Signal Tribune Your Weekly Community Newspaper
VOL. XLIII NO. 33
INSIDE: Greenly Art Space has been rooted in the Signal Hill community for 11 years see page 2
Serving Bixby Knolls, California Heights, Los Cerritos, Wrigley and Signal Hill
LOCAL BUSINESS
Friday, August 13, 2021 BUDGET
FROM BLIGHT...
Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune
Google Maps
TO BEER GARDEN Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune
(Upper) The vacant lot that Wrigley Tavern owner Tommy Mofid transformed into a beer garden. (Lower) A view of the garden area lit up with hanging lights on the night of August 5, 2021
How this bar owner transformed a vacant lot into a ‘third space’ for the Wrigley community
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Emma DiMaggio Managing Editor
ust a year ago, the former site of the Wrigley Village Community Garden was a hotspot for illegal dumping, graffiti, rats and overall blight. “The City would put notices that there’s couches, you know, homeless, fires,” Wrigley Tavern owner Tommy Mofid said. “It had just been, for the past five, ten years, a problematic lot. It just really housed a lot of problems.” Now, dirt piles and debris have been replaced with flourishing banana trees, patches of vegetables and herbs, strings of warm patio lights and a shaded outdoor dining area. “I have always dreamt of opening up a beer garden in Southern California, because when you go to Germany, they have beer gardens everywhere. A place that has six months of rain straight, has them everywhere,” Mofid said. “Here we have 300 days of sunshine and we don’t have hardly any beer gardens.” After a bit of luck in obtaining the property, and already equipped with a liquor license, Mofid opened up Wrigley Tavern in late 2018. But just as he was settling into the groove, the pandemic hit. He reacted to the pandemic’s first curveball—no indoor dining without food—by building out a small kitchen around August 2020. Mofid took inspiration from his travels to Greece and Turkey and created a menu of flatbreads topped with ingredients like pickles, organic cherry tomatoes, fresh mushrooms and peppers, all of which are named after neighborhoods in Long Beach. With basic dining restrictions covered, Wrigley Tavern was able to reopen with limited capacity. As the pandemic threatened to stretch into 2021, Mofid turned his attention to the vacant lot adjacent to the bar—an opportunity for see WRIGLEY TAVERN page 5
Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune
Tommy Mofid, owner of the Wrigley Tavern, hands over a freshly poured beer from behind the bar on Aug. 5, 2021.
‘Not smart or responsible’: LB Council supports maintaining police budget despite calls for divestment Emma DiMaggio Managing Editor
Long Beach City Council members were in agreement at last night’s budget hearing that cutting the Long Beach police budget would be, in Councilmember Al Austin’s words, “not smart or responsible.” The Long Beach Police Department proposed budget totals $285 million—a $16 million increase from last year’s budget, which was subject to cuts like nearly every other department due to the impacts of the pandemic. During public comment, community members called for the council to reduce the department’s budget by 25%, one of the requests of the People’s Budget. Divestment from police is a key component of the growing movement for alternative modes of policing spurred on by the racial uprisings that occurred last year in response to the murder of George Floyd by police. City Manager Tom Modica prefaced the meeting by highlighting the progress of the police department, including its Office of Constitutional Policing and efforts to increase diversity recruitment. “Clearly, you’ve misheard us,” District 2 resident Kenny Allen said of Modica’s comments. “Those things are not the problem. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last 40 years, a fundamental shift of the role of police in society.” The police budget makes up nearly half of the City’s general fund, the other half of which is distributed to services like the parks system, libraries, public works and the health department. see POLICE BUDGET page 3