Wednesday: The president in California, a famed architect is accused of harassment, and Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue.
SAN DIEGO — Good morning.
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With Mexico off in the distance, speaker after speaker stepped to the podium Tuesday, each offering their vision of California values. There was a congressman, pastors, a rabbi, a representative of the Muslim community, a union organizer.
“This wall is a symbol of hate,” said Representative Juan C. Vargas, a Democrat whose district represents part of San Diego.
The Rev. Jose Castillo, pastor of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church, told the audience to “keep praying for this country that we all love.”
A bit farther to the east was President Trump, who swept into enemy territory Tuesday for the first time as president. He inspected prototypes for his promised border wall, spoke to Marines near San Diego and then flew up to Los Angeles for an expensive fund-raiser in Beverly Park. With the president in town, and rain, Los Angeles traffic ground to a standstill.
The visit had been highly anticipated: No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt had ever taken so long to visit California after winning the presidency, and some worried about mass street protests, or clashes between supporters and opponents. But the Trump followers and his opponents stayed far enough away, and instead of wide-scale protests, there were several modest gatherings, many centered on the wall and Mexico and immigration issues.
Trumpism has come to stand for many things — a tough immigration policy, a chaotic culture inside the White House, freewheeling foreign policy.
“But its first expression was anti-Mexicanism,” said Harry Simon Salazar, an organizer with Union Del Barrio, which held a news conference and rally Monday in downtown San Diego, the night before the visit.
Another gathering on Monday was held in Chicano Park, in the Logan Heights neighborhood of San Diego, historically an area for Mexican immigrants. The park is adorned by colorful murals honoring Mexican-American and Native American history – a lineage linked by oppression and revolt. Or, as Mr. Salazar, put it, “an unbroken chain of collective consciousness.”
However, not everyone at the Trump rally was waving a Trump sign.
Two Mexican-Americans were holding signs for Point Loma Electric (“hundreds of five star reviews”). They said they supported the president, and were also hoping to drum up some business.
(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.)
• Richard Meier, a leading architect who designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles, is taking leave from his firm after five women accused him of sexual harassment. [ The New York Times]
• The California Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a man on death row. The man, Vicente Benavides Figuero, a former farmworker, served 27 years behind bars. “The evidence now shown to be false was extensive, pervasive and impactful,” wrote one justice. [ The Los Angeles Times]
• Scott Pruitt, the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, warned this week that California won’t get to decide the future of Obama-era fuel economy regulations for cars. [ Bloomberg]
• What’s on the San Francisco ballot this June? Proposals to raise the Bay Bridge toll by $3, fast-track electronic stun guns for police officers and increase taxes on commercial landlords to fund affordable housing or child care. [ The San Francisco Chronicle]
• Sacramento County threw 290 tons of recyclables into a landfill after a problem arose with one of its contractors. The issue comes as the county prepares for its recycling operation to go from earning $1 million to costing $1 million annually. [ The Sacramento Bee]
• The artist Damien Hirst has a new show at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills — and after years of relying on an army of helpers, the work is all his own. [ The New York Times]
• The Los Angeles City Attorney has charged the parents of two students for failing to lock up guns after their children made threats of violence against their schools. The fathers face up to six months in jail. [ The Los Angeles Times]
• The authorities recently seized three grenade launchers, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and several so-called ghost guns using a one-of-a-kind California database that allows the state to disarm people who are convicted of a felony or are otherwise deemed to be dangerous. [ The Mercury News]
• The San Francisco police fired a n officer after he was involved in a fatal shooting on his fourth day at work. The move led to outrage from the city’s police union. [ The San Francisco Chronicle]
• Watch out. Amazon wants to drop packages on your doorstep from as high as 25 feet. [ The Mercury News]
Telegraph Avenue begins in Oakland and ends in Berkeley, not San Francisco.
We know, we know. An early version of yesterday’s newsletter had it wrong.
After correcting our mistake, we took a spin through a new walking tour phone app that celebrates the history of a place that became a counterculture hub in the 1960s and ’70s, helping to form Berkeley’s identity.
The tour has 11 stops with titles like “the Free Speech Movement” and “Satanic Verses and Cody’s Books,” and it is narrated by people who participated in the avenue’s history. Among them is Osha Neumann, a lawyer and painter of the People’s Mural, which depicts social movements of the 1960s. This includes Bloody Thursday, a 1969 clash between students and police officers over the park that led to the death of a man named James Rector.
“I painted this mural originally because I thought history was important to be remembered, and I still do that,” Mr. Neumann says. “And that’s what this mural is about, trying to keep that monument to that spirit as everything around us tries to erase it.”
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California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.
