A show of hands, please: Who remembers where all the old local taverns/bars/dives were? Better yet, who actually patronized them? Anyone?

Possibly the most infamous was the Oak Grove, which one night became an ungodly flaming cocktail and is now a grassy lot under an oak tree. But there was also 2-Me’s on Hilltop (run by a man named Twomey) where a ( Read more... )

Back before Mary Lake was just a lake and not a subdivision, when Buenaventura was a city in Colombia, when the Benton landfill was a landfill and not a rolling landscape, there was a laundromat and little store at Placer and Pleasant in Redding. The store went under different names - Rex’s Market for a time and maybe one of the Holiday chain - ( Read more... )

Until very recently, Femme de Joie’s only visit to 970 Hartnell was about seven years ago when a vintage furniture store was there; she and  Amico del Signore picked out a leather couch which went from “this great oxblood sofa” to “that Godawful purple couch” in just a few short years. The sofa found a new home about the same time Kanya Market ( Read more... )

If you’re whipping along Hartnell Avenue, perhaps heading west toward Four Corners and planning your congested intersection strategy (You think it’s bad now? You should have tried navigating it before traffic lights were installed), or traveling east to pick up some eggs at the Hen House, you might well never notice the long cinder-block building ( Read more... )

It has long been the fervent wish of Femme de Joie that some enterprising soul would open up a Middle Eastern/Greek/Turkish restaurant in the Redding area. She vaguely recalls a short-lived one in a food court somewhere in Enterprise back in the 1970s or early ’80s, and an equally short-lived one on Antelope Boulevard in Red Bluff. Her two visits ( Read more... )

Redding and Anderson have their share of what Maman de Joie called “hard-luck spots” - places where businesses opened optimistically, closed quietly, and another business moved in rapidly - lather, rinse, repeat. For whatever reason, those locations seemed almost cursed, Bermuda Triangles of hopes and dreams that disappeared into the nether world ( Read more... )

It might surprise some folks to learn that the Redding strip mall known as Cypress Colony was once a Southern Baptist Church. When that congregation upped sticks and moved elsewhere, developers turned the Sunday school classrooms into shops and offices; the former sanctuary became a restaurant. It seemed like a promising plan - after all, Cypress ( Read more... )

The Brewers’ Journal Volume 34, published in 1909, said this about Shasta County beer: Kennett, Shasta County, Cal., is said to be the location of a new brewery to be erected by Portland, Ore., capitalists. We don’t know if this brewery paid off for the investors, but we do know it’s now underwater.

Earlier, the “Report of the State Agricultural ( Read more... )

Some 20-odd years ago, Femme de Joie had a close gal pal who lived near the Perko’s in Westwood Village. If we were out and about doing Girl Stuff, she’d often say, “Let’s grab a bite at Perko’s.” The options in that area being severely limited, M. de Joie went along with this, but was invariably underwhelmed. The food wasn’t inedible; it was ( Read more... )

Even the most dyed-in-the-wool ardent Reddingites have to admit that it gets intolerably hot here in the summer. (You think it’s bad now? Imagine what it must have been like for the early settlers, clad in voluminous layers of heavy fabrics and garments with nary an air conditioner in sight.) Many stay indoors and turn the thermostat as low as ( Read more... )