Journal of Alta California Winter 2018

Sometimes I like to say that Alta covers the past and the future, but not the present. This is somewhat in jest. The truth is that, as a quarterly, it’s virtually impossible to keep up with current events. But we are interested in how the world got this way and what might be done to make a better future. That ambition works well for the magazine, but it is less of a solution for people who share these interests and who live here in the present, every day. To serve this community, Alta needs to be more than what you’re holding in your hands right now. While the printed magazine is the hub of what we do, in this multimedia age we make Alta’s contents and ethos available through a…

His friend (and later foe) Mark Twain is better known, but Bret Harte (1836-1902) was a similarly important figure in California literature as a chronicler of 19th century life and teller of tales, most notably “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Like Twain, Harte was a frequent correspondent to newspapers in the East, sending them stories of the rapidly civilizing California frontier. He wrote these dispatches for The Christian Register in Boston and The Republican in Springfield, Mass. MARCH 1866 The California spring is … unlike any other season. It does not change into summer, neither is it perennial; its budding youth never develops into maturity and fruition, but is protracted throughout the year in a kind of withered, unprofitable virginity that gets to be very shrill and shrewish toward the…

Cari Beauchamp frequently writes about film history for books, magazines and newspapers, with a focus on the roles women played in early Hollywood. Tamara Palmer is a cookbook ghostwriter, rap historian, celebrity gossip blogger and DJ from San Francisco who left her heart in Los Angeles. Contributing Editor Gustavo Arellano writes and writes and writes from his deranged homeland of Orange County. Dustin Snipes is an award-winning photographer living in Los Angeles. He works for numerous national and international clients, including Nike, Wilson Tennis, ESPN and Coca-Cola.…

Salaries in San Francisco are higher than just about anywhere else in the U.S., and the Bay Area’s economy is one of the nation’s fastest-growing. Overpaid tech workers compete to live in high-rise apartments that didn’t even exist a few years ago. So with all this happy commerce, why do some parts of San Francisco look like ghost towns? In some neighborhoods, storefronts sit vacant for years. A single block of Balboa Street in the Richmond District, a stretch of apartment buildings and single-family homes along the northern length of Golden Gate Park, has at least a half-dozen empty storefronts — and one of those has been vacant for almost a decade. Market Street has dozens of empty spaces. And in the city’s storied Castro District, dozens of empty shops…

Peter Warner is not exactly homeless. He simply lives on public transportation. Most specifically, Amtrak trains and intercity buses, with the occasional ferry ride and Metrolink (or similar) tossed into the mix. In a typical month, Warner travels thousands of miles. In the first half of this year, he reckons, he traveled about 14,000 miles by rail. In November 2017 alone, he logged 12,000 miles, a personal record he loves to boast about as part of his nonstop stream of patter about life on the rails. Warner is an outgoing, effusive man, but he’s also more than a bit enigmatic. Why trains? “Because I don’t drive a car,” he says. He just travels around the U.S. wherever Amtrak will take him, paying his way with proceeds from survivors’ and disability…

Clad in overalls, a red plaid shirt and a straw cowboy hat, Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz proudly picks up one of his laying hens, Bessie. Then, smiling, he shovels horse manure for fertilizer and, later, displays voluptuous strawberries on the vine. Thanks to Dphrepaulezz, hope is growing in Oakland, a city that saw 5,685 violent crimes in 2017. That’s where the urban farm he calls Revolution Plantation — home of Bessie and her feathered kin — is flourishing and giving hope to the community. Dphrepaulezz, better known as multifaceted musician Fantastic Negrito to his NPR-listening fans and Bernie Sanders supporters (he played several rallies for the candidate), is not merely local in his efforts to elevate. His music, soulful, groove-heavy, sonically layered with intense lyrics, is exemplified on his latest album,…