What's at stake?
Fresnoland looks back at some of our favorite neighborhood-focused stories of 2025.
Looking back at Fresnoland accomplishments in 2025, one of the efforts of which I’m most proud was our decision to go even deeper into our neighborhoods.
We wanted to explore the often untold or forgotten stories of the store owners, the artists, the cooks and history makers that shape our community as much and sometimes even more than powerful politicians and rich developers.
I tried to put together a short list of some of our favorite neighborhood-focused stories.
They’re not all happy stories — but they’re all important and only found at Fresnoland.
‘All of those people had to relocate’
With a new UCLA report detailing the destructive history of the 99 Freeway, Fresnoland’s Julianna Morano sat down with West Fresno residents who lived that history and others still working to undo the damage on the city’s west side.
Four-hundred homes were demolished to make way for the freeway’s construction and about 1,000 residents were displaced, UCLA researchers say.
“It just created a further geographic isolation of West Fresno,” said Veronica Stumpf, a realtor whose family has roots in West Fresno’s Germantown that once thrived before the 99 cut it in half.
Communities like Germantown essentially disappeared as residents began sprawling north, triggering West Fresno’s decades-long population decline.
And it didn’t have to be that way.
Much of that destruction could have been avoided had state officials instead selected one of the alternative routes that West Fresno community leaders pushed for back then.
Read the full story from Julianna Morano here
Preserving West Fresno history
A team of artists is looking to preserve and celebrate West Fresno’s history in a public art project at Fresno City College’s West Fresno Center campus
But there’s a problem.
West Fresno has paved over, tossed aside and displaced hundreds, maybe thousands of residents, over the years, leaving relatively few historic photos or images.
“We don’t exist, as far as the city’s concerned,” said Michelle Ethridge-Meyers, who took over her family’s daycare, Bambi’s Day Care Nursery, 40-odd years ago. The business has been open since 1969 and has taken care of multiple generations of West Fresno’s children.
The Fresno-area artists are working on a “ceramic quilt” — combing glazed tiles and sculptural relief — adorning the fountain and reflecting pool in front of the West Fresno Center on Church Avenue.
The team is also turning to West Fresno families to help fill in those archival gaps, launching a community survey to help collect more of those photos from families who’ve held onto them.
Read the full story from Julianna Morano here.
Maybe Fresno’s best chile verde is red?
The green chile sauce is red, it looks like a Wendy’s and always sounds like the 1980s.
It’s Al’s Cafe, a West Fresno breakfast institution.
In June, Fresnoland reporter Pablo Orihuela sat down with Al’s Cafe manager Sandy Richardson, who has been with Al’s since nearly the very beginning.
Al’s Cafe has been serving Fresno since 2000, operating on G Street in Chinatown for several years before moving to its current Jane Addams neighborhood spot in a defunct west side hamburger stand.
Wendy’s classic 90s-style branding can still be seen on the doors as patrons sit down to order the diner’s signature Chile Verde (which is red, instead of green) or other classics like Country Fried Steak and Chilaquiles.
Read the full story from Pablo Orihuela here
Inside this Tower District’s creative vending machine
What if you could package Fresno’s creativity and sell it out of a clunky vending machine in a popular Tower District bar?
That’s the idea behind the JoyStick Vending machine — a bright fixture in an otherwise dimly lit corner inside Goldstein’s Mortuary and Deli in the Tower District.
The vending machine’s rows are lined up with Fresno-themed items like pins and stickers, novelty items like a special deck of UNO cards, mystery gifts and switchblade combs.
Most of the items are a few dollars, and a few others are at most $20.
Fresno artist Marco Tovar said the idea of a vending machine stocked with local art was hard to explain to people at first, but eventually was embraced by 20 local artists who jumped at the opportunity to have their art be featured inside the vending machine.
Read the full story from Omar S. Rashad here.
Fresno artists fix up a South Tower freeway park
Twenty new murals at San Pablo Park, several painted by local artists, represent the largest public art installation in Fresno in more than 60 years.
The project, funded through CalTrans’ Clean California Beautification program, brought together almost a dozen Fresno artists as well as a handful of muralists from across the state.
The construction of the 180 freeway through the South Tower neighborhood in the 1990s cleared out homes and permanently disrupted the neighborhood. Many have criticized the city for building a park like San Pablo right underneath the freeway.
But the revenue the Measure P sales tax has generated for Fresno parks since voters approved it in 2018 cleared the way to bring more color and beauty to San Pablo Park.
Read the full story from Julianna Morano here.
