Feature Stories
The Cribs. In 1887, a reporter for the San Diego Union grew a beard, wore threadbare duds, and stealth’d through San Diego’s red-light district. He was shocked to see drunks on every corner. Some clung …
Let’s take a walk through time. We’re at the southwest corner of Fifth and K, part of the Gaslamp Quarter. At night, lines form under bright lights at popular clubs and restaurants. Between 1875 and …
When Judith Moore suggested that because my buddy Hank and I were eating mostly cheapo street food anyway, why not write about it, I thought, “Yes, but how many ways can you describe a burger? …
I arrived in San Diego nine years ago, a well-spoiled food snob coming down (pun intended) from San Francisco like the culinary marshal sent in to clean up an untamed border town. Now, I find …
This is Ambrose Martin. Rich food makes me gassy. Juvenile? Sure. But it’s not like I ever intended it to see print. For the two years that I pounded out pinch-hit restaurant reviews for the …
I remember it was noon on a warm and sunny day. The air smelled of food, dust, gun powder, and smoke, just like every day. I was a dusty-haired six-year-old wearing a sticky dress and …
Former marbles champion Zang Duong, 34, stands in a recessed area of cement, where white pop-up tents shade five round tables covered in felt. The space is nestled in the middle of the Del Mar …
It’s dark and I’ve been sitting in this grocery store parking lot in Allied Gardens for half an hour. I continuously scan the lot, looking at cars newly arrived, trying to find the perfect target. …
I saw them up ahead, blatantly assessing the border traffic coming into Mexico, four older teens who looked tough enough to leave alone and a couple of hombres in their 20s who looked even rougher. …
I live in La Jolla, once a scrub-covered area of sandstone hills and arroyos, now covered with homes that, come a half inch of rain or so, slide down said hills into said arroyos. No …
“…White people are obsessed with being in the right neighborhood and the Internet is no exception.” The above is from a popular blogsite called “Stuff White People Like” (“This blog is devoted to stuff that …
Christmas is on my mind. As a season in San Diego it is to me as cruel as April was to the poet T.S. Eliot. New Year’s, I maintain, does not matter so much. My …
When a 12-year-old polar bear at the San Diego Zoo died of unknown causes a year ago last July, a team of investigators, led by Dr. Mark D. Schrenzel of the zoo’s Center of Research …
An old nautical joke is that the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that the former begins “Once upon a time…” while the latter begins “Now this ain’t no BS!” Also, …
“I had a feeling that something was wrong for a long time.” Fifty-six-year-old David Clark says as he lies recovering at a friend’s home from a liver transplant he received on June 13, 2008. He …
I was up north for 26 years. I came back to San Diego by invitation from an ex-wife. Two of my grown sons were in town, and my partnership in a newspaper in the Comstock …