Good morning. It’s Thursday, Sept. 8.
- Hurricane could bring deluge and lightning to California.
- San Francisco is latest city to decriminalize psychedelics.
- And a look at the oldest home in Los Angeles County.
Heat wave
1.
With temperatures poised to return to normal in the coming days, meteorologists are looking ahead to the next potential weather menace: the remnants of a hurricane now spinning off Baja California. Hurricane Kay could crawl up the California coast over the weekend and into next week, delivering a surge of moisture and possible dry lightning. “That would be kind of a nightmare in the context of the unprecedented heat wave we’re currently experiencing, and just before autumn wind season,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain. S.F. Chronicle | Washington Post
2.
California officials on Wednesday credited a well-timed text message with preventing rolling blackouts on Tuesday. Sent at 5:48 p.m. to about 27 million phones, the message — accompanied by a blaring alarm — said in part, “Power interruptions may occur unless you take action.” Within five minutes, power demand plunged by 1.2 gigawatts and the grid emergency was all but over. Bloomberg | Mercury News
3.
Other developments:
- While California avoided the need for rolling blackouts Tuesday, Alameda, Healdsburg, Lodi, and Palo Alto all needlessly cut power for about an hour. A grid spokeswoman blamed miscommunication between dispatchers. Bloomberg | Mercury News
- Grid officials are bracing for another day of extreme demand Thursday, which is expected to be only slightly cooler than the record highs set on Tuesday. “It will be 105 to 110, so we won’t say it’s cooler — just not as hot,” said David Rowe, a meteorologist. Bloomberg | S.F. Chronicle
- A “troubling trifecta of extremes”: In the past 12 months, Sacramento has experienced its highest temperature, wettest day, and longest dry spell. All of the records are made more probable by a warming planet, the meteorologist Matthew Cappucci wrote. Washington Post
- Photo essay: California’s historic heat wave. N.Y. Times
Statewide
4.
Opponents of California’s new fast-food labor law are already organizing to overturn it. A coalition calling itself Protect Neighborhood Restaurants filed paperwork Tuesday for a proposed ballot referendum that could block the law. If they collect enough signatures, the matter would likely go before voters in November 2024. Wall Street Journal | A.P.
5.
Gov. Gavin Newsom was said to be privately seething after President Biden unexpectedly called on him to sign a measure making it easier for farmworkers to unionize. The columnist Anita Chabria suggested the move could be payback for Newsom, who has spent months calling out fellow Democrats for not fighting hard enough against Republicans: “So happy Labor Day, Mr. Newsom, from your friends in Washington, D.C., who also know how this game works, and have played it a long, long time.” L.A. Times | Politico
6.
The New York Times sent a reporter and photographer to document the Pacific Crest Trail, a distance of 2,600 miles from Mexico to Canada, in a time of climate change. They found weird weather, bone-dry soil, and areas of diminished shade and disrupted water sources. “Fire scars — the blackened expanses a wildfire leaves behind — can take days to walk through.” N.Y. Times
Northern California
7.
San Francisco on Tuesday became the largest U.S. city to decriminalize psychedelics like magic mushrooms and ayahuasca. In a unanimous vote, supervisors passed a resolution making prohibition of entheogenic plants “the lowest law enforcement priority.” San Francisco’s move comes three years after Oakland become the second U.S. city to decriminalize psychedelics after Denver. In Oakland, you can now buy mushroom chocolate bars over the counter. Vice
8.
Jon Minadeo Jr., who operated an antisemitic propaganda brand called GoyimTV out of Petaluma, was arrested in Poland for hate speech after he displayed anti-Jewish banners at Auschwitz. Minadeo, an attention-seeking provocateur, blanketed cities in the Bay Area with antisemitic leaflets and taunted people at synagogues. In February, a popular Berkeley yoga instructor was fired over her relationship with him. Jewish News of Northern California | Press Democrat
9.
Sideshows — where groups of young drivers burn donuts at intersections — began in Oakland in the 1980s as mellow street parties. They later became a venue for the city’s hyphy movement, as Oakland became a national epicenter of Black youth creativity. As police now intensify their crackdowns on street takeovers, some practitioners and historians are defending them, in part, as cultural rites of passage. Ken Gross, a prominent auto historian: “The same primal factors people get off on doing sideshows have been going on for a long time.” N.Y. Times
Southern California
10.
Los Angeles is taking a novel approach to treating people in mental distress along the city’s sidewalks and underpasses. It’s called street psychiatry, and it appears to be transforming lives. Rather than bring clients into clinical settings, psychiatrists attached to outreach teams treat them where they are, going so far as conducting court hearings on the sidewalk. A reporter and photographer joined Dr. Shayan Rab on his rounds. L.A. Times
11.
Lake Isabella, nestled in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills, has become so depleted by the drought that the foundations of an infamous ghost town are now peeking up from the dry lakebed. As of Tuesday, the manmade lake was filled to about 7% of capacity. The town of Whiskey Flat — emptied and flooded in the 1950s — was founded in the waning years of the Gold Rush when a lone prospector found a gold nugget, drawing an influx of miners. It was said to be among the rowdiest places of the Old West. SFGATE
California archive
12.
The oldest house in Los Angeles County is encircled by a ring of aging mobile homes just off the 5 Freeway in the working-class city of Bell Gardens. Hidden from view and largely blocked off to the public, Casa de Rancho San Antonio contains the story of California.
As historians tell it, the adobe structure was built beginning in 1795 by Francisco Lugo, a Spanish soldier who helped found the pueblo of Los Angeles. He passed the property down to his youngest son, Antonio, who became mayor of Los Angeles and at one time owned more land than probably anyone in California. Antonio Lugo was said to be a striking figure.
The biographer Roy Whitehead described how Lugo would ride his horse around Los Angeles “in great splendor” in his latter years:
“He had never adopted American dress, culture or language, and still spoke only Spanish. He rode magnificent horses, sitting in his $1,500 silver trimmed saddle erect and stately, with his sword strapped to the saddle beneath his left leg.”
After Lugo’s death at the age of 85 in 1860, the house was eventually transferred to Henry Gage, a lawyer from Michigan, as a dowry upon his marriage to one of Lugo’s great-granddaughters. Gage would become the 20th governor of California and a U.S. minister to Portugal.
He significantly renovated the home, adding bronze fireplaces, redwood siding, and wallpaper from France. It remained within the family for generations, avoiding destruction even as a vast metropolis rose all around. Then in 1983, the home was sold to the residents of 56 surrounding mobile homes. That’s when one of the last vestiges of Southern California’s Spanish period became the venue of weekly bingo nights at the Casa Mobile Home Co-Op. Little has changed since then aside from the addition of a modest street sign noting, “Landmark #984.”
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The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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