InBerkeley

Responding to Microsoft’s Bing travel site, Google today rolled out its experimental City Tours service designed to help travelers plan their sightseeing activities.

To test it out, I tried entering a starting address of Berkeley, CA, and City Tours returned only 13 “sights” for the entire city, all of them museums. Not taking anything away from the sights listed, I think anyone who has visited Berkeley can come up with a more comprehensive list of things to see and do.

City Tours is still a project in Google Labs, so I hope it will improve with time.

General

If Warren Hewerdine has his way, the next hot item on children’s wish list for Santa won’t be a PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo, nor will it be an iPod, iMac or iPhone. Hewerdine, who is the senior director of marketing for Berkeley-based Apisphere, is co-inventor of the Geomate.jr, a $70, first-of-its-kind GPS device that is shaking up the world of geocaching.

Geo-what? Geocaching is a high-tech version of treasure hunting. Geocaching relies on the same network of GPS satellites used to guide ships to their ports and cruise missiles to their targets to enable these treasure hunters, called geocachers, to find containers of varying sizes that have been hidden by others and recorded in an online database by their latitudes and longitudes. Armed with this lat-lon data, geocachers head out with their handheld GPS devices to find the hidden treasures, which usually consists of nothing more valuable than a few trinkets, if that much. But for geocachers, it’s all about the hunt.

Designed to make geocaching fun for kids.

And so today I went hunting with Heweredine. Armed with our Geomate.jrs, we headed off from the Apishpere headquarters near downtown Berkeley to the wilds of Cesar Chavez Park and the Berkeley Marina to track down the geocaches others have hidden there.

Before we left, because this was my first experience with geocaching, Hewerdine gave me a quick introduction to the sport, and showed me how much easier it is to do with the Geomate.jr instead of using a general purpose GPS device. Without going into details, suffice it to say it is like the difference between driving stick and an automatic.

Heweredine fired up his Geomate.jr as we were driving down University Avenue, and before I knew it, the thing started displaying distances to all the nearby geocaches stored in its internal database. To me, it was like looking through a magic portal into a parallel universe. I had passed by here so many times, completely unaware that these things even existed, yet here was this gadget telling me the closest geocache at the moment was just 90 feet away.

We had decided to start at Cesar Chavez Park, which contains several geocaches of varying difficulty to find, but because I was a novice at this, the first one we sought was a relatively large geocache that was not particularly hard to find. We entered the park, and my Geomate.jr indicated the target was about 1732 feet away in a northwest direction from where we were standing. As we walked, the distance displayed decreased, and the arrow started pointing in a more westerly direction, so we turned left at the next trail and headed down towards the bay.

Successful capture of my first geocache.

Like most GPS devices, the Geomate.jr’s accuracy is good to a radius of about 30 feet, and so when the display showed we were about 50 feet away, it became obvious we were going to have to head off the trail into the brush and then start searching the old fashioned way. The people who hide these geocaches can be quite tricky in their choice of containers and hiding spots, but in this first simple example, the much more experienced Hewerdine quickly found the old Army ammo box we were looking for hiding under a nearby bush. Inside were several trinkets, some log notebooks, a pen and a few other items. Fortunately, there weren’t any muggles – nosey, uninitiated spectators – around to bother us, so I simply signed and dated the log book, closed up the box and placed it back into its hiding spot for the next geocacher to find.

By its nature, geocaching is something best done unobserved by others. As geocaching has grown in popularity, however, there have been several unfortunate incidents of muggles calling the police after observing geocachers uncovering their hidden treasures and then placing them back. In many of these cases, the bomb squad is quickly called to the scene, and they subsequently blow up the geocache, even though most of them are clearly marked at such. Hopefully, as this sport becomes better known, people won’t find this kind of activity so unusual, or suspicious.

Nope, not under there. Sometimes a geocache can't be found, or is no longer there.

Our next attempt was not as successful as our first, and after checking the Internet with Hewerdine’s iPhone – cheating, really  – we determined the geocache was probably missing, possibly stolen by a muggle. And so we next decided to try something a bit more challenging, and set out to find a micro-geocache, the smallest of the breed, and one that had been designated as difficult to find. Pushing the button on the Geomate.jr a couple of times brought up this entry in the built-in database, and the display quickly told us to turn around and head off in another direction.

And more difficult it was. After zeroing in on the approximate location with the Geomate.jr, we both spent the next 15 minutes looking under bushes, into trees, behind rocks, around discarded beer bottles and in other potential hiding spots with no luck. Hewerdine cheated again and checked the geocaching.com web site with his iPhone for clues, and found two hints associated with this particular geocache. We learned that whoever hid the geocache “would be nuts to give a hint,” and that it was in plain sight, but hidden. Nuts? What could that mean? Looking around, we decided that meant a pine cone. After another 10 minutes, Hewerdine, again, found the geocache,  this time hidden inside a pine cone lying on the ground in plain sight next to a tree. In retrospect it should have been obvious, as this kind of pine cone could not have come from the kinds of pine trees in the area, and this is precisely the kind of experience that makes you a better geocacher.

Sneaky geocache hidden inside a pine cone.

Heading back toward the civilization of the Berkeley Marina, we decided to hunt for one more geocache hidden nearby. This one turned out to be the easiest to find, but it also showed how you have to really pay attention while hunting instead of just burying your head in the display and following the arrow. This geocache turned out to be at the very end of a pier jutting out into the bay. The pier is only about 50 feet long, but the Geomate.jr was telling me the geocache was about 60 feet away. You do the math.

When geocaching, be careful of long walks on short piers.

Geocaches can be hidden almost anywhere, and probably are.

Hewerdine is quite active in the geocaching community, recently attending the Geo-Woodstock VII gathering in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, where he mingled with some of the truly hardcore geocachers, and he has lead numerous local school outings to introduce the students (and most of the teachers) to the sport. Beyond the obvious goal of selling more Geomate.jrs, Hewerdine feels strongly that geocaching is an ideal venue for getting children off their behinds and into an outdoor activity that is much healthier for them. Families who have purchased the Geomate.jr are starting to “complain” they can’t drive anywhere without the kids screaming to stop the car so they can run out and find the geocache the display is telling them is nearby. And with 250,000 geocache locations stored in the Geomate.jr out of the box, the kids will be screaming for a long time to come.

General Berkeley, geocaching, Geomate.jr, GPS

CB2 represents my central problem with Fourth Street. When I first moved to Berkeley, the same retail space housed Cody’s bookstore. It didn’t have quite the range of the original Cody’s on Telegraph, but it was still a very good bookstore. Cody’s gave my family and me plenty of reasons to go to Fourth Street — I’d guess we were there at least several times a month. You could have a nice browse in Cody’s, perhaps look in some of the other stores, and get a nice bite of lunch at Tacubaya, The Pasta Shop or Bette’s To Go. Since Cody’s closed, I don’t find many reasons to go to Fourth Street.

It looks like I’m not alone. It’s not just the absence of Cody’s, of course. The slump has certainly hit Fourth Street, just as it is hurting many other retail areas in Berkeley. There are plenty of empty spaces on Fourth Street.

If you start walking from the corner of 4th and Hearst, you first encounter the former CP Shades, which sold women’s clothes. A few steps further on, the very large space that used to house furnishings store Slater Marinoff looks extremely sad.

Walk a few more steps and the lovely wooden building that used to have Hear Music on the ground floor is also vacant (although the yoga studio upstairs is still active). It’s not surprising that a music retailer struggled anywhere, but it’s another blank spot on the Fourth Street map.

Those three stores are all, to my mind, in the prime part of Fourth Street, with the greatest amount of foot traffic. Perhaps the west side of the street between Hearst and Delaware is a little better — no empty spaces there — but the east side is nearly as attractive. Further down, on the west side of Fourth Street, beyond CB2, I expected to find vacancies. The spaces are large and ill-suited for retailing. I think I never went into the furniture store next to CB2. I did visit next-door Hydra a number of times. It sold very clever, creative soaps, but is it a shock that a clever soap store is out of business in this economy?

So what’s the future for Fourth Street? I know there are Berkeleyites who loath it, viewing it as a confected, isolated shopping area, far removed from the real world. I don’t have the same natural antipathy. But if it continues to move in the direction of upscale furniture and homewares chains (there’s already Restoration Hardware, CB2, Crate and Barrel Outlet and Sur La Table), my reasons for venturing there will continue to diminish.

Am I typical?

Business, Retail

Several Berkeley residents have demonstrated their commitment to architectural preservation again this year by putting enormous time, effort and money into restoring some of the city’s most interesting homes.

The Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) has just announced the winners of its annual Preservation Awards. Included in the prize list is Ballantine House (above) at 1512 La Loma Avenue.

This beautiful cottage was designed by John Ballantine in 1924 as his family’s home. Having lost a home in the Berkeley fire of 1923, Ballantine, who worked in the office of noted architect Henry Gutterson, made sure to choose fire-resistant materials — including a slate roof and concrete blocks that imitated stone — when building the house.

However, the home was not designed with earthquakes in mind, an issue that has now been thoughtfully addressed by its current owners who have overseen a skillful reconstruction of walls, beams and fireplace — even built-in cabinets — to ensure an invisible upgrade to 21st century standards.

For full details of all this year’s preservation winners, visit the BAHA website.

And for fans of Gutterson’s architecture, it’s worth knowing one of his Berkeley homes is currently for sale at 715 The Alameda — and its price is on the way down. It listed for $1,900,000 and is now at $1,675,000.

[Photos: Daniella Thompson, 2009, BAHA.]

Source: Home Girl.

Architecture, Property Architecture