Imagining the Unimaginable

The Fort Bragg Fires Part II: Fort Bragg Burned In More Ways Than One by Mark Heimann and Bruce Anderson for the Anderson Valley Advertiser February 3  rd , 1999 Edited by Peter J. Mello – December 29  th , 2017 A ffinito family roots run deep here in Pittsburg, not the east coast steel town, but Pittsburg, California, a sprawling Contra Costa County community where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers combine to become Suisun Bay, then San Pablo Bay, then San Francisco Bay. Pittsburg is no longer the sleepy, but prosperous, Italian-American farming and fishing town it was before World War Two. Today, it takes a concentrated search to even find downtown Pittsburg amid the gated hillside communities that look down on booming commercial development, sprawling strip malls and cookie-cutter housing tracts. Remnants of what was once a coherent and even charming downtown remain, but these remnants of a less frantic time are...

The Fort Bragg Fires Part I: The Money Trail by Mark Heimann and Bruce Anderson for the Anderson Valley Advertiser February 3  rd , 1999 Edited by Peter J. Mello – December 29  th , 2017 Publisher’s Note: In a remote Northern California logging and fishing hamlet, hidden in the inky autumn blackness before either moon or sun would rise on September 20  th , 1987, an unknown group ignited three brazen and near-simultaneous arson fires that destroyed the Ten Mile Justice Court , the adjacent City Library and, just two blocks down Main Street, the venerable Piedmont Hotel and restaurant (seen right). No one was ever prosecuted for the blazes, spectacular and disheartening as they were, and only much later would residents learn the motives behind them and the rest of the series of arsons-for-profit that plagued the small coastal community of Fort Bragg in the late 1980s....