In the Mix

    In the location long familiar to Berkeleyites as Smokey Joe’s Vegetarian Cafe, the cafe now sports an artist-activist motif, thanks to co-owners and artists Andrea Ali, Afro-Buddha designer Rachel Konte and Keba Konte. Images of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali are silhouetted on one wall, and Black Panther–associated “Burn Baby Burn” hot sauce sits on every table. Instead of numbers, the order placards bear stylized images of such icons as James Baldwin, Assata Shakur and Bruce Lee, with biographies on the reverse side for patrons to read while waiting for their food. They are all Guerilla reminders of the ongoing struggles of disenfranchised Africans, Latin Americans, Asians and others—the cafe’s way of educating without alienating.
    DJs play the most elucidating music from the worlds of jazz, reggae, soul, hip-hop and global music Tuesdays through Thursdays, with live music on Saturdays. Guerilla, which marked its one-year anniversary in May, serves organic, French-pressed coffee from Oakland’s Blue Bottle. The menu offers a daily waffle made from ingredients like yam or buckwheat, a daily vegetarian panini and a small but far-reaching selection of organic, local and free-range fare.
    This old-world diner with coming-world spirit boasts a beautiful clientele of artists, activists, retired teachers and bright-eyed students. With its logo of a gorilla dressed as a guerilla in wrap-around shades and beret, the cafe is thoroughly styled as a neo-bohemian urban enclave in the midst of war, a place for freedom fighters resisting oppressive regimes to commiserate, make their plans over a poached-egg breakfast and rise up, sunny-side up. Guerilla Cafe, 1620 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, (510) 845-2233, www.guerillacafe.com.    
                                              

Homegrown Asset

    Tucked into the margins of a quiet Rockridge neighborhood, a beautiful kid-friendly park and greenbelt has emerged in what was a forgotten expanse of asphalt near an overpass, run through by a concrete viaduct. The skinny, three-block-long park, which follows the path of Temescal Creek, was originally an overgrown area behind the neighbors’ back fences. But now, thanks to a coalition of local residents, it is a landscaped meandering walk alongside the creek bed, with large play structures at either end that crawl with kids on weekends, and a broad grassy field with adjacent basketball courts.
    Anchored by Hardy Park at one end, where the Highway 24 overpass crosses Claremont Avenue, and winding southwest past the Department of Motor Vehicles to end at a small pocket park and play structure at Claremont near the intersection with Telegraph Avenue, FROG Park gets its name from the Friends of the Rockridge Temescal Greenbelt neighborhood group that formed in the late 1990s. The group raised money from the community and the city, and installed the first play structures in 2001. But the greenbelt, which followed the spine of the creek, took longer.
    After five years of negotiating with neighborhood groups and the city over such details as how the pathway would be configured and whether the eucalyptus trees (which make the surrounding soil slightly toxic to plants) should be kept, the final $2.5 million greenbelt and two linked parks opened in October 2006 with an official celebration.
    The park uses natural grasses, ivy and Australian creepers that are easy to maintain and can coexist with the eucalyptus, says Barnali Ghosh, one of the park’s landscape architects at MIG Inc., who counts as her real clients the urban kids who will be playing there. “Access to natural elements, which children don’t often have in cities—that’s the real positive part of it,” she says.
    The park’s greenbelt winds past the bustling Temescal Farmers Market, held in the DMV parking lot every Sunday, and the area now shows no hint of its red-light past, which included the renowned Pussycat porn theater.
    “It’s a great feeling,” says FROG founder Theresa Nelson. “This was a sad, neglected part of the neighborhood, and after countless hours of fundraising and negotiating and community meetings, we have this incredible asset. A community-built, homegrown, phenomenal asset.”            
    Find out more about FROG Park at www.frogpark.org.