This Week on the Central Coast
The hostel gets an upgrade, Sand City's West End Celebration, Marina rallies around a local bakery, SC wants to expand Homeless Garden Project, and Bookshop SC hosts an evening with Sandra Cisneros.
Monterey hostel is getting an upgrade
The hostel on Hawthorne street near Cannery Row is getting remodeled. After the hostel closed due to the pandemic, a Nashville-based non-profit company took it over. The company is remodeling throughout 2021 and hopes to reopen the location in 2022. The owner, Ron Limb, is from the area and this will be the company’s first hostel outside of Tennessee.
Artists will paint murals throughout Sand City as part of the West End Celebration
Sand City will bring together thirty-one artists to paint murals for the 20th annual West End Celebration. Sand City has long been solidifying itself as an art city. To further push this point, several murals will be visible from the freeway after this year’s event. Several murals can be found on the Monterey Weekly’s article, as well as plenty of background information about the event and it’s coordinators and artists.
Help a local business by eating their cheesecakes!
A local cheesecake bakery was facing closure when they could not renew their lease. With the pandemic seriously hindering their sales, Cheesecake Dreamations set up a GoFundMe account as a last resort. The community rallied around the bakery and as of Saturday, owner Melissa Yeater announced that they would be able to renew their lease. It’s a great story and the perfect example of how our community comes together to help each other at the biggest time of need! You can order online and view the menu here, though it would be wise to call ahead of time; they have been selling out every day!
Homeless Garden Project petitions for a new development.
The non-profit would like to use the site of the closed Pogonip Clubhouse to expand its “organic farm job skills training and housing support program for homeless individuals”. The Santa Cruz City Counsel is fully on-board with the project, voting unanimously to review the proposal. The proposed plans would replace the tennis courts and swimming pool (which is filled-in and unusable) with a 9.5 acre farm, as well as renovate the existing clubhouse. The layout of the proposed plan is at the link.
An evening with author Sandra Cisneros will be featured at Bookshop Santa Cruz
UCSC’s Humanities Institute is co-sponsoring an online event with the author with Bookshop Santa Cruz. Sandra Cisneros is best known for The House on Mango Street, which has sold over 6 million copies, been translated into more than 20 languages, and has become required reading at schools across the United States. The event will have Cisneros discussing her new book, Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo, with Emmy Award winning journalist Rubén Martínez. “The book will be published the day before in a dual-language edition.”