Archive for the ‘Warm Springs Boulevard’ Category

Turn-by-turn

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

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I’m still writing about the Shellmound Peace Walk. How did I end up there? I learned of the walk when my family and I went to the Gathering of Ohlone PeoplesIMG_2019 at Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont on October 3, 2010. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, watching traditional Ohlone dances, trying (and failing) to make fire, and learning all about Native life. One of the exhibit tables belonged to Indian People Organizing for Change (IPOC) and was staffed by Corrina Gould and Perry Matlock. They were promoting the Shellmound Peace Walk which immediately captured my imagination, especially when I found out they were going through Milpitas. I resolved to join the walk if logistics permitted.

Logistics permitted, so the morning of November 17 I left my car at the Great Mall and took public transit to Alviso Marina. I had a bit of a wait since all the other walkers were coming from the Oakland/Berkeley area and were stuck in rush hour traffic. I didn’t mind; it was a beautiful, sunny morning out on the Marina and I quietly contemplated the views of the water, tule marsh, and the Valley hills until everyone arrived.

Corrina explained to us the significance of Alviso: that her Ohlone ancestors lived there and collected salt for trade. (The Alviso salt ponds continued to be a major commercial operation up until pretty recently.) When the Spanish rounded up Indians they used Alviso as a collection point before marching them to Mission San Jose so our Peace Walk that day was approximating their trail.

We set off. Our route took us from the Marina down First Street, towards Tasman. Earlier that morning I had sent a tweet to Adelaide Chen of Milpitas Patch to let her know the Walk was coming through, and I was delighted she came out to meet us on First Street. I recognized her from her profile photo and introduced myself, and she was a great sport, walking along with us while we chatted. She commissioned me to write the article for Patch, which was an unexpected opportunity. I was a little hesitant because I envisioned myself later that evening furiously pounding out the article on my laptop while soaking my feet in an Epsom salt bath and I was worried about possible electrocution hazards, but I accepted. She gave me some quick journalism tips which were a big help because I would have been stuck after who/when/where/why/what’s-for-lunch. My new assignment colored the rest of my day though because now I had real responsibility, and I felt I had to inform everybody that the casual conversations we had been having were now “on the record.”

We turned up Tasman, passing through Cisco land. We took a break on a patch of grass in front of a Cisco building where we were questioned by some Cisco employees, probably plainclothes security. I suspect they wanted to make sure we weren’t protesting them, but they were happy when Corrina told them we were just passing through. It was strange being here because I work very nearby, so reflecting on ancient peoples in the midst of all the high-tech companies that comprise my world now was a jarring juxtaposition. Crossing Coyote Creek into Milpitas grounded me because the creek has special significance to me. I live and work close to it, and it’s a constant feature I’ve seen on many old maps so it helps me link the past and the present.

The next point of interest for the Walk was Elmwood Correctional Complex, former site of an Ohlone shellmound. As we passed we could hear the shouts of inmates; I don’t know if they were shouting at us, for us, or if they even knew we were there. Our group said prayers and dropped tobacco—traditional medicine—for the spirits of the dead. Turning up Abel we walked along the culvert that used to be Penitencia Creek and marveled at a number of majestic blue herons gathered there. I could see the Jain Center on Main Street and thought about how this spot is a spiritual nexus for Milpitas. The Ohlone buried their dead here, and the Franciscans gave penance here, giving Penitencia Creek its name. I remarked on the irony of passing Serra Center, a strip mall named for Father-President Junipero, considered by many to be a symbol of Indian oppression. His 297th birthday happened to be exactly one week later, November 24.

We rested again outside Carl’s Jr. and IPOC co-founder Johnella LaRose gave us some history of the Walk and its roots in 1978’s The Longest Walk and its connection to numerous international Peace Walks for varied causes such as nuclear non-proliferation. I interviewed Jun Yasuda, the Japanese Buddhist nun heading our procession, to understand her dedication to Native American causes. She explained to me that as a Buddhist she is drawn to confront human suffering such as the Indians endured through history. Also she sees traditional Native selflessness—putting the community ahead of one’s self—as compatible with Buddhist teaching and a way forward for mankind to Peace. Maybe Columbus was onto something when he confused the so-called “Indians” of the “New World” with residents of India, birthplace of Buddhism.

The rest of the trek was a long haul up Abel to Milpitas Boulevard and Warm Springs. We were supposed to turn onto Mission Boulevard and end at Mission San Jose but our late start caught up with us so we ended the day at Booster Park in Fremont. IPOC provided food fixin’s and I made myself a peanut butter, jelly, and corn chip sandwich. After a ten-mile walk I think officially it was The Best Sandwich I ever tasted. My feet were tender and my thighs ached (as much from the barbell lunges I did in the gym the day before as from the walk) and I was more than a little damp from the unseasonably warm weather, but it was all worth it. We sat in a circle and several in the group shared their thoughts and feelings on the day.

I had planned to take a bus back to the Great Mall but I ended up catching a ride with a driver who kindly shuttled those who had to retrieve vehicles left in Alviso. It was astounding how quickly we got back, retracing by car in minutes the route it took us hours to walk. Modern transportation is a gift, but being able to complete the walk, even for just one day, was a blessing.

The People before El Camino

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

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I’ve already told you that I participated in Day One of the Shellmound Peace Walk on November 17, 2010, and pointed you to the article I wrote for Milpitas Patch. Here’s why I walked.

The Ohlone Indians lived around the Bay for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. The Spanish missionaries arrived in the 17th century and once they baptized Indians, the missionaries treated them as property of Spain. They were confined to the mission compounds and forcibly brought back if they tried to escape. Revolts were answered by lethal retaliation. Physically they were worn down by imposed labor and sickened and killed by unfamiliar diseases. The old and the very young were particularly susceptible. There are reports of abuse of every nature. Their culture was erased.

When the mission era ended and California became an American state, the Indians were set free but their homes and way of life were gone. They suffered horrible persecution at the hands of Americans, from denial of civil rights to murder. Some went underground, pretending to be Mexican just to get by.

The Native Americans did what mankind does. They adapted and they survived. They kept their spiritual roots intact, never forgetting their languages, their songs, their medicines, and their values. In the 1960s and ’70s they reclaimed their identity, shouldered their history, and politically activated. They’re making tremendous strides but many still carry the social scars from the trauma they suffered starting with Spanish contact.

Meanwhile after reaping the benefits of the Gold Rush, agriculture, and the Industrial Revolution, Americans in California started to rediscover the state’s Spanish past. In 1884 Helen Hunt Jackson published her novel Ramona which romanticized the mission era and sparked a new expression of California identity: a western paradise on the Pacific coast infused with Mexican charm. The crumbling missions were literally revived and rebuilt and became cornerstones of communities and tourist draws. El Camino Real was reinvented as a continuous highway from San Diego to San Francisco. Most recently I caught the bug and climbed on board the nostalgia train. I celebrate El Camino, what it is today and what I think it will be. But I have to face its past, and that includes the pain of the Ohlone.

That’s why I went on the Shellmound Peace Walk, to experience the history firsthand. “El Camino” means “the road,” and a road is one of the fundamental ways a people leave their mark on the Earth. Walking a road means following the footsteps of those who went before. Where a bit of nature remained—the Alviso slough, Coyote Creek, the Diablo Mountain Range—I could see what earlier people saw and immerse myself in the immutable sense of place. The physical exertion of walking reminded me of my universal humanity, and sharpened my motivations as I reflected on the multitude of emotions that preceded me there: hope, fear, elation, sorrow. Walking with Indians, some of them descendants of Ohlones, was a gift. Talking with them connected me directly to the people of this land not just through earth, but through flesh, blood, and spirit. Walking with non-Indians bolstered my faith in friendship and fraternity. Injustice shared is peace conceived.

I will continue to celebrate El Camino Real. It has a story to tell and I will continue to listen and share what I hear. El Camino remembers the Ohlone. So do we all.

Pounding Pavement for Peace on Patch

Friday, November 19th, 2010

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So let me tell you about my Wednesday. I participated in the Shellmound Peace Walk, a ten-day walking tour around the Bay Area of sites  sacred to the Ohlone Indians. I walked the first day, from Alviso Marina, through Milpitas, all the way to Fremont: ten miles. On the way I tweeted to Adelaide Chen of Milpitas Patch, a hyperlocal news site, that we were coming through town. She actually came out and met us in San Jose and talked me into writing an article and providing photos for the site! So here it is, my journalistic debut. I will follow up soon with a more personal account of my experience and the great people I met. I have tons to talk about.


Native Americans Visit Elmwood to Remember Burial Site (in Milpitas Patch)

A group promoting awareness of ancestral burial sites walked from Alviso to Fremont on the first day of the Peace Walk.

By Bill Moore

(that’s me!)
Read more >


Old Counting Road

Monday, September 20th, 2010

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Sorry, I didn’t mean to leave you hanging. As I completed my reverse bus trip down El Camino Real earlier this month I tallied many chain stores like fast food restaurants and grocery stores as well as other categories like gas stations and bike shops. I also kept track of every El Camino Real bell. I tallied everything on the southbound trip, but I didn’t count them until now. Here are the totals for both the southbound trip and the northbound trip last November. I got some nice results.

Name

East Bay East

Peninsula East

Peninsula West

Peninsula Total

Gas Station 4 24 23 47
El Camino Bell 1 25 18 43
Subway 2 5 8 13
Taco Bell 2 7 4 11
Jack in the Box 0 7 3 10
McDonald’s 3 1 9 10
Safeway 2 5 4 9
Blockbuster 0 7 1 8
Kragen 0 5 3 8
Burger King 1 5 2 7
KFC 0 5 2 7
Bicycle shop* 0 5 1 6
Lucky 0 4 2 6
Carl’s Jr. 0 2 2 4
Togo’s 0 2 2 4
In-n-Out Burger 0 0 2 2
The Off Ramp 0 2 0 2
Wendy’s 0 0 2 2
Midas* 0 0 1 1

* Under-counted due  to inconsistent counting between trips

On every leg of the trip I only looked out the windows on the right side of the bus so I only saw one side of the road. The East Bay East column counts the businesses I passed heading north from San Jose to the Fremont BART station. It’s a short trip so the counts are low. I only made the trip in one direction so I only counted the east side of the road; I don’t have counts for the west side of the road at this time. The Peninsula East and West columns are for the long rides between San Jose and San Francisco. On the northbound trip I looked at the east side of the road, and southbound I looked west. The Peninsula Totals column is just that and does not include the East Bay counts. The main anomalies are bicycle shops and Midases because I didn’t count them consistently between the two trips so I know they are underrepresented in my table.

CIMG0229 I’m delighted to see that bells are pretty much at the top of the list, outnumbered only by conglomerated gas stations regardless of brand.  The original vision of the bell marker project in 1906 was to place them one mile apart on El Camino Real. It’s a 50-mile trip from San Jose to San Francisco and I counted 43 bells. There’s room for plenty more since I only saw one bell in San Francisco. It’s amazing how faithful Caltrans and the California Federation of Women’s Clubs have been to that original vision.

In the food department I’m surprised to see Subway at the top of the list with 13 stores though I shouldn’t be since they really do seem to be everywhere. I remarked on the northbound trip how there were 7 Taco Bells but only 1 McDonald’s. The southbound trip equalized the disparity with 4 Taco Bells but a whopping 9 McDonald’ses. Taco Bell still edges out McDonald’s with a total of 11 to 10, but that’s within the margin of error. The weird thing is how Taco Bell dominates the east side and McDonald’s dominates the west. The bell and the arch; the perfect symbols for the modern mission road.

My picks for which businesses to count were arbitrary.  I don’t know why I didn’t count Starbucks; I regret the omission. On the southbound trip I wished I had been counting Walgreens and CVS drugstores because I saw a lot of them. Another unusually frequent chain was Holiday Inn Express. I think I saw half a dozen on the southbound trip alone. Car washes, car dealerships, hotels, and banks would also have been interesting to count.

The purpose of this is to embrace the vast stretches of El Camino which are zoned as commercial strip and celebrate the beauty in their homogeneity. They are home to pretty much every national and regional brand I can think of. Even so all these chain stores combined are a drop in the bucket. El Camino as I saw it is made up primarily of small businesses of every description from mom & pop dry cleaners to favorite local chain eateries. There are also homes, schools, municipal buildings, and open space. I can try to reduce this Royal Road to simple numbers, but the whole will always be greater than a count of its parts.

Your Coffee Cups

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

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I don’t drink coffee. Never have. I don’t know why; it’s just on the long list of things I never bothered with. When upscale coffee consumption exploded in popularity in the nineties, I kind of missed the whole thing but I understand that competition is fierce and new companies have to come up with a hook to compete with the big boys. A new drive-through coffeehouse in Fremont called Your Coffee Cups believes it has a winning formula: premium product prepared by beautiful baristas in bikinis.

Bikini baristas aren’t a new concept. Not surprisingly it was pioneered in the Seattle area at the end of the 20th century and has spread to cities around the country. Your Coffee Cups is however the first to bring it to the Bay Area. They opened about eight weeks ago in a parking lot kiosk at a strip mall (ha!) at the intersection of Warm Springs Boulevard and Mission Boulevard. This is located on what I call El Camino de San Jose, the historic road to Mission San Jose.

So what is the Your Coffee Cups experience? The kiosk has two drive-up windows and a walk-up window. As you approach it’s an unassuming little pink and white building but when you pull up to the window you’re greeted by a friendly, shapely young lady in skimpy attire: your bikini barista. “Bikini” is an oversimplification. Y.C.C. features a different theme every day:

  • Military Mondays
  • Heroic Tuesdays
  • Steamin’ Hot Wednesdays
  • Tantalizing Thursdays
  • Fantasy Fridays
  • Surprise Saturdays
  • Sports Sundays

So while there’s certainly a place for classic two-piece swimwear, primarily you’ll see lingerie and costumes of the “sexy Halloween” variety. Your Coffee Cups gets its outfits from Yandy.com.

Continuing with the experience, the barista takes your order and prepares it herself, furiously working all the complicated knobs and buttons with all the requisite hissing and gurgling. The kiosk offers a full range of the typical mocha-chocolata-yaya coffee drinks that I don’t understand. A cute touch is that the available sizes are “B Cup,” “C Cup,” and “D Cup,” Your Coffee Cups. The menu includes tea, smoothies, cold drinks, and assorted baked goods. The quality of the beverages and food should be high since they use premium ingredients from top shelf vendors. Their coffee beans come from Oakland’s Mr. Espresso whose unique fire-roasted beans are featured in some of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. Vienna Bakery in Fremont provides fresh pastries daily. Between you and me I think Your Coffee Cups goes to great lengths to serve excellent food to provide cover for customers who can legitimately claim to go there “just for the coffee.”

As you pay and your barista serves you your order, hopefully she has brightened your day with efficient service, some pleasant small talk, and a smile. You are encouraged to leave a gratuity. Your Coffee Cups wants you to understand that these are college students working for tips. They’ve put more effort into their appearance and frankly flashed you more skin than you’re likely to see in any other coffee shop. The value added is not reflected in the price of the java and there’s no cover charge, so drop something in the jar to make it worth their while.

CIMG0349_croppedYour Coffee Cups held a grand opening and ribbon cutting ceremony on Thursday, September 16 and I stopped by to check it out. This is a tough job…you know the rest. They had closed off the drive-through lanes and decorated the kiosk with balloons so the scene was festive for visitors mingling in the small seating area normally reserved for walk-up customers.  Radio personalities from MOViN 99.7 set up a booth and boomed some tunes while handing out free toothbrushes (?) and other promotional materials. One of the baristas wearing an awfully grown-up girl scout cookie costume circulated with a tray of pound cake and brownie tidbits. I tried the cake; it was tasty but a little dry which is understandable since it was late in the day. In addition to the scout there was a naughty nurse, a scantily-clad schoolgirl, and a couple of cup-a-licious cowgirls, one of whom wielded a can of whipped cream in her hip holster. The stand was open for business and it was quite a sight to see women dressed this way scurrying inside the kiosk, hard at work.

CIMG0357I chatted with the owners, Robert and Irene, an engaged couple who describe themselves as life partners and business partners. (They were modestly dressed, in case you were wondering.) They are Bay Area natives who researched the concept extensively in Seattle before opening the shop here. They chose the Fremont location simply because it was the first parking lot kiosk to come available and it’s working well for them though they wish it were more easily visible from busy Mission Boulevard. I asked if the job description was a tough sell and they said not at all; in this challenging economy they got plenty of applicants from their Craig’s List ad. Irene impressed upon me the quality of the food and Robert explained how they favor hiring responsible, sympathetic college students who will be motivated by tips. Your Coffee Cups has hosted local fundraisers and in fact the radio station was collecting donations for victims of the tragic San Bruno gas explosion.

So is this a good idea? That’s difficult to answer. It’s certainly a sound business proposition. There’s no shortage of demand for good coffee, drive-through convenience, and peeks at pretty women. Your Coffee Cups fills a niche among El Camino’s existing exotic entertainment venues, from Hooters to The Hiphugger. On the other hand many will not approve of its exploitative race-to-the-bottom nature. In Washington State there has been a backlash from people in the community who feel the “sexpresso” joints are too risque, especially in school zones. Traditional full-dress coffee vendors bristle at the loss of business. Coffee kiosks have been around for a long time but the addition of an elaborate theme reminds me of the ascent of the gourmet food trucks and strikes me as classic disruptive marketing in which there will be winners and losers.

My personal experience at the grand opening was mixed. The women were sure attractive so that was a plus and they were friendly enough, but as it turns out the less they wore, the more self-conscious I felt. It was ironic. They were half-dressed, but I was the one worrying about saying or doing the wrong thing. The women had elevated themselves to our society’s standards of stylized super-sexualized beauty and as a result a mere schlub like myself suddenly felt unworthy and unseemly to be there leering at them. If the nurse or schoolgirl had been wearing an over-sized tee shirt and pair of old jeans instead, I would have been much more at ease. To a large extent my complaint is unfair since I was there under atypical circumstances, an extended grand opening celebration. The standard model is to drive up, cop an eyeful and a cupful, and drive off. Gone in a couple minutes; no time for over-analysis.

You might wonder why I don’t have any pictures of the women here. There were signs posted prohibiting photography without their permission and even then, they were charging money for posed photos. More barriers. Happily the folks at MOViN 99.7 took a ton of pictures, baristas, belly buttons and all. There’s even one of me. Cheese!

Overall I think Your Coffee Cups is a fun and innovative addition to El Camino. Robert and Irene are delightful and sincere and I have no doubt they are working hard to create a win-win situation for their staff and their customers. Does sex sell coffee? Should it? Go by and judge for yourself. Check their web site first for discounts and promotions. The novelty alone of meeting the Bay Area’s barest baristas is worth the trip.

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Around the Bay in a Day

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

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Last November I took a bus ride up El Camino Real from San Jose to San Francisco and blogged my impressions and observations. To avoid giving myself whiplash, that day I only looked out the right side of the bus at the eastern side of the street and doggedly ignored the left side so the job was only half done. Last Friday, September 3, 2010, I completed the task, taking the reverse bus trip from San Francisco down to San Jose, observing the west side. Back in November I scribbled all my notes on the bus by hand in a notebook and ended up taking four months to type them all up. It’s not that I’m a slow typist, it’s just that the scope of the project was much larger than I anticipated. For the second trip I found a more efficient way: I live-tweeted my journey.

If you’re unfamiliar with tweeting, it means I used my cell phone on the road to type and send text messages to the Twitter service. Twitter messages, or “tweets,” are limited to 140 characters each so it enforces brevity. A great advantage is that every message was timestamped and geocoded by GPS so I have a complete record of what I saw, when I saw it, and where I was. I tried to live in the moment and just write what was on my mind which means whatever happened to catch my eye out the bus window. I know it’s a pretty pedestrian read (irony intended) but I hope I conveyed a sense of El Camino’s diverse profile.

Follow allcamino on Twitter

Below are my 167 tweets from that day from my brand new @allcamino twitter account. It took some effort to extract them all from Twitter’s web site. There are web apps that do this but they didn’t work for me because they rely on Twitter’s search engine which failed me, returning only six tweets (?!). I wrote a Perl script to convert their HTML to the format I wanted for the blog. To improve the readability I put each time stamp and location stamp against the right margin above each tweet. You can click the location links to open a Google map. My live-tweeting strategy worked great. Last year it took me four months to finish the writeup. Here I’ve done it in less than four days.

I cleaned the text up, fixing obvious two-left-thumb typos and grammar issues, but the content is largely raw and uncut. I’ve put a few editor notes in [square] brackets and added hyperlinks for your reference. I’ve written broader post-trip comments in between tweets in italics. You’ll see a bunch of the photos I took, many from the windows of the buses. Please excuse their quality. (more…)