Parking, Art and Packing

Northern Exposure

BLUE-COLLAR BLUES? Everything’s up to date in Escondido. Now the inland city can boast one ritzy attribute not even tony Carlsbad can call its own: valet parking at the hospital. Palomar Hospital now lets visitors check their cars at the door for $2 (with validation) through a contract with Ace Parking, which uses about two dozen spaces near the hospital’s back entrance on Grand Avenue.

WHO NEEDS THE GETTY ANYWAY? Oceanside hasn’t exactly earned a reputation as a high-culture mecca, but the seaside city has just taken a significant step into fine art with the opening last month of the Oceanside Museum of Art’s new 16,000-square-foot central pavilion. Now showing is “Masterpieces of San Diego Painting: Fifty Works from Fifty Years: 1900-1950,” an intriguing collection of art that includes works by such celebrated San Diegans as Maurice Braun, Charles Fries and Charles Reiffel, as well as such early modernists as Belle Baranceanu and Ethel Greene. The exhibit runs through June. “The 50 paintings were chosen to present a survey of the prominent artists who worked in San Diego during this period,” says Beth Smith, the museum’s assistant director.

ALL THE NEWS: Like newspapers everywhere, The San Diego Union-Tribune is having a tough go of things, so it’s no surprise that part of the daily’s revamping of its North County section includes cutting out one more day (Tuesday, in addition to Monday) and selling banner ads at the bottom of the section’s front page. And oh yes, the name of the section has been changed from “North County” to “Our North County.”

TUNING IN: Homegrown singer-songwriter Alyssa Jacey, now living in Carlsbad, is releasing her first full-length, self-produced album later this year. Jacey, 26, grew up in Rancho Santa Fe and Del Mar and moved to Los Angeles four years ago to become a professional dancer. After hoofing it at Super Bowl XXXVII and in several music videos, she moved back to San Diego to pursue a career in music. (“It started when my friends pushed me to sing karaoke,” she says.) She’s released three EPs and has been gigging all over Southern California, from the Belly Up Tavern to the Viper Room in Los Angeles. At the same time, she attended California State University at San Marcos, graduating with a degree in communications. Now that she’s out of school, she’s focusing on music full-time. “Once this album is released, I know my life is going to change even greater than it has over the three short years I’ve been pursuing music,” Jacey says. “ ‘I will be signed by 2009’ is what I keep telling myself, and I know I’m not far away.” Check out Jacey’s Web site at AlyssaJacey.com.

GONE COUNTRY: We keep hearing about how out-of-town developers are contracting with local cities to build public buildings. Now it’s turnaround time: The builder of the proposed new $635 million Nashville Convention Center is Foursquare Properties——of Carlsbad.

CUBISTS: Eagle Creek, a Vista-based company that manufactures packing cubes——small bags designed to organize suit cases ——has been written up in the Wall Street Journal in one of the august business paper’s well-read trend pieces. “Heightened airport security and more airplane baggage restrictions have turned the humble packing cube from a curiosity into a popular accessory,” the Journal notes.

STEPPING UP: Solana Beach is getting a new $1 million stairway to the beach. The stairway, at 180 Del Mar Shores Terrace, is one of the city’s few coastal accesses and replaces the original concrete stairway, built in 1977 but suffering badly with time. Much of the concrete is cracked, the iron rails are badly rusted, and the bottom steps have been eroded by the tide. The new and improved staircase will feature aluminum rails and timber steps.

SPREADING THE WORD: An Encinitas-based Web site all about Jesus is going Chinese. JesusCentral.com has launched a new interactive Chinese-language Web site, YesuZhongxin.org, that’s taking aim at the 137 million Internet users around the world who are literate in Chinese. One of the original Web site’s most popular features, an introductory course on the life and times of Christ called “Jesus 101,” also is making the move. “Now, people from around the globe with different Chinese [spoken] dialects are able to communicate with each other about Jesus in their common written language,” says Vip Patel, founder and president of JesusCentral.com. “We are delighted to offer a scholastic approach to learning about Jesus in the two most widely used languages in the world, English and Chinese.”

TEENS FOR TEMPERENCE: A group of Poway High School students has formed a club to promote sober living, in the wake of a school study that found 21 percent of students had engaged in binge drinking in the month before the survey. The 24 members of the Poway High Leaders promote alcohol-free lifestyles through school assemblies and individual talks with fellow students. Student services coordinator Kathleen Gibbs says the club is growing “little by little,” but concedes, “It’s a little hard to sell it to the kids.”

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