SAT OCT. 20: PIPE BOMB! by DANIEL DEBOOM
Tues | Oct 16 Yesterday, we put the Best of Long Beach issue together inside a studio apartment in Bluff Heights, where we were joined by a desktop printer, one pizza, four laptops, a highlighter and two cats. This is all very unusual, of course . . . [...]

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BEST OF LONG BEACH
Think your life is tough? Well, just try figuring out who has the best cure for a hangover or who makes the best oatmeal. Yeah, you may have one of those jobs where you lift stuff or save lives or read, but do you have to whittle down and/or differentiate between the [...]

Best succinct restaurant: Long Beach Thai Restaurant . . . Best police substation: the one on Los Coyotes Diagonal by the Krispy Kreme donut shop . . . Best improved intersection: the transition from eastbound Sixth Street to northbound Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue to eastbound Seventh Street (Now 99 percent moving-violation-free) . . . [...]

EYE ON YOU: ABRAHAM LINCOLN STATUE When they built the new City Hall in the mid-1970s, this was supposed to be a redo of the old Lincoln Park, but the new place didn’t come out so well—perhaps because the city didn’t ask Mr. Lincoln. It feels oddly disjointed—and Lincoln relocated seems strangely out-of-place in a [...]

Talking Beowulf and Miles Davis with local arts champion Helen Borgers

PHOTO by DAVID GUETTLER
“My earliest memories are of being read to,” says Helen Borgers, artistic director for the Long Beach Shakespeare Company and a renowned KJAZZ 88.1 FM show host. “Detective fiction, P.G. Wodehouse—even in those days, it was pretty rare to read, though.”
Frustration might [...]

Angie Evans and the rebirth of Viento y Agua

PHOTO by SUSAN SABO
When Viento y Agua’s original owners packed up and moved away, musician Angie Evans knew that she didn’t want to abandon the space. “I had been putting on open mic nights at Viento y Agua since it started,” she explains. “I knew that’s where [...]

TREE OF LIFE: BEACH HEALTH TREE NATURAL FOODS The necessary center step between the prescription conglomerates and drinking hot lemon water in your darkened sick hole: Beach Tree has a sympathetic and knowledgeable staff able to deploy their selection with precision, compassion and efficiency. Simple things they have totally covered and esoteric things they have [...]

Meow’s Kathleen Schaaf buying vintage when downtown was empty–except for the secondhand stores

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
It’s hard to believe today, with the new buildings like stents in the city’s heart—and the vacant lots with white plastic Redevelopment Agency fences around them—but in the late 1970s, downtown was one big thrift in many old buildings. The [...]

Mike Cincola runs Loof’s Lite-A-Line, the last surviving game from the Pike amusement park

PHOTO by DAVID GUETTLER
“The game is handmade,” Looff’s Lite-a-Line owner Mike Cincola says, and he has the credit card to prove it—the small-sized, long-expired Broadway charge card of Vincent C. Engstrom, the man who wired Lite-a-Line at the Pike in 1941 after [...]