have bucked downward trends and eased the pain city governments are feeling from the recession. Alameda, Piedmont, Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Lafayette, Moraga and Orinda have all seen their assessed property values increase, albeit slightly, according to data from the Alameda and Contra Costa counties’ assessors’ offices.

The 3/50 project: Pick 3. Spend 50. Save your local economy!

Interesting article in the WSJ:

A survey released in January by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Minneapolis nonprofit research group, found that community efforts can often at least protect independent companies from the worst of the recession. Independent retailers in cities with buy-local campaigns saw holiday sales drop 3.2% from the previous year, compared with 5.6% in cities without them. There are about 100 such campaigns across the country, the group estimates.

More information on the 3/50 project is here.

Given that we have a similarly limited number of entry/exit points, this might be an idea worth considering.

Situated on a peninsula, Tiburon’s hillside homes and waterfront shops are accessible by only two roads, allowing police to point the special cameras known as license plate readers at every lane that leads into and out of the town of 8,800. The readers, which use character recognition software, can compare plates to databases of cars that have been stolen or linked to crimes, then immediately notify police of matches, said Police Chief Michael Cronin.

If someone burglarized a Tiburon home at 3 a.m. one morning, he said, detectives could consult the devices and find out who came to town in the hours before – and who rolled out soon after.