Best Reader stories from 1998
Baja rock art, Broderick in jail, Alan Bersin, San Diego's orphanage, U.S, Grant Jr., top ten San Diego high schools, Porsche owners, Okies
8:30 a.m., Jan. 19
Peter Jensen
Prolific writer for Sunset magazine, Jensen has authored books on San Diego and California. He wrote stories on local architecture for the Reader in the mid-1990s.
Articles by Peter Jensen
Best Reader stories from 1995
Prince of Peace Abbey, Perry Mason, Crawdaddy's daddy, Pat Welsh, Asian gangs, Eckankar, SEALS spy for Koch, Kate Sessions, Carlsbad flower fields
I've got Perry Mason on board! In early 1960, the man who created Perry Mason was introduced to an Imperial Beach resident named Francisco Muñoz. Erle Stanley Gardner had many friends, and he particularly liked ...
Best Reader stories from 1994
Santee creation museum, Swami's, flamenco, David Baze, San Diego bridges, hunting as it was, Spanish Village murder, Nixon-Copley, Ramona biography, Baja Chinese, Cambodians
A little bit east of Eden When I was living in Los Angeles years ago, a door-to-door solicitor pitching San Diego vacations and tours showed me a brochure of local attractions. Included on the list ...
Peter Jensen and the Reader
Pat Welsh, Cliff May, Russell Forester, pick-up b-ball, San Diego's alleys, libraries, courtyards, bridges, towers, signs, stucco, 100-year-old buildings
A prolific writer for Sunset magazine, Jensen has authored books on San Diego and California. He wrote stories on local architecture for the Reader in the mid-1990s. Pat Welsh, the Julia Child of Gardening At ...
Pat Welsh, the Julia Child of Gardening
Why does San Diego have so many tropicals and sub-tropicals?
At lunch she is joined by her husband, Louis Welsh, whose parents, Frances and John Lloyd Wright (son of Frank Lloyd Wright), both now deceased, lived next door. Pat and Lou eat in the garden if it’s sunny.
The secret life of San Diego's alleys
Eyes put on the street
Today in Mission Hills’ neighborhoods a few blocks north and south of Fort Stockton Drive, Sunset Boulevard, and Juan Street, alleys have a different feeling than straight alleys in Pacific Beach.
The look of San Diego branch libraries
Sharp hiss for silence
“We narrowed the Mira Mesa branch down to a design we liked, one with a roof we thought was very attractive. But the community group didn’t like it: they thought it looked like a Quonset hut.”
San Diego pick-up basketball - heroes, courts, legends
George Young, Barry Alman, Glenn Plummer, Bruce Walton, Dwayne Burton
San Diego is one of the only basketball meccas where beach sand tracked onto the court is part of the game. At South Mission or Crown Point or in North County at Pillbox or Glen Park up in Cardiff.
Russell Forester, the architect of Jack in the Box
A weirdly honest approach to dispensing food
McDonald’s, once known for its exuberant golden twin parabolas flanking a glass-and-steel pavilion, is now the most boring recitation of mansardism. Only the Wienerschnitzel chain still clings to its defining, red-roofed mini-A frames.
Cliff May, inventor of the ranch house
Hugging the ground
"One of the county’s most appealing concentrations of ranch houses occurs in an unlikely place, the steep hillsides and winding streets of Del Mar…. several of these May mass-market houses were built in Del Mar as second homes.”
