Today’s Davisville is a story about the new — and about getting started in Davis, as well as art, life after the pandemic, ambition, and the weird. We talk with Toni Rizzo and Harry Greer, who along with Stephanie Peel have started the Secret Spot, an arts gallery and music lounge business that opened this month in a former house at 117 D St. downtown. #ConstructiveDiscomfort #RookieRoom #ArtMania! #LockdownArt #DavisSound #ArtAsTherapy #PsychicScream #HelpingOthers The photo shows, from left, Toni, Harry and Stephanie
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Finding information and news about Davis is harder than it should be. The Enterprise still prints and posts local stories, but lacks the scope and heft it had before the rise of internet technology decimated newspapers as a business. Other paid sources of news and information have also retreated, turning what used to be a town commons for communication into a series of walled gardens, with information about local events and news scattered across a variety of formats, outlets, and channels. If the information is present at all.
Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access (the parent of KDRT), thinks DMA could work with the community to create a new source of information and news about Davis, and eventually Yolo County. The venture has the working title of civic information hub. The idea is in its very early stages, and we talk about it today on Davisville.
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Measure N is the latest Davis schools parcel tax to come before voters — the latest in a string that goes back 40 years. Relatively few school districts in California have such taxes, and few levy as much as Davis does.
The sample ballot for the March 5th election presents the arguments for and against Measure N, plus a list of what the $768 tax supports. For context, today’s Davisville talks with John Fensterwald, an editor at large with EdSource, about how Californians pay for public schools, the pros and cons of parcel taxes, and why Davis receives less money per student from the state than most other districts receive. EdSource, a nonprofit, reports on education issues in California.
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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. |
You’ve probably got a smartphone. Does it ever confuse you, or do anything you don't expect? When you have a question, where do you get answers? From friends? YouTube videos? Many of us just click different things and hope for the best.
Smartphones do wonderful things, but they’re also tricky, sometimes inscrutable, change frequently, and are almost essential in the modern economy. Today’s guest on Davisville, Louie Toro, is teaching classes this winter and spring at Davis Adult and Community Education for people who want their smartphones to be less of a black box. We talk about common questions (“a big one is almost always downloading files”), how he teaches, and how to live more of your life outside your phone. The phone is “just a tool,” he says. “You should be the one who chooses how to use that tool.”
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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.” |
Traffic on Interstate 80 is often frustratingly slow through Davis, and has been for years. What’s the remedy? Caltrans proposes adding a fourth lane, and the options include allowing free use of the lane only to vehicles with at least three occupants — anyone else using the lane would pay a toll. That’s the option the Yolo Transportation District Board unanimously endorsed a couple weeks ago.
In other words, there are two big changes on the table — a bigger freeway, plus the start of tolls for some of the traffic on I-80 in Yolo County.
The project is in the news this season as people respond via surveys, comments, and various events (including this Davis teach-in). On today’s Davisville we talk with Autumn Bernstein, executive director of the Yolo Transportation District, and Lucas Frerichs, who chairs the county Board of Supervisors and is a former mayor of Davis, about what's proposed, and why.
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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.
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Get yourself settled and turn off your phone, we're raising the curtain on our latest year-end movie show with Davis film critic Derrick Bang. We talk about the effects of this year's writers’ and actors’ strikes, streaming, some of the best and worst movies of 2023, and films he’s looking forward to — or not — during the next several weeks.
Derrick writes for the Davis Enterprise and his blog Derrick Bang on Film (the photo shows Derrick lurking behind a laptop displaying his blog).
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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.)
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