Davisville

The Artery co-op/gallery/store turns 50 this year. Most of its downtown Davis neighbors from the 1970s are gone, so how has the Artery lasted? Heidi Bekebrede and Adele Shaw, two of its members, list several reasons on today’s Davisville, and some might surprise you — they include the hours (most art galleries don’t open daily), the variety (most don’t display so many artists), members who work in the shop, turnover that brings in new artists, fresh displays, and a town with lots of people interested in the arts. The train station a block away helps too.

We also talk about the store’s name, how they find members, the other meaning of “cute” in Bekebrede’s Cuteware, the way Putah Creek inspires Shaw’s paintings, and how managing a 32-machine laundromat in San Francisco introduced Shaw to first- and second-hand stories of her neighborhood from many decades before.

Housing in Davis has kept evolving since we last talked about it on Davisville in summer 2022. The supply has grown, more new housing is in the works, and the city logged just 354 home sales in 2023, when in “a really strong year, [Davis will] get upwards of close to 600 home sales,” says Davis real estate broker Steve Boschken. Rising interest rates were a cause.

Today’s returning guests on Davisville are Steve; Kit Boschken, manager of Boschken Properties, which she co-owns with Steve; and their son James Boschken, a real estate agent and property manager who moved back to Davis from Texas a year ago. We talk about rents, prices, the G Street downtown apartment proposals, opting to live in Woodland, and a few interesting details from the market last year — like the three UC Davis seniors who moved from Davis to Sacramento, Kit says, because they had to be in Davis only two days a week and Sacramento had “more of a nightlife.”

Some individuals’ work in Davis is so visible that they end up personifying their jobs. Today’s guest is one of those folks — Bruce Gallaudet, a longtime, prolific writer about sports in Davis. A former editor and sports editor of the Davis Enterprise, he has retired from the news organization twice, and recently returned for the second time. Officially, he’s now a sports correspondent for the paper.

On today’s Davisville our topics include why he’s back, how he’s working within the limits imposed by a publication that’s a fraction of its former size, and what people miss when they dismiss sports stories as uninteresting. "There's a great deal of flavor in sports," he says.

Jake Berman, who lived in Davis when he was younger, has developed a writer’s interest in something Davis has never had — subways. So he wrote The Lost Subways of North America — a Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been, a new book about transit and how it reflects a city’s personality, interests, and other attributes.

He writes this about the Bay Area, for example -- that after the Freeway Revolt a half century ago, in which San Francisco turned away seven of 10 freeways planned for the city, “the Bay Area adopted a posture that any changes to the urban fabric were presumptively bad, and that exhaustive study of any such changes would be necessary.” We're living with the aftermath of the attitude, which he believes is also present in Davis and other California communities.

Jake, now an attorney in New York City, will speak about his book Nov. 29 at the Avid Reader bookstore in downtown Davis, and joins us today on Davisville. (He also created the transit illustrations in the book -- this image is an excerpt from his map of San Francisco's cable cars in 1892.)