"The Only Place to Eat in Berkeley": Hank Rubin and the Pot Luck

2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-31
Author(s):  
Barry Glassner
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Early Age ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
East Bay ◽  
The 1960S

The Pot Luck restaurant in Berkeley served what was arguably the most sophisticated and inventive food in the East Bay in the 1960s and early'70s. Though unfamiliar to many present-day food writers and scholars,in its day the restaurant was well known. In the 1960s and early '70s,laudatory pieces appeared in magazines such as GQ and in Herb Caen's column in the San Francisco Chronicle. The owner of the Pot Luck, Hank Rubin, a man for whom food and cooking have been principal concerns since an early age, is perhaps best known as the former wine columnist for of Bon Apptit. This article reviews Rubin's considerable achievements at the Pot Luck, both culinary (e.g., the development of more than 600 soup recipes) and socio-cultural (e.g., Pot Luck is said to be the first restaurant in the Bay Area to hire African-Americans as waiters).

scholarly journals “In Today’s Society, It’s a Necessity”: Latino/a Postsecondary Plans in the College-for-all Era

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Ovink
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
College Completion ◽  
Socioeconomic Mobility ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
East Bay ◽  
College Completion Rates

Latino/a enrollments at U.S. colleges are rapidly increasing. However, Latinos/as remain underrepresented at four-year universities, and college completion rates and household earnings lag other groups’. Yet, little theoretical attention has been paid to the processes that drive these trends, or to what happens when students not traditionally expected to attend college begin to enroll in large numbers. Longitudinal interviews with 50 Latino/a college aspirants in the San Francisco East Bay Area reveal near-universal college enrollment among these mostly low-income youth, despite significant barriers. East Bay Latino/a youth draw on a set of interrelated logics (economic, regional, family/group, college-for-all) supporting their enrollment, because they conclude that higher education is necessary for socioeconomic mobility. In contrast to the predictions of status attainment and rational choice models, these rationally optimistic college aspirants largely ignore known risks, instead focusing on anticipated gains. Given a postrecession environment featuring increasing costs and uncertain employment, this approach led many to enroll in low-cost, less supportive two-year institutions, resulting in long and winding pathways for some. Results suggest that without structural supports, access to college fails to meaningfully redress stratification processes in higher education and the postrecession economy that significantly shape possibilities for mobility.

Kumbuka African Drum and Dance Collective

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Ausettua Amor Amenkum
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Impact ◽  
Dance Companies ◽  
The 1960S

Halifu Osumare presents a regional history of African dance in the United States, focusing on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with the first cohort of local Dunham-trained dance instructors in the 1950s and 1960s to more contemporary instructors hailing directly from the African continent. She analyzes how African and African diasporic dance traditions became important fixtures in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, becoming powerful tools in teaching social justice through various community programs and dance companies that extended from Ghana, the Congo, Senegal, and Liberia into that region. Osumare’s research traces the formation of artistic lineages, while offering insights about the local impact of African dance instruction as a narrative history of how the Bay Area became a regional powerhouse in the African dance field.

The Embattled Creation of a Residents-Only Park

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Yuji Sugimoto
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Palo Alto ◽  
Residential Patterns ◽  
Environmental Racism ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

On November 2, 2020, after almost sixty years of restriction, the City of Palo Alto opened the gates of its Foothills Park to nonresidents. Prior to the lifting of the residency restriction, it was a crime for nonresidents of Palo Alto to enter this 1,400-acre park, a crime that carried possible jail time. Although the reason for this rule was initially rooted in local financial squabbles, the rule itself had racist consequences that were felt for decades after its passage. Thus, the history of Foothills Park’s residency restriction serves as a useful example of the insidious ways that past racist policies and practices can persist to the present day, largely invisible and thus easily dismissed by policymakers and the public alike. Examining the evolution of Palo Alto’s Foothills Park through a historical lens, and within the context of the 1960s and ’70s environmentalist movement, reveals the clear imprint of environmental racism and white privilege. Given the widespread economic disparity that shaped residential patterns in the San Francisco Bay Area, the park’s residents-only rule effectively excluded people of color, the poor, and the working class. Though racially restrictive covenants may no longer be legally enforced today, relatively few people of color can afford to live in Palo Alto. Thus, despite the passage of many years, and despite repeal of Foothills Park’s residents-only restriction, the community’s historical residential patterns have perpetuated ongoing inequalities.

Chinese and Indian Restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 94 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
Laresh Jayasanker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Indian Food ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

Accelerated global trade and mass immigration have brought rapid change to food culture in the United States over the past fifty years. San Francisco has been at the center of these changes. Bay Area restaurateurs Cecilia Chiang (The Mandarin) and her son Philip Chiang (P.F. Chang's), illustrate how Chinese food changed in the United States, moving out of historic Chinatowns and into the suburbs. David Brown's India House restaurant in San Francisco embodied the way Indian food was understood before the 1960s – interpreted through the lens of the British Empire. By the 2000s, Indian food had broken free of this colonial association and was available in its diverse regional variations – especially in the Bay Area suburbs fueled by the computer industry. These case studies all illustrate the impact of globalization and immigration on American food culture through the lens of San Francisco.

The Tide Rises

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Levy
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Natural Habitat ◽  
Significant Loss ◽  
Tidal Marshes ◽  
Treated Wastewater ◽  
Dry Land ◽  
Sea Levels ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
East Bay ◽  
Rising Sea Levels

David Sedlak, an environmental engineering professor at the University of California– Berkeley, stands on a levee near San Francisco Bay’s eastern shore. Manmade embankments extend for many miles, lining much of the bay’s edge, but Sedlak, a lean, intense guy, is fired up about this newly built one. Instead of the usual barren concrete, the bayward face of the levee slopes gently beneath a dense growth of native wetland plants. From muddy clumps of roots and rhizomes placed here only a year ago, the plants have sprouted into a lush palette of green, from the deep dark of Baltic rush to the bright tones of creeping wild rye. Sedlak is part of a bold experiment. If it succeeds, the project may reshape the East Bay shoreline, restoring a vast acreage of lost tidal wetlands that will be nourished by treated wastewater. The hope is that vegetated levees (the official moniker for the concept is the Horizontal Levee) will save money and energy, recycle treated sewage to create habitat, and help the urbanized East Bay adapt to rising sea levels. Conventional levees form steep concrete or earthen walls that armor roads and buildings against the bay’s powerful waves. The Horizontal Levee is a lovely contrast, a compressed version of a natural habitat long missing from the shoreline. The transition zones, or ecotones, between land and bay were biologically rich places that once hosted a diversity of native plants and animals. Since the Bay Area was settled, wetlands have been diked off from both the open bay and the surrounding land. Between 1800 and 1998, 92 percent of tidal marshes were lost to diking and filling. “In San Francisco Bay, we’ve separated the contacts between the terrestrial and the tidal,” explains Peter Baye, a consulting ecologist whose deep knowledge of remnant natural wetlands acts as guideline for the creation of the Horizontal Levee. Habitats that once formed a continuous gradient from dry land to salt marsh have been boxed off, separated by dikes. The disappearance of what ecologists call the “back end” of tidal marshes has been a significant loss.

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