.Best Of People & Places

When the US Postal Service announced in June 2012 that it hoped to sell Berkeley's historic downtown post office building and relocate operations, the city cried foul. Represented exclusively by the Richard Blum-led commercial real estate broker...

Selling cookies and learning to quilt is cool and all, but for modern day Bay Area youth, that kind of life training just isn't going to cut it. Oakland-based educators Anayvette Martinez and Marilyn Holinquest know that,...

An explicitly anti-capitalist community center, Omni is a collective composed of other collectives. Its members include food justice group Phat Beets; Sudo Room, a community-driven hacker space; La Commune, a worker-owned cafe and bookstore; Bay Area Public School, an organization that offers tuition-free liberal arts classes, and many other social justice-oriented organizations. Omni's calendar is packed to the brim with free events, such as yoga classes, literature seminars, coding workshops, and D.I.Y. printmaking sessions. The organization relied on a crowdfunding campaign to open its multifaceted space, and now its members want to buy the building and the land beneath it to make sure they can stay in the area long-term. They need to raise nearly $2 million within the next year. If you want them to stick around, you might want to consider donating.

Artists and entrepreneurs throughout the East Bay have grown increasingly fond of applying the "do-it-yourself" label to a wide variety of projects and organizations — so much so that the DIY stamp has become practically meaningless. But...

Pennie Opal Plant, who was born in Richmond and claims ancestors from several Native American tribes, owns the Gathering Tribes shop on Solano Avenue in Albany. She got involved several years ago with environmental-justice struggles in Bay...

Located just outside Mountain View Cemetery on Piedmont Avenue, Chapel of the Chimes is a beautiful, labyrinthine structure originally constructed in 1909 and redesigned by pioneering Bay Area architect Julia Morgan in 1929. Floor-to-ceiling cinerary urns look...

This 110-page report released last year provides data, history, and personal stories to explain the ways in which development has led to the displacement of working-class people of color in Bay Area cities. The report also outlines...