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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’ve ever driven across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, you’ve passed right over one of the Bay Area’s most historic houses — probably without realizing it. Take the Yerba Buena Island exit and after a few winding turns, you’ll come upon a surprisingly nice group of homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The houses in question are multi-storied, perched on a sloping green hillside. It’s a grand scene, a collection of white columns framing stately front porches, windows adorned with delicate lattice work, and sweeping views of the Bay. Although one house stands out from the rest: the Nimitz House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More formally known as Quarters One, the Nimitz House is a relic of the island’s military past. Built in the early 1900s, the home was once the official residence for the top commanding officer on base. Compare old photos with the house today, and you’ll see how much has changed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most dramatic shift is the Bay Bridge itself — the rebuilt eastern span towers over the grand home, creating a cacophony of car noise. Years of disuse have also stripped the house of some of its original shine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just such an anomaly there,” said Bay Curious listener Ben Kaiser. “It just does not belong… it [looks] like a toy house placed under a bridge. [It’s] truly visually confusing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12060394\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12060394\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Windows look out onto the Bay and the Bay Bridge at the Nimitz House on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco on Oct. 16, 2025. Built around 1900 as part of the Naval Training Station, the home later served as the residence of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz during the final years of his life. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Kaiser wants to know nearly everything about the history of this house that led to its surreal placement. Who was Nimitz and why is this house named for him? How did it end up tucked beneath the bridge? And what plans are there for it in the future?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Who is Nimitz?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For retired Rear Admiral John Bitoff, a mention of Nimitz takes him straight back to his childhood. Growing up in Brooklyn during World War II, Bitoff was captivated by Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, whose leadership in the Pacific made him a household name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My father was a big newspaper junkie,” Bitoff remembered, “there were always these front page photographs of the war in the Pacific and the pictures of Admiral Nimitz and Admiral Spruance. And so I just ate that up.”[aside postID=news_12063643 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-01-BL.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before World War II, Nimitz taught Naval Science at Berkeley and helped start the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) program. He grew fond of the area and later returned to retire. When his health deteriorated, the Navy offered him a home in Quarters One.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s how he became the occupant of that grand home and lived out his last days,” Bitoff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, Bitoff would live there himself — as part of his own Naval career. “It seemed like it was deemed to happen,” Bitoff said, “that I would find myself living in those very Quarters.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was inspired to preserve the Admiral’s legacy. During his time there, Bitoff said he tracked down Nimitz’s old paperboy, hosted the Admiral’s daughter for dinner, and interviewed the last remaining firefighter on the island who remembered Nimitz. Bitoff and his wife, Maureen, even refurbished Nimitz’s desk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[We] put it back in the library, in the very same spot where Nimitz had it, where he could look out the window,” Bitoff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12060954\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12060954\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ret. Rear Admiral John Bitoff sits in the living room of his home in San Francisco on Oct. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But the idyllic chapter was short-lived. In 1991, Bitoff retired and a few years later the base shut down entirely. It was swept up in a nationwide Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) effort, meant to reign in military spending after the Cold War. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12022479/why-are-there-so-many-abandoned-military-bases-in-the-bay-area\">More than 30 major bases in California closed, including Treasure Island in 1997.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was the end of an era for the Nimitz House.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Nimitz House in Limbo\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“I knew that when the military closes down its bases, it’s not very good about maintaining historical edifices,” Bitoff said. “They basically don’t have the wherewithal to do it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was worried about what would happen to the house he’d come to love. His wife, Maureen, worked to get the residence listed as a historic site, but the designation offered little practical protection. Most of the former base was turned over to the city of San Francisco, and the newly created Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) took over long-term oversight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12066230\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12066230\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2500\" height=\"833\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4.jpg 2500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4-2000x666.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4-160x53.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4-1536x512.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4-2048x682.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2500px) 100vw, 2500px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Quarters One, also known as the Nimitz House, stands in all its glory. Right: The interior of the Nimitz House on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco on Oct. 16, 2025. Built around 1900 as part of the Naval Training Station, the home later served as the residence of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz during the final years of his life. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress, Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12066231\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-12066231 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2500\" height=\"833\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3.jpg 2500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3-2000x666.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3-160x53.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3-1536x512.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3-2048x682.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2500px) 100vw, 2500px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: The interior of the Nimitz House on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco shows signs of decay on Oct. 16, 2025. Built around 1900 as part of the Naval Training Station, the home later served as the residence of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz during the final years of his life. Right: Ret. Rear Admiral John Bitoff holds a photo of the Nimitz House, where he lived with his wife from 1989 to 1992, at his home in San Francisco on Oct. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cdiv class=\"mceTemp\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>Peter Summerville, a long-time TIDA employee, says the Nimitz House comes with a series of challenges that make reuse difficult. Its exposed location in the middle of the bay means it takes a beating from the weather, and its historic designation makes upgrades difficult. “[There are limits] in terms of how much you can adjust the building,” Summerville said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the city handles basic maintenance, but long-term plans for the house — and the entire district — are still being worked out. Summerville says possibilities include a series of restaurants, an artists colony or an educational space. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12023708/surprising-ways-former-bay-area-military-bases-are-transforming-and-why-it-takes-so-long\">Realizing those possibilities, however, could take a long time.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I mean, I share [Bitoff’s] chagrin that maybe something didn’t happen way back when the city first took over to kind of keep the ball rolling with those buildings,” Summerville said. “But again, it’s just sort of an example of the challenge of a public agency maintaining a building.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Bridge Becomes a Backdrop\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One of the biggest obstacles to reusing the house for anything productive is the presence of the bridge. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake — \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ERvsmnTb6w\">which caused a section of the old upper deck to collapse\u003c/a> — made rebuilding a must.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When planners debated where the new span should land on Yerba Buena Island, conflict quickly ensued. Nearly everyone had something at stake, including the Coast Guard, East Bay MUD, the Port of Oakland, the Navy and the City of San Francisco.[aside postID=news_12062909 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Ocean-Spray_3.jpg']With thousands of commuters still using the old bridge while the new one was being built, the question was: Should the new span connect to the island south of the old bridge or north of it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So, the city, and I believe particularly the mayor’s office at the time, put up a strenuous defense of the southern alignment,” Summerville said. This alignment would veer clear of the Nimitz House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The city saw this district as a great opportunity for reuse of these historic properties and to sort of bring them back to their original shine,” he said. A handful of state lawmakers and the Navy agreed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite those objections, the more northern alignment won out. Competing interests from other agencies plus Caltrans’ own arguments over earthquake safety sealed the deal. The new span now towers over the Nimitz House, adding a constant buzz of traffic to an otherwise tranquil setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It destroyed much of the ambience, and certainly destroyed the gardens and the buildings surrounding it,” Bitoff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bitoff sees the Nimitz House story as a lesson in forgotten history. The Bay Area was once a major military hub, but as time passed, that connection faded. “I don’t think it was done intentionally, I just think it was just what happens when people forget,” Bitoff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hello, hello! I’m Olivia Allen-Price, back in the Bay Curious host’s seat after a 6 month maternity leave. For those who know me – pfew! I have missed this job, and you. And if you’ve started listening while I was gone – welcome! I’m so glad you’re here. Listen at the end for more update on me, but for now on the with show…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Something that I learned recently is every time you cross the Bay Bridge, you’re passing over one of the Bay Area’s most historic houses. We’re talking so close… that if you got out of your car on the bridge – \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">not recommended\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – you could toss a rock and hit the home’s roof, a few hundred feet below. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Kaiser: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even today, the mansion is stunning, even in its slow demise.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s Ben Kaiser, this week’s question asker. The house he’s talking about is an odd sight to say the least: a once glorious mansion, tucked right beneath the Bay bridge’s eastern span.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are a handful of grand old white houses grouped together in a little neighborhood of sorts. They’re multi-story with white columns framing stately front porches…. windows adorned with delicate lattice work. And the location could be primo… perched on the sloping green hillside of Yerba Buena island….looking out at the East Bay hills.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s an impressive scene… although there’s one house that stands out from the rest.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Kaiser:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was called Nimitz house. It was called quarters one. It was, it was built in 1900 and played a certain role, I guess, in the naval efforts of World War Two.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While none of these homes are small, this ‘Quarters One’ is notably more imposing than the rest. It’s a stately mansion – complete with multiple bedrooms and baths – and it’s a vestige from the Island’s military past. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These days though, the house tells a different story — one of peeling plaster, water damage, disrepair.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And since 2013, there’s been a new visual addition to the background: the rebuilt eastern span of the Bay Bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Kaiser: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s this contrast in old with the house, and new with the bridge, and big with the house, but massive with the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a contrast indicative of an fascinating/captivating/intriguing history, one that Ben wants to know nearly everything about.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Kaiser:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I want to know its role in the Navy before it was renamed Nimitz house. I want to know about life after Nimitz passed away. But more than anything, I want to know what the future of it is.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This week on Bay Curious we’re stepping inside the Nimitz house. (Yes, the same Nimitz with a freeway named after him.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ll learn more about the house’s namesake and meet a retired Navy officer who used to live there. Then we’ll turn to the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor Break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> For much of the 20th century, Yerba Buena Island was part of the Navy’s West Coast operations. Quarters one – later known as the Nimitz house – was the official residence for the top/commanding officer on base.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Over the years, many Naval officers have called the house home. To start our story, Bay Curious reporter Gabriela Glueck met up with one of them – someone who can’t quite let go of the history.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Chances are, someone else lived in your house before you did.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you look closely, maybe you can see traces of them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When it comes to the Nimitz house, RADM John Bitoff has spent a lot of time thinking about the man who came before him: Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I would find myself\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">sitting there and thinking I wonder what happened here.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nimitz was a legendary WWII Naval Commander and John’s childhood hero.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Archival war tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The Nimitz story is not simply an account of an outstanding Naval officer who rose to a position of greatness and honour. It is also the chronicle of our modern Navy, its coming of age and its greatest triumphs in the epic struggle of the Pacific during World War II.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As a kid growing up in Brooklyn at the onset of the War, John watched this ‘epic struggle’ play out in real time. When the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor, drawing the United States into war, John saw the uptick of ships going in and out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Archival war tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The flames had hardly died before Chester Nimitz was called from a desk in Washington to take command of the Pacific Fleet. It was a dark time and a formidable task. It would take a man of vast experience and vigour to get victory out of wreckage and chaos. It would take a Nimitz.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With the United States officially at war, many Americans turned their focus to Europe. But John was preoccupied with the Pacific front and the Naval commander at its center.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Well, my father was a big newspaper junkie and so there were always these front page photographs of the war in the Pacific and the pictures of Admiral Nimitz and Admiral Spruance. I just ate that up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s hard to say how exactly we settle on a childhood hero — a mix of context, timing, and awe. But for John it was Nimitz.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1945, Japan’s formal surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay, the end of World War II.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By then Nimitz was a Fleet Admiral, holding the Navy’s highest rank. After the war, he became Chief of Naval operations.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then, in 1947, he retired.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so when he retired, they decided to buy a house in Berkeley.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nimitz had taught Naval Sciences there, before the war, and he’d also helped start the school’s ROTC unit. He wanted to spend his golden years there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But when it comes to five star admirals, as John puts it, you never really retire from the Navy. So when Nimitz’s health started to deteriorate in his late 70s, the Navy stepped in.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So we can provide you with a staff, a driver and a house staff, but you must live in public quarters. We cannot do that in a private home. They said, “You can have any set of quarters the Navy has.’ And Nimitz said, “Well, How about quarters one on Yerba Buena? And so they moved him over there. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yerba Buena Island had been an important part of the Navy’s West Coast operations since the early 1900s. And during WWII, it fell under the jurisdiction of the Treasure Island Naval Station, serving as headquarters for the 12th Naval District. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Quarters one – where Nimitz was headed – was a fitting home for a legendary admiral.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s how he became the occupant of that grand home and lived out his last days.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Nimitz passed away in 1966 — four days before his 81st birthday — he was laid to rest at the Golden Gate National Cemetery. If you’d looked to the sky at the end of that service, you’d have seen a 70 plane flyover and heard the military bugle song of Taps floating through the crisp winter air\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of Taps playing\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s no surprise then, that the home he died in took on his name.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok, fast forward about 20 years. It’s 1989 now. Many a naval officer have come and gone from the Nimitz house and a new Rear Admiral is about to move in.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">His name? John Bitoff. No longer a boy from Brooklyn but a Navy man in his own right, at the end of a long career.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As part of his final duty station, *John was assigned to the Nimitz house.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so I was absolutely astonished. It seemed like it was deemed to be. That I would find myself living in those very in those very quarters.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For John, it was a marvelous place to live.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It had a grand porch leading up to the quarters, and it looked out onto a garden, a rose garden in the back that a double door let out, and steps led out to where they held receptions, there was a goldfish pond there. It was just absolutely gorgeous.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With Nimitz history surrounding him, John thought he’d take the opportunity to learn more about the Fleet Admiral. To kick off a sort of oral history project.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I had heard that he used to go down to the firehouse on Yerba Buena Island and have a cup of coffee with the firemen, firefighters and and then at Christmas time, he was known to bring down chocolate chip cookies they cooked and he would share with the firefighters. And so I found out that the last remaining firefighter was retiring in a very short period of time. So I met with him.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And John and his wife also made efforts to restore the home to the way it was in the Nimitz days to honor the Fleet Admiral’s legacy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They refurbished Nimitz’s desk and — using a photograph as reference — put it back in the library. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In the very same spot where Nimitz had it, where he could look out the window\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When John retired in 1991, he moved out of the Nimitz house.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was replaced by two other admirals. And then the whole Navy establishment was was part of the Base Realignment, and it was closed. All Navy activities were closed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With the Cold War winding down, the US was looking to tighten its defense budget. And the base closure process — which ramped up in the 90s — was a big part of that effort.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These series of cuts hit California hard. More than 30 major bases shut down.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For John, the Treasure Island closure in 1997 was particularly worrisome.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I knew that when the military closes down its bases, it’s not very good about maintaining historical edifices, and they basically don’t, don’t, they don’t have the wherewithal to do it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While John’s wife managed to get the residence listed as a *historic site… most of the former base was ultimately turned over to the city of San Francisco. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was very concerned, because I love that House, and it is such a historic residence. If the walls could speak, they’d be a history lesson.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And soon enough, a new agency was created to oversee the base’s reuse and development. It’s called the Treasure Island Development Authority or TIDA.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Peter Summerville has worked at TIDA for over 20 years and says if he’s got the time, he’ll sometimes take his lunch break on the front porch of the Nimitz house.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Although – he admits – these days with the bridge there, it’s kind of loud.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of loud traffic\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I met up with him at the house to take a tour.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Standing on the front porch, the first thing you notice about the place – after the bridge noise – is the many signs of weathering on the old home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think it’s a very challenging site. Exposure wise, definitely, we see that a lot, which is all our public infrastructure, that out here, we’re right in the middle of the bay, and it takes a beating.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The old porch ceiling fan is warped, the wooden blades drooping now.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck (in scene): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Should we go inside? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Go inside? And I’m proud of myself. They actually brought the keys. One of my tricks I’m good at is getting places and forgetting my keys.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The slamming sounds you’re hearing now are from the door. After years of little use it’s jammed and Peter has to use all his body weight to open it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of kicking at a door\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s coming. It’s coming. I just don’t have anything to kick them. Oh, my goodness.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Traffic sounds fade away\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When you get inside, the air feels… still… save for a few floating spider webs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kiah: \u003c/b>We have beautiful hardwood floors, and then big, kind of big open spaces, big doorways, tall ceilings that really you can hear the echo of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s Kiah McCarley, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">she works with Peter. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Compared to him, she’s new to the agency and it’s her first time in the house too.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s a sight to behold.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: What has happened on the ceiling?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kiah McCarley: Yeah, it looks like we’re having some the paint or plaster come off the ceiling. A little bit of time damage, maybe a little bit of water damage.\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are speckles of black mold creeping up some of the walls, but other rooms look to be in pretty good shape. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">After everything John’s told me about the house, I have to admit it’s a little bit shocking to see. And when I ask Peter about the city of San Francisco’s plans for the space, he gives me a kind of open-ended answer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The long term plans for the house and for its kind of overall district are still being developed. They’ll ultimately be some sort of that kind of public use, either a collective reuse of the whole district, as, you know, a series of restaurants and bed and breakfasts, or an artists colony, or, you know, a variety of different things, or maybe their individual uses in each of the buildings. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Or maybe, he says, they’ll let an educational institution come in and use some leftover military houses for studios or classrooms.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But right now, they’re focused on basic repairs. Although Peter says the home’s historic designation complicates things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> All the improvements that you have to make in their systems, architecturally, all of that has to be done very sensitively, and is limited in terms of how much you can adjust the building as well. So even bringing the buildings up to kind of modern standards for practical reuse going forward is a challenge. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Heading into the main room, I notice pieces of broken glass all over the floor. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Turn the corner, and a beautiful, airy, sun room.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Head across the hallway and you’ll see an antique looking elevator next to the staircase.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, this is definitely some can do. Can do Navy engineering.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a house full of contrast. Outside, the same is true.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck (in scene):\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s kind of funny right now, out the window, you can see, what would you call that? Like, the legs of the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This window is really just like a portrait of the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Back when John lived here, the window was mostly a portrait of the Bay. The Bay Bridge existed, true, but it used to touch down on another point of the island.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, what happened?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Archival tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> On Tuesday, October 17 1989 at 17:04 Pacific Daylight Time, a strong motion earthquake emanated from a location south southeast of San Francisco, near Loma Prieta in the Santa Cruz mountain range.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The 6.9 magnitude quake was the strongest shock to hit the area since the 1906 earthquake\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">63 people were killed, and thousands more injured.\u003c/span>\u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of emergency response radio and crackling\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Drivers on the Bay Bridge watched as a section of the upper deck collapsed, falling onto the lower deck, trapping many and ultimately killing one motorist.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After that, as the years went on Caltrans, which owns the bridge. Caltrans and the state toll bridge authority determined that the Eastern span of the Bay Bridge needed to be replaced.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There were plenty of opinions about what the new span should look like. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Oakland Tribune commented:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Voice Over reading newspaper clipping: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s make this a splendid front door to the East Bay….the bridges spanning San Francisco Bay are a world-class attraction that have made our Bay Area a living postcard. Let’s keep them picture perfect.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But one of the fiercest debates wasn’t about design at all. It was about location. Thousands of commuters were still using the old bridge, while the new one was being built. So the question was, where should the new bridge connect to Yerba Buena Island? Should it land south of the old bridge, or north of it?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The question became known as the alignment debate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nearly everyone felt they had something at stake. The Coast Guard, the East Bay MUD, the Port of Oakland, the Navy, the City of San Francisco, just to name a few.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the city, and I believe, particularly the mayor’s office at the time, put up a strenuous defense of, you know, the southern alignment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s the one that would have steered clear of the Nimitz house.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The city saw this district as sort of a great opportunity for reuse of these historic properties and to sort of bring them back to their, you know, original shine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A handful of state lawmakers and the Navy agreed\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But despite those objections the northern alignment won out. Competing interests from other agencies plus Caltrans own arguments over earthquake safety sealed the deal. Even the grand promise of the Nimitz house couldn’t tip the scales.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And that’s sort of the alignment that we have today. The new bridge is up. You know, it just sort of is what it is in our world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The bridge construction project dragged on for decades. And by the time the new eastern span opened in 2013, it cost billions more than the original estimate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For the Nimitz house, the Bridge’s impact was just as dramatic.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Much of the ambience, and certainly destroyed the gardens and the buildings surrounding it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What was once a stately home with sweeping views now sits in the shadow of concrete columns surrounded by the constant drone of traffic.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I really don’t like going over there because the area is so changed. I was very saddened by it, and I didn’t want to go back again. The last time I went down to the quarters\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the house was in a terrible state of disrepair, and I made up my mind I didn’t want to go back there again, because it was ruining my memory.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For John, visiting the house now stirs up this very particular kind of feeling. It’s like driving by your childhood home — a place that’s meant so much to you — except it’s not yours anymore. The porch is different, the tree out front is gone, the lawn is overgrown. It’s your old house but not really.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That’s precisely how I felt. You know, they say you can never go home, that’s the old saying, you can never go home. Well, that’s true in this case.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One thing is for sure, if the once grand Nimitz house is ever going to have a new future as an artist colony, a history museum, or anything else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of traffic on the bridge\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Soundproofing is going to be a must.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Car horn squeals\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b> That was reporter and producer Gabriela Glueck. Who, I want to give a special shout out to. Gabi filled in as producer on Bay Curious for the six months while I was out and did an incredible job. The team will miss her creativity, impeccable taste in music and infectious passion about whatever story she was working on. Luckily, she’ll continue to report for Bay Curious, so stay tuned for more from Gabi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also gotta give some flowers to Katrina Schwartz, who has been editing and hosting these past six months. It is truly a gift to be able to walk away from something you love as much as I love this show and know that it’s in the very best hands. Thank you Katrina – and I’m so happy to be working alongside you – and audio engineer extraordinaire, Christopher Beale – every day again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baby sounds…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Let me introduce you all to Clark, who was born in May. We call him our smiley guy because he cannot help but smile at you whenever you make eye contact. It was so special to get to spend these early months of his life with him, day in and day out. It’s a time of my life I know I’ll remember forever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. If you’re not a member, join us! Whether with a one-time donation or a monthly membership – it all helps. KQED.org/donate is the place to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale, Gabriela Glueck and me, Olivia Allen-Price.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Extra Support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien,Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m Olivia Allen-Price. See ya next week!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Hidden under the eastern span of the Bay Bridge on Yerba Buena Island is a historic mansion with links to the San Francisco Bay Area’s military past.\r\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’ve ever driven across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, you’ve passed right over one of the Bay Area’s most historic houses — probably without realizing it. Take the Yerba Buena Island exit and after a few winding turns, you’ll come upon a surprisingly nice group of homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The houses in question are multi-storied, perched on a sloping green hillside. It’s a grand scene, a collection of white columns framing stately front porches, windows adorned with delicate lattice work, and sweeping views of the Bay. Although one house stands out from the rest: the Nimitz House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More formally known as Quarters One, the Nimitz House is a relic of the island’s military past. Built in the early 1900s, the home was once the official residence for the top commanding officer on base. Compare old photos with the house today, and you’ll see how much has changed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most dramatic shift is the Bay Bridge itself — the rebuilt eastern span towers over the grand home, creating a cacophony of car noise. Years of disuse have also stripped the house of some of its original shine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just such an anomaly there,” said Bay Curious listener Ben Kaiser. “It just does not belong… it [looks] like a toy house placed under a bridge. [It’s] truly visually confusing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12060394\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12060394\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-27-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Windows look out onto the Bay and the Bay Bridge at the Nimitz House on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco on Oct. 16, 2025. Built around 1900 as part of the Naval Training Station, the home later served as the residence of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz during the final years of his life. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Kaiser wants to know nearly everything about the history of this house that led to its surreal placement. Who was Nimitz and why is this house named for him? How did it end up tucked beneath the bridge? And what plans are there for it in the future?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Who is Nimitz?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For retired Rear Admiral John Bitoff, a mention of Nimitz takes him straight back to his childhood. Growing up in Brooklyn during World War II, Bitoff was captivated by Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, whose leadership in the Pacific made him a household name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My father was a big newspaper junkie,” Bitoff remembered, “there were always these front page photographs of the war in the Pacific and the pictures of Admiral Nimitz and Admiral Spruance. And so I just ate that up.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before World War II, Nimitz taught Naval Science at Berkeley and helped start the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) program. He grew fond of the area and later returned to retire. When his health deteriorated, the Navy offered him a home in Quarters One.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s how he became the occupant of that grand home and lived out his last days,” Bitoff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, Bitoff would live there himself — as part of his own Naval career. “It seemed like it was deemed to happen,” Bitoff said, “that I would find myself living in those very Quarters.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was inspired to preserve the Admiral’s legacy. During his time there, Bitoff said he tracked down Nimitz’s old paperboy, hosted the Admiral’s daughter for dinner, and interviewed the last remaining firefighter on the island who remembered Nimitz. Bitoff and his wife, Maureen, even refurbished Nimitz’s desk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[We] put it back in the library, in the very same spot where Nimitz had it, where he could look out the window,” Bitoff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12060954\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12060954\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251021-NIMITZHOUSE-10-BL_QED-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ret. Rear Admiral John Bitoff sits in the living room of his home in San Francisco on Oct. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But the idyllic chapter was short-lived. In 1991, Bitoff retired and a few years later the base shut down entirely. It was swept up in a nationwide Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) effort, meant to reign in military spending after the Cold War. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12022479/why-are-there-so-many-abandoned-military-bases-in-the-bay-area\">More than 30 major bases in California closed, including Treasure Island in 1997.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was the end of an era for the Nimitz House.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Nimitz House in Limbo\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“I knew that when the military closes down its bases, it’s not very good about maintaining historical edifices,” Bitoff said. “They basically don’t have the wherewithal to do it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was worried about what would happen to the house he’d come to love. His wife, Maureen, worked to get the residence listed as a historic site, but the designation offered little practical protection. Most of the former base was turned over to the city of San Francisco, and the newly created Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) took over long-term oversight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12066230\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12066230\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2500\" height=\"833\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4.jpg 2500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4-2000x666.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4-160x53.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4-1536x512.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-4-2048x682.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2500px) 100vw, 2500px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Quarters One, also known as the Nimitz House, stands in all its glory. Right: The interior of the Nimitz House on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco on Oct. 16, 2025. Built around 1900 as part of the Naval Training Station, the home later served as the residence of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz during the final years of his life. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress, Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12066231\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-12066231 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2500\" height=\"833\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3.jpg 2500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3-2000x666.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3-160x53.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3-1536x512.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/Side-by-side-Downpage-3-2048x682.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2500px) 100vw, 2500px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: The interior of the Nimitz House on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco shows signs of decay on Oct. 16, 2025. Built around 1900 as part of the Naval Training Station, the home later served as the residence of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz during the final years of his life. Right: Ret. Rear Admiral John Bitoff holds a photo of the Nimitz House, where he lived with his wife from 1989 to 1992, at his home in San Francisco on Oct. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cdiv class=\"mceTemp\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>Peter Summerville, a long-time TIDA employee, says the Nimitz House comes with a series of challenges that make reuse difficult. Its exposed location in the middle of the bay means it takes a beating from the weather, and its historic designation makes upgrades difficult. “[There are limits] in terms of how much you can adjust the building,” Summerville said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the city handles basic maintenance, but long-term plans for the house — and the entire district — are still being worked out. Summerville says possibilities include a series of restaurants, an artists colony or an educational space. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12023708/surprising-ways-former-bay-area-military-bases-are-transforming-and-why-it-takes-so-long\">Realizing those possibilities, however, could take a long time.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I mean, I share [Bitoff’s] chagrin that maybe something didn’t happen way back when the city first took over to kind of keep the ball rolling with those buildings,” Summerville said. “But again, it’s just sort of an example of the challenge of a public agency maintaining a building.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Bridge Becomes a Backdrop\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One of the biggest obstacles to reusing the house for anything productive is the presence of the bridge. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake — \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ERvsmnTb6w\">which caused a section of the old upper deck to collapse\u003c/a> — made rebuilding a must.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When planners debated where the new span should land on Yerba Buena Island, conflict quickly ensued. Nearly everyone had something at stake, including the Coast Guard, East Bay MUD, the Port of Oakland, the Navy and the City of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>With thousands of commuters still using the old bridge while the new one was being built, the question was: Should the new span connect to the island south of the old bridge or north of it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So, the city, and I believe particularly the mayor’s office at the time, put up a strenuous defense of the southern alignment,” Summerville said. This alignment would veer clear of the Nimitz House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The city saw this district as a great opportunity for reuse of these historic properties and to sort of bring them back to their original shine,” he said. A handful of state lawmakers and the Navy agreed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite those objections, the more northern alignment won out. Competing interests from other agencies plus Caltrans’ own arguments over earthquake safety sealed the deal. The new span now towers over the Nimitz House, adding a constant buzz of traffic to an otherwise tranquil setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It destroyed much of the ambience, and certainly destroyed the gardens and the buildings surrounding it,” Bitoff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bitoff sees the Nimitz House story as a lesson in forgotten history. The Bay Area was once a major military hub, but as time passed, that connection faded. “I don’t think it was done intentionally, I just think it was just what happens when people forget,” Bitoff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hello, hello! I’m Olivia Allen-Price, back in the Bay Curious host’s seat after a 6 month maternity leave. For those who know me – pfew! I have missed this job, and you. And if you’ve started listening while I was gone – welcome! I’m so glad you’re here. Listen at the end for more update on me, but for now on the with show…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Something that I learned recently is every time you cross the Bay Bridge, you’re passing over one of the Bay Area’s most historic houses. We’re talking so close… that if you got out of your car on the bridge – \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">not recommended\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – you could toss a rock and hit the home’s roof, a few hundred feet below. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Kaiser: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even today, the mansion is stunning, even in its slow demise.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s Ben Kaiser, this week’s question asker. The house he’s talking about is an odd sight to say the least: a once glorious mansion, tucked right beneath the Bay bridge’s eastern span.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are a handful of grand old white houses grouped together in a little neighborhood of sorts. They’re multi-story with white columns framing stately front porches…. windows adorned with delicate lattice work. And the location could be primo… perched on the sloping green hillside of Yerba Buena island….looking out at the East Bay hills.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s an impressive scene… although there’s one house that stands out from the rest.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Kaiser:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was called Nimitz house. It was called quarters one. It was, it was built in 1900 and played a certain role, I guess, in the naval efforts of World War Two.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While none of these homes are small, this ‘Quarters One’ is notably more imposing than the rest. It’s a stately mansion – complete with multiple bedrooms and baths – and it’s a vestige from the Island’s military past. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These days though, the house tells a different story — one of peeling plaster, water damage, disrepair.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And since 2013, there’s been a new visual addition to the background: the rebuilt eastern span of the Bay Bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Kaiser: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s this contrast in old with the house, and new with the bridge, and big with the house, but massive with the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a contrast indicative of an fascinating/captivating/intriguing history, one that Ben wants to know nearly everything about.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Kaiser:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I want to know its role in the Navy before it was renamed Nimitz house. I want to know about life after Nimitz passed away. But more than anything, I want to know what the future of it is.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This week on Bay Curious we’re stepping inside the Nimitz house. (Yes, the same Nimitz with a freeway named after him.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ll learn more about the house’s namesake and meet a retired Navy officer who used to live there. Then we’ll turn to the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor Break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> For much of the 20th century, Yerba Buena Island was part of the Navy’s West Coast operations. Quarters one – later known as the Nimitz house – was the official residence for the top/commanding officer on base.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Over the years, many Naval officers have called the house home. To start our story, Bay Curious reporter Gabriela Glueck met up with one of them – someone who can’t quite let go of the history.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Chances are, someone else lived in your house before you did.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you look closely, maybe you can see traces of them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When it comes to the Nimitz house, RADM John Bitoff has spent a lot of time thinking about the man who came before him: Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I would find myself\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">sitting there and thinking I wonder what happened here.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nimitz was a legendary WWII Naval Commander and John’s childhood hero.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Archival war tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The Nimitz story is not simply an account of an outstanding Naval officer who rose to a position of greatness and honour. It is also the chronicle of our modern Navy, its coming of age and its greatest triumphs in the epic struggle of the Pacific during World War II.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As a kid growing up in Brooklyn at the onset of the War, John watched this ‘epic struggle’ play out in real time. When the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor, drawing the United States into war, John saw the uptick of ships going in and out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Archival war tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The flames had hardly died before Chester Nimitz was called from a desk in Washington to take command of the Pacific Fleet. It was a dark time and a formidable task. It would take a man of vast experience and vigour to get victory out of wreckage and chaos. It would take a Nimitz.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With the United States officially at war, many Americans turned their focus to Europe. But John was preoccupied with the Pacific front and the Naval commander at its center.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Well, my father was a big newspaper junkie and so there were always these front page photographs of the war in the Pacific and the pictures of Admiral Nimitz and Admiral Spruance. I just ate that up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s hard to say how exactly we settle on a childhood hero — a mix of context, timing, and awe. But for John it was Nimitz.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1945, Japan’s formal surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay, the end of World War II.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By then Nimitz was a Fleet Admiral, holding the Navy’s highest rank. After the war, he became Chief of Naval operations.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then, in 1947, he retired.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so when he retired, they decided to buy a house in Berkeley.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nimitz had taught Naval Sciences there, before the war, and he’d also helped start the school’s ROTC unit. He wanted to spend his golden years there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But when it comes to five star admirals, as John puts it, you never really retire from the Navy. So when Nimitz’s health started to deteriorate in his late 70s, the Navy stepped in.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So we can provide you with a staff, a driver and a house staff, but you must live in public quarters. We cannot do that in a private home. They said, “You can have any set of quarters the Navy has.’ And Nimitz said, “Well, How about quarters one on Yerba Buena? And so they moved him over there. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yerba Buena Island had been an important part of the Navy’s West Coast operations since the early 1900s. And during WWII, it fell under the jurisdiction of the Treasure Island Naval Station, serving as headquarters for the 12th Naval District. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Quarters one – where Nimitz was headed – was a fitting home for a legendary admiral.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s how he became the occupant of that grand home and lived out his last days.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Nimitz passed away in 1966 — four days before his 81st birthday — he was laid to rest at the Golden Gate National Cemetery. If you’d looked to the sky at the end of that service, you’d have seen a 70 plane flyover and heard the military bugle song of Taps floating through the crisp winter air\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of Taps playing\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s no surprise then, that the home he died in took on his name.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok, fast forward about 20 years. It’s 1989 now. Many a naval officer have come and gone from the Nimitz house and a new Rear Admiral is about to move in.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">His name? John Bitoff. No longer a boy from Brooklyn but a Navy man in his own right, at the end of a long career.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As part of his final duty station, *John was assigned to the Nimitz house.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so I was absolutely astonished. It seemed like it was deemed to be. That I would find myself living in those very in those very quarters.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For John, it was a marvelous place to live.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It had a grand porch leading up to the quarters, and it looked out onto a garden, a rose garden in the back that a double door let out, and steps led out to where they held receptions, there was a goldfish pond there. It was just absolutely gorgeous.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With Nimitz history surrounding him, John thought he’d take the opportunity to learn more about the Fleet Admiral. To kick off a sort of oral history project.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I had heard that he used to go down to the firehouse on Yerba Buena Island and have a cup of coffee with the firemen, firefighters and and then at Christmas time, he was known to bring down chocolate chip cookies they cooked and he would share with the firefighters. And so I found out that the last remaining firefighter was retiring in a very short period of time. So I met with him.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And John and his wife also made efforts to restore the home to the way it was in the Nimitz days to honor the Fleet Admiral’s legacy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They refurbished Nimitz’s desk and — using a photograph as reference — put it back in the library. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In the very same spot where Nimitz had it, where he could look out the window\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When John retired in 1991, he moved out of the Nimitz house.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was replaced by two other admirals. And then the whole Navy establishment was was part of the Base Realignment, and it was closed. All Navy activities were closed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With the Cold War winding down, the US was looking to tighten its defense budget. And the base closure process — which ramped up in the 90s — was a big part of that effort.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These series of cuts hit California hard. More than 30 major bases shut down.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For John, the Treasure Island closure in 1997 was particularly worrisome.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I knew that when the military closes down its bases, it’s not very good about maintaining historical edifices, and they basically don’t, don’t, they don’t have the wherewithal to do it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While John’s wife managed to get the residence listed as a *historic site… most of the former base was ultimately turned over to the city of San Francisco. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was very concerned, because I love that House, and it is such a historic residence. If the walls could speak, they’d be a history lesson.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And soon enough, a new agency was created to oversee the base’s reuse and development. It’s called the Treasure Island Development Authority or TIDA.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Peter Summerville has worked at TIDA for over 20 years and says if he’s got the time, he’ll sometimes take his lunch break on the front porch of the Nimitz house.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Although – he admits – these days with the bridge there, it’s kind of loud.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of loud traffic\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I met up with him at the house to take a tour.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Standing on the front porch, the first thing you notice about the place – after the bridge noise – is the many signs of weathering on the old home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think it’s a very challenging site. Exposure wise, definitely, we see that a lot, which is all our public infrastructure, that out here, we’re right in the middle of the bay, and it takes a beating.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The old porch ceiling fan is warped, the wooden blades drooping now.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck (in scene): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Should we go inside? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Go inside? And I’m proud of myself. They actually brought the keys. One of my tricks I’m good at is getting places and forgetting my keys.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The slamming sounds you’re hearing now are from the door. After years of little use it’s jammed and Peter has to use all his body weight to open it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of kicking at a door\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s coming. It’s coming. I just don’t have anything to kick them. Oh, my goodness.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Traffic sounds fade away\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When you get inside, the air feels… still… save for a few floating spider webs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kiah: \u003c/b>We have beautiful hardwood floors, and then big, kind of big open spaces, big doorways, tall ceilings that really you can hear the echo of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s Kiah McCarley, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">she works with Peter. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Compared to him, she’s new to the agency and it’s her first time in the house too.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s a sight to behold.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: What has happened on the ceiling?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kiah McCarley: Yeah, it looks like we’re having some the paint or plaster come off the ceiling. A little bit of time damage, maybe a little bit of water damage.\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are speckles of black mold creeping up some of the walls, but other rooms look to be in pretty good shape. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">After everything John’s told me about the house, I have to admit it’s a little bit shocking to see. And when I ask Peter about the city of San Francisco’s plans for the space, he gives me a kind of open-ended answer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The long term plans for the house and for its kind of overall district are still being developed. They’ll ultimately be some sort of that kind of public use, either a collective reuse of the whole district, as, you know, a series of restaurants and bed and breakfasts, or an artists colony, or, you know, a variety of different things, or maybe their individual uses in each of the buildings. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Or maybe, he says, they’ll let an educational institution come in and use some leftover military houses for studios or classrooms.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But right now, they’re focused on basic repairs. Although Peter says the home’s historic designation complicates things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> All the improvements that you have to make in their systems, architecturally, all of that has to be done very sensitively, and is limited in terms of how much you can adjust the building as well. So even bringing the buildings up to kind of modern standards for practical reuse going forward is a challenge. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Heading into the main room, I notice pieces of broken glass all over the floor. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Turn the corner, and a beautiful, airy, sun room.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Head across the hallway and you’ll see an antique looking elevator next to the staircase.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, this is definitely some can do. Can do Navy engineering.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a house full of contrast. Outside, the same is true.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck (in scene):\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s kind of funny right now, out the window, you can see, what would you call that? Like, the legs of the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This window is really just like a portrait of the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Back when John lived here, the window was mostly a portrait of the Bay. The Bay Bridge existed, true, but it used to touch down on another point of the island.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, what happened?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Archival tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> On Tuesday, October 17 1989 at 17:04 Pacific Daylight Time, a strong motion earthquake emanated from a location south southeast of San Francisco, near Loma Prieta in the Santa Cruz mountain range.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The 6.9 magnitude quake was the strongest shock to hit the area since the 1906 earthquake\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">63 people were killed, and thousands more injured.\u003c/span>\u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of emergency response radio and crackling\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Drivers on the Bay Bridge watched as a section of the upper deck collapsed, falling onto the lower deck, trapping many and ultimately killing one motorist.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After that, as the years went on Caltrans, which owns the bridge. Caltrans and the state toll bridge authority determined that the Eastern span of the Bay Bridge needed to be replaced.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There were plenty of opinions about what the new span should look like. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Oakland Tribune commented:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Voice Over reading newspaper clipping: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s make this a splendid front door to the East Bay….the bridges spanning San Francisco Bay are a world-class attraction that have made our Bay Area a living postcard. Let’s keep them picture perfect.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But one of the fiercest debates wasn’t about design at all. It was about location. Thousands of commuters were still using the old bridge, while the new one was being built. So the question was, where should the new bridge connect to Yerba Buena Island? Should it land south of the old bridge, or north of it?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The question became known as the alignment debate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nearly everyone felt they had something at stake. The Coast Guard, the East Bay MUD, the Port of Oakland, the Navy, the City of San Francisco, just to name a few.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the city, and I believe, particularly the mayor’s office at the time, put up a strenuous defense of, you know, the southern alignment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s the one that would have steered clear of the Nimitz house.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The city saw this district as sort of a great opportunity for reuse of these historic properties and to sort of bring them back to their, you know, original shine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A handful of state lawmakers and the Navy agreed\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But despite those objections the northern alignment won out. Competing interests from other agencies plus Caltrans own arguments over earthquake safety sealed the deal. Even the grand promise of the Nimitz house couldn’t tip the scales.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Summerville:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And that’s sort of the alignment that we have today. The new bridge is up. You know, it just sort of is what it is in our world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The bridge construction project dragged on for decades. And by the time the new eastern span opened in 2013, it cost billions more than the original estimate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For the Nimitz house, the Bridge’s impact was just as dramatic.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Much of the ambience, and certainly destroyed the gardens and the buildings surrounding it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What was once a stately home with sweeping views now sits in the shadow of concrete columns surrounded by the constant drone of traffic.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I really don’t like going over there because the area is so changed. I was very saddened by it, and I didn’t want to go back again. The last time I went down to the quarters\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the house was in a terrible state of disrepair, and I made up my mind I didn’t want to go back there again, because it was ruining my memory.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For John, visiting the house now stirs up this very particular kind of feeling. It’s like driving by your childhood home — a place that’s meant so much to you — except it’s not yours anymore. The porch is different, the tree out front is gone, the lawn is overgrown. It’s your old house but not really.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Bitoff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That’s precisely how I felt. You know, they say you can never go home, that’s the old saying, you can never go home. Well, that’s true in this case.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One thing is for sure, if the once grand Nimitz house is ever going to have a new future as an artist colony, a history museum, or anything else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of traffic on the bridge\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Soundproofing is going to be a must.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Car horn squeals\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b> That was reporter and producer Gabriela Glueck. Who, I want to give a special shout out to. Gabi filled in as producer on Bay Curious for the six months while I was out and did an incredible job. The team will miss her creativity, impeccable taste in music and infectious passion about whatever story she was working on. Luckily, she’ll continue to report for Bay Curious, so stay tuned for more from Gabi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also gotta give some flowers to Katrina Schwartz, who has been editing and hosting these past six months. It is truly a gift to be able to walk away from something you love as much as I love this show and know that it’s in the very best hands. Thank you Katrina – and I’m so happy to be working alongside you – and audio engineer extraordinaire, Christopher Beale – every day again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baby sounds…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Let me introduce you all to Clark, who was born in May. We call him our smiley guy because he cannot help but smile at you whenever you make eye contact. It was so special to get to spend these early months of his life with him, day in and day out. It’s a time of my life I know I’ll remember forever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. If you’re not a member, join us! Whether with a one-time donation or a monthly membership – it all helps. KQED.org/donate is the place to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale, Gabriela Glueck and me, Olivia Allen-Price.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Extra Support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien,Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m Olivia Allen-Price. See ya next week!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "san-franciscos-love-hate-relationship-with-big-box-stores",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I arrived in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a> in 1981, I rented a room for $400 in a Victorian condo on Masonic Avenue near Waller Street —the heart of the world-famous Haight-Ashbury. Whenever I walked down Haight Street, I was struck by how many stores seemed to be remnants of the hippie era and the 1967 Summer of Love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were stores selling tie-dye clothes, incense, smoke shops, art supplies, a bowling alley, bars and coffee houses where people lingered talking or writing in their journals. One thing that did not exist: chain stores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That was probably the result of the neighborhood’s “alternative” vibe, which included resistance to corporatizing the commercial district of an iconic neighborhood famous for being the center of the hippie movement and culture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I vividly remember one day in 1988, when a construction site for a new Thrifty Drug Store at Haight and Cole Street exploded in flames in the middle of the night — a fire determined to have been caused by arson. The drug store had been vehemently opposed by some in the neighborhood. The fire destroyed it — and Thrifty never returned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back then, there was no real way for residents to stop the arrival of a chain store. And look around today, there are plenty of chain stores — Starbucks, Safeway and Walgreens, to name a few. But there have also been big fights against chain stores moving into the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064707\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064707\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">People walk past the Target store on 4th and Mission Streets in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious listener, Sarah Soule, remembers some of the controversy over stores like Costco opening. And she wants to gut check something she heard as a kid growing up here: “Did San Francisco really use to prevent big box stores from opening in the city? And when did that change and what effects has that change had on the city?”\u003cstrong>\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like most big controversies in San Francisco, this one revolved around land use and zoning — what you can build where.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, I turned to someone who knows the city’s planning codes and zoning restraints better than anyone — former Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who was a county supervisor for more than 20 years. His district included North Beach, which is notoriously hostile to chain stores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As we walked up Columbus Avenue, Peskin described the neighborhood’s retail environment. “The neighborhood is thriving; it actually led the way in post-pandemic recovery,” he explained. “It has an extremely low vacancy rate.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>North Beach is perhaps best known for its coffeehouse culture. Over the decades, it’s attracted members of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/201205071000/one-and-only-the-untold-story-of-on-the-road\">the Beat Generation\u003c/a> — writers like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — and others looking for that smell of fresh ground espresso in an atmospheric setting. Long-time establishments like \u003ca href=\"https://caffetrieste.com/\">Caffe Trieste\u003c/a> and the Savoy Tivoli are part of what makes North Beach, North Beach.[aside postID=news_12063643 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-01-BL.jpg']Inside Caffe Trieste, the walls are full of black and white photos of the many famous people who’ve stopped by, many of them Italian.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s Francis Ford Coppola sitting at the back table writing the screenplay for \u003cem>The Godfather\u003c/em> right there. There’s Luciano Pavarotti singing in here,” Peskin said. This cafe serves as a kind of satellite office for him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peskin — who termed out of the Board of Supervisors last year and has a long history as a local preservationist — remembers a day decades ago that made him sit up and pay attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was a petition on the counter. This is in maybe the early 1990s, asking people to sign to object to a Starbucks on the corner of Columbus and Broadway. I remember it vividly,” Peskin recalled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That petition, all those years ago, was an early example of San Franciscans \u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-aug-06-me-starbucks6-story.html\">pushing \u003c/a>back against a chain moving in. And they succeeded in keeping Starbucks out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, other neighborhoods were waging similar battles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was outcry from various parts of the city,” Peskin said. The problem for regulating chain stores was that there was no official definition of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What makes something a chain store?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>So, in 2004, San Francisco defined what a chain store — more formally known as “formula retail” — was exactly: A business having 11 or more stores nationwide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That definition never existed in the San Francisco Planning Code, [and] it did not prohibit anything at all,” Peskin noted. “It defined what a chain store was and then left it to the future to determine where they were green light, where they were red light, and where they were yellow light, needing a conditional use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064706\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064706\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Former San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin leaves Caffe Trieste in the city’s North Beach neighborhood on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>With that 2004 definition in place, neighborhoods began adopting different levels of control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A “red light” meant a total ban on chains — that’s what Hayes Valley did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, some of you might say, “Hey, wait a minute. There \u003cem>are\u003c/em> chain stores in Hayes Valley — like All Birds shoes and Warby Parker eyeglasses.” Yep, that’s true. But when they opened, they were relatively small companies and had fewer than the 11 locations nationwide that triggered those limitations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A “yellow light” applied to neighborhoods — like Cole Valley and parts of the Haight Ashbury — where chains were allowed, but only after neighbors could weigh in. It required what’s called “a conditional use permit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And finally, “green light” areas — South of Market, Union Square and the rest of downtown — where chain stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom and Old Navy are allowed without any additional permits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The regulations grew piecemeal, neighborhood by neighborhood, without any citywide coordination. So, in 2006, voters approved Proposition G, dubbed the “Small Business Protection Act,” mandating conditional use permits for new chain stores in \u003cem>all\u003c/em> neighborhood commercial districts where small businesses dominate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>San Franciscans continue to fight chain stores\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>But having clearer regulations didn’t end the fights over big box stores. That became clear in a battle over whether to allow Lowe’s, a major hardware chain, to open on Bayshore Boulevard.[aside postID=news_12062909 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Ocean-Spray_3.jpg']The site where Lowe’s wanted to open — Bayshore Avenue near Cortland — bordered on two very different supervisorial districts — the thriving Bernal Heights and the economically depressed Bayview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>It was a huge fight,” Peskin recalled. Lowe’s sweetened the pot by promising to hire hundreds of local workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ultimately, the Board of Supervisors on a 6-to-5 vote voted to approve Lowe’s. I was the swing vote,” Peskin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The store opened in 2010 — and remains there today.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What the research says about chain store impacts\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This seems like a good time to lay out some of the research on chains and how they affect local communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was \u003ca href=\"https://sfplanning.org/project/policy-basis-formula-retail-chain-stores#economic-analysis\">a lot of analysis\u003c/a> about how local businesses kept money in the local economy and the multiplier effect of keeping money in the local economy rather than it being sucked out to a corporate headquarters in Atlanta or New York City,” Peskin said. “There was also the fact that local businesses hired people at better living wages. So there’s a lot of data that supported the legislation beyond just the fact that people wanted to maintain the unique character of their neighborhoods.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another argument against chains — they \u003ca href=\"https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/affordable-space/#:~:text=As%20the%20cost%20of%20space,locally%20owned%20businesses%20can%20thrive.\">put upward pressure on rents\u003c/a>. Because they have more access to revenue than a small retail operation, chains can sign longer leases and pay higher rents if they really want the location. It can leave small businesses priced out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the upside, counties get a lot of sales tax revenue from chains, customers like them, and they do provide some jobs. For example, Costco on 11th Street is always packed with customers. And the sales tax from that business stays in San Francisco, as opposed to, say, Home Depot, which only has Bay Area locations outside the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A post-COVID shift towards more chain stores\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Earlier this year, Supervisor Danny Sauter, whose district includes North Beach, co-sponsored legislation making it \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-to-make-easier-to-open-chain-stores-van-ness-20288462.php\">easier \u003c/a>for chain stores to open on a relatively desolate stretch of Van Ness Avenue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a reflection of the current state of things, where it’s rows and rows of empty storefronts — we have to try something,” Sauter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064711\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064711\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lowe’s home improvement store on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>He said there are already a few sprouts of interest, and even glimmers of success, including a new Apple Cinemas movie theatre to \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/apple-cinemas-san-francisco-opening-20762805.php\">replace \u003c/a>one that closed years ago. That opened pretty quickly at 1000 Van Ness Ave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now Sauter is going even further. He authored an ordinance titled “\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/zoning-north-beach-21122722.php\">District 3 Thrives\u003c/a>,” which weakens long-time restrictions on what businesses can do in parts of the district, including North Beach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It will expand the kinds of commercial enterprises allowed to operate, and allow adjacent storefronts to merge to make a larger space so existing businesses can expand, or new ones can move into it, assuming they get a permit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064713\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064713\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The now closed Silver Crest donut shop on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Sauter’s ordinance passed 8–2 last month and has prompted a spirited neighborhood debate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All this shows that the city —for all its crazy building codes, permitting and chain store regulations — has a fair amount of flexibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“San Francisco’s land use laws were built on the notion that different neighborhoods had different destinies and were trying to do different things to be economically successful,” Peskin said. “The whole notion was that it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Will other neighborhoods also loosen restrictions on chain stores? Stay tuned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Growing up in San Francisco, I’ve always loved how each neighborhood is distinct…like little villages. Each with their own shopping streets\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of cars passing and people walking by\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>My family lived in the Richmond District, so we did our shopping on Clement. On it, you can find everything from fresh-caught fish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Fishmonger: So right now we have rock cod and we have calamari… \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> To produce, hair salons, pastry shops…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Bakery worker: You pay with cash or card?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Ice cream, restaurants, a bookstore — you name it. By and large, local businesses, one of a kind in the neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Bookstore worker: Welcome to Green Apple\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>And most neighborhoods in San Francisco have a street like this…it’s part of what makes San Francisco feel unique.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>My name is Sarah Soule. I live in San Francisco. And I’ve grown up here my whole life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Sarah remembers shopping mostly at local businesses growing up. She even remembers hearing that San Francisco didn’t allow big box stores, like Walmart or Home Depot, at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah: \u003c/strong>In order to protect local businesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>But recently, she’s noticed more chain stores in the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>We didn’t use to have Costco. Um, and I kind of remember Costco opening here for the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>That was in the early 90s. Sarah remembers the fight around it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>Like, it was controversial. Some people were upset about it, and I was wondering, you know, why that happened? Why did it get to open here?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>She’s trying to understand what’s changed in the city since she was a kid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>And my question is: Did San Francisco really used to prevent big box stores from opening in the city? And when did that change, and what effects have that change had on the city?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Today on Bay Curious, we’re going shopping for some answers to Sarah’s question and learning a little retail history, San Francisco style. I’m Katrina Schwartz. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> San Francisco today definitely has chain stores. Think Safeway, Starbucks and Target, to name just a few. But there are hundreds of pages of planning codes and regulations for them. And that means politics. So we asked Scott Shafer, KQED’s senior politics correspondent and co-host of the Political Breakdown podcast, to walk us through how those regulations have changed over the last several decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer:\u003c/strong> Land use in San Francisco is guided by the city’s Byzantine Planning Code, which is kind of like the twisty, curvy part of Lombard Street. And few understand it better than this guy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>My name is Aaron Peskin. I live and work in North Beach, and we are in the heart of North Beach on the 400 block of Columbus Avenue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Aaron Peskin served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for more than 20 years, and his district included this neighborhood, which has been famously anti-chain store for a long time..\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> North Beach has always been a dining and entertainment destination zone, but it’s also a place where people live and shop and maintaining the balance of neighborhood-serving businesses is also important and also adds to making it a real neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer in scene:\u003c/strong> So this neighborhood, obviously, as you said, it’s a historic neighborhood. How are the businesses doing here, and how the cafe scene doing?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> So the neighborhood is thriving; it actually led the way in post-pandemic recovery. It has an extremely low vacancy rate. The cafes, as we can see, here is Stella Pastry and Cafe is booming with a bunch of the old Italians who are hanging out. What’s going on, Frankie How are you gentlemen?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frankie: \u003c/strong>Buon giorno!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> KQED wants to know if you guys are alive and well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frankie:\u003c/strong> We’re okay. It’s a little bit hot. Yeah, but yeah. When we check his blood pressure, he’s all right. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Among the things North Beach is most famous for are its small, independent coffee houses…like Cafe Trieste.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>Cafe Trieste is 70 years old. It was the first place on the western seaboard of the United States that started to serve espresso. It is still in the same family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of espresso maker. Barista says: This is a coffee latte. The next one is a cappuccino. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>It’s kind of North Beach’s living room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>The walls are covered in old photos showing the many famous people who’ve been through.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>Here’s Francis Ford Coppola sitting at the back table writing the screenplay for The Godfather right there. There’s Luciano Pavarotti singing in here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>People come to North Beach for businesses like this. That’s why Peskin remembers one day at Cafe Trieste so clearly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>And there was a petition on the counter. This is in maybe the early 1990s; this was a long time ago, asking people to sign to object to a Starbucks on the corner of Columbus and Broadway. I remember it vividly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>This petition, all those years ago, was one of the first instances of a neighborhood pushing back against a chain moving in. They succeeded in keeping the Starbucks out, by the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back at his office, Peskin tells me that fight against Starbucks was just the beginning. Other neighborhoods were waging similar battles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>There was outcry from various parts of the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>In 2004, San Francisco defined what a chain store, more formally known as “formula retail”, was exactly — having 11 or more stores nationwide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>That definition never existed in the San Francisco Planning Code; it did not prohibit anything at all. It defined what a chain store was and then left it to the future to determine where they were green light, where they where red light, and where they are yellow light needing a conditional use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer:\u003c/strong> With that 2004 definition in place, neighborhoods began adopting different levels of control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A red light meant a total ban on chains — that’s what Hayes Valley did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, some of you might say, “Hey, wait a minute. There \u003cem>are\u003c/em> chain stores in Hayes Valley — like \u003cem>All Birds\u003c/em> shoes and \u003cem>Warby Parker \u003c/em>eyeglasses. Yep, that’s true. \u003cu>But\u003c/u> when they opened, they were relatively small companies … and had fewer than the 11 locations nationwide that triggered those limitations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A yellow light applied to neighborhoods — like Cole Valley and parts of the Haight Ashbury — where chains were allowed, but only after neighbors could weigh in before any final decisions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And finally green light areas — South of Market, Union Square and the rest of downtown — where chain stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom and Old Navy are allowed without any additional permits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gradually, more neighborhoods adopted limitations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the regulations grew piecemeal, in 2006, voters approved Proposition G, dubbed the “Small Business Protection Act,” mandating those conditional use permits for new chain stores in all neighborhood commercial districts where small businesses dominate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But having clearer regulations didn’t end the fights over big box stores. That became clear in a battle over whether to allow a major hardware chain to open on Bayshore Boulevard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lowe’s commercial:\u003c/strong> Go to Lowe’s home improvement warehouse because Lowe’s knows (fades out)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>The site where Lowe’s wanted to open bordered on two very different supervisorial districts — the thriving Bernal Heights and the economically depressed Bayview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>It was a huge fight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Lowe’s sweetened the pot by promising to hire hundreds of local workers..\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> Ultimately, the Board of Supervisors, on a 6 to 5 vote, voted to approve Lowe’s. I was the swing vote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>The store opened — and remains there today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This seems like a good time to lay out some of the research on chains and how they affect local communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>There was a lot of analysis about how local businesses kept money in the local economy and the multiplier effect of keeping money in the local economy rather than it being sucked out to a corporate headquarters in Atlanta or New York City. The fact that local businesses hired people at better living wages. So there’s a lot of data that supported the legislation beyond just the fact that people wanted to maintain the unique character of their neighborhoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Another argument against chains — they put upward pressure on rents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>There is no question that multinational chain stores can command higher rents, and the impact of that has been to raise commercial rents for small businesses and neighborhood commercial districts, which has been very deleterious to the health of small businesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>On the pro side, counties get a lot of tax revenue from chains, customers like them, and they do provide some jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>There are plenty of places in San Francisco where they are allowed as of right or where they’re allowed conditionally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer:\u003c/strong> In fact, despite the hurdles, the regulations and the NIMBY politics, San Francisco still has plenty of chain stores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> So this whole notion that San Francisco isn’t allowing businesses to grow is kind of nonsense.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>And when chains close, people complain. That happened along Van Ness Avenue as KGO reported earlier this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>KGO clip: \u003c/strong>Van Ness Avenue was once San Francisco’s auto row. Rambler, Dodge, Cadillac, Buick all had a stake in the city. The majority are gone, leaving behind large, empty commercial spaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Supervisor Danny Sauter … co-sponsored legislation making it easier for chain stores to open on Van Ness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Danny Sauter: \u003c/strong>It’s a reflection of the current state of things. Where it’s rows and rows of empty storefronts, we have to try something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Sauter says there’s already a few sprouts of interest … and even glimmers of success … including a new Apple Cinemas movie theatre to replace one that closed years ago. That opened pretty quickly at 1000 Van Ness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All this shows that the city — for all its crazy building codes, permitting and chain store regulations, as Peskin noted, has a fair amount of flexibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> San Francisco’s land use laws were built on the notion that different neighborhoods had different destinies and were trying to do different things to be economically successful. The whole notion was that it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>In thriving neighborhoods like Hayes Valley…where sidewalks are filled with shoppers, it’s still hard to open a chain store. But in others, like Van Ness Ave, where huge storefronts sit empty, the calculus is changing. A big box store doesn’t look so bad anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I took all this back to our question asker, Sarah, to see what she makes of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>I actually spent some time as a small child in those North Beach cafes. And I learned to play Pac-Man in one of those. So it’s interesting to hear that it started in that neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>She’s been thinking a lot about where she chooses to spend her money and wants to invest more in local businesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule:\u003c/strong> One of the things that makes any city so special is those small local businesses that exist there and no place else\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>No doubt the city will keep tweaking its rules for chain stores … trying to find that elusive balance between protecting the unique character of its neighborhoods and allowing chains to open where they make sense.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by KQED’s senior politics correspondent and co-host of Political Breakdown, Scott Shafer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Next week, the Bay Curious team will be taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday. But we’re back with you the following week …Dec. 4 … with a new episode. And…drumroll please…Olivia Allen-Price is back from maternity leave and will be back in the host seat! We’re super excited to have her back and want to say a special thank you to producer Gabriela Glueck, who has been an amazing partner on the show during Olivia’s leave. Much of the beautiful scoring and sound design you’ve enjoyed over the last many months is her magic. Thank you, Gabi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has been very fun to host the show over these past couple months, but I’m not going anywhere, and I’m excited to do more reporting and to get out into the field a bit more to answer your questions!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening. Have a holiday and we’ll see you back here in a couple weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I arrived in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a> in 1981, I rented a room for $400 in a Victorian condo on Masonic Avenue near Waller Street —the heart of the world-famous Haight-Ashbury. Whenever I walked down Haight Street, I was struck by how many stores seemed to be remnants of the hippie era and the 1967 Summer of Love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were stores selling tie-dye clothes, incense, smoke shops, art supplies, a bowling alley, bars and coffee houses where people lingered talking or writing in their journals. One thing that did not exist: chain stores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That was probably the result of the neighborhood’s “alternative” vibe, which included resistance to corporatizing the commercial district of an iconic neighborhood famous for being the center of the hippie movement and culture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I vividly remember one day in 1988, when a construction site for a new Thrifty Drug Store at Haight and Cole Street exploded in flames in the middle of the night — a fire determined to have been caused by arson. The drug store had been vehemently opposed by some in the neighborhood. The fire destroyed it — and Thrifty never returned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back then, there was no real way for residents to stop the arrival of a chain store. And look around today, there are plenty of chain stores — Starbucks, Safeway and Walgreens, to name a few. But there have also been big fights against chain stores moving into the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064707\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064707\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-13-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">People walk past the Target store on 4th and Mission Streets in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious listener, Sarah Soule, remembers some of the controversy over stores like Costco opening. And she wants to gut check something she heard as a kid growing up here: “Did San Francisco really use to prevent big box stores from opening in the city? And when did that change and what effects has that change had on the city?”\u003cstrong>\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like most big controversies in San Francisco, this one revolved around land use and zoning — what you can build where.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, I turned to someone who knows the city’s planning codes and zoning restraints better than anyone — former Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who was a county supervisor for more than 20 years. His district included North Beach, which is notoriously hostile to chain stores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As we walked up Columbus Avenue, Peskin described the neighborhood’s retail environment. “The neighborhood is thriving; it actually led the way in post-pandemic recovery,” he explained. “It has an extremely low vacancy rate.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>North Beach is perhaps best known for its coffeehouse culture. Over the decades, it’s attracted members of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/201205071000/one-and-only-the-untold-story-of-on-the-road\">the Beat Generation\u003c/a> — writers like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — and others looking for that smell of fresh ground espresso in an atmospheric setting. Long-time establishments like \u003ca href=\"https://caffetrieste.com/\">Caffe Trieste\u003c/a> and the Savoy Tivoli are part of what makes North Beach, North Beach.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Inside Caffe Trieste, the walls are full of black and white photos of the many famous people who’ve stopped by, many of them Italian.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s Francis Ford Coppola sitting at the back table writing the screenplay for \u003cem>The Godfather\u003c/em> right there. There’s Luciano Pavarotti singing in here,” Peskin said. This cafe serves as a kind of satellite office for him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peskin — who termed out of the Board of Supervisors last year and has a long history as a local preservationist — remembers a day decades ago that made him sit up and pay attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was a petition on the counter. This is in maybe the early 1990s, asking people to sign to object to a Starbucks on the corner of Columbus and Broadway. I remember it vividly,” Peskin recalled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That petition, all those years ago, was an early example of San Franciscans \u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-aug-06-me-starbucks6-story.html\">pushing \u003c/a>back against a chain moving in. And they succeeded in keeping Starbucks out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, other neighborhoods were waging similar battles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was outcry from various parts of the city,” Peskin said. The problem for regulating chain stores was that there was no official definition of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What makes something a chain store?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>So, in 2004, San Francisco defined what a chain store — more formally known as “formula retail” — was exactly: A business having 11 or more stores nationwide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That definition never existed in the San Francisco Planning Code, [and] it did not prohibit anything at all,” Peskin noted. “It defined what a chain store was and then left it to the future to determine where they were green light, where they were red light, and where they were yellow light, needing a conditional use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064706\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064706\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-07-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Former San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin leaves Caffe Trieste in the city’s North Beach neighborhood on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>With that 2004 definition in place, neighborhoods began adopting different levels of control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A “red light” meant a total ban on chains — that’s what Hayes Valley did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, some of you might say, “Hey, wait a minute. There \u003cem>are\u003c/em> chain stores in Hayes Valley — like All Birds shoes and Warby Parker eyeglasses.” Yep, that’s true. But when they opened, they were relatively small companies and had fewer than the 11 locations nationwide that triggered those limitations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A “yellow light” applied to neighborhoods — like Cole Valley and parts of the Haight Ashbury — where chains were allowed, but only after neighbors could weigh in. It required what’s called “a conditional use permit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And finally, “green light” areas — South of Market, Union Square and the rest of downtown — where chain stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom and Old Navy are allowed without any additional permits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The regulations grew piecemeal, neighborhood by neighborhood, without any citywide coordination. So, in 2006, voters approved Proposition G, dubbed the “Small Business Protection Act,” mandating conditional use permits for new chain stores in \u003cem>all\u003c/em> neighborhood commercial districts where small businesses dominate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>San Franciscans continue to fight chain stores\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>But having clearer regulations didn’t end the fights over big box stores. That became clear in a battle over whether to allow Lowe’s, a major hardware chain, to open on Bayshore Boulevard.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The site where Lowe’s wanted to open — Bayshore Avenue near Cortland — bordered on two very different supervisorial districts — the thriving Bernal Heights and the economically depressed Bayview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>It was a huge fight,” Peskin recalled. Lowe’s sweetened the pot by promising to hire hundreds of local workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ultimately, the Board of Supervisors on a 6-to-5 vote voted to approve Lowe’s. I was the swing vote,” Peskin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The store opened in 2010 — and remains there today.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What the research says about chain store impacts\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This seems like a good time to lay out some of the research on chains and how they affect local communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was \u003ca href=\"https://sfplanning.org/project/policy-basis-formula-retail-chain-stores#economic-analysis\">a lot of analysis\u003c/a> about how local businesses kept money in the local economy and the multiplier effect of keeping money in the local economy rather than it being sucked out to a corporate headquarters in Atlanta or New York City,” Peskin said. “There was also the fact that local businesses hired people at better living wages. So there’s a lot of data that supported the legislation beyond just the fact that people wanted to maintain the unique character of their neighborhoods.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another argument against chains — they \u003ca href=\"https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/affordable-space/#:~:text=As%20the%20cost%20of%20space,locally%20owned%20businesses%20can%20thrive.\">put upward pressure on rents\u003c/a>. Because they have more access to revenue than a small retail operation, chains can sign longer leases and pay higher rents if they really want the location. It can leave small businesses priced out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the upside, counties get a lot of sales tax revenue from chains, customers like them, and they do provide some jobs. For example, Costco on 11th Street is always packed with customers. And the sales tax from that business stays in San Francisco, as opposed to, say, Home Depot, which only has Bay Area locations outside the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A post-COVID shift towards more chain stores\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Earlier this year, Supervisor Danny Sauter, whose district includes North Beach, co-sponsored legislation making it \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-to-make-easier-to-open-chain-stores-van-ness-20288462.php\">easier \u003c/a>for chain stores to open on a relatively desolate stretch of Van Ness Avenue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a reflection of the current state of things, where it’s rows and rows of empty storefronts — we have to try something,” Sauter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064711\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064711\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-26-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lowe’s home improvement store on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>He said there are already a few sprouts of interest, and even glimmers of success, including a new Apple Cinemas movie theatre to \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/apple-cinemas-san-francisco-opening-20762805.php\">replace \u003c/a>one that closed years ago. That opened pretty quickly at 1000 Van Ness Ave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now Sauter is going even further. He authored an ordinance titled “\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/zoning-north-beach-21122722.php\">District 3 Thrives\u003c/a>,” which weakens long-time restrictions on what businesses can do in parts of the district, including North Beach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It will expand the kinds of commercial enterprises allowed to operate, and allow adjacent storefronts to merge to make a larger space so existing businesses can expand, or new ones can move into it, assuming they get a permit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064713\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064713\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251118-BIGBOXSTORES-30-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The now closed Silver Crest donut shop on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Sauter’s ordinance passed 8–2 last month and has prompted a spirited neighborhood debate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All this shows that the city —for all its crazy building codes, permitting and chain store regulations — has a fair amount of flexibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“San Francisco’s land use laws were built on the notion that different neighborhoods had different destinies and were trying to do different things to be economically successful,” Peskin said. “The whole notion was that it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Will other neighborhoods also loosen restrictions on chain stores? Stay tuned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Growing up in San Francisco, I’ve always loved how each neighborhood is distinct…like little villages. Each with their own shopping streets\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of cars passing and people walking by\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>My family lived in the Richmond District, so we did our shopping on Clement. On it, you can find everything from fresh-caught fish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Fishmonger: So right now we have rock cod and we have calamari… \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> To produce, hair salons, pastry shops…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Bakery worker: You pay with cash or card?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Ice cream, restaurants, a bookstore — you name it. By and large, local businesses, one of a kind in the neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Bookstore worker: Welcome to Green Apple\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>And most neighborhoods in San Francisco have a street like this…it’s part of what makes San Francisco feel unique.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>My name is Sarah Soule. I live in San Francisco. And I’ve grown up here my whole life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Sarah remembers shopping mostly at local businesses growing up. She even remembers hearing that San Francisco didn’t allow big box stores, like Walmart or Home Depot, at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah: \u003c/strong>In order to protect local businesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>But recently, she’s noticed more chain stores in the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>We didn’t use to have Costco. Um, and I kind of remember Costco opening here for the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>That was in the early 90s. Sarah remembers the fight around it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>Like, it was controversial. Some people were upset about it, and I was wondering, you know, why that happened? Why did it get to open here?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>She’s trying to understand what’s changed in the city since she was a kid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>And my question is: Did San Francisco really used to prevent big box stores from opening in the city? And when did that change, and what effects have that change had on the city?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Today on Bay Curious, we’re going shopping for some answers to Sarah’s question and learning a little retail history, San Francisco style. I’m Katrina Schwartz. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> San Francisco today definitely has chain stores. Think Safeway, Starbucks and Target, to name just a few. But there are hundreds of pages of planning codes and regulations for them. And that means politics. So we asked Scott Shafer, KQED’s senior politics correspondent and co-host of the Political Breakdown podcast, to walk us through how those regulations have changed over the last several decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer:\u003c/strong> Land use in San Francisco is guided by the city’s Byzantine Planning Code, which is kind of like the twisty, curvy part of Lombard Street. And few understand it better than this guy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>My name is Aaron Peskin. I live and work in North Beach, and we are in the heart of North Beach on the 400 block of Columbus Avenue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Aaron Peskin served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for more than 20 years, and his district included this neighborhood, which has been famously anti-chain store for a long time..\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> North Beach has always been a dining and entertainment destination zone, but it’s also a place where people live and shop and maintaining the balance of neighborhood-serving businesses is also important and also adds to making it a real neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer in scene:\u003c/strong> So this neighborhood, obviously, as you said, it’s a historic neighborhood. How are the businesses doing here, and how the cafe scene doing?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> So the neighborhood is thriving; it actually led the way in post-pandemic recovery. It has an extremely low vacancy rate. The cafes, as we can see, here is Stella Pastry and Cafe is booming with a bunch of the old Italians who are hanging out. What’s going on, Frankie How are you gentlemen?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frankie: \u003c/strong>Buon giorno!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> KQED wants to know if you guys are alive and well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frankie:\u003c/strong> We’re okay. It’s a little bit hot. Yeah, but yeah. When we check his blood pressure, he’s all right. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Among the things North Beach is most famous for are its small, independent coffee houses…like Cafe Trieste.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>Cafe Trieste is 70 years old. It was the first place on the western seaboard of the United States that started to serve espresso. It is still in the same family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of espresso maker. Barista says: This is a coffee latte. The next one is a cappuccino. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>It’s kind of North Beach’s living room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>The walls are covered in old photos showing the many famous people who’ve been through.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>Here’s Francis Ford Coppola sitting at the back table writing the screenplay for The Godfather right there. There’s Luciano Pavarotti singing in here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>People come to North Beach for businesses like this. That’s why Peskin remembers one day at Cafe Trieste so clearly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>And there was a petition on the counter. This is in maybe the early 1990s; this was a long time ago, asking people to sign to object to a Starbucks on the corner of Columbus and Broadway. I remember it vividly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>This petition, all those years ago, was one of the first instances of a neighborhood pushing back against a chain moving in. They succeeded in keeping the Starbucks out, by the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back at his office, Peskin tells me that fight against Starbucks was just the beginning. Other neighborhoods were waging similar battles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>There was outcry from various parts of the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>In 2004, San Francisco defined what a chain store, more formally known as “formula retail”, was exactly — having 11 or more stores nationwide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>That definition never existed in the San Francisco Planning Code; it did not prohibit anything at all. It defined what a chain store was and then left it to the future to determine where they were green light, where they where red light, and where they are yellow light needing a conditional use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer:\u003c/strong> With that 2004 definition in place, neighborhoods began adopting different levels of control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A red light meant a total ban on chains — that’s what Hayes Valley did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, some of you might say, “Hey, wait a minute. There \u003cem>are\u003c/em> chain stores in Hayes Valley — like \u003cem>All Birds\u003c/em> shoes and \u003cem>Warby Parker \u003c/em>eyeglasses. Yep, that’s true. \u003cu>But\u003c/u> when they opened, they were relatively small companies … and had fewer than the 11 locations nationwide that triggered those limitations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A yellow light applied to neighborhoods — like Cole Valley and parts of the Haight Ashbury — where chains were allowed, but only after neighbors could weigh in before any final decisions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And finally green light areas — South of Market, Union Square and the rest of downtown — where chain stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom and Old Navy are allowed without any additional permits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gradually, more neighborhoods adopted limitations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the regulations grew piecemeal, in 2006, voters approved Proposition G, dubbed the “Small Business Protection Act,” mandating those conditional use permits for new chain stores in all neighborhood commercial districts where small businesses dominate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But having clearer regulations didn’t end the fights over big box stores. That became clear in a battle over whether to allow a major hardware chain to open on Bayshore Boulevard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lowe’s commercial:\u003c/strong> Go to Lowe’s home improvement warehouse because Lowe’s knows (fades out)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>The site where Lowe’s wanted to open bordered on two very different supervisorial districts — the thriving Bernal Heights and the economically depressed Bayview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>It was a huge fight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Lowe’s sweetened the pot by promising to hire hundreds of local workers..\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> Ultimately, the Board of Supervisors, on a 6 to 5 vote, voted to approve Lowe’s. I was the swing vote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>The store opened — and remains there today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This seems like a good time to lay out some of the research on chains and how they affect local communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>There was a lot of analysis about how local businesses kept money in the local economy and the multiplier effect of keeping money in the local economy rather than it being sucked out to a corporate headquarters in Atlanta or New York City. The fact that local businesses hired people at better living wages. So there’s a lot of data that supported the legislation beyond just the fact that people wanted to maintain the unique character of their neighborhoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Another argument against chains — they put upward pressure on rents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>There is no question that multinational chain stores can command higher rents, and the impact of that has been to raise commercial rents for small businesses and neighborhood commercial districts, which has been very deleterious to the health of small businesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>On the pro side, counties get a lot of tax revenue from chains, customers like them, and they do provide some jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin: \u003c/strong>There are plenty of places in San Francisco where they are allowed as of right or where they’re allowed conditionally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer:\u003c/strong> In fact, despite the hurdles, the regulations and the NIMBY politics, San Francisco still has plenty of chain stores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> So this whole notion that San Francisco isn’t allowing businesses to grow is kind of nonsense.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>And when chains close, people complain. That happened along Van Ness Avenue as KGO reported earlier this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>KGO clip: \u003c/strong>Van Ness Avenue was once San Francisco’s auto row. Rambler, Dodge, Cadillac, Buick all had a stake in the city. The majority are gone, leaving behind large, empty commercial spaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Supervisor Danny Sauter … co-sponsored legislation making it easier for chain stores to open on Van Ness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Danny Sauter: \u003c/strong>It’s a reflection of the current state of things. Where it’s rows and rows of empty storefronts, we have to try something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>Sauter says there’s already a few sprouts of interest … and even glimmers of success … including a new Apple Cinemas movie theatre to replace one that closed years ago. That opened pretty quickly at 1000 Van Ness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All this shows that the city — for all its crazy building codes, permitting and chain store regulations, as Peskin noted, has a fair amount of flexibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Aaron Peskin:\u003c/strong> San Francisco’s land use laws were built on the notion that different neighborhoods had different destinies and were trying to do different things to be economically successful. The whole notion was that it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>In thriving neighborhoods like Hayes Valley…where sidewalks are filled with shoppers, it’s still hard to open a chain store. But in others, like Van Ness Ave, where huge storefronts sit empty, the calculus is changing. A big box store doesn’t look so bad anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I took all this back to our question asker, Sarah, to see what she makes of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule: \u003c/strong>I actually spent some time as a small child in those North Beach cafes. And I learned to play Pac-Man in one of those. So it’s interesting to hear that it started in that neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>She’s been thinking a lot about where she chooses to spend her money and wants to invest more in local businesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Soule:\u003c/strong> One of the things that makes any city so special is those small local businesses that exist there and no place else\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer: \u003c/strong>No doubt the city will keep tweaking its rules for chain stores … trying to find that elusive balance between protecting the unique character of its neighborhoods and allowing chains to open where they make sense.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by KQED’s senior politics correspondent and co-host of Political Breakdown, Scott Shafer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Next week, the Bay Curious team will be taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday. But we’re back with you the following week …Dec. 4 … with a new episode. And…drumroll please…Olivia Allen-Price is back from maternity leave and will be back in the host seat! We’re super excited to have her back and want to say a special thank you to producer Gabriela Glueck, who has been an amazing partner on the show during Olivia’s leave. Much of the beautiful scoring and sound design you’ve enjoyed over the last many months is her magic. Thank you, Gabi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has been very fun to host the show over these past couple months, but I’m not going anywhere, and I’m excited to do more reporting and to get out into the field a bit more to answer your questions!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening. Have a holiday and we’ll see you back here in a couple weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rita Hayworth, Robin Williams, Adele — these are just a few of the huge stars that have graced the stage of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">Bimbo’s 365 Club\u003c/a> over its 94 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the act the club is most famous for is Dolphina — or the “Girl in the Fishbowl.” Artistic interpretations of her riding a fish are everywhere in the club: etched into the glass on the front doors, painted on murals on the walls, even immortalized in an Italian marble sculpture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dolphina isn’t a person, though; she’s a character who’s been played by many different women since 1931. When Dolphina performs, it looks like there is a real, live woman, shrunk down to 6 inches, swimming in a fish tank at the bar — hence the moniker, “The Girl in the Fishbowl.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How did this quirky act come to be?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My understanding is that a magician came up with this idea and presented it to my grandfather,” said Michael Cerchiai, the club’s current owner and general manager. “And he thought it was fantastic, so the two of them collaborated on the whole thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062972\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062972\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1504\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY-1536x1155.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Patrons watch the ‘Girl in the Fishbowl’ at Bimbo’s 365 Club in the late 1940s or 1950s. \u003ccite>(San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Cerchiai practically grew up at Bimbo’s because his grandfather was the original owner and founder: Agostino “Bimbo” Giuntoli.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Giuntoli immigrated to the United States from Tuscany, Italy, in 1922. He got the nickname “Bimbo” (Italian slang for ‘boy’) from a man named Arthur Monk Young while working at a restaurant in San Francisco. In 1930, Bimbo and Young decided to strike out on their own and opened up the 365 Club, located at 365 Market Street.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062956\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2225px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062956\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2225\" height=\"1143\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych.jpg 2225w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-2000x1027.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-160x82.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-1536x789.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-2048x1052.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2225px) 100vw, 2225px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Agostino “Bimbo” Giuntoli. Right: A stage show at Bimbo’s 365 Club around 1950. \u003ccite>(Left: Courtesy of Michael Cerchiai Right: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Even though it was technically Prohibition, guests drank gin out of coffee mugs while they enjoyed decadent chorus lines and $3.65 dinners. Eventually, Bimbo bought out his partner, renamed the joint to “Bimbo’s 365 Club,” and relocated to a bigger spot on Columbus Avenue, where it still stands today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Prohibition came to an end in 1933, the San Francisco nightlife scene exploded. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13914487/the-chinatown-nightclub-dancer-who-helped-squash-asian-stereotypes\">Forbidden City\u003c/a> on Sutter Street broke barriers as the first Chinese nightclub in the U.S. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13929998/historic-lesbian-bars-san-francisco-mauds-pegs-front-anns-monas-440-tommy-vasu\">Mona’s 440 Club\u003c/a> had drag kings on staff and advertised itself as a place where “girls could be boys.” Bimbo knew he needed something special to set Bimbo’s 365 Club apart from the rest of the scene. The Girl in the Fishbowl Act fit the bill perfectly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063185\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063185\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"884\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04-160x71.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04-1536x679.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Owner Michael Cerchiai looks through a book featuring the club’s art at his office at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 22, 2025. Right: Cerchiai holds a patch made of the ‘Girl in the Fishbowl.’ \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062966\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1999px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062966\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on July 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“[The Girl in the Fishbowl] was all about building the brand,” Cerchiai said. In between floor shows and comedy acts, the emcee would announce that Dolphina would be appearing in the fishtank. “People would get up and go to the bar, and want to see her, and of course, while they’re there, they were more likely to buy a cocktail. So it was just a gimmick to get people to go to the bar and spend some money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The illusion behind the Girl in the Fishbowl is remarkably low-tech and hasn’t changed since the 1930s. Down in the club’s basement, a motor powers a turntable topped with a black mattress. As Dolphina lies on the turntable, her image is projected up into the fishtank at the bar via a chute with curved mirrors that line the side of the tank. When the turntable rotates, her image ripples into the tank in such a way that it looks like she is swimming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063618\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063618\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1033\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04-160x83.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04-1536x793.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Burlesque star Tempest Storm in 1965. Right: Stage performers relax in the dressing room at Bimbo’s 365 Club in 1943. \u003ccite>(San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One of the earliest Dolphina performers was iconic burlesque star Tempest Storm. With her flaming red hair and infamous bust, “the Queen of Exotic Dancers,” as she was known, owned the stage in the ’50s and ’60s. With performers like her, it didn’t take long for Bimbo’s to become famous as the “Home of the Girl in the Fishbowl.” A 1939 travel guide called “How to Sin in San Francisco” described it like this:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ll like the food, which is superb, because it was cooked by Bimbo. You’ll like your drinks because they’re good. You’ll like the Girl in the Fishbowl because she’s very naked.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062967\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062967\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Hanna Longwell sits in the vanity room at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 8, 2025. She performs as the club’s current ‘Girl in the Fishbowl,’ and is among many women who, over decades, have stepped into the role. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062970\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062970\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"829\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03-160x66.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03-1536x637.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: A note from a former ‘Girl in the Fishbowl’ hangs in the vanity room at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 8, 2025. The note says, “Darla says bye after almost 3 years as Dolphina. Kisses!” Right: Items left by former performers sit by the mirror in the vanity room. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Dolphina may be naked, but Cerchiai insisted Bimbo never meant for the act to be lewd.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was all done with taste and class,” he said. “[Bimbo] used to always say, ‘There’s no substitute for class.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plus, Cerchiai said it had to pass the approval of his grandmother, Bimbo’s wife, Emelia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Nothing happened [at Bimbo’s] without it going through her,” Cerchiai said. “He used to call her ‘the General.’ If you had a question for him that he didn’t want to answer, ‘You better go talk to the General.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062961\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062961\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Owner Michael Cerchiai holds a photo of himself as a child surrounded by family at the club in his office at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 22, 2025. Cerchiai’s grandfather, Agostino “Bimbo” Giuntoli, founded the club in 1931, and Michael continues his family’s longtime management of the venue. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For nearly 4 decades, Dolphina performed every night of the week. She even made the cover of LIFE Magazine. But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and the last nightly Dolphina show happened on New Year’s Eve, 1969. In an era when television was becoming more popular and people weren’t going out as much, Bimbo decided to shut down the club’s expensive nightly shows and rent out the venue for events instead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though she no longer performs nightly, you \u003cem>can \u003c/em>hire Dolphina to perform at your Bimbo’s event.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062955\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062955\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Hanna Longwell poses for a portrait in front of the fishbowl at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 8, 2025. She performs as the club’s current ‘Girl in the Fishbowl,’ and she is now developing a documentary about the role’s legacy and its place in San Francisco’s nightlife. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>If you do, you will see Hanna Longwell, Bimbo’s current Dolphina. Longwell has been performing at Bimbo’s since April 2024 and is producing a documentary on Dolphina and all the women who have been a part of her history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said so far she’s found 35 former Girls in the Fishbowl.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I am honored to be in the same role as them,” Longwell said. “They’re all really brave and powerful and creative.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside of their gig at Bimbo’s, the women have held jobs ranging from contortionist to tattoo artist, wedding dress designer to Mexican masked wrestler. One of them, Donna Powers, was even a Richmond City Councilmember.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote id=\"newscom-article-:r0:\" data-embed-url=\"https://www.newspapers.com/embed/183940268/\">\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/article/san-francisco-chronicle-donna-powers-as/183940268/\">Donna Powers as Dolphina\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Article from Mar 13, 1992 San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California) <!— \u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://img.newspapers.com/img/img?clippingId=183940268&width=700&height=511\"> –>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Powers started working as the Girl in the Fishbowl in 1969, when she was a 19-year-old art student. She performed as Dolphina for 25 years, a fact which surfaced when she ran for Richmond City Council in 1991. When people found out she “was swimming naked in the fishbowl,” there were calls for her to step down, but Powers refused. In 1992, she told the San Francisco Chronicle:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of people get to be politicians, but how many people get to be a mermaid? I love being the girl in the fishbowl, the whole mystique, it’s very glamorous and charming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062960\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062960\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Celeste Knickerbocker, a former ‘Girl in the Fishbowl,’ at Bimbo’s 365 Club on July 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Pilates instructor Celeste Knickerbocker performed as Dolphina from 2011 to 2015. She said the experience was empowering, similar to her work as a burlesque performer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m very proud of having done it,” she said. “I got to be this iconic, San Francisco, elegant, classy homage to the days when women’s bodies were still somewhat mysterious and a lot was left to the imagination. Because a lot really is left to the imagination as the Girl in the Fishbowl.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s got a point. Compared to what we see today on TV or online, the Girl in the Fishbowl seems almost demure. Dolphina is a reflection, just 6 inches long, seen for only seconds at a time as her watery image spins in and out of view. She’s a reminder of a time when there were no cell phones, martinis cost 85 cents, and San Francisco was a place where the weird and wonderful could truly shine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>The inside of Bimbo’s 365 Club” in San Francisco’s North Beach is lush with red velvet, moody lighting, and dark wood paneling, you half expect the Rat Pack to step out from the coat room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And almost everywhere you look, there are images of a naked woman on a fish. She’s etched into the glass on the front doors, painted on murals on the walls, even immortalized as an Italian marble statue in the lobby.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s Dolphina – the star of Bimbo’s Girl in the Fishbowl act who’s been luring customers in since 1931. What — and who — was this Girl in the Fish Bowl. And can you still see her?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today on Bay Curious, we’re diving into the mysterious waters of the famous nightclub’s past. I’m Katrina Schwartz, stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Bimbo’s 365 Club has been entertaining San Franciscans for 94 years. Huge stars have graced its stage from a young Adele to Robin Williams… but the act it’s MOST famous for is Dolphina, the Girl in the Fishbowl. KQED’s Bianca Taylor visited Bimbo’s to find out more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor:\u003c/strong> The story of Dolphina actually starts with the story of Agostino Giuntoli.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>19-year-old Agostino immigrated to the United States from Tuscany, Italy, in 1922. When he arrived in San Francisco, he started working in hospitality … first as a janitor, then a cook, where his boss, Arthur Monk Young, gave him the nickname “Bimbo” – Italian slang for “boy”.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> You know, old school Italian, he had a hot temper, he let him have it, but once he got his point across, water under the bridge and you know he’d put his arm around you and move on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>That’s Michael Cerchiai, the current owner of Bimbos’ 365 Club and Bimbo’s grandson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1931, Bimbo and Arthur opened their own nightclub on Market Street called the 365 Club. There, A young Rita Hayworth danced in the chorus line and guests ate steaks and sipped gin out of coffee mugs. Even though it was technically Prohibition, San Francisco openly flouted the law. Over the next few decades, Bimbo would buy out his partner, rename the joint to Bimbo’s 365 Club, and move the venue to a bigger spot on Columbus Avenue, where it still stands today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like his namesake club, Bimbo the man was larger than life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> My grandfather was like a celebrity. He had a lot of personality. He was very jovial. He was a showman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Michael took over the family business from HIS dad, Graziano Cerchiai, who was Bimbo’s son-in-law. Michael’s earliest memories of being at the nightclub are running around with his cousins, drinking Shirley Temples, and meeting quite a few famous people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai: \u003c/strong>I’ve got a picture sitting on Frank Sinatra, Jr.’s lap. Went up to meet Smokey Robinson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Here he is at 9 years old, on stage at Bimbo’s for a banquet honoring his grandfather in 1969.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Young Michael Cerchiai: \u003c/strong>Dear Nonna, I’m here tonight to thank you for all the things you have done. Like when you actually take me someplace or actually to help me or do something for me, you always say yes. And everyone says I look like you, and I’m glad I do because next to my dad, you’re the next man I love best.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Michael may have grown up in the club, but his grandfather, Bimbo, was the club. He would do anything to drum up publicity and promote the Bimbo brand, including paging his own name at the airport so people would hear it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> You know, Mr. Bimbo, white courtesy telephone, Mr Bimbo, white, courtesy telephone, you know, and it was all about building the brand and all his publicity stunts. And the girl in the fishbowl was part of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>The Girl in the Fishbowl, aka Dolphina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In post-prohibition San Francisco, every night club was competing for customers: Forbidden City on Sutter Street broke barriers as the first Chinese nightclub in the US… Mona’s 440 Club had drag kings on staff and advertised itself as a place where “girls could be boys.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, in addition to the good food and floor shows that the SF Chronicle called “miniature Broadway revues,” the Girl in the Fishbowl Act was yet another way to set Bimbo’s 365 Club apart from the crowd.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Girl in the Fishbowl is both exactly what it sounds like and not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> Well, most people, to be honest, when they come in, they think that there’s a big fish tank, a huge fish tank with a life-size naked woman swimming in that tank. But that’s not the case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>In the main bar of Bimbo’s sits a standard fishtank. When Dolphina is performing, it looks like there’s a real, live woman, but shrunk down to about 6 inches, swimming in the tank with fish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> From my understanding, is that a magician came up with this idea and presented it to my grandfather, and he thought it was fantastic, so the two of them collaborated on the whole thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>The illusion behind the Girl in the Fishbowl is remarkably low-tech. In the basement of the club, there’s a mattress on a motor-powered turntable. When Dolphina lies down on the turntable, her image is projected up into the fishtank at the bar via curved mirrors that line the side of the tank. When the turntable rotates, her image ripples into the tank in such a way that it looks like she is “swimming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In between floor shows and comedy acts, the emcee at Bimbo’s would announce that Dolphina would be appearing in the fishtank.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> And so people would get up and go to the bar, and want to see her, and of course, while they’re there, they were more likely to buy a cocktail. So it was just like, you know, it was a gimmick just to get people to go to the bar and spend some money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>One of the earliest Dolphina performers was iconic burlesque star, Tempest Storm. With her flaming red hair and infamous bust, “the Queen of Exotic Dancers,” as she was known, owned the stage in the 50’s and 60’s. With performers like her, it didn’t take long for Bimbo’s to become known as the Home of the Girl in the Fishbowl. A 1939 travel guide called “How to Sin in San Francisco” described it like this:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Voice over reading: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>You’ll like the food, because it was cooked by Bimbo. You’ll like your drinks because they’re good. You’ll like the Girl in the Fish Bowl because she’s very naked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Yes, Dolphina was naked. But Michael says Bimbo never meant for the act to be be lewd:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai: \u003c/strong>Even though a naked woman and a club called Bimbo’s, you would think that it’s a strip joint, but it’s never ever not even close to something like that. But it was all done with taste and class. He used to always say, there’s no substitute for class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Bimbo himself was a conservative Italian Catholic family man, plus he had a tough critic who had to sign off on Dolphina: his wife Emelia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> It obviously got my grandmother’s approval because, really, nothing happened here without it going through her. And he used to call her the general, and if you had a question for him and you didn’t want to answer, you better go talk to the general.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>For nearly 4 decades, Dolphina performed every night of the week. She even made the cover of \u003cem>LIFE Magazine\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai: I\u003c/strong>n the day, Life Magazine was, excuse my French, it was the s***, right? I mean, it was very prestigious. It was highly regarded. And to make it into \u003cem>LIFE Magazine\u003c/em> in 1947 was a big deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>The era of nightly Dolphina shows came to an end on New Year’s Eve, 1969. Bimbo had made the decision to shut down the club’s expensive nightly shows and rent out the venue for events instead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai: \u003c/strong>My grandfather was competing with, TV was becoming popular, people weren’t going out as much. So times were changing, and he just said, you know, it’s time for me to call it quits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>You can still see lots of music and comedy shows at Bimbo’s these days, but Dolphina only performs on rare occasions. And for those who heed her siren call, the chance to perform in the fishtank is an alluring opportunity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>I mean, who doesn’t want to be a mermaid?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Celeste Knickerbocker performed as Dolphina for 5 years. At the time, she was doing burlesque and studying to become a pilates instructor. One night, a friend called her and asked if she wouldn’t mind filling in for her shift at Bimbo’s. Celeste barely hesitated:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>So, I really felt excited about being an iconic sort of legendary San Francisco creature, for lack of a better term.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>For a three-hour shift, Celeste made $150. On New Year’s Eve, she made $200. She credits being Dolphina as one of the things that helped launch her pilates career: It was good money and she could study for her exams in the basement in between shifts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Working at the old club, though, did have its eerie moments … like the time she says she saw a ghost in the coatroom. For the record, Michael Cerchiai agrees — there is just too much history here for it not to be haunted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> You know, you walk through the room, and if it’s dark before the lights are on or it’s late at night, we’re closing up, you might hear a laugh or two. But like I said, they’re happy ghosts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>There was also the fact that down in the basement, lying underneath the tunnel of mirrors projecting her image, Celeste could hear everything the people at the bar were saying about her, even though they couldn’t see her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>You know I would hear bar patrons standing at the bar and noticing that, you know, she was performing and, they, you know, like. I don’t really remember specifics other than I do remember one gentleman was analyzing which one of my breasts he thought was bigger than the other, you know, which of course just could have been the water. Changing the visual or whatever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>For the most part, though, Celeste says the performance of Dolphina was, like burlesque, a way to reclaim her body and sexuality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>It was never even a question of, you know, is this something taboo or is this something that I’m gonna regret doing one day?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Another Dolphina from the past is former Richmond city councilmember Donna Powers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Donna started working as the Girl in the Fishbowl in 1969, when she was a 19-year-old art student. She performed as Dolphina for 25 years … a fact which surfaced when she ran for Richmond City Council in 1991. When people found out she “was swimming naked in the fishbowl”, there were calls for her to step down…but Donna refused.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a 1992 story for the SF Chronicle, she said:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Voice-over reading: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>A lot of people get to be politicians, but how many people get to be a mermaid? I love being the girl in the fishbowl, the whole mystique, it’s very glamorous and charming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Like Donna, Celeste is PROUD of her time as Girl in the Fishbowl.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>Plus, I got to be this iconic San Francisco, you know, to me, elegant, and classy kind of homage to the days when women’s bodies were still somewhat mysterious and you know, a lot was left to the imagination because a lot really is left to the imagination as the girl in the fishbowl.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Yes, the Girl in the Fishbowl is a naked woman, but compared to advertisements and entertainment we see today, she seems almost demure. A reflection, just 6 inches long, seen for only seconds at a time as her watery image spins in and out of view. Dolphina is a reminder of a time when there were no cell phones, martinis cost 85 cents, and San Francisco was a place where the weird and wonderful could truly shine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>That was KQED’s Bianca Taylor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is a production of member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m Katrina Schwartz. Have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Since 1931, audiences at Bimbo’s 365 Club in North Beach have been shocked and delighted by Dolphina, the Girl in the Fishbowl. The act, which simulates a nude woman swimming in a fishtank, hasn’t changed since the club’s opening.",
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"title": "The Girl in the Fishbowl: The Secret Behind San Francisco's Quirkiest Nightclub Act | KQED",
"description": "Since 1931, audiences at Bimbo’s 365 Club in North Beach have been shocked and delighted by Dolphina, the Girl in the Fishbowl. The act, which simulates a nude woman swimming in a fishtank, hasn’t changed since the club’s opening.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rita Hayworth, Robin Williams, Adele — these are just a few of the huge stars that have graced the stage of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">Bimbo’s 365 Club\u003c/a> over its 94 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the act the club is most famous for is Dolphina — or the “Girl in the Fishbowl.” Artistic interpretations of her riding a fish are everywhere in the club: etched into the glass on the front doors, painted on murals on the walls, even immortalized in an Italian marble sculpture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dolphina isn’t a person, though; she’s a character who’s been played by many different women since 1931. When Dolphina performs, it looks like there is a real, live woman, shrunk down to 6 inches, swimming in a fish tank at the bar — hence the moniker, “The Girl in the Fishbowl.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How did this quirky act come to be?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My understanding is that a magician came up with this idea and presented it to my grandfather,” said Michael Cerchiai, the club’s current owner and general manager. “And he thought it was fantastic, so the two of them collaborated on the whole thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062972\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062972\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1504\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Patrons-of-Bimbos-365-Club-watching-_the-girl-in-the-fishbowl_-1940-1980-San-Francisco-Historical-Photograph-Collection-SAN-FRANCISCO-PUBLIC-LIBRARY-1536x1155.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Patrons watch the ‘Girl in the Fishbowl’ at Bimbo’s 365 Club in the late 1940s or 1950s. \u003ccite>(San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Cerchiai practically grew up at Bimbo’s because his grandfather was the original owner and founder: Agostino “Bimbo” Giuntoli.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Giuntoli immigrated to the United States from Tuscany, Italy, in 1922. He got the nickname “Bimbo” (Italian slang for ‘boy’) from a man named Arthur Monk Young while working at a restaurant in San Francisco. In 1930, Bimbo and Young decided to strike out on their own and opened up the 365 Club, located at 365 Market Street.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062956\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2225px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062956\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2225\" height=\"1143\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych.jpg 2225w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-2000x1027.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-160x82.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-1536x789.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-2048x1052.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2225px) 100vw, 2225px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Agostino “Bimbo” Giuntoli. Right: A stage show at Bimbo’s 365 Club around 1950. \u003ccite>(Left: Courtesy of Michael Cerchiai Right: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Even though it was technically Prohibition, guests drank gin out of coffee mugs while they enjoyed decadent chorus lines and $3.65 dinners. Eventually, Bimbo bought out his partner, renamed the joint to “Bimbo’s 365 Club,” and relocated to a bigger spot on Columbus Avenue, where it still stands today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Prohibition came to an end in 1933, the San Francisco nightlife scene exploded. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13914487/the-chinatown-nightclub-dancer-who-helped-squash-asian-stereotypes\">Forbidden City\u003c/a> on Sutter Street broke barriers as the first Chinese nightclub in the U.S. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13929998/historic-lesbian-bars-san-francisco-mauds-pegs-front-anns-monas-440-tommy-vasu\">Mona’s 440 Club\u003c/a> had drag kings on staff and advertised itself as a place where “girls could be boys.” Bimbo knew he needed something special to set Bimbo’s 365 Club apart from the rest of the scene. The Girl in the Fishbowl Act fit the bill perfectly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063185\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063185\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"884\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04-160x71.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-04-1536x679.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Owner Michael Cerchiai looks through a book featuring the club’s art at his office at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 22, 2025. Right: Cerchiai holds a patch made of the ‘Girl in the Fishbowl.’ \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062966\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1999px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062966\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-02_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on July 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“[The Girl in the Fishbowl] was all about building the brand,” Cerchiai said. In between floor shows and comedy acts, the emcee would announce that Dolphina would be appearing in the fishtank. “People would get up and go to the bar, and want to see her, and of course, while they’re there, they were more likely to buy a cocktail. So it was just a gimmick to get people to go to the bar and spend some money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The illusion behind the Girl in the Fishbowl is remarkably low-tech and hasn’t changed since the 1930s. Down in the club’s basement, a motor powers a turntable topped with a black mattress. As Dolphina lies on the turntable, her image is projected up into the fishtank at the bar via a chute with curved mirrors that line the side of the tank. When the turntable rotates, her image ripples into the tank in such a way that it looks like she is swimming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063618\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063618\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1033\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04-160x83.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/BimbosDiptych_04-1536x793.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Burlesque star Tempest Storm in 1965. Right: Stage performers relax in the dressing room at Bimbo’s 365 Club in 1943. \u003ccite>(San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One of the earliest Dolphina performers was iconic burlesque star Tempest Storm. With her flaming red hair and infamous bust, “the Queen of Exotic Dancers,” as she was known, owned the stage in the ’50s and ’60s. With performers like her, it didn’t take long for Bimbo’s to become famous as the “Home of the Girl in the Fishbowl.” A 1939 travel guide called “How to Sin in San Francisco” described it like this:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ll like the food, which is superb, because it was cooked by Bimbo. You’ll like your drinks because they’re good. You’ll like the Girl in the Fishbowl because she’s very naked.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062967\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062967\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Hanna Longwell sits in the vanity room at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 8, 2025. She performs as the club’s current ‘Girl in the Fishbowl,’ and is among many women who, over decades, have stepped into the role. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062970\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062970\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"829\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03-160x66.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Bimbos365Club-Diptych-03-1536x637.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: A note from a former ‘Girl in the Fishbowl’ hangs in the vanity room at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 8, 2025. The note says, “Darla says bye after almost 3 years as Dolphina. Kisses!” Right: Items left by former performers sit by the mirror in the vanity room. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Dolphina may be naked, but Cerchiai insisted Bimbo never meant for the act to be lewd.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was all done with taste and class,” he said. “[Bimbo] used to always say, ‘There’s no substitute for class.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plus, Cerchiai said it had to pass the approval of his grandmother, Bimbo’s wife, Emelia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Nothing happened [at Bimbo’s] without it going through her,” Cerchiai said. “He used to call her ‘the General.’ If you had a question for him that he didn’t want to answer, ‘You better go talk to the General.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062961\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062961\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251022-GirlInTheFishbowl-01-BL_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Owner Michael Cerchiai holds a photo of himself as a child surrounded by family at the club in his office at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 22, 2025. Cerchiai’s grandfather, Agostino “Bimbo” Giuntoli, founded the club in 1931, and Michael continues his family’s longtime management of the venue. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For nearly 4 decades, Dolphina performed every night of the week. She even made the cover of LIFE Magazine. But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and the last nightly Dolphina show happened on New Year’s Eve, 1969. In an era when television was becoming more popular and people weren’t going out as much, Bimbo decided to shut down the club’s expensive nightly shows and rent out the venue for events instead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though she no longer performs nightly, you \u003cem>can \u003c/em>hire Dolphina to perform at your Bimbo’s event.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062955\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062955\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-06-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Hanna Longwell poses for a portrait in front of the fishbowl at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Oct. 8, 2025. She performs as the club’s current ‘Girl in the Fishbowl,’ and she is now developing a documentary about the role’s legacy and its place in San Francisco’s nightlife. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>If you do, you will see Hanna Longwell, Bimbo’s current Dolphina. Longwell has been performing at Bimbo’s since April 2024 and is producing a documentary on Dolphina and all the women who have been a part of her history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said so far she’s found 35 former Girls in the Fishbowl.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I am honored to be in the same role as them,” Longwell said. “They’re all really brave and powerful and creative.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside of their gig at Bimbo’s, the women have held jobs ranging from contortionist to tattoo artist, wedding dress designer to Mexican masked wrestler. One of them, Donna Powers, was even a Richmond City Councilmember.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote id=\"newscom-article-:r0:\" data-embed-url=\"https://www.newspapers.com/embed/183940268/\">\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/article/san-francisco-chronicle-donna-powers-as/183940268/\">Donna Powers as Dolphina\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Article from Mar 13, 1992 San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California) <!— \u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://img.newspapers.com/img/img?clippingId=183940268&width=700&height=511\"> –>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Powers started working as the Girl in the Fishbowl in 1969, when she was a 19-year-old art student. She performed as Dolphina for 25 years, a fact which surfaced when she ran for Richmond City Council in 1991. When people found out she “was swimming naked in the fishbowl,” there were calls for her to step down, but Powers refused. In 1992, she told the San Francisco Chronicle:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of people get to be politicians, but how many people get to be a mermaid? I love being the girl in the fishbowl, the whole mystique, it’s very glamorous and charming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062960\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062960\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/250718-BimbosGirlintheFishbowl-04_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Celeste Knickerbocker, a former ‘Girl in the Fishbowl,’ at Bimbo’s 365 Club on July 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Pilates instructor Celeste Knickerbocker performed as Dolphina from 2011 to 2015. She said the experience was empowering, similar to her work as a burlesque performer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m very proud of having done it,” she said. “I got to be this iconic, San Francisco, elegant, classy homage to the days when women’s bodies were still somewhat mysterious and a lot was left to the imagination. Because a lot really is left to the imagination as the Girl in the Fishbowl.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s got a point. Compared to what we see today on TV or online, the Girl in the Fishbowl seems almost demure. Dolphina is a reflection, just 6 inches long, seen for only seconds at a time as her watery image spins in and out of view. She’s a reminder of a time when there were no cell phones, martinis cost 85 cents, and San Francisco was a place where the weird and wonderful could truly shine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>The inside of Bimbo’s 365 Club” in San Francisco’s North Beach is lush with red velvet, moody lighting, and dark wood paneling, you half expect the Rat Pack to step out from the coat room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And almost everywhere you look, there are images of a naked woman on a fish. She’s etched into the glass on the front doors, painted on murals on the walls, even immortalized as an Italian marble statue in the lobby.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s Dolphina – the star of Bimbo’s Girl in the Fishbowl act who’s been luring customers in since 1931. What — and who — was this Girl in the Fish Bowl. And can you still see her?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today on Bay Curious, we’re diving into the mysterious waters of the famous nightclub’s past. I’m Katrina Schwartz, stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Bimbo’s 365 Club has been entertaining San Franciscans for 94 years. Huge stars have graced its stage from a young Adele to Robin Williams… but the act it’s MOST famous for is Dolphina, the Girl in the Fishbowl. KQED’s Bianca Taylor visited Bimbo’s to find out more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor:\u003c/strong> The story of Dolphina actually starts with the story of Agostino Giuntoli.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>19-year-old Agostino immigrated to the United States from Tuscany, Italy, in 1922. When he arrived in San Francisco, he started working in hospitality … first as a janitor, then a cook, where his boss, Arthur Monk Young, gave him the nickname “Bimbo” – Italian slang for “boy”.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> You know, old school Italian, he had a hot temper, he let him have it, but once he got his point across, water under the bridge and you know he’d put his arm around you and move on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>That’s Michael Cerchiai, the current owner of Bimbos’ 365 Club and Bimbo’s grandson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1931, Bimbo and Arthur opened their own nightclub on Market Street called the 365 Club. There, A young Rita Hayworth danced in the chorus line and guests ate steaks and sipped gin out of coffee mugs. Even though it was technically Prohibition, San Francisco openly flouted the law. Over the next few decades, Bimbo would buy out his partner, rename the joint to Bimbo’s 365 Club, and move the venue to a bigger spot on Columbus Avenue, where it still stands today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like his namesake club, Bimbo the man was larger than life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> My grandfather was like a celebrity. He had a lot of personality. He was very jovial. He was a showman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Michael took over the family business from HIS dad, Graziano Cerchiai, who was Bimbo’s son-in-law. Michael’s earliest memories of being at the nightclub are running around with his cousins, drinking Shirley Temples, and meeting quite a few famous people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai: \u003c/strong>I’ve got a picture sitting on Frank Sinatra, Jr.’s lap. Went up to meet Smokey Robinson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Here he is at 9 years old, on stage at Bimbo’s for a banquet honoring his grandfather in 1969.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Young Michael Cerchiai: \u003c/strong>Dear Nonna, I’m here tonight to thank you for all the things you have done. Like when you actually take me someplace or actually to help me or do something for me, you always say yes. And everyone says I look like you, and I’m glad I do because next to my dad, you’re the next man I love best.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Michael may have grown up in the club, but his grandfather, Bimbo, was the club. He would do anything to drum up publicity and promote the Bimbo brand, including paging his own name at the airport so people would hear it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> You know, Mr. Bimbo, white courtesy telephone, Mr Bimbo, white, courtesy telephone, you know, and it was all about building the brand and all his publicity stunts. And the girl in the fishbowl was part of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>The Girl in the Fishbowl, aka Dolphina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In post-prohibition San Francisco, every night club was competing for customers: Forbidden City on Sutter Street broke barriers as the first Chinese nightclub in the US… Mona’s 440 Club had drag kings on staff and advertised itself as a place where “girls could be boys.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, in addition to the good food and floor shows that the SF Chronicle called “miniature Broadway revues,” the Girl in the Fishbowl Act was yet another way to set Bimbo’s 365 Club apart from the crowd.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Girl in the Fishbowl is both exactly what it sounds like and not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> Well, most people, to be honest, when they come in, they think that there’s a big fish tank, a huge fish tank with a life-size naked woman swimming in that tank. But that’s not the case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>In the main bar of Bimbo’s sits a standard fishtank. When Dolphina is performing, it looks like there’s a real, live woman, but shrunk down to about 6 inches, swimming in the tank with fish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> From my understanding, is that a magician came up with this idea and presented it to my grandfather, and he thought it was fantastic, so the two of them collaborated on the whole thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>The illusion behind the Girl in the Fishbowl is remarkably low-tech. In the basement of the club, there’s a mattress on a motor-powered turntable. When Dolphina lies down on the turntable, her image is projected up into the fishtank at the bar via curved mirrors that line the side of the tank. When the turntable rotates, her image ripples into the tank in such a way that it looks like she is “swimming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In between floor shows and comedy acts, the emcee at Bimbo’s would announce that Dolphina would be appearing in the fishtank.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> And so people would get up and go to the bar, and want to see her, and of course, while they’re there, they were more likely to buy a cocktail. So it was just like, you know, it was a gimmick just to get people to go to the bar and spend some money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>One of the earliest Dolphina performers was iconic burlesque star, Tempest Storm. With her flaming red hair and infamous bust, “the Queen of Exotic Dancers,” as she was known, owned the stage in the 50’s and 60’s. With performers like her, it didn’t take long for Bimbo’s to become known as the Home of the Girl in the Fishbowl. A 1939 travel guide called “How to Sin in San Francisco” described it like this:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Voice over reading: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>You’ll like the food, because it was cooked by Bimbo. You’ll like your drinks because they’re good. You’ll like the Girl in the Fish Bowl because she’s very naked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Yes, Dolphina was naked. But Michael says Bimbo never meant for the act to be be lewd:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai: \u003c/strong>Even though a naked woman and a club called Bimbo’s, you would think that it’s a strip joint, but it’s never ever not even close to something like that. But it was all done with taste and class. He used to always say, there’s no substitute for class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Bimbo himself was a conservative Italian Catholic family man, plus he had a tough critic who had to sign off on Dolphina: his wife Emelia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> It obviously got my grandmother’s approval because, really, nothing happened here without it going through her. And he used to call her the general, and if you had a question for him and you didn’t want to answer, you better go talk to the general.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>For nearly 4 decades, Dolphina performed every night of the week. She even made the cover of \u003cem>LIFE Magazine\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai: I\u003c/strong>n the day, Life Magazine was, excuse my French, it was the s***, right? I mean, it was very prestigious. It was highly regarded. And to make it into \u003cem>LIFE Magazine\u003c/em> in 1947 was a big deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>The era of nightly Dolphina shows came to an end on New Year’s Eve, 1969. Bimbo had made the decision to shut down the club’s expensive nightly shows and rent out the venue for events instead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai: \u003c/strong>My grandfather was competing with, TV was becoming popular, people weren’t going out as much. So times were changing, and he just said, you know, it’s time for me to call it quits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>You can still see lots of music and comedy shows at Bimbo’s these days, but Dolphina only performs on rare occasions. And for those who heed her siren call, the chance to perform in the fishtank is an alluring opportunity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>I mean, who doesn’t want to be a mermaid?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Celeste Knickerbocker performed as Dolphina for 5 years. At the time, she was doing burlesque and studying to become a pilates instructor. One night, a friend called her and asked if she wouldn’t mind filling in for her shift at Bimbo’s. Celeste barely hesitated:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>So, I really felt excited about being an iconic sort of legendary San Francisco creature, for lack of a better term.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>For a three-hour shift, Celeste made $150. On New Year’s Eve, she made $200. She credits being Dolphina as one of the things that helped launch her pilates career: It was good money and she could study for her exams in the basement in between shifts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Working at the old club, though, did have its eerie moments … like the time she says she saw a ghost in the coatroom. For the record, Michael Cerchiai agrees — there is just too much history here for it not to be haunted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Cerchiai:\u003c/strong> You know, you walk through the room, and if it’s dark before the lights are on or it’s late at night, we’re closing up, you might hear a laugh or two. But like I said, they’re happy ghosts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>There was also the fact that down in the basement, lying underneath the tunnel of mirrors projecting her image, Celeste could hear everything the people at the bar were saying about her, even though they couldn’t see her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>You know I would hear bar patrons standing at the bar and noticing that, you know, she was performing and, they, you know, like. I don’t really remember specifics other than I do remember one gentleman was analyzing which one of my breasts he thought was bigger than the other, you know, which of course just could have been the water. Changing the visual or whatever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>For the most part, though, Celeste says the performance of Dolphina was, like burlesque, a way to reclaim her body and sexuality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>It was never even a question of, you know, is this something taboo or is this something that I’m gonna regret doing one day?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Another Dolphina from the past is former Richmond city councilmember Donna Powers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Donna started working as the Girl in the Fishbowl in 1969, when she was a 19-year-old art student. She performed as Dolphina for 25 years … a fact which surfaced when she ran for Richmond City Council in 1991. When people found out she “was swimming naked in the fishbowl”, there were calls for her to step down…but Donna refused.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a 1992 story for the SF Chronicle, she said:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Voice-over reading: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>A lot of people get to be politicians, but how many people get to be a mermaid? I love being the girl in the fishbowl, the whole mystique, it’s very glamorous and charming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Like Donna, Celeste is PROUD of her time as Girl in the Fishbowl.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Celeste Knickerbocker: \u003c/strong>Plus, I got to be this iconic San Francisco, you know, to me, elegant, and classy kind of homage to the days when women’s bodies were still somewhat mysterious and you know, a lot was left to the imagination because a lot really is left to the imagination as the girl in the fishbowl.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bianca Taylor: \u003c/strong>Yes, the Girl in the Fishbowl is a naked woman, but compared to advertisements and entertainment we see today, she seems almost demure. A reflection, just 6 inches long, seen for only seconds at a time as her watery image spins in and out of view. Dolphina is a reminder of a time when there were no cell phones, martinis cost 85 cents, and San Francisco was a place where the weird and wonderful could truly shine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>That was KQED’s Bianca Taylor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is a production of member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m Katrina Schwartz. Have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "the-true-story-of-the-militarys-secret-1950-san-francisco-biological-weapons-test",
"title": "The True Story of the Military's Secret 1950 San Francisco Biological Weapons Test",
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"headTitle": "The True Story of the Military’s Secret 1950 San Francisco Biological Weapons Test | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a foggy September day in 1950, most Bay Area residents were going about their daily lives, headed to work or school. The newspapers were full of headlines about the Korean War — no one suspected that the U.S military might be testing weapons just outside the Golden Gate.[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But they were. Now known as Operation Seaspray, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s real. For eight days in September 1950, the U.S. military sprayed bacteria over an unsuspecting Bay Area from a Navy ship offshore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a biological warfare experiment; \u003ca href=\"https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=CLCTL4woX_4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&ots=1gbJq0C-cL&sig=mIFxFGJC_-htAI4iwTLuljzbpKI#v=onepage&q=san%20francisco&f=false\">just one of over 200 secret tests carried out nationwide from the 1940s through the 1960s\u003c/a>. The bacteria were supposed to be harmless, so the military had no medical monitoring plan in place for the experiment. That would become a point of contention in the years that followed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why this seemed like a reasonable idea back then\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1950, the Cold War was in full swing, and the Korean War had just begun. Army spokesmen warned of a communist takeover of the world, arguing that the only intelligent move was to prepare for another global war.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During WWII, the U.S. government had created a \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1200679/\">chemical weapons research division\u003c/a> within the military. And by the late 1940s, it had begun testing on human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062950\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062950\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Edward Nevin III stands in his home in Petaluma on Nov. 4, 2025. His grandfather, Edward J. Nevin, is tied to the 1950 Operation Seaspray experiment in San Francisco, in which the U.S. military released bacteria over the city. This secret test later led to legal action by the Nevin family. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Research on weapons goes on all the time,” Matthew Meselson, a Harvard emeritus molecular biologist and geneticist, said. “Otherwise, you’d be caught with your pants down, so to speak, if a war broke out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGAXfKP1JLg\">The program was centered at Fort Detrick in Maryland\u003c/a>, where the Army produced, tested, and stockpiled pathogens like anthrax and botulism, as well as defoliants like Agent Orange. The military wanted to know how these substances could be used to attack different populated areas. For example, whether a small boat offshore could spray a biological weapon to cover a coastal city like San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They needed something that was, first of all, thought to be harmless,” Meselson said, “because they certainly didn’t want to kill everybody in San Francisco or Oakland. And [something] that could easily be detected by simple methods.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the San Francisco experiment, the military chose two bacteria: bacillus globigii and serratia marcescens. \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21976608/\">Serratia marcescens\u003c/a> is found naturally in water and soil, and it’s not normally dangerous to healthy people. But it’s not normally sprayed into the air in large quantities either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While sailors \u003ca href=\"https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005321081&seq=1\">sprayed this biological aerosol along the coast\u003c/a>, monitors at 43 sampling stations around the Bay Area held up little cones to collect it. They found that it had traveled as far as 23 miles, reaching into communities in the East Bay as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winds carried it directly over Stanford hospital, which at that time was still in San Francisco. Eleven patients developed serratia marcescens infections. And one of them — a 75-year-old Irish American named Edward Nevin — died when the bacteria made its way into his heart.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Stanford doctors were baffled as to how their patients had encountered the serratia marcescens because they’d never seen an outbreak before. They even published \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/555999#google_vignette\">an academic paper\u003c/a> about the serratia outbreak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Pentagon declined to interview for this story, but said in a statement that it is “committed to safeguarding our nation and our citizens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Biological weapons tests come to light\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1969, \u003ca href=\"https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-announcing-decisions-chemical-and-biological-defense-policies-and-programs\">Nixon ended U.S. research into biological weapons\u003c/a> and ordered all offensive toxins destroyed. And in 1972, the U.S. signed onto the international \u003ca href=\"https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/biological-weapons-convention-bwc-glance-0\">Biological Weapons Convention\u003c/a> — still in effect today — in which almost all nations agree not to develop or stockpile biochemical weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, the public started to find out about the \u003ca href=\"https://archive.org/details/biologicaltestin00unit/page/n1/mode/2up\">more than 200 tests\u003c/a> that had been done on them: in the New York City subway, at Greyhound bus stations in Alaska and Hawaii, in the national airport in Washington, D.C., on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in Texas and the Florida Keys and of course in San Francisco.[aside postID=news_12062097 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-03-KQED.jpg']Edward Nevin III was riding the BART train to work when he read his grandfather’s name in the Dec. 22, 1976, edition of \u003cem>the San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>. His grandfather was the man who died in Stanford hospital due to complications from a serratia marcescens infection. Nevin III, or Eddie III as his grandfather called him, had been nine years old when his grandpa went into the hospital for a simple surgery, with a full recovery expected. His family had been stunned and puzzled by the death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember sitting in a ‘41 Chevy, my family’s car, outside, waiting for my parents who went in to see him,” Eddie III said. “They didn’t want the children in there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the time Eddie III learned that a secret biochemical weapons test in the 50s might have killed his beloved grandfather, he was a trial lawyer in his early 30s. He decided to sue the United States government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His huge Irish American family was reluctant at first. They didn’t want the publicity. And they knew Eddie’s grandfather, a proud immigrant who loved America, would not have wanted to sue his country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He had his citizenship papers on the wall of the living room in the home,” Eddie III said. “I truly believe he would’ve told me not to do it if he were alive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the family came to see it as the only way to find out what had truly happened to their loved one. So in 1981, the trial of the Nevin family — all 67 of them — vs. the United States began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/abs/clouds-of-secrecy-the-armys-germ-warfare-tests-over-populated-areasleonard-a-cole-totowa-new-jersey-rowman-and-littlefield-1988/9F78E0487B7B3A3FB24AE5C612A6F141\">It was action-packed\u003c/a>. At one point, an army general challenged Eddie III to a fistfight outside the courtroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were really mad at me,” Eddie III said. “They felt like they were heroes themselves for doing this hard work, you know? And so they were upset that I would even imagine bringing a case like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The military maintained that the test was safe and the death was a coincidence. Its lawyers argued that the government had \u003ca href=\"https://www.plainsite.org/opinions/4y32hvk8/mabel-nevin-v-united-states/\">legal immunity\u003c/a> from being sued by a citizen for a high-level planning decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the family’s side, Dr. Meselson and other scientists argued that the serratia found in Edward Nevin’s blood was likely the same serratia the military had sprayed over the city. They said the military should have considered that there was potential for the test to cause disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The judge did one fine thing,” Eddie III said. “He said, ‘There’s no jury in this case. I will give the jury box to the press.’ And so they filled the jury box every day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062951\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062951\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Edward Nevin III looks at a New York Times article from 1981 about the lawsuit at his home in Petaluma on Nov. 4, 2025. His grandfather, Edward J. Nevin, is tied to the 1950 Operation Seaspray experiment in San Francisco, in which the U.S. military released bacteria over the city. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/696/1229/328999/\">The Nevins lost their case\u003c/a>. They appealed, lost again at the 9th Circuit, and appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Nevin said he never thought that they would win.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But we still had to tell the story,” he said.” To have a citizen submitted to that kind of risk is awful.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back on it all, Dr. Meselson is relieved that the era of secret chemical warfare testing on the public is over. And that today, so far as we have evidence for, no country in the world is developing new biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This kind of weapon is really useful only if you want to kill civilians,” he said. “And who knows where it could lead? It’s turning our knowledge of life against life. It’s a bad idea.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> It’s a foggy September day in 1950s San Francisco. For most Bay Area residents, it’s a normal day…people get up and head out to work or school…just like any other day. The San Francisco Examiner is full of news about the Korean War and a reminder that daylight savings ends soon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the ocean, just outside the Golden Gate, floats a Navy boat. On deck, men hold up what look like big metal hoses and point them at San Francisco. There’s a long, low cloud over them that could be mistaken for part of the area’s usual fog, but it’s not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two days later, Stanford hospital, which was located in San Francisco at the time, started noticing something odd. Doctors started seeing some patients complaining of serious chest pain, shortness of breath, chills and fever — symptoms of what’s called serratia marcescens infection. Doctors had never seen this bacteria at the hospital before, and certainly not in so many patients at one time. Eleven people got sick, and one would die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is it possible that the U.S. military was testing biological weapons on its own citizens? That’s what one Bay Curious listener wants to know. We’ll get into it right after this. I’m Katrina Schwartz, and you’re listening to Bay Curious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>The question we’re answering today is whether it’s possible the U.S. government was spraying bacteria over its own citizens to learn more about how to stage a biological attack on an enemy. And it’s true. In 1950, the military sprayed bacteria over an unsuspecting Bay Area for eight days, with no medical monitoring plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was just one of hundreds of experiments that the military carried out in secret across the nation from the 1940s through the 1960s. These tests would affect people’s lives and help shape our country’s policy on biological weapons. Reporter Katherine Monahan takes us back to that time to help us understand how and why this happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of archival newsreel static\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The U.S. was obsessed with the threat from the Soviet Union.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel:\u003c/strong> \u003cem>In 1950, men throughout the world learned to look at the brutal face of communism…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Cold War was in full swing, and the Korean War had just begun. Only a few years out of World War II, people feared a World War III was on the horizon. And Army spokesmen said the only intelligent move was to prepare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 1: \u003c/strong>For many years, information has been needed about the effects of a biological warfare attack on man.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 2: \u003c/strong>Because today the threat cannot be ignored.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 3: \u003c/strong>If we adopt a pacifist attitude the end can only be a communist dictatorship of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>During WWII, the U.S. government had created a chemical weapons research division within the military. And in the late 1940s, it began testing on human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>A very small circle of people knew anything about this. After all, it certainly wasn’t public knowledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Matthew Meselson is a Harvard molecular biologist and geneticist who served as a government consultant on arms control. He was instrumental in changing our nation’s policy on biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Research on weapons goes on all the time. Otherwise, you’d be caught with your pants down, so to speak. If a war broke out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The program was centered at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where the Army produced, tested, and stockpiled pathogens like anthrax and botulism, as well as defoliants like Agent Orange.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The military wanted to know how these substances could be used to attack different populated areas. For example, whether a small boat offshore could spray a biological weapon to cover a coastal city like San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>They needed something that was, first of all, thought to be harmless because they certainly didn’t wanna kill everybody in San Francisco or Oakland. And that could easily be detected by simple methods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>So the Army used substances that would disperse like a biological weapon, but weren’t actually harmful, as far as they knew.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the San Francisco experiment, they chose two bacteria: bacillus globigii and serratia marcescens. Serratia marcescens is found naturally in water and soil, and it’s not normally dangerous to healthy people, but then it’s not normally sprayed into the air in large quantities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has a unique property that makes it easy to track.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>It’s bright red, and that’s why the Navy decided to use it, because when you plate a sample from the air on a petri dish, there’s only one thing that makes nice red colonies and they’re very easy to see.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>While the testing team sprayed the bacteria along the coast, monitors at 43 sampling stations around the Bay Area held up little cones to collect it, and found that it had traveled as far as 23 miles, covering the East Bay as well. The Army summarized its findings in a report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice over: \u003c/strong>Every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at normal breathing rate (10 liters per minute) inhaled 5,000 or more fluorescent particles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>That’s per minute. The test, Meselson said, showed that it was indeed possible to attack a coastal city by spraying a biological weapon from a boat offshore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Presumably, of course, if it was a real war, you’d use something like anthrax that would kill people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>But this supposedly harmless bacteria may have killed someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music featuring chimes\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winds carried the spray directly over Stanford hospital. Eleven patients developed serratia marcescens infections. And one of them — a 75-year-old Irish American named Edward Nevin — died, when the bacteria made its way into his heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Its source was a mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meselson would be one of the first members of the public to connect Edward Nevin’s death to the military’s experiment. But not until 15 years later, when a lab assistant shared a secret with him. Her boyfriend had worked at the Navy’s Biological Laboratory Facility in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Her boyfriend told her that one day the commander of this naval base called a meeting of everybody and told them that a recent test they had just done, probably was responsible for the death of a man, and if anyone ever talked about that publicly, that the Navy would make sure that that person could never find a job anywhere in the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Pentagon declined to interview for this story, but said in a statement that it is “committed to safeguarding our nation and our citizens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meselson was already gravely concerned about the U.S. biological weapons program because he’d worked for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1963. He had high security clearances and was given a tour of Fort Detrick in Maryland, where the biological weapons were developed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel:\u003c/strong> At Camp Detrick, a National Guard airport near Fredrick, Maryland, requisitioned for this purpose, a new chapter in an uncharted adventure was to begin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>We came to a seven-story building. So I asked the Colonel. What do you do in this building? And he said, we make anthrax spores there. So I said something like, well, why do we do that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel: \u003c/strong>The aim: defensive and offensive protection against this new weapon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>And he said, because anthrax could be a strategic weapon. Much cheaper than hydrogen bombs. Now, I don’t know if it occurred to me right away. But certainly on the taxi ride back to the State Department, it dawned on me that the last thing the United States would like is a cheap hydrogen bomb so that everybody could have one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Meselson began alerting members of the government that this was madness. He was friends with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and was able to get the message through to President Richard Nixon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>You don’t wanna make powerful weapons very, very cheap. This would create a world in which we would be the losers. It’s obvious. It’s a simple argument and that’s what made the United States decide to get out of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>In 1969, Nixon ended U.S. research into biological weapons and ordered all offensive toxins destroyed. And in 1972, the U.S. signed on to the international Biological Weapons Convention — still in effect today — in which almost all nations agree not to develop or stockpile biochemical weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, the public started to find out about the more than 200 tests that had been done on them. And people were horrified. One of the first experiments people learned about was in the New York City subway system. Here’s a reenactment from a 1975 Senate hearing. Senator Gary Hart of Colorado is questioning Charles Senseney, a physicist at Fort Detrick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart: \u003c/strong>How was the study or experiment conducted?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney: \u003c/strong>Well, there was one person that was the operator — if you want to call it an operator — who rode a certain train, and walking between trains, dropped what looked like an ordinary light bulb, which contained biological simulant agent. And it went quite well through the entire subway system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart: \u003c/strong>Were the officials of the city of New York aware that this study was being conducted?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney:\u003c/strong> I do not believe so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart:\u003c/strong> And certainly the passengers weren’t?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney:\u003c/strong> That is correct.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The public was appalled. Even more so when a subsequent hearing and report revealed more tests — in greyhound bus stations in Alaska and Hawaii, in the national airport in Washington D.C., on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in Texas, and the Florida Keys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Edward Nevin III remembers when he first learned about the San Francisco experiment, now known to the public as Operation Seaspray.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III:\u003c/strong> I was on the BART train going into my office in San Francisco for Berkeley, where I lived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>He was reading the San Francisco Chronicle, as he usually did on his way to work, and saw that his grandfather was the man who died in Stanford hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>I was reading it with sort of an upset that the government would do something like that. And, uh, I turned to the back page and it says, ‘The only person who died was Edward Nevin.’ That’s how I learned it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Eddie III, as his grandfather used to call him, had been 9-years-old when his grandpa went into the hospital for a simple surgery, with a full recovery expected. His family had been stunned and puzzled by his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>I remember sitting in a ‘41 Chevy, my family’s car, uh, outside, waiting for my parents who went in to see him. They didn’t want the children in there. So I have absolute memory of that moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Eddie III by 1976 was a trial lawyer in his early 30s. And he decided to sue the United States government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He called his huge Irish American family together to discuss it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>One aunt, God love her, said, uh, ‘Eddie, you’re pretty young, are you sure we shouldn’t get someone that’s been around a while, you know?’ I said, ‘I don’t think anyone will do it. There’s no real money in it.’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The family was reluctant at first. They didn’t want the publicity. And they knew Eddie’s grandfather, a proud immigrant who loved America, would not have wanted to sue his country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>He had his citizenship papers on the wall of the living room in the home. I truly believe he would’ve told me not to do it if he were alive. I’m sure he would’ve said no.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>But Eddie III was determined, and his family came to see it as the only way to find out what had truly happened to their loved one. So in 1981, the trial of the Nevin family — all 67 of them — vs. the United States began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was action-packed. At one point, an army general challenged Eddie III to a fistfight outside the courtroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>People were really mad at me. They, they were, they felt like they were quite a heroes themselves for doing this hard work, you know? And so they were upset that I would even imagine bringing a case like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The military maintained that the test was safe, and the death was a coincidence. And that, anyway, the government had legal immunity from being sued by a citizen for a high-level planning decision like this one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the family’s side, Dr. Meselson and other scientists argued that the serratia found in Edward Nevin’s blood was likely the same serratia the military had sprayed over the city. And that they should have considered that there was potential for it to cause disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>The judge did one fine thing. He said, there’s no jury in this case. I will give the jury box to the press. And so they filled the jury box every day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>That is where the real trial took place, Nevin figures, in the minds of the American people. He says every day he was interviewed outside the courthouse, and the story ran in newspapers across the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan in scene: \u003c/strong>Did you ever think that you were gonna win?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>No. But we still had to tell the story. To have a citizen submitted to that kind of risk is awful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Nevins lost their case. They appealed, lost again at the 9th Circuit, and appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back on it all, Dr. Meselson, who campaigned to ban chemical weapons, is relieved that the era of secret chemical warfare testing on the public is over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson:\u003c/strong> This kind of weapon is really useful only if you want to kill civilians. And that’s not a very good thing to do in a war. Who knows where it could lead. It’s turning our knowledge of life against life. It’s a bad idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Today, so far as we have evidence for, no country in the world is developing new biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by KQED reporter Katherine Monahan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thank you for listening and donating and being members. We appreciate it so much. Thank you, and have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a foggy September day in 1950, most Bay Area residents were going about their daily lives, headed to work or school. The newspapers were full of headlines about the Korean War — no one suspected that the U.S military might be testing weapons just outside the Golden Gate.\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But they were. Now known as Operation Seaspray, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s real. For eight days in September 1950, the U.S. military sprayed bacteria over an unsuspecting Bay Area from a Navy ship offshore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a biological warfare experiment; \u003ca href=\"https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=CLCTL4woX_4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&ots=1gbJq0C-cL&sig=mIFxFGJC_-htAI4iwTLuljzbpKI#v=onepage&q=san%20francisco&f=false\">just one of over 200 secret tests carried out nationwide from the 1940s through the 1960s\u003c/a>. The bacteria were supposed to be harmless, so the military had no medical monitoring plan in place for the experiment. That would become a point of contention in the years that followed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why this seemed like a reasonable idea back then\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1950, the Cold War was in full swing, and the Korean War had just begun. Army spokesmen warned of a communist takeover of the world, arguing that the only intelligent move was to prepare for another global war.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During WWII, the U.S. government had created a \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1200679/\">chemical weapons research division\u003c/a> within the military. And by the late 1940s, it had begun testing on human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062950\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062950\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Edward Nevin III stands in his home in Petaluma on Nov. 4, 2025. His grandfather, Edward J. Nevin, is tied to the 1950 Operation Seaspray experiment in San Francisco, in which the U.S. military released bacteria over the city. This secret test later led to legal action by the Nevin family. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Research on weapons goes on all the time,” Matthew Meselson, a Harvard emeritus molecular biologist and geneticist, said. “Otherwise, you’d be caught with your pants down, so to speak, if a war broke out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGAXfKP1JLg\">The program was centered at Fort Detrick in Maryland\u003c/a>, where the Army produced, tested, and stockpiled pathogens like anthrax and botulism, as well as defoliants like Agent Orange. The military wanted to know how these substances could be used to attack different populated areas. For example, whether a small boat offshore could spray a biological weapon to cover a coastal city like San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They needed something that was, first of all, thought to be harmless,” Meselson said, “because they certainly didn’t want to kill everybody in San Francisco or Oakland. And [something] that could easily be detected by simple methods.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the San Francisco experiment, the military chose two bacteria: bacillus globigii and serratia marcescens. \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21976608/\">Serratia marcescens\u003c/a> is found naturally in water and soil, and it’s not normally dangerous to healthy people. But it’s not normally sprayed into the air in large quantities either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While sailors \u003ca href=\"https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005321081&seq=1\">sprayed this biological aerosol along the coast\u003c/a>, monitors at 43 sampling stations around the Bay Area held up little cones to collect it. They found that it had traveled as far as 23 miles, reaching into communities in the East Bay as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winds carried it directly over Stanford hospital, which at that time was still in San Francisco. Eleven patients developed serratia marcescens infections. And one of them — a 75-year-old Irish American named Edward Nevin — died when the bacteria made its way into his heart.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Stanford doctors were baffled as to how their patients had encountered the serratia marcescens because they’d never seen an outbreak before. They even published \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/555999#google_vignette\">an academic paper\u003c/a> about the serratia outbreak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Pentagon declined to interview for this story, but said in a statement that it is “committed to safeguarding our nation and our citizens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Biological weapons tests come to light\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1969, \u003ca href=\"https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-announcing-decisions-chemical-and-biological-defense-policies-and-programs\">Nixon ended U.S. research into biological weapons\u003c/a> and ordered all offensive toxins destroyed. And in 1972, the U.S. signed onto the international \u003ca href=\"https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/biological-weapons-convention-bwc-glance-0\">Biological Weapons Convention\u003c/a> — still in effect today — in which almost all nations agree not to develop or stockpile biochemical weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, the public started to find out about the \u003ca href=\"https://archive.org/details/biologicaltestin00unit/page/n1/mode/2up\">more than 200 tests\u003c/a> that had been done on them: in the New York City subway, at Greyhound bus stations in Alaska and Hawaii, in the national airport in Washington, D.C., on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in Texas and the Florida Keys and of course in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Edward Nevin III was riding the BART train to work when he read his grandfather’s name in the Dec. 22, 1976, edition of \u003cem>the San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>. His grandfather was the man who died in Stanford hospital due to complications from a serratia marcescens infection. Nevin III, or Eddie III as his grandfather called him, had been nine years old when his grandpa went into the hospital for a simple surgery, with a full recovery expected. His family had been stunned and puzzled by the death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember sitting in a ‘41 Chevy, my family’s car, outside, waiting for my parents who went in to see him,” Eddie III said. “They didn’t want the children in there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the time Eddie III learned that a secret biochemical weapons test in the 50s might have killed his beloved grandfather, he was a trial lawyer in his early 30s. He decided to sue the United States government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His huge Irish American family was reluctant at first. They didn’t want the publicity. And they knew Eddie’s grandfather, a proud immigrant who loved America, would not have wanted to sue his country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He had his citizenship papers on the wall of the living room in the home,” Eddie III said. “I truly believe he would’ve told me not to do it if he were alive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the family came to see it as the only way to find out what had truly happened to their loved one. So in 1981, the trial of the Nevin family — all 67 of them — vs. the United States began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/abs/clouds-of-secrecy-the-armys-germ-warfare-tests-over-populated-areasleonard-a-cole-totowa-new-jersey-rowman-and-littlefield-1988/9F78E0487B7B3A3FB24AE5C612A6F141\">It was action-packed\u003c/a>. At one point, an army general challenged Eddie III to a fistfight outside the courtroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were really mad at me,” Eddie III said. “They felt like they were heroes themselves for doing this hard work, you know? And so they were upset that I would even imagine bringing a case like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The military maintained that the test was safe and the death was a coincidence. Its lawyers argued that the government had \u003ca href=\"https://www.plainsite.org/opinions/4y32hvk8/mabel-nevin-v-united-states/\">legal immunity\u003c/a> from being sued by a citizen for a high-level planning decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the family’s side, Dr. Meselson and other scientists argued that the serratia found in Edward Nevin’s blood was likely the same serratia the military had sprayed over the city. They said the military should have considered that there was potential for the test to cause disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The judge did one fine thing,” Eddie III said. “He said, ‘There’s no jury in this case. I will give the jury box to the press.’ And so they filled the jury box every day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062951\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062951\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Edward Nevin III looks at a New York Times article from 1981 about the lawsuit at his home in Petaluma on Nov. 4, 2025. His grandfather, Edward J. Nevin, is tied to the 1950 Operation Seaspray experiment in San Francisco, in which the U.S. military released bacteria over the city. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/696/1229/328999/\">The Nevins lost their case\u003c/a>. They appealed, lost again at the 9th Circuit, and appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Nevin said he never thought that they would win.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But we still had to tell the story,” he said.” To have a citizen submitted to that kind of risk is awful.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back on it all, Dr. Meselson is relieved that the era of secret chemical warfare testing on the public is over. And that today, so far as we have evidence for, no country in the world is developing new biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This kind of weapon is really useful only if you want to kill civilians,” he said. “And who knows where it could lead? It’s turning our knowledge of life against life. It’s a bad idea.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> It’s a foggy September day in 1950s San Francisco. For most Bay Area residents, it’s a normal day…people get up and head out to work or school…just like any other day. The San Francisco Examiner is full of news about the Korean War and a reminder that daylight savings ends soon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the ocean, just outside the Golden Gate, floats a Navy boat. On deck, men hold up what look like big metal hoses and point them at San Francisco. There’s a long, low cloud over them that could be mistaken for part of the area’s usual fog, but it’s not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two days later, Stanford hospital, which was located in San Francisco at the time, started noticing something odd. Doctors started seeing some patients complaining of serious chest pain, shortness of breath, chills and fever — symptoms of what’s called serratia marcescens infection. Doctors had never seen this bacteria at the hospital before, and certainly not in so many patients at one time. Eleven people got sick, and one would die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is it possible that the U.S. military was testing biological weapons on its own citizens? That’s what one Bay Curious listener wants to know. We’ll get into it right after this. I’m Katrina Schwartz, and you’re listening to Bay Curious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>The question we’re answering today is whether it’s possible the U.S. government was spraying bacteria over its own citizens to learn more about how to stage a biological attack on an enemy. And it’s true. In 1950, the military sprayed bacteria over an unsuspecting Bay Area for eight days, with no medical monitoring plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was just one of hundreds of experiments that the military carried out in secret across the nation from the 1940s through the 1960s. These tests would affect people’s lives and help shape our country’s policy on biological weapons. Reporter Katherine Monahan takes us back to that time to help us understand how and why this happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of archival newsreel static\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The U.S. was obsessed with the threat from the Soviet Union.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel:\u003c/strong> \u003cem>In 1950, men throughout the world learned to look at the brutal face of communism…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Cold War was in full swing, and the Korean War had just begun. Only a few years out of World War II, people feared a World War III was on the horizon. And Army spokesmen said the only intelligent move was to prepare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 1: \u003c/strong>For many years, information has been needed about the effects of a biological warfare attack on man.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 2: \u003c/strong>Because today the threat cannot be ignored.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 3: \u003c/strong>If we adopt a pacifist attitude the end can only be a communist dictatorship of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>During WWII, the U.S. government had created a chemical weapons research division within the military. And in the late 1940s, it began testing on human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>A very small circle of people knew anything about this. After all, it certainly wasn’t public knowledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Matthew Meselson is a Harvard molecular biologist and geneticist who served as a government consultant on arms control. He was instrumental in changing our nation’s policy on biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Research on weapons goes on all the time. Otherwise, you’d be caught with your pants down, so to speak. If a war broke out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The program was centered at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where the Army produced, tested, and stockpiled pathogens like anthrax and botulism, as well as defoliants like Agent Orange.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The military wanted to know how these substances could be used to attack different populated areas. For example, whether a small boat offshore could spray a biological weapon to cover a coastal city like San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>They needed something that was, first of all, thought to be harmless because they certainly didn’t wanna kill everybody in San Francisco or Oakland. And that could easily be detected by simple methods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>So the Army used substances that would disperse like a biological weapon, but weren’t actually harmful, as far as they knew.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the San Francisco experiment, they chose two bacteria: bacillus globigii and serratia marcescens. Serratia marcescens is found naturally in water and soil, and it’s not normally dangerous to healthy people, but then it’s not normally sprayed into the air in large quantities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has a unique property that makes it easy to track.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>It’s bright red, and that’s why the Navy decided to use it, because when you plate a sample from the air on a petri dish, there’s only one thing that makes nice red colonies and they’re very easy to see.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>While the testing team sprayed the bacteria along the coast, monitors at 43 sampling stations around the Bay Area held up little cones to collect it, and found that it had traveled as far as 23 miles, covering the East Bay as well. The Army summarized its findings in a report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice over: \u003c/strong>Every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at normal breathing rate (10 liters per minute) inhaled 5,000 or more fluorescent particles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>That’s per minute. The test, Meselson said, showed that it was indeed possible to attack a coastal city by spraying a biological weapon from a boat offshore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Presumably, of course, if it was a real war, you’d use something like anthrax that would kill people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>But this supposedly harmless bacteria may have killed someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music featuring chimes\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winds carried the spray directly over Stanford hospital. Eleven patients developed serratia marcescens infections. And one of them — a 75-year-old Irish American named Edward Nevin — died, when the bacteria made its way into his heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Its source was a mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meselson would be one of the first members of the public to connect Edward Nevin’s death to the military’s experiment. But not until 15 years later, when a lab assistant shared a secret with him. Her boyfriend had worked at the Navy’s Biological Laboratory Facility in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Her boyfriend told her that one day the commander of this naval base called a meeting of everybody and told them that a recent test they had just done, probably was responsible for the death of a man, and if anyone ever talked about that publicly, that the Navy would make sure that that person could never find a job anywhere in the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Pentagon declined to interview for this story, but said in a statement that it is “committed to safeguarding our nation and our citizens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meselson was already gravely concerned about the U.S. biological weapons program because he’d worked for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1963. He had high security clearances and was given a tour of Fort Detrick in Maryland, where the biological weapons were developed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel:\u003c/strong> At Camp Detrick, a National Guard airport near Fredrick, Maryland, requisitioned for this purpose, a new chapter in an uncharted adventure was to begin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>We came to a seven-story building. So I asked the Colonel. What do you do in this building? And he said, we make anthrax spores there. So I said something like, well, why do we do that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel: \u003c/strong>The aim: defensive and offensive protection against this new weapon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>And he said, because anthrax could be a strategic weapon. Much cheaper than hydrogen bombs. Now, I don’t know if it occurred to me right away. But certainly on the taxi ride back to the State Department, it dawned on me that the last thing the United States would like is a cheap hydrogen bomb so that everybody could have one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Meselson began alerting members of the government that this was madness. He was friends with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and was able to get the message through to President Richard Nixon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>You don’t wanna make powerful weapons very, very cheap. This would create a world in which we would be the losers. It’s obvious. It’s a simple argument and that’s what made the United States decide to get out of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>In 1969, Nixon ended U.S. research into biological weapons and ordered all offensive toxins destroyed. And in 1972, the U.S. signed on to the international Biological Weapons Convention — still in effect today — in which almost all nations agree not to develop or stockpile biochemical weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, the public started to find out about the more than 200 tests that had been done on them. And people were horrified. One of the first experiments people learned about was in the New York City subway system. Here’s a reenactment from a 1975 Senate hearing. Senator Gary Hart of Colorado is questioning Charles Senseney, a physicist at Fort Detrick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart: \u003c/strong>How was the study or experiment conducted?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney: \u003c/strong>Well, there was one person that was the operator — if you want to call it an operator — who rode a certain train, and walking between trains, dropped what looked like an ordinary light bulb, which contained biological simulant agent. And it went quite well through the entire subway system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart: \u003c/strong>Were the officials of the city of New York aware that this study was being conducted?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney:\u003c/strong> I do not believe so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart:\u003c/strong> And certainly the passengers weren’t?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney:\u003c/strong> That is correct.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The public was appalled. Even more so when a subsequent hearing and report revealed more tests — in greyhound bus stations in Alaska and Hawaii, in the national airport in Washington D.C., on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in Texas, and the Florida Keys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Edward Nevin III remembers when he first learned about the San Francisco experiment, now known to the public as Operation Seaspray.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III:\u003c/strong> I was on the BART train going into my office in San Francisco for Berkeley, where I lived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>He was reading the San Francisco Chronicle, as he usually did on his way to work, and saw that his grandfather was the man who died in Stanford hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>I was reading it with sort of an upset that the government would do something like that. And, uh, I turned to the back page and it says, ‘The only person who died was Edward Nevin.’ That’s how I learned it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Eddie III, as his grandfather used to call him, had been 9-years-old when his grandpa went into the hospital for a simple surgery, with a full recovery expected. His family had been stunned and puzzled by his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>I remember sitting in a ‘41 Chevy, my family’s car, uh, outside, waiting for my parents who went in to see him. They didn’t want the children in there. So I have absolute memory of that moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Eddie III by 1976 was a trial lawyer in his early 30s. And he decided to sue the United States government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He called his huge Irish American family together to discuss it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>One aunt, God love her, said, uh, ‘Eddie, you’re pretty young, are you sure we shouldn’t get someone that’s been around a while, you know?’ I said, ‘I don’t think anyone will do it. There’s no real money in it.’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The family was reluctant at first. They didn’t want the publicity. And they knew Eddie’s grandfather, a proud immigrant who loved America, would not have wanted to sue his country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>He had his citizenship papers on the wall of the living room in the home. I truly believe he would’ve told me not to do it if he were alive. I’m sure he would’ve said no.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>But Eddie III was determined, and his family came to see it as the only way to find out what had truly happened to their loved one. So in 1981, the trial of the Nevin family — all 67 of them — vs. the United States began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was action-packed. At one point, an army general challenged Eddie III to a fistfight outside the courtroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>People were really mad at me. They, they were, they felt like they were quite a heroes themselves for doing this hard work, you know? And so they were upset that I would even imagine bringing a case like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The military maintained that the test was safe, and the death was a coincidence. And that, anyway, the government had legal immunity from being sued by a citizen for a high-level planning decision like this one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the family’s side, Dr. Meselson and other scientists argued that the serratia found in Edward Nevin’s blood was likely the same serratia the military had sprayed over the city. And that they should have considered that there was potential for it to cause disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>The judge did one fine thing. He said, there’s no jury in this case. I will give the jury box to the press. And so they filled the jury box every day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>That is where the real trial took place, Nevin figures, in the minds of the American people. He says every day he was interviewed outside the courthouse, and the story ran in newspapers across the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan in scene: \u003c/strong>Did you ever think that you were gonna win?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>No. But we still had to tell the story. To have a citizen submitted to that kind of risk is awful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Nevins lost their case. They appealed, lost again at the 9th Circuit, and appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back on it all, Dr. Meselson, who campaigned to ban chemical weapons, is relieved that the era of secret chemical warfare testing on the public is over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson:\u003c/strong> This kind of weapon is really useful only if you want to kill civilians. And that’s not a very good thing to do in a war. Who knows where it could lead. It’s turning our knowledge of life against life. It’s a bad idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Today, so far as we have evidence for, no country in the world is developing new biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by KQED reporter Katherine Monahan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thank you for listening and donating and being members. We appreciate it so much. Thank you, and have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003cbr>\nFounded in 1885, Stanford University is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities, not to mention its 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003cbr>\nThis manicured institution on the San Francisco peninsula isn’t necessarily the kind of place you’d expect to harbor a century-old murder mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But 120 years ago this year, the university’s co-founder, Jane Stanford, died suddenly one winter evening. And although the official verdict was natural causes, the original coroner’s report indicated something far more sinister: poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what really happened to Jane Stanford in 1905? It’s a question that preoccupies Richard White, Stanford University history professor emeritus and author of \u003ca href=\"https://history.stanford.edu/people/richard-white\">\u003cem>Who Killed Jane Stanford\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several years ago, White was teaching his students how to use the Stanford University archives. He asked them to research the curious history of Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061787\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1594px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061787\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1594\" height=\"2500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg 1594w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-160x251.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-979x1536.jpg 979w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-1306x2048.jpg 1306w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1594px) 100vw, 1594px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Portrait of Jane Stanford with her son, Leland Jr., before he died of typhoid in 1884. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When his students kept hitting roadblocks in the archives, an intrigued White couldn’t resist looking into the story himself — and soon found himself baffled that the death of Jane Stanford wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially since Stanford Medical School physician Robert Cutler had \u003ca href=\"https://www.sup.org/books/history/mysterious-death-jane-stanford\">already published a 2003 book\u003c/a> concluding that she did not die of natural causes, but had instead been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack,” White said. “And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university — but it hadn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.stanford.edu/about/history/\">The university’s history webpage\u003c/a> doesn’t mention the death of Jane Stanford at all, let alone the fact that she may well have been murdered. (Stanford University didn’t respond to our request for official comment on their co-founder’s death.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But one thing is certain: strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die. When this white powder gets into the body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to a person’s muscles, inducing waves of painful spasms. The jaw locks tight and the limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but is odorless, making it a notoriously popular way to poison a person in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also an ingredient in rat bait — and even some medicines — making it easy to obtain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence,” White said. And after much research, he has a theory about who ended Jane Stanford’s life.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A ‘personal fiefdom’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was born Jane Lathrop in 1828 in upstate New York. At the age of 22, she married Leland Stanford, a railroad baron, who briefly served as governor of California from 1862 to 1863, and then a U.S. senator for almost a decade starting in 1885.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 39, Jane Stanford gave birth to \u003ca href=\"https://stanfordmag.org/contents/about-a-boy\">her only child, Leland Stanford Jr\u003c/a>., but Leland Jr. died from typhoid in his teens. “She never gets over that,” White said. “She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.”[aside postID=news_11893685 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/10/RS39771_4.34-qut.jpg']In their grief, the Stanfords sought ways to honor Leland Jr.’s memory. At this time, “California has great ambitions beyond just being a sort of outpost of wealth in the West,” White said. “It wants to become a cultural leader, an industrial leader. And so, founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened their university on the San Francisco Peninsula, called Leland Stanford Junior University. But Leland Stanford Sr would only live two more years before he too died, in 1893.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 65, Jane Stanford found herself in charge of the new university — a heavy responsibility compounded, White said, by Leland Sr’s financial mismanagement of both the university’s funds and the Stanfords’ own money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the next several years, Jane Stanford was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t further tank her considerable fortune. But her methods of managing the university’s affairs swiftly made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once she gets power, she uses it ruthlessly,” White said. “She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power — so much so that she makes a great many enemies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but then treated those same students poorly. The women in her personal life found this out firsthand — chief among them her longtime companion and secretary, Bertha Berner, “who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061782\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061782\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1387\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-1536x1065.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Stanford women’s basketball team circa 1896. Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, insisted that women be admitted from the school’s inception in 1891. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While running the university as what White called “a personal fiefdom,” Jane Stanford butted heads often with the institution’s president, David Starr Jordan. While “devoted” to the university, Jordan knew “that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford’s religious beliefs were also a major headache for Jordan. She was a Spiritualist: a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. Like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Stanford was motivated by the losses in her own life: the death of her son and husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in the Victorian era, the sheer prevalence of death through disease and infant mortality meant that virtually everyone was surrounded by tragedies like Stanford’s. But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time, and quite another for the leader of a major university. Not least because Stanford told people that she was using those seances to receive instructions on how to run the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan and his Stanford University colleagues lived in fear of their boss’s Spiritualism becoming common knowledge, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s going to endanger all the legal documents she signs,” he said. “It’s very hard to uphold a legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for Jordan, things soon got even worse, White said – when he realized “that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this leads us to 1905, when 76-year-old Jane Stanford was poisoned not once but twice. She did not survive the second attempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A cover-up across an ocean\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first poisoning attempt in January 1905, inside Jane Stanford’s San Francisco mansion, was unsuccessful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of Poland Spring water and called out for her household staff, including her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner. After vomiting, Stanford recovered — and when the water was tested, strychnine was found.[aside postID=news_11700225 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/10/RS33251_composite_2-qut.jpg'] However, it wasn’t a pure form of the poison in the bottle. “Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people had dumped rat poison in it,” White said. Other ingredients in the rat poison had caused Stanford to vomit, which saved her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford’s inner circle advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal that could taint the university, and to get far away from San Francisco and a poisoner who might try again. So just over a month later, Stanford departed for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her attempts to evade her poisoner proved unsuccessful. On February 28, 1905, Stanford woke up in her Oahu hotel in the middle of the night and screamed out for Berner. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in,” White said — and the medical evaluation swiftly concluded she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. “Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was the story reported by the earliest newspaper accounts, like that of \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=BT19050304.2.29&srpos=10&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">the Oceanside Blade in Southern California\u003c/a> on March 4, 1905, which noted the “suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine.\u003cstrong>”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061783\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2047px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061783\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2047\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg 2047w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-2000x2501.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-160x200.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1228x1536.jpg 1228w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1638x2048.jpg 1638w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2047px) 100vw, 2047px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan was the first president of Stanford University and butted heads with Jane Stanford often. He died in 1931, outliving Jane by more than 20 years. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While Stanford’s household fell under suspicion, another person absolutely had the motive, White said: Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan. Just a few weeks before the first poisoning attempt, Jordan had not only discovered that Stanford intended to fire him, but had been working with colleagues to try to take control of the university’s finances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the news of Jane Stanford’s death, Jordan jumped on a boat to Oahu: “Ostensibly to bring her body home,” White said, “but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On arrival in Honolulu, Jordan hired another doctor to deliver a verdict on the death, one who contradicted the earlier account of strychnine poisoning, “though he has not examined the body,” and “doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, an inquiry which neatly concluded that rather than being poisoned, Stanford had instead died of a heart attack. \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SRPD19051231.2.17&srpos=5&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">He also used the local papers\u003c/a> to discredit the Hawaii authorities, creating a general air of — as White put it — “There’s nothing to see here, there’s nothing to look at, let’s get on with things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University: That she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A suspect in plain sight\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>While Jordan certainly acted suspiciously, White said that “the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan may have had several reasons to want Jane Stanford out of the picture, but he wasn’t actually present at either poisoning attempt. He lacked the opportunity to poison her himself. “Sometimes you just get really lucky,” White said. “He wanted her killed, and she was killed.\u003cbr>\n[aside postID=news_11894939 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/3738571926_99e9526967_o-1020x683.jpg']For White, there’s a far more persuasive suspect hiding in plain sight: Stanford’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Berner had been in Stanford’s service from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Leland Junior. She was, by all accounts, “a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman,” White said — and he believes Berner’s decision not to marry was a strategic, practical move.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not only would marriage have meant giving up traveling the world with Jane Stanford and access to high society, but Berner was also the sole caretaker for her sick mother. “She really cannot afford to give up this job,” White said. And Stanford knew it, even going so far as to sabotage any romantic relationships Berner dared to have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The relationship between the two women became “incredibly rocky,” White said, to the point where Berner quit Stanford’s employ several times. “But she always comes back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not convinced? How about this for motive — Berner was a beneficiary in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And at the time of the second poisoning attempt, Berner’s mother became even sicker. Berner even declined to join Stanford on her Hawaii trip due to fears about her mother’s ailing health, but her employer insisted that Berner make the trip if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Stanford clearly did not harbor any suspicions that her trusted companion and secretary of many years had anything to do with the first attempt on her life, she was nonetheless aware that Berner was romantically involved with Stanford’s own butler — and that the pair had been “embezzling money from her,” White said. “She can hang that over Bertha Berner’s head.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A killer walks free?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To White, when added together, Berner’s motives are convincing. Her trusted position meant she also had the opportunity to poison Stanford, and she was present at both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White’s research shows Berner also had the means to kill Jane Stanford. By the time Berner left for Hawaii, she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist. This association provided “a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine,” White said. “Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061780\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061780\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1362\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-160x109.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-1536x1046.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, bats in a faculty versus student baseball game, a tradition on campus. Jordan often butted heads with Jane Stanford over how to run the university and covered up her death by poisoning in 1905. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>White suspects that university president Jordan may have suspected Berner at the time, and that he may have actively protected her after Jane Stanford’s demise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He does it in writing,” White said: “He reassures her that, ‘we know you didn’t do it; we’re going take care of you; you have nothing to worry about.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And even if other people close to Jane Stanford suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, nobody wanted to bring that kind of scandal upon Stanford University, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University, next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to its final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The man who led the cover-up of her murder now led the walk from the church to her tomb. And walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" data-testid=\"embed-iframe\" style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/63j9eNYdy78nVPUzUJ791e?utm_source=generator&theme=0\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Stanford University is undeniably a Bay Area icon with the pedigree to match.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Founded back in the late 19th century, this private institution sprawling over 8,000 manicured acres on the sunny San Francisco peninsula is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities. It has 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short: not the kind of place you’d necessarily expect to harbor a century-old mystery full of skulduggery, lies and poison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s exactly what lies beneath Stanford’s history. Because the woman who co-founded this place, Jane Stanford, died in very strange circumstances in 1905. And although the official verdict was natural causes, some suspect something far more sinister happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today on Bay Curious, we’re following the historic breadcrumbs to discover who might have been responsible. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> What really happened to Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, who died suddenly in 1905?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED’s Carly Severn brings us the historic mystery — and dastardly cover-up — that a lot of people in the Bay Area still don’t know about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn:\u003c/strong> Death by poisoning is a nasty way to go. But strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When this white powder gets into your body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to your muscles resulting in overwhelming, painful spasms all over. Your jaw locks tight. Your limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill you within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but it doesn’t smell of anything. And as an ingredient in rat bait, and even some medicines in the 19th and early twentieth centuries, it was a very popular way to poison someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what if I told you that 120 years ago, the co-founder of Stanford University found this out first-hand. And almost nobody is talking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard White is a professor emeritus in Stanford University’s history department. Several years ago he was TEACHING students how to use the university’s own archives to investigate historical conundrums … and he asked them to find out what happened to Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard found there was a lot his students couldn’t uncover about this case, prompting him to turn historical detective after the class had long ended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he started looking into it he was baffled this wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially because a physician at Stanford Medical School had already written a book showing that Jane Stanford had 100% been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And the university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack. And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university, but it hadn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>To get to the bottom of this mystery, let’s wind back all the way to 1828 when Jane Stanford entered this world in upstate New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a young woman, Jane married Leland Stanford, a businessman and politician who made his fortune in the railroad business, and who briefly served as governor of California in the 1860s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane gave birth to her only child — also called Leland — when she was 39. And she doted on him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then tragedy struck in 1884, when that son died of typhoid. And in their grief, the Stanfords looked for ways to honor his memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And so, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened a university on the Peninsula calling it Leland Stanford Junior University, after their son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just two years later, Jane’s husband died. And at age 65, Jane found herself in charge of the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard says Leland Stanford had mismanaged University funds and his own fortune for a long time. So for the next several years, Jane was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t tank her considerable fortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is really where the trouble began. Because Jane’s way of managing affairs at Stanford University made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White:\u003c/strong> Once she gets power she uses it ruthlessly. She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power, so much so that she makes a great many enemies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but treated those students terribly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And when it came to men, Jane particularly butted heads with the president of Stanford University: David Starr Jordan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford runs Stanford University as a personal fiefdom. David Starr Jordan is devoted to the university, but he knows that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford was also a Spiritualist, a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. And like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Jane was motivated by personal tragedy beginning with the death of her son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She never gets over that. She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time and quite another for the leader of a major university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane’s Spiritualism became a big problem for Stanford University and for its president, Jordan. Because Jane told people that she was using her seances to receive instructions from her dead husband and son on how to run Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The great fear of Stanford University is that they’re gonna discover that Jane Stanford is a spiritualist and that’s gonna endanger all the legal documents she signs. It’s very hard to uphold the legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane’s beliefs were a constant source of stress for Jordan. And their relationship deteriorated even further when Jane made him fire a professor friend of his, sparking a scandal about academic freedom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while trying to navigate all of this, Jordan made a discovery:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He also realizes that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>In 1905, when Jane was 76, someone tried to poison her not once, but twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first attempt, at her Nob Hill mansion, was unsuccessful. Jane complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of spring water and called for her staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>One of them was her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner, who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha and the maids helped Jane to vomit. And when that water bottle was tested, the verdict came back: it was strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it wasn’t pure strychnine. Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people, had dumped rat poison in it. The rat poison had caused her to vomit. She felt very sick, but she recovered from it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>The people around Jane advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal. And to get the hell out of dodge away from the poisoner who might try again with something even stronger than rat poison this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Jane left for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which leads us to the second poisoning. Just over a month after the first attempt, Jane woke up in the middle of the night in her Oahu hotel and screamed for Bertha. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Somebody obtained pure strychnine, put it in her water and she died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in. The doctors looked at her, she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And this was the story that was reported by the earliest newspaper accounts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reads newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Oceanside Blade, March 1905: Mrs. Jane Stanford of San Francisco … died at Honolulu Wednesday under suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine which had been mixed with bicarbonate of soda taken as a medicine … Mrs. Stanford had taken the medicine and retired but was soon afterward seized with violent convulsions dying in a few minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Naturally, Jane’s household was under suspicion. But another person absolutely had the motive — David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just a few weeks before Jane was poisoned the first time he’d found out that she was planning to fire him. And Richard says Jordan had also been trying to take control from Jane of those Stanford finances via some pretty shady means.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And now, Jane was dead and Jordan was on a boat to Hawaii.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Ostensibly to bring her body home, but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict. He hires another doctor. He says she didn’t die of strychnine poisoning, though he has not examined the body, doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning, and he discredits doctors who in fact are much more senior and well-known than him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, which neatly concluded that instead of being poisoned, Jane had died of a heart attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan also used the newspapers to discredit the Hawaii authorities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Press Democrat, December 1905: According to Dr. Jordan no strychnine was found in Mrs. Stanford’s room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>There’s nothing to see here. There’s nothing to look at. Let’s get on with things. And it is a conspiracy to cover up her death and the conspiracy worked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Because in 1905 — before widespread telephones, before the internet — covering up someone’s death like this across an ocean no less was in many ways a lot simpler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University, that she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So you’re hearing all this and thinking: well, it’s so clearly this guy right? David Starr Jordan’s the murderer? He’s the one trying to cover up her death! I mean, what more do we need??\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And that’s what a lot of people think, except that the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>For one thing, he’s not present at the scene of either poisoning attempt. And he definitely wasn’t anywhere near Hawaii the second time. So while he had the motive, he doesn’t actually have the opportunity to poison her himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>It’s one of those times where for David Starr Jordan, you just think sometimes you just get really lucky. He wanted her killed and she was killed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it wasn’t David Starr Jordan, who did kill Jane Stanford?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well if you’ve watched one murder mystery in your life, you’ve probably learned to watch out for that one “harmless” background character who keeps popping up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so you might be wondering, what about Jane’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary: Bertha Berner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bertha had been employed by Jane from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Jane’s son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And Bertha Berner, by all accounts, was both a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha never married, which wasn’t that unusual for the time, but Richard says that was a strategic, practical decision she made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>First of all, it would give up her job that she has with Stanford, traveling around the world, the access to a society which otherwise she would have no access to. And secondly, she becomes the sole support of her mother. She really cannot afford to give up this job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And Jane knew it. Richard says this gave her carte blanche to treat Bertha like a true “frenemy,” even going so far as to sabotage Bertha’s romantic relationships when she dared to have them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Their relationship becomes incredibly rocky. Bertha Berner refuses to put up with it. And several times, which rarely shows up until I started looking at it, she leaves Jane Stanford’s employ, sometimes for years at a time. But she always comes back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Another reason that Bertha stuck around through it all … she was in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is where we come to Richard’s theory about Bertha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the second poisoning attempt coincides with Bertha’s mother getting really sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>When Jane Stanford asked her to come to Hawaii, says, I can’t. My mother’s dying. I have to stay here and take care of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But Jane insisted she make the journey if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane clearly still trusted Bertha and harbored zero suspicions she’d been involved in the first poisoning. Although she did have some dirt on Bertha:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Bertha Berner has had an affair with Albert Beverly, who’s Jane Stanford’s butler at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Yup, there’s a shady butler in this mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford knows about that. And she also knows that both of them have been embezzling money from her. She can hang that over Bertha Berners head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>As all good mysteries show, a killer needs the means, the motive, and the opportunity. And according to Richard, Bertha had all three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She had the motive: anger at her years of mistreatment by Jane, fear that her embezzlement might be exposed, and financial incentive, from being in the will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>If she can get away with the murder, she will have money in the will. She will in fact be able to continue to take care of her mother and she can set herself up not comfortably, but well enough to last for the rest of her life, which she does do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>She also had the physical opportunity. All of Jane’s servants were suspects in the first poisoning, but Bertha was the only one who’d been present for both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the means. That first poisoning, with the rat poison, had been clumsy. But by the time Bertha left for Hawaii, Richard says she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He becomes a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine. Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Guess the Butler was out of the picture?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some time after Jane died, Bertha also did something really weird. She wrote a tell-all book about Jane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She doesn’t mention the affairs, she doesn’t mentioned the embezzling, but what she says is Jane Stanford had money and she knew the power of money. She used it like a queen. She dominated everyone around her. She got what she wanted and she forced people to do what she want them to do because she has control over her money. Which sounds very much like the reason why, in fact, in the end, she will kill her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it was Bertha, even if Stanford president David Starr Jordan wasn’t in on it, did he know?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richard says he’s pretty sure the answer is yes, given how Jordan treated Bertha after the murder:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>What he does, and this he does in writing, is he reassures her that we know you didn’t do it, we’re gonna take care of you, you have nothing to worry about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And even if other people close to Jane suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, they didn’t want to bring that kind of smoke to Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to her final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Starr Jordan — the man who led the cover-up of her murder — led the walk from the church to her tomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the final insult? Walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The woman I think, murdered her.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>When you made as many enemies in life as Jane Stanford not even your funeral is safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That was KQED’s Carly Severn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious has published many episodes over the years that get into the spookier side of Bay Area history. If you’re looking for a little thrill this All Hallow’s Eve, check out our spooky Spotify playlist linked in the show notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, don’t forget to grab yourself a ticket to our trivia night. It’s on Thursday, November 13 at KQED headquarters in San Francisco. Come alone or with a team. It will be a lot of fun! Tickets are at kqed.org/events.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Christopher Beale, Gabriela Glueck, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween tomorrow. See you next week!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cbr>\nFounded in 1885, Stanford University is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities, not to mention its 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003cbr>\nThis manicured institution on the San Francisco peninsula isn’t necessarily the kind of place you’d expect to harbor a century-old murder mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But 120 years ago this year, the university’s co-founder, Jane Stanford, died suddenly one winter evening. And although the official verdict was natural causes, the original coroner’s report indicated something far more sinister: poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what really happened to Jane Stanford in 1905? It’s a question that preoccupies Richard White, Stanford University history professor emeritus and author of \u003ca href=\"https://history.stanford.edu/people/richard-white\">\u003cem>Who Killed Jane Stanford\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several years ago, White was teaching his students how to use the Stanford University archives. He asked them to research the curious history of Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061787\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1594px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061787\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1594\" height=\"2500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg 1594w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-160x251.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-979x1536.jpg 979w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-1306x2048.jpg 1306w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1594px) 100vw, 1594px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Portrait of Jane Stanford with her son, Leland Jr., before he died of typhoid in 1884. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When his students kept hitting roadblocks in the archives, an intrigued White couldn’t resist looking into the story himself — and soon found himself baffled that the death of Jane Stanford wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially since Stanford Medical School physician Robert Cutler had \u003ca href=\"https://www.sup.org/books/history/mysterious-death-jane-stanford\">already published a 2003 book\u003c/a> concluding that she did not die of natural causes, but had instead been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack,” White said. “And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university — but it hadn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.stanford.edu/about/history/\">The university’s history webpage\u003c/a> doesn’t mention the death of Jane Stanford at all, let alone the fact that she may well have been murdered. (Stanford University didn’t respond to our request for official comment on their co-founder’s death.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But one thing is certain: strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die. When this white powder gets into the body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to a person’s muscles, inducing waves of painful spasms. The jaw locks tight and the limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but is odorless, making it a notoriously popular way to poison a person in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also an ingredient in rat bait — and even some medicines — making it easy to obtain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence,” White said. And after much research, he has a theory about who ended Jane Stanford’s life.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A ‘personal fiefdom’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was born Jane Lathrop in 1828 in upstate New York. At the age of 22, she married Leland Stanford, a railroad baron, who briefly served as governor of California from 1862 to 1863, and then a U.S. senator for almost a decade starting in 1885.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 39, Jane Stanford gave birth to \u003ca href=\"https://stanfordmag.org/contents/about-a-boy\">her only child, Leland Stanford Jr\u003c/a>., but Leland Jr. died from typhoid in his teens. “She never gets over that,” White said. “She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In their grief, the Stanfords sought ways to honor Leland Jr.’s memory. At this time, “California has great ambitions beyond just being a sort of outpost of wealth in the West,” White said. “It wants to become a cultural leader, an industrial leader. And so, founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened their university on the San Francisco Peninsula, called Leland Stanford Junior University. But Leland Stanford Sr would only live two more years before he too died, in 1893.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 65, Jane Stanford found herself in charge of the new university — a heavy responsibility compounded, White said, by Leland Sr’s financial mismanagement of both the university’s funds and the Stanfords’ own money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the next several years, Jane Stanford was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t further tank her considerable fortune. But her methods of managing the university’s affairs swiftly made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once she gets power, she uses it ruthlessly,” White said. “She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power — so much so that she makes a great many enemies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but then treated those same students poorly. The women in her personal life found this out firsthand — chief among them her longtime companion and secretary, Bertha Berner, “who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061782\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061782\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1387\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-1536x1065.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Stanford women’s basketball team circa 1896. Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, insisted that women be admitted from the school’s inception in 1891. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While running the university as what White called “a personal fiefdom,” Jane Stanford butted heads often with the institution’s president, David Starr Jordan. While “devoted” to the university, Jordan knew “that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford’s religious beliefs were also a major headache for Jordan. She was a Spiritualist: a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. Like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Stanford was motivated by the losses in her own life: the death of her son and husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in the Victorian era, the sheer prevalence of death through disease and infant mortality meant that virtually everyone was surrounded by tragedies like Stanford’s. But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time, and quite another for the leader of a major university. Not least because Stanford told people that she was using those seances to receive instructions on how to run the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan and his Stanford University colleagues lived in fear of their boss’s Spiritualism becoming common knowledge, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s going to endanger all the legal documents she signs,” he said. “It’s very hard to uphold a legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for Jordan, things soon got even worse, White said – when he realized “that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this leads us to 1905, when 76-year-old Jane Stanford was poisoned not once but twice. She did not survive the second attempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A cover-up across an ocean\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first poisoning attempt in January 1905, inside Jane Stanford’s San Francisco mansion, was unsuccessful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of Poland Spring water and called out for her household staff, including her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner. After vomiting, Stanford recovered — and when the water was tested, strychnine was found.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp> However, it wasn’t a pure form of the poison in the bottle. “Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people had dumped rat poison in it,” White said. Other ingredients in the rat poison had caused Stanford to vomit, which saved her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford’s inner circle advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal that could taint the university, and to get far away from San Francisco and a poisoner who might try again. So just over a month later, Stanford departed for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her attempts to evade her poisoner proved unsuccessful. On February 28, 1905, Stanford woke up in her Oahu hotel in the middle of the night and screamed out for Berner. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in,” White said — and the medical evaluation swiftly concluded she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. “Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was the story reported by the earliest newspaper accounts, like that of \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=BT19050304.2.29&srpos=10&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">the Oceanside Blade in Southern California\u003c/a> on March 4, 1905, which noted the “suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine.\u003cstrong>”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061783\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2047px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061783\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2047\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg 2047w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-2000x2501.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-160x200.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1228x1536.jpg 1228w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1638x2048.jpg 1638w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2047px) 100vw, 2047px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan was the first president of Stanford University and butted heads with Jane Stanford often. He died in 1931, outliving Jane by more than 20 years. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While Stanford’s household fell under suspicion, another person absolutely had the motive, White said: Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan. Just a few weeks before the first poisoning attempt, Jordan had not only discovered that Stanford intended to fire him, but had been working with colleagues to try to take control of the university’s finances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the news of Jane Stanford’s death, Jordan jumped on a boat to Oahu: “Ostensibly to bring her body home,” White said, “but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On arrival in Honolulu, Jordan hired another doctor to deliver a verdict on the death, one who contradicted the earlier account of strychnine poisoning, “though he has not examined the body,” and “doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, an inquiry which neatly concluded that rather than being poisoned, Stanford had instead died of a heart attack. \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SRPD19051231.2.17&srpos=5&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">He also used the local papers\u003c/a> to discredit the Hawaii authorities, creating a general air of — as White put it — “There’s nothing to see here, there’s nothing to look at, let’s get on with things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University: That she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A suspect in plain sight\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>While Jordan certainly acted suspiciously, White said that “the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan may have had several reasons to want Jane Stanford out of the picture, but he wasn’t actually present at either poisoning attempt. He lacked the opportunity to poison her himself. “Sometimes you just get really lucky,” White said. “He wanted her killed, and she was killed.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>For White, there’s a far more persuasive suspect hiding in plain sight: Stanford’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Berner had been in Stanford’s service from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Leland Junior. She was, by all accounts, “a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman,” White said — and he believes Berner’s decision not to marry was a strategic, practical move.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not only would marriage have meant giving up traveling the world with Jane Stanford and access to high society, but Berner was also the sole caretaker for her sick mother. “She really cannot afford to give up this job,” White said. And Stanford knew it, even going so far as to sabotage any romantic relationships Berner dared to have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The relationship between the two women became “incredibly rocky,” White said, to the point where Berner quit Stanford’s employ several times. “But she always comes back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not convinced? How about this for motive — Berner was a beneficiary in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And at the time of the second poisoning attempt, Berner’s mother became even sicker. Berner even declined to join Stanford on her Hawaii trip due to fears about her mother’s ailing health, but her employer insisted that Berner make the trip if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Stanford clearly did not harbor any suspicions that her trusted companion and secretary of many years had anything to do with the first attempt on her life, she was nonetheless aware that Berner was romantically involved with Stanford’s own butler — and that the pair had been “embezzling money from her,” White said. “She can hang that over Bertha Berner’s head.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A killer walks free?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To White, when added together, Berner’s motives are convincing. Her trusted position meant she also had the opportunity to poison Stanford, and she was present at both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White’s research shows Berner also had the means to kill Jane Stanford. By the time Berner left for Hawaii, she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist. This association provided “a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine,” White said. “Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061780\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061780\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1362\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-160x109.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-1536x1046.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, bats in a faculty versus student baseball game, a tradition on campus. Jordan often butted heads with Jane Stanford over how to run the university and covered up her death by poisoning in 1905. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>White suspects that university president Jordan may have suspected Berner at the time, and that he may have actively protected her after Jane Stanford’s demise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He does it in writing,” White said: “He reassures her that, ‘we know you didn’t do it; we’re going take care of you; you have nothing to worry about.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And even if other people close to Jane Stanford suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, nobody wanted to bring that kind of scandal upon Stanford University, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University, next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to its final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The man who led the cover-up of her murder now led the walk from the church to her tomb. And walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" data-testid=\"embed-iframe\" style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/63j9eNYdy78nVPUzUJ791e?utm_source=generator&theme=0\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Stanford University is undeniably a Bay Area icon with the pedigree to match.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Founded back in the late 19th century, this private institution sprawling over 8,000 manicured acres on the sunny San Francisco peninsula is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities. It has 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short: not the kind of place you’d necessarily expect to harbor a century-old mystery full of skulduggery, lies and poison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s exactly what lies beneath Stanford’s history. Because the woman who co-founded this place, Jane Stanford, died in very strange circumstances in 1905. And although the official verdict was natural causes, some suspect something far more sinister happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today on Bay Curious, we’re following the historic breadcrumbs to discover who might have been responsible. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> What really happened to Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, who died suddenly in 1905?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED’s Carly Severn brings us the historic mystery — and dastardly cover-up — that a lot of people in the Bay Area still don’t know about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn:\u003c/strong> Death by poisoning is a nasty way to go. But strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When this white powder gets into your body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to your muscles resulting in overwhelming, painful spasms all over. Your jaw locks tight. Your limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill you within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but it doesn’t smell of anything. And as an ingredient in rat bait, and even some medicines in the 19th and early twentieth centuries, it was a very popular way to poison someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what if I told you that 120 years ago, the co-founder of Stanford University found this out first-hand. And almost nobody is talking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard White is a professor emeritus in Stanford University’s history department. Several years ago he was TEACHING students how to use the university’s own archives to investigate historical conundrums … and he asked them to find out what happened to Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard found there was a lot his students couldn’t uncover about this case, prompting him to turn historical detective after the class had long ended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he started looking into it he was baffled this wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially because a physician at Stanford Medical School had already written a book showing that Jane Stanford had 100% been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And the university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack. And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university, but it hadn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>To get to the bottom of this mystery, let’s wind back all the way to 1828 when Jane Stanford entered this world in upstate New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a young woman, Jane married Leland Stanford, a businessman and politician who made his fortune in the railroad business, and who briefly served as governor of California in the 1860s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane gave birth to her only child — also called Leland — when she was 39. And she doted on him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then tragedy struck in 1884, when that son died of typhoid. And in their grief, the Stanfords looked for ways to honor his memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And so, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened a university on the Peninsula calling it Leland Stanford Junior University, after their son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just two years later, Jane’s husband died. And at age 65, Jane found herself in charge of the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard says Leland Stanford had mismanaged University funds and his own fortune for a long time. So for the next several years, Jane was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t tank her considerable fortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is really where the trouble began. Because Jane’s way of managing affairs at Stanford University made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White:\u003c/strong> Once she gets power she uses it ruthlessly. She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power, so much so that she makes a great many enemies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but treated those students terribly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And when it came to men, Jane particularly butted heads with the president of Stanford University: David Starr Jordan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford runs Stanford University as a personal fiefdom. David Starr Jordan is devoted to the university, but he knows that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford was also a Spiritualist, a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. And like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Jane was motivated by personal tragedy beginning with the death of her son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She never gets over that. She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time and quite another for the leader of a major university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane’s Spiritualism became a big problem for Stanford University and for its president, Jordan. Because Jane told people that she was using her seances to receive instructions from her dead husband and son on how to run Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The great fear of Stanford University is that they’re gonna discover that Jane Stanford is a spiritualist and that’s gonna endanger all the legal documents she signs. It’s very hard to uphold the legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane’s beliefs were a constant source of stress for Jordan. And their relationship deteriorated even further when Jane made him fire a professor friend of his, sparking a scandal about academic freedom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while trying to navigate all of this, Jordan made a discovery:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He also realizes that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>In 1905, when Jane was 76, someone tried to poison her not once, but twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first attempt, at her Nob Hill mansion, was unsuccessful. Jane complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of spring water and called for her staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>One of them was her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner, who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha and the maids helped Jane to vomit. And when that water bottle was tested, the verdict came back: it was strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it wasn’t pure strychnine. Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people, had dumped rat poison in it. The rat poison had caused her to vomit. She felt very sick, but she recovered from it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>The people around Jane advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal. And to get the hell out of dodge away from the poisoner who might try again with something even stronger than rat poison this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Jane left for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which leads us to the second poisoning. Just over a month after the first attempt, Jane woke up in the middle of the night in her Oahu hotel and screamed for Bertha. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Somebody obtained pure strychnine, put it in her water and she died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in. The doctors looked at her, she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And this was the story that was reported by the earliest newspaper accounts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reads newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Oceanside Blade, March 1905: Mrs. Jane Stanford of San Francisco … died at Honolulu Wednesday under suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine which had been mixed with bicarbonate of soda taken as a medicine … Mrs. Stanford had taken the medicine and retired but was soon afterward seized with violent convulsions dying in a few minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Naturally, Jane’s household was under suspicion. But another person absolutely had the motive — David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just a few weeks before Jane was poisoned the first time he’d found out that she was planning to fire him. And Richard says Jordan had also been trying to take control from Jane of those Stanford finances via some pretty shady means.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And now, Jane was dead and Jordan was on a boat to Hawaii.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Ostensibly to bring her body home, but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict. He hires another doctor. He says she didn’t die of strychnine poisoning, though he has not examined the body, doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning, and he discredits doctors who in fact are much more senior and well-known than him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, which neatly concluded that instead of being poisoned, Jane had died of a heart attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan also used the newspapers to discredit the Hawaii authorities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Press Democrat, December 1905: According to Dr. Jordan no strychnine was found in Mrs. Stanford’s room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>There’s nothing to see here. There’s nothing to look at. Let’s get on with things. And it is a conspiracy to cover up her death and the conspiracy worked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Because in 1905 — before widespread telephones, before the internet — covering up someone’s death like this across an ocean no less was in many ways a lot simpler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University, that she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So you’re hearing all this and thinking: well, it’s so clearly this guy right? David Starr Jordan’s the murderer? He’s the one trying to cover up her death! I mean, what more do we need??\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And that’s what a lot of people think, except that the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>For one thing, he’s not present at the scene of either poisoning attempt. And he definitely wasn’t anywhere near Hawaii the second time. So while he had the motive, he doesn’t actually have the opportunity to poison her himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>It’s one of those times where for David Starr Jordan, you just think sometimes you just get really lucky. He wanted her killed and she was killed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it wasn’t David Starr Jordan, who did kill Jane Stanford?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well if you’ve watched one murder mystery in your life, you’ve probably learned to watch out for that one “harmless” background character who keeps popping up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so you might be wondering, what about Jane’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary: Bertha Berner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bertha had been employed by Jane from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Jane’s son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And Bertha Berner, by all accounts, was both a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha never married, which wasn’t that unusual for the time, but Richard says that was a strategic, practical decision she made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>First of all, it would give up her job that she has with Stanford, traveling around the world, the access to a society which otherwise she would have no access to. And secondly, she becomes the sole support of her mother. She really cannot afford to give up this job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And Jane knew it. Richard says this gave her carte blanche to treat Bertha like a true “frenemy,” even going so far as to sabotage Bertha’s romantic relationships when she dared to have them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Their relationship becomes incredibly rocky. Bertha Berner refuses to put up with it. And several times, which rarely shows up until I started looking at it, she leaves Jane Stanford’s employ, sometimes for years at a time. But she always comes back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Another reason that Bertha stuck around through it all … she was in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is where we come to Richard’s theory about Bertha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the second poisoning attempt coincides with Bertha’s mother getting really sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>When Jane Stanford asked her to come to Hawaii, says, I can’t. My mother’s dying. I have to stay here and take care of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But Jane insisted she make the journey if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane clearly still trusted Bertha and harbored zero suspicions she’d been involved in the first poisoning. Although she did have some dirt on Bertha:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Bertha Berner has had an affair with Albert Beverly, who’s Jane Stanford’s butler at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Yup, there’s a shady butler in this mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford knows about that. And she also knows that both of them have been embezzling money from her. She can hang that over Bertha Berners head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>As all good mysteries show, a killer needs the means, the motive, and the opportunity. And according to Richard, Bertha had all three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She had the motive: anger at her years of mistreatment by Jane, fear that her embezzlement might be exposed, and financial incentive, from being in the will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>If she can get away with the murder, she will have money in the will. She will in fact be able to continue to take care of her mother and she can set herself up not comfortably, but well enough to last for the rest of her life, which she does do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>She also had the physical opportunity. All of Jane’s servants were suspects in the first poisoning, but Bertha was the only one who’d been present for both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the means. That first poisoning, with the rat poison, had been clumsy. But by the time Bertha left for Hawaii, Richard says she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He becomes a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine. Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Guess the Butler was out of the picture?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some time after Jane died, Bertha also did something really weird. She wrote a tell-all book about Jane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She doesn’t mention the affairs, she doesn’t mentioned the embezzling, but what she says is Jane Stanford had money and she knew the power of money. She used it like a queen. She dominated everyone around her. She got what she wanted and she forced people to do what she want them to do because she has control over her money. Which sounds very much like the reason why, in fact, in the end, she will kill her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it was Bertha, even if Stanford president David Starr Jordan wasn’t in on it, did he know?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richard says he’s pretty sure the answer is yes, given how Jordan treated Bertha after the murder:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>What he does, and this he does in writing, is he reassures her that we know you didn’t do it, we’re gonna take care of you, you have nothing to worry about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And even if other people close to Jane suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, they didn’t want to bring that kind of smoke to Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to her final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Starr Jordan — the man who led the cover-up of her murder — led the walk from the church to her tomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the final insult? Walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The woman I think, murdered her.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>When you made as many enemies in life as Jane Stanford not even your funeral is safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That was KQED’s Carly Severn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious has published many episodes over the years that get into the spookier side of Bay Area history. If you’re looking for a little thrill this All Hallow’s Eve, check out our spooky Spotify playlist linked in the show notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, don’t forget to grab yourself a ticket to our trivia night. It’s on Thursday, November 13 at KQED headquarters in San Francisco. Come alone or with a team. It will be a lot of fun! Tickets are at kqed.org/events.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Christopher Beale, Gabriela Glueck, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween tomorrow. See you next week!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "the-return-of-mabuhay-gardens-the-punk-club-that-changed-san-francisco",
"title": "The Return of Mabuhay Gardens: The Punk Club That Changed San Francisco",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Few places are as legendary in San Francisco’s punk scene as Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Located on Broadway, at the edge of North Beach and Chinatown, it was ground zero for the city’s emerging punk movement in the late 1970s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hybrid Filipino restaurant and music venue hosted bands like the Avengers and the Dead Kennedys — even punk rock icon Patti Smith took the stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When it closed in 1987, much of the city’s punk history seemed to fade with it. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13980619/mabuhay-gardens-reopening-sf-punk-club-north-beach\">But nearly 40 years later, a group of investors and enthusiasts is working to bring the so-called “Fab Mab” back to life.\u003c/a> We dig into the history and legacy of Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are few places as revered in the San Francisco punk music scene as a place called Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12060034\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12060034\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"670\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg 1000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience-160x107.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Punk band with Zippy Pinhead performing at Mabuhay Gardens; includes Vince Deranged of Animal Things in the audience, 1978. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Mindaugis Bagdon, San Francisco Punk Archive, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To play, you need a place, be it where you live, the street, a venue. For unrestricted play, you need an unrestricted playground. Dirk Dirksen envisioned the Fab Mab just as such a playground. Without him and the Mab, there might not have been the great punk scene in the late 1970s in San Francisco. The San Francisco punk scene was fun. I miss it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Located on Broadway, right on the edge of North Beach and Chinatown, Mabuhay Gardens, actually a nightclub, was ground zero for a nascent punk scene in late 1970s San Francisco. Bands like the Avengers, Dead Kennedys, The Nuns, and Patti Smith played there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Announcer:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s gonna part for a woman. I think Patti died. I’m gonna get her for this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Originally a Filipino supper club, Mabuhay Gardens was part of the small but vibrant community known as Manilatown. Redevelopment, gentrification, and other factors in the late 1970s forced many of the Filipino residents of Manilatown out. They moved to other neighborhoods or out of the city entirely. But Mabuhay Gardens remained and took on a surprising new life as a punk club.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Audio from Mabuhay Gardens:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Are you ready for some breakdancing right now?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Katrina Schwartz, and you’re listening to Bay Curious. Today on the show, we’re transporting you back to the epicenter of San Francisco’s ’70s punk scene. And we’ll learn why Mabuhay Gardens was such an important place to so many people. Stay with us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor message\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Legendary punk music venue Mabuhay Gardens, known to fans as the Fab Mab, has been closed since 1987. But it reopened this month to great fanfare from local music lovers. To understand what this place meant to San Francisco’s punk scene, we’re immersing you in 1970s North Beach. Producer Brandi Howell brings us this story, which first aired on the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_98_b3e69dbd-c23d-498a-9e79-6ea56ec10ad7&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.fugitivewaves.org%2Ffugitivewaves\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kitchen Sisters Presents podcast.[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The Mabuhay was not your average rock club.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here was this little club all of a sudden attracting the energy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Dills, Negative Trend, The Avengers…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, of course, you are going to say, “Oh, what is going on over there?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More and more people started coming to town. The Ramones played there. Blondie played there. It just became the punk mecca.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I was real young, I would go by and see this place. It was there for years.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The music itself was nothing really developed yet in the very beginning. It was just a supper club. People would do the Mabuhay dance and stuff like that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Dirk was helping Ness with the Amapola show. Amapola was this Filipino night club singer, and she was popular within the Filipino community and had a TV show on Channel 26 and a number of characters from The Mab had performed there. My name is Denise Demise Dunne. I was Dirk’s assistant at the very beginning of The Mab.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hi, welcome to The Counter Culture Hour. I’m your host, V Vale, and I published starting in ‘77 Search and Destroy, the punk publication chronicling the rise of the punk rock cultural revolution. My guest tonight is Dirk Dirksen, the impresario of The Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We were open for 10 years, did 3,600 plus concerts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The thing was at the time, things were so conservative that no club wanted anything to do with punk rock until Dirk Dirksen showed up and made The Mabuhay Gardens available.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ness downstairs at The Mabuhay was having a tough go of it, so I came in and said, Look — how about if you give us Monday nights because that is your dark night. Let me try that, and I will guarantee you $175 a night at the bar. I didn’t have $175 at the time, but I figured there are enough people I know that if I say, “Hey, c’mon down,” and if they each drink two beers, we’ll meet the guarantee. And within a very short time, we were grossing more on the Monday than he was grossing on the weekend with name Filipino acts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My name is Mindy Bagdon. My film’s name is “Louder Faster Shorter”. At one point on Mondays, which was a dead period on the Broadway strip, Dirk convinced Ness Aquino, who owned the club, to let him put on different acts. Little by little, it went from sort of vaudevillian variety acts to where The Nuns, who were one of the first groups to play there, apparently, they went up to Dirk and they found out this venue was available and they said, Well, can we put on a show? And I remember I was walking up Grant Avenue and Vale’s then girlfriend was coming down, and proceeding me was the drummer for The Nuns and he was handing out flyers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My girlfriend who looked like a rocker — I guess I looked like one too, you know with platform shoes and spiked hair and all that junk, just superficial style — my girlfriend was walking down the street and a really short guy said, Hey…feel like coming to our band’s debut at The Mabuhay Gardens, which none of us had heard of because it was Filipino. I’ll put you on the guest list! Those are the magic words for any so-called real punk rocker. So we went, and then the rest is history.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The first time we went to The Mabuhay, there were more people on stage than there were in the audience, because it hadn’t gotten around. But within two weeks, it was packed. I mean, word got around town. Don’t forget this is before the internet, before smartphones; it was literally person-to-person or on the telephone or snail mail to say this venue was doing this. And like I said, within two weeks, it was jammed. The joke was Bruce Conner, the famous artist, said — You’d be watching a band and you said, well, I can do this too. So you’d go home and learn at least one chord on your bass and you’d get on the stand and you were the audience one week and now you are on the stage.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m Kathy Peck, bass player for The Contractions and the co-founder and executive director of H.E.A.R., Hearing Education Awareness for Rockers. I came here with Don Peck and he was playing drums with Mary Monday. She actually started the punk scene at The Mabuhay Gardens. She was like the first one. There were other people that played there, but she was the one that really…she was amazing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> She came from a dancer background, but she was really punk. She was just wild! And I would hear stuff at The Mab and see it being played. I loved the music. I got inspired by Mary, and I had a bass — a Hofner Beatle bass. I was learning to play. I was self-taught. Yeah, it was really exciting. People were like, they call it pogo-ing or whatever, slam dancing. It was like very crowded and electrifying.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Dirk at that point asked me to be his assistant, and it was like, Yeah, but I can’t type. Because I basically avoided typing because as a female you get pigeoned-holed into being someone’s assistant. And he said, Well, you don’t have to type that much, and you get to do a lot of things around there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pretty often during the evening, he would be wearing what looks like the Groucho Marx nose with the glasses and eyebrows, except this one had a dildo instead of a nose. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Mustache, glasses, a bit overweight. I remember the beige jacket, the beret on his hair, and the poodle in his arms. The was the first time I met Dirk.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> At the end of the evenings, of course, he’d come out on stage and tell everyone to get out, which no one is ever paying attention to. So he had a real police whistle which he would blow as hard as he could through the PA til people would leave. His favorite line was “We can’t make any more money off you, so get out!” I’m John Seabury. I started out playing in a band, Psychotic Pineapple, back in the ’70s, and I’m a graphic artist. I did all of the graphics for the band. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I went to this nightclub called The Night Break, I guess you go downstairs on Columbus. This guy walks up to me. This big eye ball T-shirt and this big chicken hawk hair, red flaming hair, and he looks at me and says, Do you play guitar? And I say yeah. And so we talk for a little bit, and within 30 days, we each get Marshall stacks. That’s how quick it was. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Before we were Crime, we were the Space Invaders. Ron Greco, Ron “The Ripper” Greco. I had a Gibson Ripper Bass and everybody goes — Man, you rip a lot! Ripper!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I took the job and would come in and help him go through all the paperwork. Listen to some of the demo tapes of the bands that came in. Get their press announcement, like Devo. I still remember it saying, Achtung, De-Revolution has begun!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I got the band members together and said, Let’s walk in and talk to the owner. We had a good time there talking to him, and so we arranged a show to play.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In 1977, I moved down to San Francisco to go to the Art Institute in North Beach. And after I got there, I started to see these posters around town for this band called Crime. And they were really intriguing posters and they weren’t like anything I’d ever seen. They were at a club called The Mabuhay. I was 19 at the time, but they let people in 18 or older, but they let people in because it was also a Filipino restaurant, so they were able to let minors in. My name is Penelope Houston, I’m in a band called The Avengers. We started in 1977. That was my first band. I’d been going to these shows and ran into Danny Furious, who ended up being The Avengers drummer. He had a friend in Los Angeles, Greg Ingraham, and he brought Greg to SF to be in a band with him. Danny had rented part of a warehouse out in Dogpatch, and they had a PA set up for their rehearsals. I was staying over there one day, hanging out, and everybody was gone, and I put on some records and started singing through the PA. I just fell in love with the power of amplification. I was like, this is so awesome. I’m so loud, and then when they got back, I said, I’m going to be your singer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When I found the club, I felt at home. I could be exactly who I was and still be part of it. I was freed. My name is Liz Keim and along with Karen Merchant, we created the film, In The Red. It’s a punk document of the late 1970s, mostly filmed at The Mab. For the last 40 years, I’ve also been working at the Exploratorium. I’ve been the director of the Cinema Arts program, and I’m one of the senior curators. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Oh, it was fabulous. There were people that came in for the first time to explore and they were still looking hippie. Then there were folks who had taken on the persona. Leather jacket, jeans, black pants, ripped T-shirts. You’d walk down the corridor, and there were all these little crevices with people hanging out there. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You’re a night creature, looking for that place to be that feels like home.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was one of those creatures cuz you’re just kind of there and you’re watching. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I went up to UC Davis to study art and that was a kind of isolating experience, when I came back into San Francisco I was looking for an intimacy in some ways. Looking for those smaller landscapes. I started filming. I prefer observing and critically assessing where I’m at, and I was drawn to the experimental film genre, so I wasn’t looking for something that followed a bell-curve narrative or, you know, was scripted outside of any experience I was living in. So for me, it was just capturing a kind of way of being in San Francisco. There were all kinds of relationships that didn’t have to feel permanent, where you didn’t have to have names, there was just something about a recognition.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There was just this excitement. There was the energy back to that word. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was about being in the mosh pit. It was about hanging on to someone I didn’t know just for counterbalance, and it was fine because my counterbalance was as into me as a counterbalance as I was into him or her as a counterbalance. You didn’t have to talk. You know, in some ways, we just talked through our bodies. Maybe The Mab was an analog experience for me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was at KSAN at that point, and Lou Reed came in for an interview; he was playing at the Old Waldorf. And he brought this guy in with him, and the DJ didn’t want to deal with him and said, Well, show him around. So we are talking and I’m showing him around and I’m telling this guy about The Mab and what’s going on cuz Lou has his show and I said, Oh, I’ll take you there. You know, and this was Jim Carroll. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Once we got in the Mabuhay, Dirk was really good to us. He had the sense of humor, he kind of got us. So sometimes he would have us open for someone really inappropriate, like the Jim Carroll Band or somebody like that, just because he was being perverse about it. We opened for Jim Carroll twice. And the second time word was out that Patti Smith was in town playing the old Waldorf and she is probably going to show up and jam. So the Mabuhay was double-packed that night. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patti Smith, Patti Smith, Patti Smith!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After the set, we were backstage and Dirk comes up and goes, Hey, you know, Patti Smith is coming. We were like, Yeah yeah, we heard. Well, she needs to borrow a guitar and we were like — No! Because we know she is going to break the guitar.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When Patti played the Mab, it was mesmerizing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Of course, most of the players in the scene at the time would have run home and gotten a guitar just to give to her to smash. Dirk goes off, and he comes back 10 minutes later and goes, Please guys, please….really, just one guitar for Patti. And we were like, No — forget it! So the band was on and Patti did show up, and it was really mobbed and all I could see of the band was the tops of their heads and then I just see the guitar overhead going smash, smash, smash and that was it. And it’s probably in a museum somewhere now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was awestruck. Like, wow! I mean, these are stupid words to come up with because it was just there and here’s this persona mixing this punk with poetry. It was like, yeah, this is it. This is just taking it to a whole different level. Because there were so many levels. There was the fun part, there was the political part, and here is the poetry — here is the art. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hanging outside was like the preamble or whatever. You got your sense of whether it was going to be crowded and what the energy was like. You didn’t just rush in. It was a lingering. The kind of slow meander and then you would hope to just squeeze in and get by admissions. And maybe having enough money for a beer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Early on, people would throw beer bottles at the stage and that was very dangerous. So they actually thought maybe we will put a screen up between the band and the audience but that didn’t sound like a good idea. So then he got the idea, Ah ha — I’m going to make 55-gallon drums of popcorn!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> All the super salty popcorn you could eat. I realize later the theory is that this makes you buy drinks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Free popcorn on the tables. It was really old popcorn and it wasn’t for eating — it was for throwing at the bands.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There would be this big mess of popcorn and jumbled chairs and tables knocked over and it was kind of like a disaster zone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I remember being in my house and all of a sudden just having this paradigm shift. The music was playing and all of a sudden, WHAP! Like — reality is not the same anymore. All of a sudden something woke up inside of me. I didn’t even know what it was called at that time, but it was like, Oh, something — something just changed here.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Not having much money, it was like, how to get into these places without it. You could sometimes climb in through the front window at The Mab and one time someone came and grabbed me and said, Dirk wants to talk to you in his office. So he goes, You don’t think I see you sneaking in all of the time! You know, no more of that. But it didn’t stop you. It was part of the culture. We were there to just get it however we could.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The first show we played at The Mab, we had been asked two weeks before if we would play this show — an after-party for The Nuns. Between when we heard about the gig and when we played it, we went to LA and were visiting with friends of mine from Seattle, The Screamers. Tomata du Plenty and Tommy Gear. And I remember Tommy and Tomato saying to me, Oh, you can’t do cover songs. You guys need to write your own songs. So we got back from LA and we had about a week to go and were like, all right, let’s write some original songs. So we sat down and wrote “Car Crash”, “I Believe in Me”, “Teenage Rebel” — maybe six songs, original songs, in that week. Then, when we got up to play our first time on a real stage in front of a real audience — for me anyway — and someone had written the setlist wrong and so the guitar player was playing a different song from the bass player and the drummer. And when the music started, I was like, Oh my god. Oh my god. I can’t do this. I don’t even know what song this is. It just sounds like a big mish-mash. I can’t remember the lyrics and I was so confused and we stopped playing a few seconds later and was like what? What song are we playing? And then they figured it out, and we started playing the same song and I was like, All right, OK. Here’s how it goes and I can actually do this. But for 10 long seconds there, I thought, Oh, it’s all gone out of my head. I can’t do this. This is a nightmare. So then we just piled through the set and some people who were there were like, that was really amazing. And we were like, Oh my god. That was such a car crash. Jan. 14, 1978, we’d been invited to support the [Sex] Pistols. We got there and the place was absolutely sold out. Between 5-and-6,000 people. The biggest show The Sex Pistols ever played and like 10 times bigger than the biggest show we’d ever played. So when The Nuns were up there performing the stage got covered in things people were throwing, and spit, it was just pretty rough. So we walked out after they were done to take our place on stage and the first thing that happened to me was I slipped on the stage because there was so much spit. And I almost hit the ground but I kind of caught myself and made my way carefully to my microphone. There is a video of the whole night. And you can see how when we start we were a little frightened and shaky and scared. And then as are set progressed we just got more and more confident and got stronger til at the end we were feeling pretty awesome. It was crazy because there were so many people there and they were all mashed together. People were getting squeezed out of the audience like pimples. And passed overhead like they were passing out. You’d look out at the sea of faces and see someone you knew and make eye contact with them and a second later they would disappear into the crowd. So it was intense, especially for us. We were used to seeing a lot of our friends right up front singing along with us and this was like a huge number of people who had never seen punk before and were there for the spectacle. You know, the circus. A lot of people out there, it was a pretty intense experience. I think the throwing of things increased when the Sex Pistols got out there because Johnny Rotten egged them on. Someone threw a camera on stage. He was like, Oh, thank you. Like he was really egging them on to throw stuff. It started out terrifying for us and ended up feeling very good. There were rumors that Sid’s bass was not even plugged in for that set. And I guess I would have to go back and listen to it to see if I could tell, but I think the band was pretty used to making their way through the set without counting on him. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Janet Clyde. I am one of the owners of Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach. I moved here in 1978 when I was 21. I got my first job in San Francisco at The Mabuhay Gardens. I knew how to waitress, I knew how to cocktail, and so it was basically pick up a tray. Dirk right there, he would be at the front, insulting people — What are you wearing, rat fur? He was just the funniest guy. Never took himself or anybody too seriously. And really good to the bands, like really good. You’d come in and it was this long, rectangular room with a low ceiling. Dark, cave-like — really dark — barebones, tables and chairs, bar in the back. You’d walk in and in the front a stage that was only a few feet high. And there was a back seating area that was raised a little bit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After they removed all of the tables and chairs and seating and all that junk then a lot more people could fit in. Legally, you could maybe cram in 200 people. The most crowded night I remember was some show with both Iggy, Blondie, and David Bowie were there in the audience. And somehow everyone found out about it, and that was the most crowded I’ve ever seen The Mabuhay.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’d go in at 10. There would be no one there at 10 at night, nobody there. But by 11–11:30 it would be packed! And I saw 999, Lene Lovich — I mean, more people than I can count — SVT! It was so much fun, so much fun! Two people stand out — waiting on Bill Graham, who terrified me — and waiting on The Clash, who also terrified me! The Clash, though, when Joe Strummer is asking you for a beer and you are just like, OK, and giving you money and you are trying to think about how to make change for this. Like, my brain has just disappeared. It was amazing! He gave me a $50 bill for the beers. I gave him back like $150 in change. I just could not count — I could not think! And the manager, I will never forget, he just took the money out of Strummer’s hand, put the money back into my hand. And then like you would with a child, counted back the change. Like, how much are the beers? They are this…OK then…here’s $12, $13, $14, $15, $20, $30, $50, boom. I will never forget that, it was the funniest thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Well, what happened was Dirksen started to do some gigs upstairs at the On Broadway. That was pretty successful for a while.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was when MTV was coming in, so there was a whole new chapter.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When the big earthquake and the freeway collapsed, that really cut people off from coming there really quickly.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I left The Mabuhay after a few years, and time changed on Broadway and they moved the clubs off Broadway.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Venues like [924] Gilman Street in Berkeley developed around that time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I don’t really know what it was like at the very end. I think it just got harder, it just got harder for them. And you know, the scene just changed. And so do we, so do we.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If it wasn’t for Dirk, punk rock would have started in San Francisco at some point or other anyway, but Dirk really facilitated its rise. He understood what was happening, you know, and he knew how to let it be free.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It felt intimate to me. I just remember being excited. And that’s a good place to be sometimes when you are that young. Longing and driven — wanting to be nowhere else — and then also just wanting to go crazy, in whatever way that was. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In America, when you get to a certain age, you’re suddenly told by the urban environment, What are you doing there pogo-ing? You are 45 years old, you should be at the PTA meeting. You have to want to find out something about your life to go to these scenes. I have a Philippine friend and it turns out that “Mabuhay” means “welcome”. And it also means “good life”. So it’s funny in that context because that’s what really happened at The Mabuhay, you know. You were welcome — and it was a good life! When Dirk died, I called Bruce (Conner) and told him because the three of us were going to make a film about the totality of the punk scene in San Francisco. That died with both Bruce and Dirk dying. It was very sad for me. I have not recovered from that to this day because Bruce was a very creative artist and Dirk had every connection necessary in the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think a lot of people and musicians and artists and everyone contributed. It was a community, even though it was a misfit community. Dirksen was like an entertainer really, definitely the emcee. He was the ringmaster. I had seen that they had named a street in North Beach after the Beat people, so I thought — Well, punk rock man. It was amazing that the punk rockers got a street named. It was right on Broadway and Rowland, like, who is going to get that done with no money? I wanted it to be Dirk Dirksen Alley. Joel Selvin from the [San Francisco] Chronicle helped. It’s a historic plaque. It’s in the ground right in the alley, so they can’t really ever take it out. It talks about Dirk and Ness and The Mabuhay Gardens. It says, Shut up, you animals! He’d be thrilled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You have approximately 290 seconds in which to absorb our Filipino family supper club in the…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That was Kitchen Sisters producer Brandi Howell. The reopening of the Fab Mab is still in its early stages, so stay tuned for more shows at the venue. Special thanks to Denise Demise Dunne, Liz Keim, Penelope Houston, Ron Greco, John Seabury, V Vale, Janet Clyde, and Kathy Peck. The archival interview with Dirk Dirksen is from Vale’s Vale’s RE/Search Conversations 13. Production support from Mary Franklin Harvin. Bay Curious is produced at Member Supported KQED in San Francisco. Our show is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Few institutions in San Francisco are as crucial to punk as Mabuhay Gardens. A group of dedicated investors, nightlife veterans and North Beach neighbors is trying to bring the venue back. \r\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Few places are as legendary in San Francisco’s punk scene as Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Located on Broadway, at the edge of North Beach and Chinatown, it was ground zero for the city’s emerging punk movement in the late 1970s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hybrid Filipino restaurant and music venue hosted bands like the Avengers and the Dead Kennedys — even punk rock icon Patti Smith took the stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When it closed in 1987, much of the city’s punk history seemed to fade with it. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13980619/mabuhay-gardens-reopening-sf-punk-club-north-beach\">But nearly 40 years later, a group of investors and enthusiasts is working to bring the so-called “Fab Mab” back to life.\u003c/a> We dig into the history and legacy of Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are few places as revered in the San Francisco punk music scene as a place called Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12060034\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12060034\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"670\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg 1000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience-160x107.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Punk band with Zippy Pinhead performing at Mabuhay Gardens; includes Vince Deranged of Animal Things in the audience, 1978. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Mindaugis Bagdon, San Francisco Punk Archive, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To play, you need a place, be it where you live, the street, a venue. For unrestricted play, you need an unrestricted playground. Dirk Dirksen envisioned the Fab Mab just as such a playground. Without him and the Mab, there might not have been the great punk scene in the late 1970s in San Francisco. The San Francisco punk scene was fun. I miss it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Located on Broadway, right on the edge of North Beach and Chinatown, Mabuhay Gardens, actually a nightclub, was ground zero for a nascent punk scene in late 1970s San Francisco. Bands like the Avengers, Dead Kennedys, The Nuns, and Patti Smith played there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Announcer:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s gonna part for a woman. I think Patti died. I’m gonna get her for this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Originally a Filipino supper club, Mabuhay Gardens was part of the small but vibrant community known as Manilatown. Redevelopment, gentrification, and other factors in the late 1970s forced many of the Filipino residents of Manilatown out. They moved to other neighborhoods or out of the city entirely. But Mabuhay Gardens remained and took on a surprising new life as a punk club.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Audio from Mabuhay Gardens:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Are you ready for some breakdancing right now?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Katrina Schwartz, and you’re listening to Bay Curious. Today on the show, we’re transporting you back to the epicenter of San Francisco’s ’70s punk scene. And we’ll learn why Mabuhay Gardens was such an important place to so many people. Stay with us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor message\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Legendary punk music venue Mabuhay Gardens, known to fans as the Fab Mab, has been closed since 1987. But it reopened this month to great fanfare from local music lovers. To understand what this place meant to San Francisco’s punk scene, we’re immersing you in 1970s North Beach. Producer Brandi Howell brings us this story, which first aired on the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_98_b3e69dbd-c23d-498a-9e79-6ea56ec10ad7&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.fugitivewaves.org%2Ffugitivewaves\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kitchen Sisters Presents podcast.\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The Mabuhay was not your average rock club.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here was this little club all of a sudden attracting the energy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Dills, Negative Trend, The Avengers…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, of course, you are going to say, “Oh, what is going on over there?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More and more people started coming to town. The Ramones played there. Blondie played there. It just became the punk mecca.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I was real young, I would go by and see this place. It was there for years.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The music itself was nothing really developed yet in the very beginning. It was just a supper club. People would do the Mabuhay dance and stuff like that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Dirk was helping Ness with the Amapola show. Amapola was this Filipino night club singer, and she was popular within the Filipino community and had a TV show on Channel 26 and a number of characters from The Mab had performed there. My name is Denise Demise Dunne. I was Dirk’s assistant at the very beginning of The Mab.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hi, welcome to The Counter Culture Hour. I’m your host, V Vale, and I published starting in ‘77 Search and Destroy, the punk publication chronicling the rise of the punk rock cultural revolution. My guest tonight is Dirk Dirksen, the impresario of The Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We were open for 10 years, did 3,600 plus concerts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The thing was at the time, things were so conservative that no club wanted anything to do with punk rock until Dirk Dirksen showed up and made The Mabuhay Gardens available.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ness downstairs at The Mabuhay was having a tough go of it, so I came in and said, Look — how about if you give us Monday nights because that is your dark night. Let me try that, and I will guarantee you $175 a night at the bar. I didn’t have $175 at the time, but I figured there are enough people I know that if I say, “Hey, c’mon down,” and if they each drink two beers, we’ll meet the guarantee. And within a very short time, we were grossing more on the Monday than he was grossing on the weekend with name Filipino acts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My name is Mindy Bagdon. My film’s name is “Louder Faster Shorter”. At one point on Mondays, which was a dead period on the Broadway strip, Dirk convinced Ness Aquino, who owned the club, to let him put on different acts. Little by little, it went from sort of vaudevillian variety acts to where The Nuns, who were one of the first groups to play there, apparently, they went up to Dirk and they found out this venue was available and they said, Well, can we put on a show? And I remember I was walking up Grant Avenue and Vale’s then girlfriend was coming down, and proceeding me was the drummer for The Nuns and he was handing out flyers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My girlfriend who looked like a rocker — I guess I looked like one too, you know with platform shoes and spiked hair and all that junk, just superficial style — my girlfriend was walking down the street and a really short guy said, Hey…feel like coming to our band’s debut at The Mabuhay Gardens, which none of us had heard of because it was Filipino. I’ll put you on the guest list! Those are the magic words for any so-called real punk rocker. So we went, and then the rest is history.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The first time we went to The Mabuhay, there were more people on stage than there were in the audience, because it hadn’t gotten around. But within two weeks, it was packed. I mean, word got around town. Don’t forget this is before the internet, before smartphones; it was literally person-to-person or on the telephone or snail mail to say this venue was doing this. And like I said, within two weeks, it was jammed. The joke was Bruce Conner, the famous artist, said — You’d be watching a band and you said, well, I can do this too. So you’d go home and learn at least one chord on your bass and you’d get on the stand and you were the audience one week and now you are on the stage.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m Kathy Peck, bass player for The Contractions and the co-founder and executive director of H.E.A.R., Hearing Education Awareness for Rockers. I came here with Don Peck and he was playing drums with Mary Monday. She actually started the punk scene at The Mabuhay Gardens. She was like the first one. There were other people that played there, but she was the one that really…she was amazing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> She came from a dancer background, but she was really punk. She was just wild! And I would hear stuff at The Mab and see it being played. I loved the music. I got inspired by Mary, and I had a bass — a Hofner Beatle bass. I was learning to play. I was self-taught. Yeah, it was really exciting. People were like, they call it pogo-ing or whatever, slam dancing. It was like very crowded and electrifying.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Dirk at that point asked me to be his assistant, and it was like, Yeah, but I can’t type. Because I basically avoided typing because as a female you get pigeoned-holed into being someone’s assistant. And he said, Well, you don’t have to type that much, and you get to do a lot of things around there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pretty often during the evening, he would be wearing what looks like the Groucho Marx nose with the glasses and eyebrows, except this one had a dildo instead of a nose. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Mustache, glasses, a bit overweight. I remember the beige jacket, the beret on his hair, and the poodle in his arms. The was the first time I met Dirk.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> At the end of the evenings, of course, he’d come out on stage and tell everyone to get out, which no one is ever paying attention to. So he had a real police whistle which he would blow as hard as he could through the PA til people would leave. His favorite line was “We can’t make any more money off you, so get out!” I’m John Seabury. I started out playing in a band, Psychotic Pineapple, back in the ’70s, and I’m a graphic artist. I did all of the graphics for the band. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I went to this nightclub called The Night Break, I guess you go downstairs on Columbus. This guy walks up to me. This big eye ball T-shirt and this big chicken hawk hair, red flaming hair, and he looks at me and says, Do you play guitar? And I say yeah. And so we talk for a little bit, and within 30 days, we each get Marshall stacks. That’s how quick it was. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Before we were Crime, we were the Space Invaders. Ron Greco, Ron “The Ripper” Greco. I had a Gibson Ripper Bass and everybody goes — Man, you rip a lot! Ripper!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I took the job and would come in and help him go through all the paperwork. Listen to some of the demo tapes of the bands that came in. Get their press announcement, like Devo. I still remember it saying, Achtung, De-Revolution has begun!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I got the band members together and said, Let’s walk in and talk to the owner. We had a good time there talking to him, and so we arranged a show to play.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In 1977, I moved down to San Francisco to go to the Art Institute in North Beach. And after I got there, I started to see these posters around town for this band called Crime. And they were really intriguing posters and they weren’t like anything I’d ever seen. They were at a club called The Mabuhay. I was 19 at the time, but they let people in 18 or older, but they let people in because it was also a Filipino restaurant, so they were able to let minors in. My name is Penelope Houston, I’m in a band called The Avengers. We started in 1977. That was my first band. I’d been going to these shows and ran into Danny Furious, who ended up being The Avengers drummer. He had a friend in Los Angeles, Greg Ingraham, and he brought Greg to SF to be in a band with him. Danny had rented part of a warehouse out in Dogpatch, and they had a PA set up for their rehearsals. I was staying over there one day, hanging out, and everybody was gone, and I put on some records and started singing through the PA. I just fell in love with the power of amplification. I was like, this is so awesome. I’m so loud, and then when they got back, I said, I’m going to be your singer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When I found the club, I felt at home. I could be exactly who I was and still be part of it. I was freed. My name is Liz Keim and along with Karen Merchant, we created the film, In The Red. It’s a punk document of the late 1970s, mostly filmed at The Mab. For the last 40 years, I’ve also been working at the Exploratorium. I’ve been the director of the Cinema Arts program, and I’m one of the senior curators. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Oh, it was fabulous. There were people that came in for the first time to explore and they were still looking hippie. Then there were folks who had taken on the persona. Leather jacket, jeans, black pants, ripped T-shirts. You’d walk down the corridor, and there were all these little crevices with people hanging out there. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You’re a night creature, looking for that place to be that feels like home.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was one of those creatures cuz you’re just kind of there and you’re watching. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I went up to UC Davis to study art and that was a kind of isolating experience, when I came back into San Francisco I was looking for an intimacy in some ways. Looking for those smaller landscapes. I started filming. I prefer observing and critically assessing where I’m at, and I was drawn to the experimental film genre, so I wasn’t looking for something that followed a bell-curve narrative or, you know, was scripted outside of any experience I was living in. So for me, it was just capturing a kind of way of being in San Francisco. There were all kinds of relationships that didn’t have to feel permanent, where you didn’t have to have names, there was just something about a recognition.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There was just this excitement. There was the energy back to that word. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was about being in the mosh pit. It was about hanging on to someone I didn’t know just for counterbalance, and it was fine because my counterbalance was as into me as a counterbalance as I was into him or her as a counterbalance. You didn’t have to talk. You know, in some ways, we just talked through our bodies. Maybe The Mab was an analog experience for me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was at KSAN at that point, and Lou Reed came in for an interview; he was playing at the Old Waldorf. And he brought this guy in with him, and the DJ didn’t want to deal with him and said, Well, show him around. So we are talking and I’m showing him around and I’m telling this guy about The Mab and what’s going on cuz Lou has his show and I said, Oh, I’ll take you there. You know, and this was Jim Carroll. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Once we got in the Mabuhay, Dirk was really good to us. He had the sense of humor, he kind of got us. So sometimes he would have us open for someone really inappropriate, like the Jim Carroll Band or somebody like that, just because he was being perverse about it. We opened for Jim Carroll twice. And the second time word was out that Patti Smith was in town playing the old Waldorf and she is probably going to show up and jam. So the Mabuhay was double-packed that night. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patti Smith, Patti Smith, Patti Smith!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After the set, we were backstage and Dirk comes up and goes, Hey, you know, Patti Smith is coming. We were like, Yeah yeah, we heard. Well, she needs to borrow a guitar and we were like — No! Because we know she is going to break the guitar.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When Patti played the Mab, it was mesmerizing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Of course, most of the players in the scene at the time would have run home and gotten a guitar just to give to her to smash. Dirk goes off, and he comes back 10 minutes later and goes, Please guys, please….really, just one guitar for Patti. And we were like, No — forget it! So the band was on and Patti did show up, and it was really mobbed and all I could see of the band was the tops of their heads and then I just see the guitar overhead going smash, smash, smash and that was it. And it’s probably in a museum somewhere now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was awestruck. Like, wow! I mean, these are stupid words to come up with because it was just there and here’s this persona mixing this punk with poetry. It was like, yeah, this is it. This is just taking it to a whole different level. Because there were so many levels. There was the fun part, there was the political part, and here is the poetry — here is the art. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hanging outside was like the preamble or whatever. You got your sense of whether it was going to be crowded and what the energy was like. You didn’t just rush in. It was a lingering. The kind of slow meander and then you would hope to just squeeze in and get by admissions. And maybe having enough money for a beer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Early on, people would throw beer bottles at the stage and that was very dangerous. So they actually thought maybe we will put a screen up between the band and the audience but that didn’t sound like a good idea. So then he got the idea, Ah ha — I’m going to make 55-gallon drums of popcorn!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> All the super salty popcorn you could eat. I realize later the theory is that this makes you buy drinks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Free popcorn on the tables. It was really old popcorn and it wasn’t for eating — it was for throwing at the bands.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There would be this big mess of popcorn and jumbled chairs and tables knocked over and it was kind of like a disaster zone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I remember being in my house and all of a sudden just having this paradigm shift. The music was playing and all of a sudden, WHAP! Like — reality is not the same anymore. All of a sudden something woke up inside of me. I didn’t even know what it was called at that time, but it was like, Oh, something — something just changed here.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Not having much money, it was like, how to get into these places without it. You could sometimes climb in through the front window at The Mab and one time someone came and grabbed me and said, Dirk wants to talk to you in his office. So he goes, You don’t think I see you sneaking in all of the time! You know, no more of that. But it didn’t stop you. It was part of the culture. We were there to just get it however we could.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The first show we played at The Mab, we had been asked two weeks before if we would play this show — an after-party for The Nuns. Between when we heard about the gig and when we played it, we went to LA and were visiting with friends of mine from Seattle, The Screamers. Tomata du Plenty and Tommy Gear. And I remember Tommy and Tomato saying to me, Oh, you can’t do cover songs. You guys need to write your own songs. So we got back from LA and we had about a week to go and were like, all right, let’s write some original songs. So we sat down and wrote “Car Crash”, “I Believe in Me”, “Teenage Rebel” — maybe six songs, original songs, in that week. Then, when we got up to play our first time on a real stage in front of a real audience — for me anyway — and someone had written the setlist wrong and so the guitar player was playing a different song from the bass player and the drummer. And when the music started, I was like, Oh my god. Oh my god. I can’t do this. I don’t even know what song this is. It just sounds like a big mish-mash. I can’t remember the lyrics and I was so confused and we stopped playing a few seconds later and was like what? What song are we playing? And then they figured it out, and we started playing the same song and I was like, All right, OK. Here’s how it goes and I can actually do this. But for 10 long seconds there, I thought, Oh, it’s all gone out of my head. I can’t do this. This is a nightmare. So then we just piled through the set and some people who were there were like, that was really amazing. And we were like, Oh my god. That was such a car crash. Jan. 14, 1978, we’d been invited to support the [Sex] Pistols. We got there and the place was absolutely sold out. Between 5-and-6,000 people. The biggest show The Sex Pistols ever played and like 10 times bigger than the biggest show we’d ever played. So when The Nuns were up there performing the stage got covered in things people were throwing, and spit, it was just pretty rough. So we walked out after they were done to take our place on stage and the first thing that happened to me was I slipped on the stage because there was so much spit. And I almost hit the ground but I kind of caught myself and made my way carefully to my microphone. There is a video of the whole night. And you can see how when we start we were a little frightened and shaky and scared. And then as are set progressed we just got more and more confident and got stronger til at the end we were feeling pretty awesome. It was crazy because there were so many people there and they were all mashed together. People were getting squeezed out of the audience like pimples. And passed overhead like they were passing out. You’d look out at the sea of faces and see someone you knew and make eye contact with them and a second later they would disappear into the crowd. So it was intense, especially for us. We were used to seeing a lot of our friends right up front singing along with us and this was like a huge number of people who had never seen punk before and were there for the spectacle. You know, the circus. A lot of people out there, it was a pretty intense experience. I think the throwing of things increased when the Sex Pistols got out there because Johnny Rotten egged them on. Someone threw a camera on stage. He was like, Oh, thank you. Like he was really egging them on to throw stuff. It started out terrifying for us and ended up feeling very good. There were rumors that Sid’s bass was not even plugged in for that set. And I guess I would have to go back and listen to it to see if I could tell, but I think the band was pretty used to making their way through the set without counting on him. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Janet Clyde. I am one of the owners of Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach. I moved here in 1978 when I was 21. I got my first job in San Francisco at The Mabuhay Gardens. I knew how to waitress, I knew how to cocktail, and so it was basically pick up a tray. Dirk right there, he would be at the front, insulting people — What are you wearing, rat fur? He was just the funniest guy. Never took himself or anybody too seriously. And really good to the bands, like really good. You’d come in and it was this long, rectangular room with a low ceiling. Dark, cave-like — really dark — barebones, tables and chairs, bar in the back. You’d walk in and in the front a stage that was only a few feet high. And there was a back seating area that was raised a little bit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After they removed all of the tables and chairs and seating and all that junk then a lot more people could fit in. Legally, you could maybe cram in 200 people. The most crowded night I remember was some show with both Iggy, Blondie, and David Bowie were there in the audience. And somehow everyone found out about it, and that was the most crowded I’ve ever seen The Mabuhay.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’d go in at 10. There would be no one there at 10 at night, nobody there. But by 11–11:30 it would be packed! And I saw 999, Lene Lovich — I mean, more people than I can count — SVT! It was so much fun, so much fun! Two people stand out — waiting on Bill Graham, who terrified me — and waiting on The Clash, who also terrified me! The Clash, though, when Joe Strummer is asking you for a beer and you are just like, OK, and giving you money and you are trying to think about how to make change for this. Like, my brain has just disappeared. It was amazing! He gave me a $50 bill for the beers. I gave him back like $150 in change. I just could not count — I could not think! And the manager, I will never forget, he just took the money out of Strummer’s hand, put the money back into my hand. And then like you would with a child, counted back the change. Like, how much are the beers? They are this…OK then…here’s $12, $13, $14, $15, $20, $30, $50, boom. I will never forget that, it was the funniest thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Well, what happened was Dirksen started to do some gigs upstairs at the On Broadway. That was pretty successful for a while.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was when MTV was coming in, so there was a whole new chapter.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When the big earthquake and the freeway collapsed, that really cut people off from coming there really quickly.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I left The Mabuhay after a few years, and time changed on Broadway and they moved the clubs off Broadway.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Venues like [924] Gilman Street in Berkeley developed around that time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I don’t really know what it was like at the very end. I think it just got harder, it just got harder for them. And you know, the scene just changed. And so do we, so do we.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If it wasn’t for Dirk, punk rock would have started in San Francisco at some point or other anyway, but Dirk really facilitated its rise. He understood what was happening, you know, and he knew how to let it be free.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It felt intimate to me. I just remember being excited. And that’s a good place to be sometimes when you are that young. Longing and driven — wanting to be nowhere else — and then also just wanting to go crazy, in whatever way that was. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In America, when you get to a certain age, you’re suddenly told by the urban environment, What are you doing there pogo-ing? You are 45 years old, you should be at the PTA meeting. You have to want to find out something about your life to go to these scenes. I have a Philippine friend and it turns out that “Mabuhay” means “welcome”. And it also means “good life”. So it’s funny in that context because that’s what really happened at The Mabuhay, you know. You were welcome — and it was a good life! When Dirk died, I called Bruce (Conner) and told him because the three of us were going to make a film about the totality of the punk scene in San Francisco. That died with both Bruce and Dirk dying. It was very sad for me. I have not recovered from that to this day because Bruce was a very creative artist and Dirk had every connection necessary in the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think a lot of people and musicians and artists and everyone contributed. It was a community, even though it was a misfit community. Dirksen was like an entertainer really, definitely the emcee. He was the ringmaster. I had seen that they had named a street in North Beach after the Beat people, so I thought — Well, punk rock man. It was amazing that the punk rockers got a street named. It was right on Broadway and Rowland, like, who is going to get that done with no money? I wanted it to be Dirk Dirksen Alley. Joel Selvin from the [San Francisco] Chronicle helped. It’s a historic plaque. It’s in the ground right in the alley, so they can’t really ever take it out. It talks about Dirk and Ness and The Mabuhay Gardens. It says, Shut up, you animals! He’d be thrilled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You have approximately 290 seconds in which to absorb our Filipino family supper club in the…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That was Kitchen Sisters producer Brandi Howell. The reopening of the Fab Mab is still in its early stages, so stay tuned for more shows at the venue. Special thanks to Denise Demise Dunne, Liz Keim, Penelope Houston, Ron Greco, John Seabury, V Vale, Janet Clyde, and Kathy Peck. The archival interview with Dirk Dirksen is from Vale’s Vale’s RE/Search Conversations 13. Production support from Mary Franklin Harvin. Bay Curious is produced at Member Supported KQED in San Francisco. Our show is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "why-are-there-so-many-motels-on-san-franciscos-lombard-street",
"title": "Why Are There So Many Motels on San Francisco’s Lombard Street?",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lombard Street is one of San Francisco’s most iconic thoroughfares.[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003cbr>\nBeautiful mansions and carefully trimmed hedges frame the winding brick lane. But after the curves end, the street continues, heading all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’ve ever driven along this stretch through the Marina district, you might have noticed that dozens of motels dot the thoroughfare. Why so many in one place? That’s what Bay Curious question asker Nick Glasser wanted to know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As is so often the case, San Francisco’s built environment is a product of its past. By the 1920s, America had entered the age of automobiles and highways began to connect places that had once seemed distant. And, in the early 1930s, engineers started planning for the construction of what was, at the time, going to be the longest suspension bridge in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now one of San Francisco’s most iconic landmarks, the Golden Gate Bridge would stretch across the channel of water between Marin County and San Francisco, formerly only connected by boat. And Lombard Street would be the main approach road leading to the bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12058836\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 945px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/LombardBrod.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12058836\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/LombardBrod.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"945\" height=\"774\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/LombardBrod.jpg 945w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/LombardBrod-160x131.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 945px) 100vw, 945px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A photo of the Marina Motel, on the corner of Lombard and Broderick streets, in 1940. Built by the son of a California Gold Rush miner, the historic Marina Motel was built to celebrate the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in the late 1930s and is still run by the same family. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Back in 1939, Heidi Detjen’s grandfather could see the writing on the wall: when the bridge opened, visitors with cars would flood into San Francisco. They — and their cars — would need a place to stay. In 1939, just two years after the Bridge inauguration, he opened up the first motor lodge on Lombard Street. It was called the Marina Motel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He came out of retirement to build this after visiting a motor court yard,” Detjen said. Motor lodges offered direct access to the parking lot from each unit, making it an ideal choice for auto-crazed Americans.[aside postID=news_11907457 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/garden-from-above-1020x574.jpeg']When the bridge opened, the once quiet, 2-lane Lombard Street was transformed into a buzzing thoroughfare. The city soon decided to widen the road to six lanes of traffic. To do that, they had to raze the buildings on the south side of Lombard to make space for the bigger road. That meant when the road construction was done, there were many open lots of land available to purchase.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s when all these other motels appeared,” Detjen said. “In the old days, people literally got off the Golden Gate Bridge, and they went from motel to motel to motel to try to get the best rate.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Marina Motel is still in business today. Detjen has kept it in the family, bringing it with her into the 21st century. “I feel like I’m kind of holding up the legacy,” Detjen said. “My family has owned it since the 1930s, and I’m the third generation doing it, and now my daughters are involved as well. There’s a lot of heart that goes into this place.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is Bay Curious, the podcast that answers your questions about the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s hard to imagine life here in the Bay without the bridges that allow us to crisscross the water. Thousands of us do it every day. Sometimes it’s a real pain.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Newscaster:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have a real traffic mess on the Bay Bridge eastbound.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Newscaster: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thousands of drivers got home late tonight after a protest over vaccine mandates sparked a chaotic scene.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Newscaster: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We continue to track major delays across the San Mateo Bridge; this has just been the headache of the morning.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But since we all spend so much time sitting in bridge traffic, we get lots of questions about things you’ve noticed from your car windows. Like:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jessica Kariisa:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Why are there so many motels on Lombard Street as it approaches the Golden Gate Bridge?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What was the original San Mateo-Hayward Bridge like?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today on the show, it’s a bridge-focused lightning round where we answer several of your questions. First, we’re going to tackle why there are so many motels on Lombard Street, and then we’re moving south to a bridge that doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. Stay with us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These days, Lombard Street is best known for the short section that wiggles down a steep hill, beautiful mansions on each side. Cars line up for the chance to drive it. But just down the way from there, Lombard becomes a main thoroughfare to the Golden Gate Bridge. And dotted along it are dozens of motels. Why so many in one place? Bay Curious reporter and sound engineer Christopher Beale went to find out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I thought the most obvious place to start to answer this question was to take a look for myself, so my partner and I decided to take a little drive down Lombard Street and just count how many hotels we saw.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re gonna start at Franklin. I’m just curious how many we are going to get, there’s two and we haven’t even turned onto Lombard yet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We drove west, towards the Golden Gate Bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, so there’s the San Francisco Bay Inn, the La Casa Inn.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Montage of counting motels\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">OK, counting all of these might take a while. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Reagan Rockzsfforde: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, you look on that side and I will look on this side.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ll check in on this later, let’s get to the other part of the question. Why are these motels, or motor lodges, here in the first place?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By the 1920s, Americans were falling in love with the automobile, and highways began to snake across the United States, connecting people from coast to coast like never before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the early ’30s, plans were in place to build what was, at the time, the longest suspension bridge in the world, right here in San Francisco. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Golden Gate Bridge would stretch across a narrow, deep channel of water long known as The Golden Gate, soaring high above the water, and allowing automobile traffic from Marin County into San Francisco. Lombard Street was going to be the main approach road for this massive bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There wasn’t a lot of people who lived over there then, so it was not a very busy road.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That is Heidi Detjen. She is the owner of the first motor lodge to pop up on Lombard Street, it’s called the Marina Motel and Heidi’s grandfather started welcoming guests in 1939, just two years after the Golden Gate Bridge opened. Now, of course, her grandfather didn’t invent the concept of a motor lodge but…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He came out of retirement to build this after visiting a motor courtyard, I wanna say maybe Niagara Falls or something.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A motor lodge, or a motel is a hotel that is specifically targeted at motorists, they usually offer direct access to the parking lot from the unit vs having to enter and exit through a more traditional hotel’s central lobby.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Heidi’s granddad believed that the Golden Gate Bridge would bring people in cars who needed a place to sleep, and that a motor lodge was just the thing to service those motorists. And boy was he right! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once the bridge opened, Lombard Street got really busy, really fast! The Marina Motel was perfectly situated to take advantage of all that traffic along sleepy Lombard Street.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When they built this place, it was just a two-lane road with a lot of multi-story shingled housing along it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But right after the bridge opened, officials decided to expand Lombard Street.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And they pushed it from a two-lane road into a six-lane road.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The south side of the street was bulldozed to make room for the new lanes of traffic. But the Marina Motel is on the north side of Lombard, closer to the Bay and the Palace of Fine Arts, so it wasn’t directly impacted until the road was finished, that is.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s when all these other motels appeared.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s rare for land to be available at that scale in San Francisco, and before long, dozens of motor lodges of varying quality and price dotted the south side of Lombard Street, giving the Marina Motel some very real competition.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the old days, people literally got off the Golden Gate Bridge, and they went from motel to motel to motel to try to get the best rate. Unfortunately, then we were on the wrong side. So as people were coming over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, they would go all to the motels on the other side, and we stood empty.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Marina Motel would go through ups and downs, but is still there today, and still in the family. Business has gotten easier thanks to the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nowadays, people can look your pictures up online. So we get a clientele who really appreciates that and appreciates the historic significance. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So that covers how Lombard’s motor lodges got to be there in the first place, but just how many are we talking about here?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is by no means an official count, but on our single road trip down Lombard that day, between Franklin and Chestnut streets, my partner and I counted…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">24, like old motor lodge style motels in just a mile or so. Yeah, I think that qualifies as a high concentration, don’t you? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Reagan Rockzsfforde: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mm-hmm.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, we’ve all heard the headlines about how hotels aren’t doing so well in a post-COVID era, but Heidi’s family has weathered ups and downs in the business before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why do this in 2025?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, this is the best business ever. People come here, they’re on vacation, they’re happy. I go home and I tell my family about it at the dinner table, like, oh, I met this scientist…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The traffic from the Golden Gate Bridge is why these hotels popped up in the first place, and though these motor lodges are sort of a relic of a bygone era, Heidi said these days business is still thriving, possibly because of that fact. Nostalgia is in, so is free parking.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like I’m kind of holding up the legacy. My family has owned it since the 1930s, and I’m the third generation doing it, and now my daughters are involved as well. There’s a lot of heart that goes into this place.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That was Bay Curious reporter and sound engineer Christopher Beale.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We just heard about the huge impact the Golden Gate Bridge had on the Marina neighborhood of San Francisco, now we’re going to turn to a bridge that doesn’t get nearly the same hype as its International Orange friend.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. Today, it’s a fairly unassuming workhorse bridge. But did you know the original actually preceded the Golden Gate Bridge by almost a decade? It was once the longest bridge in North America. And one of the skinniest!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kathleen McKusick of Redwood City used to work in biotech near Bridgeview Park in Foster City. Which is how she came to ask us this question:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathleen McKusick: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I stumbled across a remnant of the 1929 San Mateo Bridge about a dozen years ago. I would love to know more about that original bridge in its heyday. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Built in 1929 and then called the San Francisco Bay Toll-Bridge, we sent KQED’s Rachael Myrow to check it out. This story first aired in 2023.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you’ve walked or cycled along the Bay Trail on the Peninsula, you know it passes under the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathleen McKusick: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My daughter and I were here on the weekend to ride bikes on the Bay Trail, and we went on the bikes a little farther than I usually went on foot, and here was this astonishing little piece of a bridge. Which raised all kinds of questions in my mind.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kathleen McKusick Googled it, naturally, as did I, and there just isn’t a whole lot out there. The best resource? One article written a few years ago for the Hayward Historical Society, an article written by this guy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> John Christian, formerly an archivist at the Hayward Historical Society.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We all met at the Bridgeview Park, where you can spy a little stub of the old bridge alongside the big new one. It’s a noisy park. You can hear the traffic from the new bridge, not to mention planes flying overhead from SFO.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is the first time I’ve been over here. I guess I’m too Hayward-centric. But yeah, I’ve never really seen it from this side, to be honest.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to Christian, the Hayward-San Mateo Bridge was originally proposed in 1922 by the Oakland Chamber of Commerce as a way to jump-start commerce between the Peninsula and the East Bay. Construction began in December of 1927. Flash forward to March 2, 1929, and we have…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Old-timey music\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The grand opening of what was then called the San Francisco Bay Toll-Bridge! Now, quick production note. 1929 is a tricky time for sound reporters in the Bay. Much of the news footage from that era was still silent.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Archival recording of Calvin Coolidge talking\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What talkies there were typically brought sound to big, national news stories. But the Bridge opening in 1929 was a big deal for the Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sound of Morse code being sent over a telegraph\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then-President Calvin Coolidge participated in the dedication by pressing a telegraph button in Washington, D.C., that directed the unfurling of an American flag from the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sound of a flag unfurling sound, crowd says “Ahhhh”\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then-San Francisco Mayor James Rolph, who was known to love attending celebrations of almost any kind, was the biggest local celebrity to show up in person.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of 1929 Ford AA Truck engine starting up\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Not unlike the Golden Gate Bridge to the north, this bridge helped farmers get their goods to market. In the 1920s, the region on both sides of the Bay was rural, as opposed to suburban, as it is today. Farms, orchards, canneries, salt harvesting. And maybe because it wasn’t designed primarily for commuter traffic, I think it’s worth noting that the original bridge was only 30 feet wide with just two lanes, and about 7 miles long.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Looking at the new bridge, I mean, compared to the old bridge, this bridge is a monster. You know, this is like, six lanes. The original bridge would have been just two lanes, back and forth. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow (in the field): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Petite, and also, I have to say, terrifying. Right? Two lanes, two lanes only, one going in one direction, one in the other. 30 feet wide, going over, over the Bay.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dramatic music swells\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I mean, it must have, I guess, you know, probably it was kind of fun, I guess. But yeah, probably a little horrifying.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow (in the field): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Especially if there’s a stiff wind? Picking up off the water?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I mean…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow (in the field): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Driving a Model T Ford?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Nobody was blown into the water, as far as I can tell.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fun fact: The original toll was 45 cents, about $8 in today’s money! So, Christian says, adjusted for inflation, it was more expensive to cross in 1929 than it is today! Takes the sting out of today’s $7 toll? Or maybe not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anyways, it wasn’t long before newspaper articles were calling the old bridge “antique.” By 1954, 7,400 cars and trucks were crossing every day. Because the rural towns on either side of the Bay did become suburbs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You know, it was a small bridge taking you to a small place, you know? And now it’s like, this massive, like, you know, city center to city center. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the biggest complaint about this bridge was not how slender it was, but the electric drawbridge that went up on average 6 times a day to let marine traffic pass underneath. That brought cars and trucks on the bridge to a standstill.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So in 1961, the groundwork was laid for the construction of a wider, taller bridge, to be built just a few feet north of the original span. The old bridge was dismantled, piece by piece, except for the small bit you can still see from Bridgeview Park today. According to the state’s Department of Transportation, by the way, the new bridge is still the longest bridge in California.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow (in the field): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So now that you know the full story, any thoughts?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathleen McKusick: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I really wish that the pier were open and I could walk out onto the bridge. That would be a dream come true.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That story was reported by KQED’s Rachael Myrow.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Both of the questions in this episode won Bay Curious voting rounds. We’ve got a new set of questions up on our website right now, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BayCurious.org\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Head on over to cast your vote for what we should answer next. And be sure you follow Bay Curious so you never miss a new episode. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our show is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Have a great week!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "If you’ve ever driven along this stretch through San Francisco's Marina neighborhood towards the Golden Gate Bridge, you might have noticed that dozens of motels dot the thoroughfare. Why so many in one place?",
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"title": "Why Are There So Many Motels on San Francisco’s Lombard Street? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lombard Street is one of San Francisco’s most iconic thoroughfares.\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cbr>\nBeautiful mansions and carefully trimmed hedges frame the winding brick lane. But after the curves end, the street continues, heading all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’ve ever driven along this stretch through the Marina district, you might have noticed that dozens of motels dot the thoroughfare. Why so many in one place? That’s what Bay Curious question asker Nick Glasser wanted to know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As is so often the case, San Francisco’s built environment is a product of its past. By the 1920s, America had entered the age of automobiles and highways began to connect places that had once seemed distant. And, in the early 1930s, engineers started planning for the construction of what was, at the time, going to be the longest suspension bridge in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now one of San Francisco’s most iconic landmarks, the Golden Gate Bridge would stretch across the channel of water between Marin County and San Francisco, formerly only connected by boat. And Lombard Street would be the main approach road leading to the bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12058836\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 945px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/LombardBrod.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12058836\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/LombardBrod.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"945\" height=\"774\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/LombardBrod.jpg 945w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/LombardBrod-160x131.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 945px) 100vw, 945px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A photo of the Marina Motel, on the corner of Lombard and Broderick streets, in 1940. Built by the son of a California Gold Rush miner, the historic Marina Motel was built to celebrate the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in the late 1930s and is still run by the same family. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Back in 1939, Heidi Detjen’s grandfather could see the writing on the wall: when the bridge opened, visitors with cars would flood into San Francisco. They — and their cars — would need a place to stay. In 1939, just two years after the Bridge inauguration, he opened up the first motor lodge on Lombard Street. It was called the Marina Motel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He came out of retirement to build this after visiting a motor court yard,” Detjen said. Motor lodges offered direct access to the parking lot from each unit, making it an ideal choice for auto-crazed Americans.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>When the bridge opened, the once quiet, 2-lane Lombard Street was transformed into a buzzing thoroughfare. The city soon decided to widen the road to six lanes of traffic. To do that, they had to raze the buildings on the south side of Lombard to make space for the bigger road. That meant when the road construction was done, there were many open lots of land available to purchase.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s when all these other motels appeared,” Detjen said. “In the old days, people literally got off the Golden Gate Bridge, and they went from motel to motel to motel to try to get the best rate.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Marina Motel is still in business today. Detjen has kept it in the family, bringing it with her into the 21st century. “I feel like I’m kind of holding up the legacy,” Detjen said. “My family has owned it since the 1930s, and I’m the third generation doing it, and now my daughters are involved as well. There’s a lot of heart that goes into this place.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is Bay Curious, the podcast that answers your questions about the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s hard to imagine life here in the Bay without the bridges that allow us to crisscross the water. Thousands of us do it every day. Sometimes it’s a real pain.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Newscaster:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have a real traffic mess on the Bay Bridge eastbound.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Newscaster: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thousands of drivers got home late tonight after a protest over vaccine mandates sparked a chaotic scene.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Newscaster: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We continue to track major delays across the San Mateo Bridge; this has just been the headache of the morning.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But since we all spend so much time sitting in bridge traffic, we get lots of questions about things you’ve noticed from your car windows. Like:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jessica Kariisa:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Why are there so many motels on Lombard Street as it approaches the Golden Gate Bridge?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What was the original San Mateo-Hayward Bridge like?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today on the show, it’s a bridge-focused lightning round where we answer several of your questions. First, we’re going to tackle why there are so many motels on Lombard Street, and then we’re moving south to a bridge that doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. Stay with us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These days, Lombard Street is best known for the short section that wiggles down a steep hill, beautiful mansions on each side. Cars line up for the chance to drive it. But just down the way from there, Lombard becomes a main thoroughfare to the Golden Gate Bridge. And dotted along it are dozens of motels. Why so many in one place? Bay Curious reporter and sound engineer Christopher Beale went to find out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I thought the most obvious place to start to answer this question was to take a look for myself, so my partner and I decided to take a little drive down Lombard Street and just count how many hotels we saw.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re gonna start at Franklin. I’m just curious how many we are going to get, there’s two and we haven’t even turned onto Lombard yet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We drove west, towards the Golden Gate Bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All right, so there’s the San Francisco Bay Inn, the La Casa Inn.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Montage of counting motels\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">OK, counting all of these might take a while. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Reagan Rockzsfforde: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, you look on that side and I will look on this side.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ll check in on this later, let’s get to the other part of the question. Why are these motels, or motor lodges, here in the first place?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By the 1920s, Americans were falling in love with the automobile, and highways began to snake across the United States, connecting people from coast to coast like never before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the early ’30s, plans were in place to build what was, at the time, the longest suspension bridge in the world, right here in San Francisco. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Golden Gate Bridge would stretch across a narrow, deep channel of water long known as The Golden Gate, soaring high above the water, and allowing automobile traffic from Marin County into San Francisco. Lombard Street was going to be the main approach road for this massive bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There wasn’t a lot of people who lived over there then, so it was not a very busy road.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That is Heidi Detjen. She is the owner of the first motor lodge to pop up on Lombard Street, it’s called the Marina Motel and Heidi’s grandfather started welcoming guests in 1939, just two years after the Golden Gate Bridge opened. Now, of course, her grandfather didn’t invent the concept of a motor lodge but…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He came out of retirement to build this after visiting a motor courtyard, I wanna say maybe Niagara Falls or something.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A motor lodge, or a motel is a hotel that is specifically targeted at motorists, they usually offer direct access to the parking lot from the unit vs having to enter and exit through a more traditional hotel’s central lobby.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Heidi’s granddad believed that the Golden Gate Bridge would bring people in cars who needed a place to sleep, and that a motor lodge was just the thing to service those motorists. And boy was he right! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once the bridge opened, Lombard Street got really busy, really fast! The Marina Motel was perfectly situated to take advantage of all that traffic along sleepy Lombard Street.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When they built this place, it was just a two-lane road with a lot of multi-story shingled housing along it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But right after the bridge opened, officials decided to expand Lombard Street.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And they pushed it from a two-lane road into a six-lane road.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The south side of the street was bulldozed to make room for the new lanes of traffic. But the Marina Motel is on the north side of Lombard, closer to the Bay and the Palace of Fine Arts, so it wasn’t directly impacted until the road was finished, that is.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s when all these other motels appeared.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s rare for land to be available at that scale in San Francisco, and before long, dozens of motor lodges of varying quality and price dotted the south side of Lombard Street, giving the Marina Motel some very real competition.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the old days, people literally got off the Golden Gate Bridge, and they went from motel to motel to motel to try to get the best rate. Unfortunately, then we were on the wrong side. So as people were coming over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, they would go all to the motels on the other side, and we stood empty.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Marina Motel would go through ups and downs, but is still there today, and still in the family. Business has gotten easier thanks to the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nowadays, people can look your pictures up online. So we get a clientele who really appreciates that and appreciates the historic significance. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So that covers how Lombard’s motor lodges got to be there in the first place, but just how many are we talking about here?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is by no means an official count, but on our single road trip down Lombard that day, between Franklin and Chestnut streets, my partner and I counted…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">24, like old motor lodge style motels in just a mile or so. Yeah, I think that qualifies as a high concentration, don’t you? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Reagan Rockzsfforde: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mm-hmm.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, we’ve all heard the headlines about how hotels aren’t doing so well in a post-COVID era, but Heidi’s family has weathered ups and downs in the business before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why do this in 2025?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, this is the best business ever. People come here, they’re on vacation, they’re happy. I go home and I tell my family about it at the dinner table, like, oh, I met this scientist…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Christopher Beale: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The traffic from the Golden Gate Bridge is why these hotels popped up in the first place, and though these motor lodges are sort of a relic of a bygone era, Heidi said these days business is still thriving, possibly because of that fact. Nostalgia is in, so is free parking.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Heidi Detjen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like I’m kind of holding up the legacy. My family has owned it since the 1930s, and I’m the third generation doing it, and now my daughters are involved as well. There’s a lot of heart that goes into this place.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That was Bay Curious reporter and sound engineer Christopher Beale.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We just heard about the huge impact the Golden Gate Bridge had on the Marina neighborhood of San Francisco, now we’re going to turn to a bridge that doesn’t get nearly the same hype as its International Orange friend.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. Today, it’s a fairly unassuming workhorse bridge. But did you know the original actually preceded the Golden Gate Bridge by almost a decade? It was once the longest bridge in North America. And one of the skinniest!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kathleen McKusick of Redwood City used to work in biotech near Bridgeview Park in Foster City. Which is how she came to ask us this question:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathleen McKusick: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I stumbled across a remnant of the 1929 San Mateo Bridge about a dozen years ago. I would love to know more about that original bridge in its heyday. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Built in 1929 and then called the San Francisco Bay Toll-Bridge, we sent KQED’s Rachael Myrow to check it out. This story first aired in 2023.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you’ve walked or cycled along the Bay Trail on the Peninsula, you know it passes under the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathleen McKusick: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My daughter and I were here on the weekend to ride bikes on the Bay Trail, and we went on the bikes a little farther than I usually went on foot, and here was this astonishing little piece of a bridge. Which raised all kinds of questions in my mind.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kathleen McKusick Googled it, naturally, as did I, and there just isn’t a whole lot out there. The best resource? One article written a few years ago for the Hayward Historical Society, an article written by this guy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> John Christian, formerly an archivist at the Hayward Historical Society.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We all met at the Bridgeview Park, where you can spy a little stub of the old bridge alongside the big new one. It’s a noisy park. You can hear the traffic from the new bridge, not to mention planes flying overhead from SFO.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is the first time I’ve been over here. I guess I’m too Hayward-centric. But yeah, I’ve never really seen it from this side, to be honest.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to Christian, the Hayward-San Mateo Bridge was originally proposed in 1922 by the Oakland Chamber of Commerce as a way to jump-start commerce between the Peninsula and the East Bay. Construction began in December of 1927. Flash forward to March 2, 1929, and we have…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Old-timey music\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The grand opening of what was then called the San Francisco Bay Toll-Bridge! Now, quick production note. 1929 is a tricky time for sound reporters in the Bay. Much of the news footage from that era was still silent.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Archival recording of Calvin Coolidge talking\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What talkies there were typically brought sound to big, national news stories. But the Bridge opening in 1929 was a big deal for the Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sound of Morse code being sent over a telegraph\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then-President Calvin Coolidge participated in the dedication by pressing a telegraph button in Washington, D.C., that directed the unfurling of an American flag from the bridge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sound of a flag unfurling sound, crowd says “Ahhhh”\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then-San Francisco Mayor James Rolph, who was known to love attending celebrations of almost any kind, was the biggest local celebrity to show up in person.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of 1929 Ford AA Truck engine starting up\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Not unlike the Golden Gate Bridge to the north, this bridge helped farmers get their goods to market. In the 1920s, the region on both sides of the Bay was rural, as opposed to suburban, as it is today. Farms, orchards, canneries, salt harvesting. And maybe because it wasn’t designed primarily for commuter traffic, I think it’s worth noting that the original bridge was only 30 feet wide with just two lanes, and about 7 miles long.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Looking at the new bridge, I mean, compared to the old bridge, this bridge is a monster. You know, this is like, six lanes. The original bridge would have been just two lanes, back and forth. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow (in the field): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Petite, and also, I have to say, terrifying. Right? Two lanes, two lanes only, one going in one direction, one in the other. 30 feet wide, going over, over the Bay.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dramatic music swells\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I mean, it must have, I guess, you know, probably it was kind of fun, I guess. But yeah, probably a little horrifying.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow (in the field): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Especially if there’s a stiff wind? Picking up off the water?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I mean…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow (in the field): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Driving a Model T Ford?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Nobody was blown into the water, as far as I can tell.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fun fact: The original toll was 45 cents, about $8 in today’s money! So, Christian says, adjusted for inflation, it was more expensive to cross in 1929 than it is today! Takes the sting out of today’s $7 toll? Or maybe not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Anyways, it wasn’t long before newspaper articles were calling the old bridge “antique.” By 1954, 7,400 cars and trucks were crossing every day. Because the rural towns on either side of the Bay did become suburbs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Christian:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You know, it was a small bridge taking you to a small place, you know? And now it’s like, this massive, like, you know, city center to city center. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the biggest complaint about this bridge was not how slender it was, but the electric drawbridge that went up on average 6 times a day to let marine traffic pass underneath. That brought cars and trucks on the bridge to a standstill.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So in 1961, the groundwork was laid for the construction of a wider, taller bridge, to be built just a few feet north of the original span. The old bridge was dismantled, piece by piece, except for the small bit you can still see from Bridgeview Park today. According to the state’s Department of Transportation, by the way, the new bridge is still the longest bridge in California.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rachael Myrow (in the field): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So now that you know the full story, any thoughts?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathleen McKusick: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I really wish that the pier were open and I could walk out onto the bridge. That would be a dream come true.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That story was reported by KQED’s Rachael Myrow.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Both of the questions in this episode won Bay Curious voting rounds. We’ve got a new set of questions up on our website right now, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BayCurious.org\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Head on over to cast your vote for what we should answer next. And be sure you follow Bay Curious so you never miss a new episode. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our show is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Have a great week!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story first aired in November 2021.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you find yourself in San Francisco’s Mission District at the corner of 24th and York streets, you can’t help but notice the massive, blue-toned mural that stands there — rising over two stories high and spanning 60 feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This intricate mural, called \u003ca href=\"https://juanaalicia.com/la-llorona-project-san-francisco/\">“La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” and created by Bay Area artist Juana Alicia\u003c/a>, is filled with expressive female figures that draw the eye with their depth and scale. In the center of this intricate mural, there’s Chalchiuhtlicue, the Aztec goddess of lakes and streams. In the background, there are women from Bolivia, women from India, women from the Mexico-U.S. border — all standing together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in the foreground, there’s a woman standing apart, stretching out her hand like she’s reaching out to the viewer. A tear falls from her eye, and she’s holding a child in her arms, as if to protect them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7962812002&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alicia’s mural has been a fixture on this San Francisco wall for the last 17 years. And if you grew up with the legend of La Llorona, you might be surprised to see her like this in this mural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s because in the popular telling — the one that’s most common in Mexico, and here in California — La Llorona is a ghost. She’s the spirit of a woman who haunts watery places, wailing for her lost children, not protecting them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So how did a traditional legend come this far, and take so many forms?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The stories we hear\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>For many Latinx people here in California, the story of La Llorona is one you hear growing up — told slightly differently each time. And because the legend is something so many people grow up with, many of my co-workers had something to say about what they remember first hearing about La Llorona.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896436\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896436\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“My family mainly used it as a scare tactic for my mom and my tías when they were younger,” says Gabriella Frenes of KQED’s The California Report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among all the variations of the legend, there are common themes: the weeping ghost of a woman, who haunts the waters, crying out for her children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She wails this: like, ‘Mis hijos! Mis hijos!,’ which means, ‘My kids! My kids!'” says Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí, a reporter and producer with KQED News and KQED en Español. “They said that she had drowned her own kids, and that she would walk around the … river, where she drowned them, feeling guilty of what she had done.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She drowned her children, and they say that her soul is not rested because she also killed herself,” adds Frenes. “With Catholicism, that’s a huge sin, suicide. They say that since her soul is not laid to rest, she’s out there searching for her children.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And because of this, La Llorona is often made into a terrifying spirit on the lookout for new children — whom she wants to take. Or maybe, as Cabrera-Lomelí says, she’s defending something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She’s looking for [her kids] and pushing away anybody that threatens things that are special to her — like her children, or rivers,” says Cabrera-Lomelí. “Because rivers, both in Mexico and in the rest of the world, can really be the lifeline of a city or a community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m Ecuadorian American, and my parents say they never heard the story of La Llorona until they arrived in Los Angeles in the early ’90s. As for me, I remember that my childhood friends who were Mexican would warn me that if we didn’t behave, La Llorona would come to get us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if you only know La Llorona from childhood stories, trust me: This legend goes far beyond those. And it’s the deep history, and the evolution of the legend, that brings us all the way to her very different appearance on that mural by Juana Alicia in the Mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The origins of La Llorona\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>To learn more about how the legend of La Llorona got started, I called up Profesora Leticia Hernández — a writer, artist and poet who teaches oral history at San Francisco State University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For many, La Llorona symbolizes the real-life 16th-century woman Malintzin, or La Malinche — the woman said to have been kidnapped by Hernán Cortés to aid his invasion of Mexico in 1519 (or who helped him by choice, depending on who’s writing the history books).\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896433\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896433\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In this telling, La Llorona becomes a symbol of the injustices of colonization. But then it goes even deeper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Others say [the legend] predates conquest with all of these incredibly complex and mythical Aztec goddesses and deities,” says Hernández. “Then you have the rendition that La Llorona is associated with Coatlicue the Aztec Earth goddess, who gave birth to the sun, moon and stars — and that’s connected to Cihuateteo, which is the the deity of women who die in childbirth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It could get really complex there, right?” says Hernández.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even if this legend predates Cortés and colonization, the way European colonizers then wrote the history books about Malintzin/La Malinche lays the emphasis firmly on her as a negative force: a woman who stepped out of line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way that the female figure of La Malinche has been demonized and constructed throughout history is problematic,” says Hernández. “Especially because that narrative has been controlled by the heteropatriarchy, and makes a woman who was most likely a victim into a villain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are variations on not just who La Llorona is, but what she’s doing — and what \u003cem>happened\u003c/em> to her children, specifically. It’s this element, says Hernández, that contains a great deal of mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the version of the narrative that has La Llorona as a scorned lover, she drowns her children out of grief, and must remain grieving forever in this limbo. “All of that gets close to that whole bad mother narrative,” says Hernández.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Around Latin America, the many mirrors of La Llorona\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>“Even though there’s La Llorona myths throughout Latin America, I often associated it more with Mexican culture,” says Hernández. “And I think that’s how we hear about it in California or the United States, in the southwest, as mostly associated with Mexican culture.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896438\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896438\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>However, Hernández’s heritage is Salvadoran, and she says so much of the La Llorona legend reminds her of La Siguanaba — a Central American story that shares a lot of DNA with La Llorona. La Siguanaba is a supernatural creature that takes the form of a woman cursed by the rain god, Tlaloc. Like La Llorona, she stalks the waters and brings vengeance upon men and children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story of La Siguanaba instantly reminded \u003cem>my\u003c/em> parents of a similar story told exclusively in Guayaquil, a major port city in Ecuador. I remember the story of La Dama Tapada — the Veiled Lady — being told to me when I was about 5 years old while visiting my great-uncle’s house, to stop me from wanting to stay up late.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the legend goes, La Dama would walk the city at night stalking drunken men and luring them into dark alleys with her beautiful scent. Once alone with a man, she would reveal her skeletal face, and the next morning, the man would be found dead foaming from the mouth. No Guayaquileño man would dare walk alone at night, I was told, out of fear of meeting La Dama.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the story of La Siguanaba, Hernández says that “if you look at the legend, it gets more problematic because it becomes more like ‘a spirited girl’ or ‘a woman with spirit’ is monstrous.” In one version, she says, the god Tlaloc turned her into La Siguanaba as punishment “for being a bad mother and a bad wife.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Who determines that?” asks Hernández. “What \u003cem>is\u003c/em> a bad woman? Why is it bad to have spirit?” They’re questions that could equally be asked of the legend of La Dama Tapada — especially given that she stalks drunken men.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, says Hernández, for many people the legends of La Llorona, La Siguanaba and La Dama Tapada are “just” simple ghost stories, and that’s OK. When analyzing the role of folklore, she stresses that she’s “wearing her ‘profe’ hat” — and says that knowing the roots of the stories we tell ourselves is always powerful.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Reimagining La Llorona through art\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://juanaalicia.com/content/57/\">Hernández has written about Juana Alicia’s Mission mural of La Llorona\u003c/a>, and how the artwork “frees the spirit of women from roles as monstrous creatures of folklore to warrior women of history.” And Juana Alicia herself explains that, because La Llorona contains multitudes, she can be used as a symbol for so many things in a mural like this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896437\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896437\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>( Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“In the Llorona mural, the issues of water and climate justice and feminism all come up,” says Alicia. “Racial justice, mixed heritage issues — they’re all there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On that wall, La Llorona isn’t a ghost: Instead, she’s flesh and blood. She’s protecting a child, not threatening it. And if you recall my colleague Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí’s words on how La Llorona is known to defend the very waters she haunts, you might say she’s playing that water protector role right here on the mural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even where Juana Alicia chose to paint her mural on the corner of York and 24th is symbolic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a neighborhood that I love. It’s where the raza is. It’s where people were being evicted rapidly,” says Alicia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s like a cultural anchor. It’s like holding on to sacred space in a neighborhood that I could no longer afford to live in, and most of my compatriots could not afford to live in either.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>A powerful emblem of grief\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>La Llorona the legend can be a meaningful symbol of so many things, past and present. Above all, she can signify loss, of many kinds. And because of this, how people interpret her can be incredibly personal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED News producer Lina Blanco knows this more than most. “The figure of La Llorona, as like a ghost who wanders at night? It was never one that scared me,” says Blanco. “Because I’ve seen scary things in my life that are not about a ghost wandering at night wanting to steal children.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896434\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896434\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For Blanco, La Llorona wasn’t someone to be afraid of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The stories of La Llorona that I gravitated to never showed La Llorona as a victim, never showed her as a vengeful spirit,” says Blanco. Instead, the legend as she learned it, from the work of \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/DCtMfkYyKjM\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">musicians like Chavela Vargas \u003c/a>and Latinx writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, was more of someone to learn from.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They showed this model of someone who was \u003cem>looking\u003c/em>, but then also a bridge and a connecting force between the world that is living and the world that is dead,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a queer, mixed Chicana coming of age in different places, Lina said she didn’t see something to fear in the story of La Llorona. Instead she saw parts of herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>La Llorona wanders in the night making those wailing sounds because she’s grieving. She makes her pain loud and clear. And sometimes, says Blanco, people can find visible grief in someone a frightening experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As someone who went through deep loss and grief as a child, when she lost her own mother, this is something Blanco says she knows firsthand. Because people sometimes just “don’t know how to engage with someone experiencing grief,” says Blanco. “They shy away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Not being able to hold someone in their grief sometimes shows up as ignoring them, fearing them, casting them aside,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Blanco, the way La Llorona grieves isn’t scary — it’s relatable. As a child experiencing the pain of grief, “no one knew how to \u003cem>talk\u003c/em> to me,” she says. What’s more, she can identify with La Llorona’s vocal calls in search of lost family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Parts of me,” says Blanco, “have gone around the world calling out for [my mother].”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Finding your own La Llorona\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Complex womanhood, being torn between two worlds, protecting threatened waters, reaching out for lost loved ones: As a symbol, La Llorona can mean so many things to so many people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On one of these cold winter nights, just as the sun is starting to set, perhaps you yourself might like to go to the Mission District in San Francisco and encounter La Llorona on that huge mural by Juana Alicia. If you’ve only heard the ghost story, she might not look exactly like you expect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if there’s one thing about La Llorona, it’s that she keeps her power to surprise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896435\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896435\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Juana Alicia’s interview used courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, recorded as part of the SFMOMA Mission Murals Project documenting the Latinx mural-making culture that emerged in San Francisco’s Mission District during the 1970s. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfmoma.org/\">The project launches soon on SFMOMA’s website.\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This episode of Bay Curious was reported by Sebastian Miño-Bucheli and edited by Carly Severn and Olivia Allen-Price. Special thanks to Lina Blanco, Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí, Erika Aguilar and Gabriella Frenes.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> In the heart of the Mission District in San Francisco, at the intersection of 24th and York, there’s a massive blue mural — one that will stop you in your tracks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Standing two stories high and 60 feet long, the intricate mural draws your eyes in with its depth and scale. It’s a world of blue tones, like standing in front of a waterfall. And it’s packed with figures — female figures.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> In the center, there’s Chalchiuhtlicue\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, Aztec goddess of lakes and streams. In the background, there are women from Bolivia, women from India, women from the Mexico-U.S. Border, all standing together. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And in the foreground, there’s a woman standing apart, stretching out her hand, like she’s reaching out to you. A tear falls from her eye, and she’s holding a child in her arms, as if to protect them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This mural is called “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters”, painted by the Bay Area artist \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Juana Alicia. And it’s been a fixture on this San Francisco wall for the last 21 years. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you’ve grown up with the legend of La Llorona, you might be surprised to see her like this in this mural. Because in the popular telling, the one that’s most common in Mexico and here in California, La Llorona is a ghost — the spirit of a woman who haunts watery places, wailing for her lost children … not protecting them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To understand how a traditional legend has come this far, and taken so many forms, we’re going to delve deep into the story of La Llorona. This story first aired in 2021, but we’re bring it back in honor of Latino Heritage Month and Spooky October.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Katrina Schwartz and you’re listening to Bay Curious. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sponsor message\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Today we’re exploring the legend of La Llorona, and how she’s evolved for new generations. Bay Curious reporter Sebastian Miño-Bucheli brings us the story.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli\u003c/b>\u003cb>: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For many Latinx people here in California, the story of La Llorona is one you heard growing up — told slightly differently each time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriella \u003c/b>\u003cb>Frenes\u003c/b>\u003cb>: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My family mainly used it to as like a scare tactic for my mom and my Tias when they were younger. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s Gabriella. Because the legend is something that so many people grow up with, I asked her and some of my coworkers what \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">they \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">remember first hearing about La Llorona. Among all the different variations of the legend, there are common themes: the ghost of a weeping woman, who haunts the waters, crying out for her children. Like my coworker Carlos says:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carlos Cabrera Lomelí: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She wails this: like “Mis Hijos, Mis Hijos!” which means my kids, my kids. And they said that she had drowned her own kids and and that she would walk around the rivers where she had the river, where she drowned them, feeling, you know, guilty of what she had done.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriella \u003c/b>\u003cb>Frenes\u003c/b>\u003cb>:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Because you know with the story of La Llorona she drowned her children and she they say that her soul is not rested because she also killed herself. You know, with Catholicism, that’s a huge sin, suicide. And so they say that since her soul is not laid to rest, she’s out there searching for her children. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And because of that, she’s often made into a terrifying ghost, on the lookout for new children — and she wants to take them. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or maybe, as Carlos says, she’s defending something:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carlos Cabrera Lomelí: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She, you know, is looking for them and pushing away anybody that threatens things that are special to her, like her children or rivers. Because rivers, you know, both in Mexico and in the rest of the world can really be the lifeline of a city or a community. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There’s also a traditional song about La Llorona. You might have heard it sung growing up, or, more recently, in the movie Coco:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">La Llorona song from the movie “Coco”\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Ecuadorian American — and \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> remember being warned by my childhood friends who were Mexican that if we didn’t behave, La Llorona would come to \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">get us\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But if \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">you \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">only know La Llorona from childhood stories, trust me: this legend goes far beyond those. And it’s the deep history, and the evolution of the legend, that brings us all the way to her very different appearance on that mural by Juana Alicia in the Mission.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I wanted to know more about how the legend of La Llorona got \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">started\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. So I called up Professora Leticia Hernández, a writer, artist and poet who teaches Oral History at San Francisco State University. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even though there’s your own myths throughout Latin America, I often associated it more with Mexican culture. And I think that’s how we we hear about it in California or the United States, in the southwest, as mostly associated with Mexican culture.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For many, La Llorona symbolizes \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Malintzin\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the woman who was said to have been kidnapped by Hernan Cortes to aid his invasion of Mexico, or helped him by choice, depending on who’s writing the history books. In \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">this \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">telling, La Llorona becomes a symbol of the injustices of colonization. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Some folks say that it starts at, you know, conquest. Others say it predates conquest with all of these incredibly complex and mythical Aztec goddesses and deities, right? Then you have the rendition that you know your honor is associated with, quite like where the Aztec Earth goddess who gave birth to the Sun Moon and stars, and that’s connected to see what that they’re all right, which is the the deity of women who die in childbirth. I mean, it could get really complex there, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Professora Hernandez says that even if this legend predates colonization in 1519, the moment Hernan Cortez arrived, the way European colonizers then wrote the history books about Malintzin, or La Malinche, lays the emphasis on her as a \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">negative \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">force — a woman that stepped out of line:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The way that the female figure of La Malinche has been demonized and constructed throughout history is problematic, especially because that that narrative has been controlled by the hetero patriarchy and makes a woman who was most likely a victim into a villain.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There are variations on not just who La Llorona is, but what she’s \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">doing\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> — and what happened to her children. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And there’s a lot of mystery around it, too, right? It’s like, Oh, she was scorned by a lover. So she, you know, drowned her children out of grief. But then she’s grieving forever in this limbo. And that kind of gets close to that whole bad mother narrative, too, right? So super complicated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Professora Hernandez’s heritage is Salvadoran, and she says so much of the La Llorona legend reminds her of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">La Siguanaba\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> — a Central American story that shares a \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">lot \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">of DNA with La Llorona. La Siguanaba is a supernatural creature that takes the form of a woman\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> cursed by the river god Lalog\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, who also stalks the waters, and brings vengeance — upon men and children.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you look at the legend, it gets more problematic because it becomes more like a spirited girl or a woman with spirit is monstrous. So one version is that Lalog punished her and turned her into Siguanaba for being a bad mother and a bad wife who determines that? What is a bad woman? Why is it bad to have spirit?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Of course, says Professor Hernandez for many people La Llorona \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">is \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a simple ghost story — and that’s okay:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sure, I’m wearing my Profe hat right now, but like, Hey, you know, I’m not trying to steal anybody’s scary story or or criticize or even patronize our our our folklore and our, you know, and our sayings. But it is important to know the history and the roots and also how to how to rethink, rethink it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And to connect us back to Juana Alicia’s mural \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">of \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">La Llorona in the Mission for a moment? Professor Hernandez has actually written about this artwork a bunch — and how it, in her words, “frees the spirit of women from roles as monstrous creatures of folklore to warrior women of history.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As Juana Alicia herself explains, because La Llorona contains multitudes, she can be used as a symbol for so many things in a mural like this:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Juana Alicia: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the Llorona mural, the issues of water and climate justice and feminism all come up. Racial justice, mixed heritage issues, they’re all there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On that wall, La Llorona isn’t a \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">ghost — \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">she’s flesh and blood. She’s protecting a child, not threatening it. And remember how my colleague Carlos mentioned how La Llorona is also known to defend the very waters she haunts? You could say she’s playing \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">that \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">water protector role right here, on this mural.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even where Juana Alicia chose to \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">paint \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">her mural is symbolic:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Juana Alicia: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The importance of putting La Llorona, Sacred Waters, on the corner of York and 24th in that neighborhood is multiple. First of all, it’s a neighborhood that I love. But it’s where the Raza is. It’s where people were being evicted rapidly. [11:29:51:11] Again, it’s like an anchor. It’s like a cultural anchor. It’s like holding on to sacred space in a neighborhood that I could no longer afford to live in, and most of my compatriots could not afford to live in either. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">La Llorona can be a symbol of complex womanhood; of being torn between two worlds. But also of loss, of many kinds. How people interpret her can be incredibly personal. Just ask journalist Lina Blanco, my colleague here at KQED:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The figure of La Llorona, as like a ghost who wanders at night? It was never one that scared me. Because I’ve seen scary things in my life that are not about a ghost wandering at night wanting to steal children. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For Lina, La Llorona \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">wasn’t \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">someone to be afraid of. The legend, as \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">she\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> learned it from the work of Latinx writers and musicians, was more of someone to learn from.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The stories of La Llorona that I gravitated to never showed La Llorona as a victim, never showed layered as a vengeful spirit, but instead showed this model of someone who was looking, but then also a bridge and a connecting force between the world that is living and the world that is dead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As a queer, mixed Chicana coming of age in different places, Lina said she didn’t see something to fear in the story of La Llorona. Instead she saw… parts of herself.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Because La Llorona wanders in the night making those sounds because she’s \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">grieving\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. She’s in pain, and showing it, and sometimes… other people \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">can \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">find grief kinda frightening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I think also one thing that I’ve learned from grief, whether or not this this mother figure La Llorona lost her kids because she killed them, or lost them because they they were lost to the dark night or by colonization, whatever it is, I think when someone is grieving and when someone is holding on to a deep loss, people fear that too. They don’t know how to engage with someone experiencing grief. They shy away. And so not being able to hold someone in their grief sometimes shows up as ignoring them, fearing them, casting them aside.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For Lina, the way La Llorena grieves isn’t scary — it’s relatable. Because she knows how it feels to be misunderstood this way.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And having experienced grief as a young kid, no one knew what to do with me, no one knew how to talk to me. And then they were like, They let me go into this fantasy world of my own to find my own ways of navigating through that. So I was on the other side. I lost my mom. She didn’t lose me, but I lost my mom. So I. Parts of me have gone around the world calling out for for her. And that’s why I feel the connection to, you know, someone who goes looking for their loved ones who are gone. We all do some of that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Just like the story of La Llorona shifts and evolves, so does that song about her. It takes on new words, gets new verses. And this is the version Lina herself likes to sing:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Singing) La Llorona, La Llorona…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And maybe, on one of these colder nights, just as the sun is starting to set, you’d like to head over to the Mission District and encounter La Llorona on that huge mural by Juana Alicia. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you’ve only heard the ghost story she might not look exactly like you expect. But if there’s one thing about La Llorona? It’s that \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">she \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">keeps her power to surprise.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Lina Blanco singing\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That story was reported by Sebastian Miño-Bucheli, and edited by Carly Severn. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tape from the interview with Juana Alicia is courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was recorded as part of their Mission Murals Project, which documents the Latinx mural-making culture that emerged in San Francisco’s Mission District during the 1970s. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You can see the mural, “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters,” at 24th and York Street in San Francisco. We’ve also got a picture online at BayCurious.org.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our show is a production of member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Have a great week!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story first aired in November 2021.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you find yourself in San Francisco’s Mission District at the corner of 24th and York streets, you can’t help but notice the massive, blue-toned mural that stands there — rising over two stories high and spanning 60 feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This intricate mural, called \u003ca href=\"https://juanaalicia.com/la-llorona-project-san-francisco/\">“La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” and created by Bay Area artist Juana Alicia\u003c/a>, is filled with expressive female figures that draw the eye with their depth and scale. In the center of this intricate mural, there’s Chalchiuhtlicue, the Aztec goddess of lakes and streams. In the background, there are women from Bolivia, women from India, women from the Mexico-U.S. border — all standing together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in the foreground, there’s a woman standing apart, stretching out her hand like she’s reaching out to the viewer. A tear falls from her eye, and she’s holding a child in her arms, as if to protect them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7962812002&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alicia’s mural has been a fixture on this San Francisco wall for the last 17 years. And if you grew up with the legend of La Llorona, you might be surprised to see her like this in this mural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s because in the popular telling — the one that’s most common in Mexico, and here in California — La Llorona is a ghost. She’s the spirit of a woman who haunts watery places, wailing for her lost children, not protecting them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So how did a traditional legend come this far, and take so many forms?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The stories we hear\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>For many Latinx people here in California, the story of La Llorona is one you hear growing up — told slightly differently each time. And because the legend is something so many people grow up with, many of my co-workers had something to say about what they remember first hearing about La Llorona.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896436\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896436\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52560_20211102_1549141-qut-1-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“My family mainly used it as a scare tactic for my mom and my tías when they were younger,” says Gabriella Frenes of KQED’s The California Report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among all the variations of the legend, there are common themes: the weeping ghost of a woman, who haunts the waters, crying out for her children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She wails this: like, ‘Mis hijos! Mis hijos!,’ which means, ‘My kids! My kids!'” says Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí, a reporter and producer with KQED News and KQED en Español. “They said that she had drowned her own kids, and that she would walk around the … river, where she drowned them, feeling guilty of what she had done.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She drowned her children, and they say that her soul is not rested because she also killed herself,” adds Frenes. “With Catholicism, that’s a huge sin, suicide. They say that since her soul is not laid to rest, she’s out there searching for her children.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And because of this, La Llorona is often made into a terrifying spirit on the lookout for new children — whom she wants to take. Or maybe, as Cabrera-Lomelí says, she’s defending something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She’s looking for [her kids] and pushing away anybody that threatens things that are special to her — like her children, or rivers,” says Cabrera-Lomelí. “Because rivers, both in Mexico and in the rest of the world, can really be the lifeline of a city or a community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m Ecuadorian American, and my parents say they never heard the story of La Llorona until they arrived in Los Angeles in the early ’90s. As for me, I remember that my childhood friends who were Mexican would warn me that if we didn’t behave, La Llorona would come to get us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if you only know La Llorona from childhood stories, trust me: This legend goes far beyond those. And it’s the deep history, and the evolution of the legend, that brings us all the way to her very different appearance on that mural by Juana Alicia in the Mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The origins of La Llorona\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>To learn more about how the legend of La Llorona got started, I called up Profesora Leticia Hernández — a writer, artist and poet who teaches oral history at San Francisco State University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For many, La Llorona symbolizes the real-life 16th-century woman Malintzin, or La Malinche — the woman said to have been kidnapped by Hernán Cortés to aid his invasion of Mexico in 1519 (or who helped him by choice, depending on who’s writing the history books).\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896433\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896433\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52557_20211102_155531-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In this telling, La Llorona becomes a symbol of the injustices of colonization. But then it goes even deeper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Others say [the legend] predates conquest with all of these incredibly complex and mythical Aztec goddesses and deities,” says Hernández. “Then you have the rendition that La Llorona is associated with Coatlicue the Aztec Earth goddess, who gave birth to the sun, moon and stars — and that’s connected to Cihuateteo, which is the the deity of women who die in childbirth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It could get really complex there, right?” says Hernández.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even if this legend predates Cortés and colonization, the way European colonizers then wrote the history books about Malintzin/La Malinche lays the emphasis firmly on her as a negative force: a woman who stepped out of line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way that the female figure of La Malinche has been demonized and constructed throughout history is problematic,” says Hernández. “Especially because that narrative has been controlled by the heteropatriarchy, and makes a woman who was most likely a victim into a villain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are variations on not just who La Llorona is, but what she’s doing — and what \u003cem>happened\u003c/em> to her children, specifically. It’s this element, says Hernández, that contains a great deal of mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the version of the narrative that has La Llorona as a scorned lover, she drowns her children out of grief, and must remain grieving forever in this limbo. “All of that gets close to that whole bad mother narrative,” says Hernández.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Around Latin America, the many mirrors of La Llorona\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>“Even though there’s La Llorona myths throughout Latin America, I often associated it more with Mexican culture,” says Hernández. “And I think that’s how we hear about it in California or the United States, in the southwest, as mostly associated with Mexican culture.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896438\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896438\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52558_20211102_155135-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>However, Hernández’s heritage is Salvadoran, and she says so much of the La Llorona legend reminds her of La Siguanaba — a Central American story that shares a lot of DNA with La Llorona. La Siguanaba is a supernatural creature that takes the form of a woman cursed by the rain god, Tlaloc. Like La Llorona, she stalks the waters and brings vengeance upon men and children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story of La Siguanaba instantly reminded \u003cem>my\u003c/em> parents of a similar story told exclusively in Guayaquil, a major port city in Ecuador. I remember the story of La Dama Tapada — the Veiled Lady — being told to me when I was about 5 years old while visiting my great-uncle’s house, to stop me from wanting to stay up late.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the legend goes, La Dama would walk the city at night stalking drunken men and luring them into dark alleys with her beautiful scent. Once alone with a man, she would reveal her skeletal face, and the next morning, the man would be found dead foaming from the mouth. No Guayaquileño man would dare walk alone at night, I was told, out of fear of meeting La Dama.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the story of La Siguanaba, Hernández says that “if you look at the legend, it gets more problematic because it becomes more like ‘a spirited girl’ or ‘a woman with spirit’ is monstrous.” In one version, she says, the god Tlaloc turned her into La Siguanaba as punishment “for being a bad mother and a bad wife.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Who determines that?” asks Hernández. “What \u003cem>is\u003c/em> a bad woman? Why is it bad to have spirit?” They’re questions that could equally be asked of the legend of La Dama Tapada — especially given that she stalks drunken men.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, says Hernández, for many people the legends of La Llorona, La Siguanaba and La Dama Tapada are “just” simple ghost stories, and that’s OK. When analyzing the role of folklore, she stresses that she’s “wearing her ‘profe’ hat” — and says that knowing the roots of the stories we tell ourselves is always powerful.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Reimagining La Llorona through art\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://juanaalicia.com/content/57/\">Hernández has written about Juana Alicia’s Mission mural of La Llorona\u003c/a>, and how the artwork “frees the spirit of women from roles as monstrous creatures of folklore to warrior women of history.” And Juana Alicia herself explains that, because La Llorona contains multitudes, she can be used as a symbol for so many things in a mural like this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896437\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896437\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52559_20211102_155031-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>( Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“In the Llorona mural, the issues of water and climate justice and feminism all come up,” says Alicia. “Racial justice, mixed heritage issues — they’re all there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On that wall, La Llorona isn’t a ghost: Instead, she’s flesh and blood. She’s protecting a child, not threatening it. And if you recall my colleague Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí’s words on how La Llorona is known to defend the very waters she haunts, you might say she’s playing that water protector role right here on the mural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even where Juana Alicia chose to paint her mural on the corner of York and 24th is symbolic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a neighborhood that I love. It’s where the raza is. It’s where people were being evicted rapidly,” says Alicia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s like a cultural anchor. It’s like holding on to sacred space in a neighborhood that I could no longer afford to live in, and most of my compatriots could not afford to live in either.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>A powerful emblem of grief\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>La Llorona the legend can be a meaningful symbol of so many things, past and present. Above all, she can signify loss, of many kinds. And because of this, how people interpret her can be incredibly personal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED News producer Lina Blanco knows this more than most. “The figure of La Llorona, as like a ghost who wanders at night? It was never one that scared me,” says Blanco. “Because I’ve seen scary things in my life that are not about a ghost wandering at night wanting to steal children.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896434\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896434\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52556_20211102_155117-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For Blanco, La Llorona wasn’t someone to be afraid of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The stories of La Llorona that I gravitated to never showed La Llorona as a victim, never showed her as a vengeful spirit,” says Blanco. Instead, the legend as she learned it, from the work of \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/DCtMfkYyKjM\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">musicians like Chavela Vargas \u003c/a>and Latinx writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, was more of someone to learn from.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They showed this model of someone who was \u003cem>looking\u003c/em>, but then also a bridge and a connecting force between the world that is living and the world that is dead,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a queer, mixed Chicana coming of age in different places, Lina said she didn’t see something to fear in the story of La Llorona. Instead she saw parts of herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>La Llorona wanders in the night making those wailing sounds because she’s grieving. She makes her pain loud and clear. And sometimes, says Blanco, people can find visible grief in someone a frightening experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As someone who went through deep loss and grief as a child, when she lost her own mother, this is something Blanco says she knows firsthand. Because people sometimes just “don’t know how to engage with someone experiencing grief,” says Blanco. “They shy away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Not being able to hold someone in their grief sometimes shows up as ignoring them, fearing them, casting them aside,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Blanco, the way La Llorona grieves isn’t scary — it’s relatable. As a child experiencing the pain of grief, “no one knew how to \u003cem>talk\u003c/em> to me,” she says. What’s more, she can identify with La Llorona’s vocal calls in search of lost family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Parts of me,” says Blanco, “have gone around the world calling out for [my mother].”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Finding your own La Llorona\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Complex womanhood, being torn between two worlds, protecting threatened waters, reaching out for lost loved ones: As a symbol, La Llorona can mean so many things to so many people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On one of these cold winter nights, just as the sun is starting to set, perhaps you yourself might like to go to the Mission District in San Francisco and encounter La Llorona on that huge mural by Juana Alicia. If you’ve only heard the ghost story, she might not look exactly like you expect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But if there’s one thing about La Llorona, it’s that she keeps her power to surprise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11896435\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11896435\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1081\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/RS52555_20211102_155938-qut-1536x865.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Juana Alicia’s mural “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Juana Alicia’s interview used courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, recorded as part of the SFMOMA Mission Murals Project documenting the Latinx mural-making culture that emerged in San Francisco’s Mission District during the 1970s. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfmoma.org/\">The project launches soon on SFMOMA’s website.\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This episode of Bay Curious was reported by Sebastian Miño-Bucheli and edited by Carly Severn and Olivia Allen-Price. Special thanks to Lina Blanco, Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí, Erika Aguilar and Gabriella Frenes.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> In the heart of the Mission District in San Francisco, at the intersection of 24th and York, there’s a massive blue mural — one that will stop you in your tracks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Standing two stories high and 60 feet long, the intricate mural draws your eyes in with its depth and scale. It’s a world of blue tones, like standing in front of a waterfall. And it’s packed with figures — female figures.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> In the center, there’s Chalchiuhtlicue\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, Aztec goddess of lakes and streams. In the background, there are women from Bolivia, women from India, women from the Mexico-U.S. Border, all standing together. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And in the foreground, there’s a woman standing apart, stretching out her hand, like she’s reaching out to you. A tear falls from her eye, and she’s holding a child in her arms, as if to protect them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This mural is called “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters”, painted by the Bay Area artist \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Juana Alicia. And it’s been a fixture on this San Francisco wall for the last 21 years. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you’ve grown up with the legend of La Llorona, you might be surprised to see her like this in this mural. Because in the popular telling, the one that’s most common in Mexico and here in California, La Llorona is a ghost — the spirit of a woman who haunts watery places, wailing for her lost children … not protecting them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To understand how a traditional legend has come this far, and taken so many forms, we’re going to delve deep into the story of La Llorona. This story first aired in 2021, but we’re bring it back in honor of Latino Heritage Month and Spooky October.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Katrina Schwartz and you’re listening to Bay Curious. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sponsor message\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Today we’re exploring the legend of La Llorona, and how she’s evolved for new generations. Bay Curious reporter Sebastian Miño-Bucheli brings us the story.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli\u003c/b>\u003cb>: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For many Latinx people here in California, the story of La Llorona is one you heard growing up — told slightly differently each time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriella \u003c/b>\u003cb>Frenes\u003c/b>\u003cb>: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My family mainly used it to as like a scare tactic for my mom and my Tias when they were younger. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s Gabriella. Because the legend is something that so many people grow up with, I asked her and some of my coworkers what \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">they \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">remember first hearing about La Llorona. Among all the different variations of the legend, there are common themes: the ghost of a weeping woman, who haunts the waters, crying out for her children. Like my coworker Carlos says:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carlos Cabrera Lomelí: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She wails this: like “Mis Hijos, Mis Hijos!” which means my kids, my kids. And they said that she had drowned her own kids and and that she would walk around the rivers where she had the river, where she drowned them, feeling, you know, guilty of what she had done.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gabriella \u003c/b>\u003cb>Frenes\u003c/b>\u003cb>:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Because you know with the story of La Llorona she drowned her children and she they say that her soul is not rested because she also killed herself. You know, with Catholicism, that’s a huge sin, suicide. And so they say that since her soul is not laid to rest, she’s out there searching for her children. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And because of that, she’s often made into a terrifying ghost, on the lookout for new children — and she wants to take them. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or maybe, as Carlos says, she’s defending something:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carlos Cabrera Lomelí: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She, you know, is looking for them and pushing away anybody that threatens things that are special to her, like her children or rivers. Because rivers, you know, both in Mexico and in the rest of the world can really be the lifeline of a city or a community. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There’s also a traditional song about La Llorona. You might have heard it sung growing up, or, more recently, in the movie Coco:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">La Llorona song from the movie “Coco”\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Ecuadorian American — and \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> remember being warned by my childhood friends who were Mexican that if we didn’t behave, La Llorona would come to \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">get us\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But if \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">you \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">only know La Llorona from childhood stories, trust me: this legend goes far beyond those. And it’s the deep history, and the evolution of the legend, that brings us all the way to her very different appearance on that mural by Juana Alicia in the Mission.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I wanted to know more about how the legend of La Llorona got \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">started\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. So I called up Professora Leticia Hernández, a writer, artist and poet who teaches Oral History at San Francisco State University. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even though there’s your own myths throughout Latin America, I often associated it more with Mexican culture. And I think that’s how we we hear about it in California or the United States, in the southwest, as mostly associated with Mexican culture.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For many, La Llorona symbolizes \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Malintzin\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the woman who was said to have been kidnapped by Hernan Cortes to aid his invasion of Mexico, or helped him by choice, depending on who’s writing the history books. In \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">this \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">telling, La Llorona becomes a symbol of the injustices of colonization. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Some folks say that it starts at, you know, conquest. Others say it predates conquest with all of these incredibly complex and mythical Aztec goddesses and deities, right? Then you have the rendition that you know your honor is associated with, quite like where the Aztec Earth goddess who gave birth to the Sun Moon and stars, and that’s connected to see what that they’re all right, which is the the deity of women who die in childbirth. I mean, it could get really complex there, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Professora Hernandez says that even if this legend predates colonization in 1519, the moment Hernan Cortez arrived, the way European colonizers then wrote the history books about Malintzin, or La Malinche, lays the emphasis on her as a \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">negative \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">force — a woman that stepped out of line:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The way that the female figure of La Malinche has been demonized and constructed throughout history is problematic, especially because that that narrative has been controlled by the hetero patriarchy and makes a woman who was most likely a victim into a villain.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There are variations on not just who La Llorona is, but what she’s \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">doing\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> — and what happened to her children. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And there’s a lot of mystery around it, too, right? It’s like, Oh, she was scorned by a lover. So she, you know, drowned her children out of grief. But then she’s grieving forever in this limbo. And that kind of gets close to that whole bad mother narrative, too, right? So super complicated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Professora Hernandez’s heritage is Salvadoran, and she says so much of the La Llorona legend reminds her of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">La Siguanaba\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> — a Central American story that shares a \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">lot \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">of DNA with La Llorona. La Siguanaba is a supernatural creature that takes the form of a woman\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> cursed by the river god Lalog\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, who also stalks the waters, and brings vengeance — upon men and children.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you look at the legend, it gets more problematic because it becomes more like a spirited girl or a woman with spirit is monstrous. So one version is that Lalog punished her and turned her into Siguanaba for being a bad mother and a bad wife who determines that? What is a bad woman? Why is it bad to have spirit?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Of course, says Professor Hernandez for many people La Llorona \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">is \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a simple ghost story — and that’s okay:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Leticia Hernández: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sure, I’m wearing my Profe hat right now, but like, Hey, you know, I’m not trying to steal anybody’s scary story or or criticize or even patronize our our our folklore and our, you know, and our sayings. But it is important to know the history and the roots and also how to how to rethink, rethink it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And to connect us back to Juana Alicia’s mural \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">of \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">La Llorona in the Mission for a moment? Professor Hernandez has actually written about this artwork a bunch — and how it, in her words, “frees the spirit of women from roles as monstrous creatures of folklore to warrior women of history.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As Juana Alicia herself explains, because La Llorona contains multitudes, she can be used as a symbol for so many things in a mural like this:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Juana Alicia: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the Llorona mural, the issues of water and climate justice and feminism all come up. Racial justice, mixed heritage issues, they’re all there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On that wall, La Llorona isn’t a \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">ghost — \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">she’s flesh and blood. She’s protecting a child, not threatening it. And remember how my colleague Carlos mentioned how La Llorona is also known to defend the very waters she haunts? You could say she’s playing \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">that \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">water protector role right here, on this mural.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even where Juana Alicia chose to \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">paint \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">her mural is symbolic:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Juana Alicia: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The importance of putting La Llorona, Sacred Waters, on the corner of York and 24th in that neighborhood is multiple. First of all, it’s a neighborhood that I love. But it’s where the Raza is. It’s where people were being evicted rapidly. [11:29:51:11] Again, it’s like an anchor. It’s like a cultural anchor. It’s like holding on to sacred space in a neighborhood that I could no longer afford to live in, and most of my compatriots could not afford to live in either. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">La Llorona can be a symbol of complex womanhood; of being torn between two worlds. But also of loss, of many kinds. How people interpret her can be incredibly personal. Just ask journalist Lina Blanco, my colleague here at KQED:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The figure of La Llorona, as like a ghost who wanders at night? It was never one that scared me. Because I’ve seen scary things in my life that are not about a ghost wandering at night wanting to steal children. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For Lina, La Llorona \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">wasn’t \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">someone to be afraid of. The legend, as \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">she\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> learned it from the work of Latinx writers and musicians, was more of someone to learn from.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The stories of La Llorona that I gravitated to never showed La Llorona as a victim, never showed layered as a vengeful spirit, but instead showed this model of someone who was looking, but then also a bridge and a connecting force between the world that is living and the world that is dead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As a queer, mixed Chicana coming of age in different places, Lina said she didn’t see something to fear in the story of La Llorona. Instead she saw… parts of herself.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Because La Llorona wanders in the night making those sounds because she’s \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">grieving\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. She’s in pain, and showing it, and sometimes… other people \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">can \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">find grief kinda frightening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I think also one thing that I’ve learned from grief, whether or not this this mother figure La Llorona lost her kids because she killed them, or lost them because they they were lost to the dark night or by colonization, whatever it is, I think when someone is grieving and when someone is holding on to a deep loss, people fear that too. They don’t know how to engage with someone experiencing grief. They shy away. And so not being able to hold someone in their grief sometimes shows up as ignoring them, fearing them, casting them aside.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For Lina, the way La Llorena grieves isn’t scary — it’s relatable. Because she knows how it feels to be misunderstood this way.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And having experienced grief as a young kid, no one knew what to do with me, no one knew how to talk to me. And then they were like, They let me go into this fantasy world of my own to find my own ways of navigating through that. So I was on the other side. I lost my mom. She didn’t lose me, but I lost my mom. So I. Parts of me have gone around the world calling out for for her. And that’s why I feel the connection to, you know, someone who goes looking for their loved ones who are gone. We all do some of that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Just like the story of La Llorona shifts and evolves, so does that song about her. It takes on new words, gets new verses. And this is the version Lina herself likes to sing:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lina Blanco:\u003c/b> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(Singing) La Llorona, La Llorona…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sebastian Miño-Bucheli: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And maybe, on one of these colder nights, just as the sun is starting to set, you’d like to head over to the Mission District and encounter La Llorona on that huge mural by Juana Alicia. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you’ve only heard the ghost story she might not look exactly like you expect. But if there’s one thing about La Llorona? It’s that \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">she \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">keeps her power to surprise.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Lina Blanco singing\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That story was reported by Sebastian Miño-Bucheli, and edited by Carly Severn. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tape from the interview with Juana Alicia is courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was recorded as part of their Mission Murals Project, which documents the Latinx mural-making culture that emerged in San Francisco’s Mission District during the 1970s. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You can see the mural, “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters,” at 24th and York Street in San Francisco. We’ve also got a picture online at BayCurious.org.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our show is a production of member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Have a great week!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Stairways Crisscross the Hills of San Francisco. Here's Why People Love Them",
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"headTitle": "Stairways Crisscross the Hills of San Francisco. Here’s Why People Love Them | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a> is widely considered \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/CITY-OF-HILLS-With-50-plus-hills-it-s-no-2676064.php\">one of the hilliest cities in the world.\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003cbr>\nBut all this elevation gain comes with a price: stairs. The city boasts more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/201107221000/urban-stairs-of-the-bay-area\">900 public stairways\u003c/a> — everything from winding wooden paths to mosaiced climbs. It’s a charming urban feature that’s given rise to a community of stair enthusiasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week’s question asker, George Krause, is one of many San Francisco stair admirers. He’s a photographer, and he stumbled upon the stairways during his work trips to the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Between shoots in San Francisco … [I’d] ride public transportation to a neighborhood that I had not been to before, and then just walk the streets with my camera doing street photography,” Krause said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every neighborhood in San Francisco has got these hidden stairway walks, Castro and Potrero Hill and Excelsior and you name it … they’re everywhere. So it’s like a free, fun thing to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12053514\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12053514\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The twists and turns of Oakhurst Lane snake up the hillside, offering one of San Francisco’s longest and most hidden climbs on July 30, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>All this got him wondering. What’s the shortest stairway in San Francisco? What’s the longest? What’s the steepest?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Shortest Stairway\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>When it comes to measuring the city’s stairways, there’s a lot more debate than data. I sat down with one of the city’s leading stair enthusiasts, Alexandra Kenin, to try to get to the bottom of it all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kenin claims to have walked 99.99% of all the city’s stairs. She’s also compiled a \u003ca href=\"https://www.urbanhikersf.com/sfstairmap\">digital stairway map.\u003c/a>[aside postID=news_11907457 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/garden-from-above-1020x574.jpeg']According to Kenin, San Francisco’s shortest stair is a single step in the city’s Financial District. It’s on Sansome Street, between Broadway and Pacific.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s literally railings like you would have on a multi-step stairway, yet there is just one stair,” Kenin said. “So it kind of looks like a stairway, because there’s stairway infrastructure.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some people would not call this one step a stairway; others would swear that it is. San Francisco Public Works, which maintains public rights of way, including stairs, offers an alternative. They list the city’s shortest stair as a five-stepper at \u003ca href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/yTWf4T9d8a7XXxHD6\">14th Avenue and Fanning Way.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Longest Stairway\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If you ask most San Franciscans to name the city’s longest stairway, they’ll probably point you towards \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11907457/how-the-filbert-steps-came-to-be-an-oasis-in-san-francisco\">the famous Filbert or Greenwich steps\u003c/a>. Located in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood, they both offer scenic climbs up to Coit Tower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there’s a catch: those stairways are broken up by roads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12053513\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12053513\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alex Kenin pauses at the top of Oakhurst Lane, the longest staircase in San Francisco, on July 30, 2025. The staircase winds through the Forest Knolls neighborhood. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“So we should debate, is it the longest continuous stairway?” Kenin queried. Or is it the most total steps?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Public Works, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfstairways.com/stairways/oakhurst-lane/\">Oakhurst Lane stairs\u003c/a> are actually the longest. They’re on the sloping hillside of Mount Sutro near Laguna Honda Hospital. Unlike the Telegraph Hill steps, Oakhurst Lane is uninterrupted — a steady climb that amounts to an estimated 290 feet. That’s roughly 10 feet higher than the Filbert and Greenwich steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Steepest Stairway\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Nailing down San Francisco’s steepest staircase is even trickier. Public works doesn’t track the steepest stairways, and it’s hard to pull together accurate data about the city’s stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But based on some Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping endeavors and Kenin’s real-life experience, here are a few top contenders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Filbert Street Steps:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThese steps are scenic and punishing, climbing through lush gardens up Telegraph Hill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11907460\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11907460\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized.jpg\" alt=\"A man in a red t-shirt, sunglasses and backpack poses on a set of wooden steps with a lush garden to his right.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bay Curious listener Eric Johnson poses on the Filbert steps. \u003ccite>(Katrina Schwartz/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Normandie Terrace Steps:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThis little-known but dizzying flight of stairs connects one street to a cul-de-sac far above.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12056079\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12056079\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stairs connect Vallejo Street between Divisadero and Scott streets to the north end of Normandie Terrace in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood on Sept. 10, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>22nd Street and Vicksburg Steps:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThis block is one of the steepest streets in the city. The grade? An estimated 31.5%. The sidewalk is a stairway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12056076\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12056076\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A man makes his way up the staircase at 22nd and Vicksburg streets on Sept. 10, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Iron Alley Steps:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThis steep stairway is no joke. One stair \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfstairways.com/stairways/iron-alley-clayton-street-to-corbett-avenue/\">database \u003c/a>lists measurements that amount to a 51% grade slope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12056078\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12056078\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wooden stairs connect Clayton Street near Market Street to Corbett Avenue at Iron Alley in San Francisco’s Upper Market/Twin Peaks neighborhood on Sept. 10, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Why People Love San Francisco’s Stairs\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For Kenin, stairway walks aren’t just about exercise or views. They’re about connecting with the city in a more mindful way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You get a visceral experience,” she said. “It all of a sudden becomes quieter. You can see beauty with your eyes. You might smell a jasmine plant that is blooming in someone’s lawn right next to the stairway. … You could hear a hummingbird float by.”[aside postID=news_11185731 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2016/11/2924064112_df11d9e7ec_o-1180x785.jpg']The stairs also offer a link to San Francisco’s history. Back in the day, when people got around on horseback, stairs were a practical pedestrian solution. Some streets were just too steep for horse-drawn carriages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s kind of a cool connection to the past because people have been going up and down these stairways, probably some of them since the 1800s,” Kenin said. “So I like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re interested in walking some of San Francisco’s most iconic stairs, \u003ca href=\"https://www.urbanhikersf.com/sfstairmap\">check out Kenin’s stairway map to chart out a route of your own.\u003c/a> And, October happens to be \u003ca href=\"https://sanfranciscoparksalliance.org/our-work/programs-events/sf-stairway-month/\">“SF Stairway Month,”\u003c/a> a new thing that started in 2024. So, it’s the perfect time to get out and explore!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Almost every day when I get home from work I strap on a baby carrier and take my one year old daughter, Esme, out for a walk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz in scene: \u003c/strong>So, Esme and I are walking up the Franconia Street Steps in Bernal Heights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of Esme humming\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz in scene: \u003c/strong>Look at that, Esme, you can see the fog comin’ in. Isn’t it beautiful?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Esme babbling sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Some of the stairways we take have swings on them. Others are beautifully cared for, with terraced gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz in scene: \u003c/strong>Hello. We love your steps, they’re so beautiful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>All have sweeping views.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz in scene: \u003c/strong>Phew, at the top of the hill now\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Esme sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>San Francisco has countless winding pathways like this, from simple wooden stairs to mosaiced climbs and utilitarian concrete steps. It’s incredibly charming and a delightful surprise to many visitors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>George Krause: \u003c/strong>Every neighborhood in San Francisco has got these hidden stairway watch Castro and Potrero Hill and Excelsior and you name it. You know, there’s, they’re everywhere. So it’s like a free, fun thing to do, you know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Our question asker this week, George Krause, is a photographer. He often comes to the city for work and likes to spend time on the stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>George Krause: \u003c/strong>When I wasn’t shooting, you know, between shoots in San Francisco. That’s basically what I did — ride public transportation to a neighborhood that I had not been to before, and then just walk the streets with my camera, doing street photography.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>San Francisco is one of the hilliest cities in the world — and stairs are often the most direct way to get from A to B.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All this got George wondering. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>George Krause:\u003c/strong> What is the longest stairway in San Francisco? What is the shortest? What is the steepest?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>George’s question won a Bay Curious voting round, so we know many of you are stair-curious too!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, we’re devoting the show to walking San Francisco’s iconic stairways. We’ll meet some stair lovers and see what’s powering their uphill devotion. Then we’ll talk with a map expert to try and answer some basic questions about the city’s stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m Katrina Schwartz, you’re listening to Bay Curious. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>With more than 900 public stairways, it’s safe to say that San Francisco is a city of stairs. But when it comes to measuring them, there’s a lot more debate than data. Pinpointing the longest, the shortest, and the steepest stairways turned out to be a bigger challenge than we imagined, but Bay Curious producer Gabriela Glueck was up to the job. She met up with one stair fanatic to get some answers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck:\u003c/strong> Alexandra Kenin is a quintessential stair enthusiast. She claims to have hiked 99.99% of all the city’s stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s an obsession that started back in 2007, when she first moved to San Francisco and started leafing through some guidebooks her dad had given her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> So he gave me, at the time, what was popular, which was a Zagat guide for restaurants, and he gave me Stairway Walks in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>\u003cem>Stairway Walks in San Francisco \u003c/em>was written by Adah Bakalinsky, the so-called Queen of San Francisco’s stairs. It’s got step-by-step directions to find hidden stairways, gives background info on neighborhood history and generally celebrates this unique side of San Francisco life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Alex, that book became a lifesaver when the coronavirus pandemic hit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> You know, we were stuck at home, and I was kind of going stir crazy. My partner and I found ourselves juggling a one and a half year old between meetings, and it was really stressful, and we needed a stress release.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>So, she started walking, following Adah’s directions. Her quest? Walk \u003cem>all\u003c/em> of the city’s stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> You get a visceral experience …It all of a sudden becomes quieter. You can see beauty with your eyes. You might smell a jasmine plant that is blooming in someone’s lawn right next to the stairway. You could hear a hummingbird float by.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The stairs also offer a window into the city’s past. Back in the day, when people got around on horseback, stairs were a practical pedestrian solution. Some streets were just too steep for horse-drawn carriages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin: \u003c/strong>And it’s kind of a cool connection to the past, because people have been going up and down these stairways, probably, some of them, since the 1800s, so I like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But Alex has also brought stair walking into the 21st century with an online map that features many of Adah’s favorites as well as some new ones. If there’s anyone who can help me figure out the longest, shortest and steepest stairway — it’s Alex.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ll start with the shortest. Sansome Street, between Broadway and Pacific\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> There is literally a random one step, which makes me laugh. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Sansome Street step is on the edge of the city’s Financial District, with a nice view of the Transamerica Pyramid in the background. And then, the single stair.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin: \u003c/strong>There’s literally railings like you would have on a multi-step stairway, yet there is just one stair. So it kind of looks like a stairway, because there’s stairway infrastructure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> So here I am at the shortest staircase in San Francisco. It is just one step. For the sake of journalism, I’m gonna walk it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of taking a step\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>I feel like this is a good place to talk about the definition of a stairway. Some people would \u003cem>not\u003c/em> call this one-step a staircase … others would swear that it is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> It really depends on your definition of a stairway. So I didn’t know if I should put that in there, but it is a stair. So I did want to include it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Many people define a stairway as two or more steps. Alex says there are plenty of two-steppers throughout the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But according to San Francisco Public Works — which maintains public rights of way, including stairs — the shortest stair is a five-stepper at 14th Avenue and Fanning Way. Do with that what you will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Next, the longest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> So I think it’s either the Filbert or Greenwich Street steps going up to Telegraph Hill. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Filbert and Greenwich Street steps are many people’s first guesses. They both offer scenic climbs up to Coit Tower. The lush Filbert Street steps are also home to a famous flock of parrots featured in film, “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Parrot sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But — and this is where things started to get even trickier — how do you define “the longest?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin: OK\u003c/strong>, so we should debate, is it the longest continuous stairway? So when you do the Filbert or Greenwich Street steps, you are crossing various roads. So does that count?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Or is it the most total steps?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> Those two stairways, Greenwich Street steps, Filbert Street steps, are around 380 to 390.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>According to Public Works, the Oakhurst Lane stairs — on Mount Sutro near Laguna Honda Hospital — are actually the longest. That’s because, unlike Filbert and Greenwich, the lane is a continuous stairway; there aren’t roads in the middle breaking it apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has fewer total steps, but climbs an estimated 290 feet. Making it the longest continuous stairway in the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, Alex and I headed to Mount Sutro to check it out for ourselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> Alright, here we go. We’re climbing the first flight of stairs. We’ve got some concrete steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of climbing stairs\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> It’s a foggy day. The eucalyptus trees are swaying. It’s a very atmospheric day. And if you take a look, it’s kind of funny. There’s moss growing on the stairs. I’m pretty sure it’s foggy here a lot of the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As we make our way up the steps, the city kind of fades away. It feels like an isolated residential path, sandwiched between houses. And, like many San Francisco stairs, it’s cared for by community members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rick:\u003c/strong> I’m just clipping the poison oak so people can walk up and down Oakhurst Lane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This is Rick, Alex and I ran into him on our walk. He lives in the neighborhood and has been walking the lane for 30 years. He’s seen all kinds of people on these steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rick: \u003c/strong>There was one guy, he was training to go up Mount Whitney, and he put on this really heavy pack, and I think he went up and down like 15 times. But this guy was sweating, and he was just like, step by step by step. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>OK, we’ve been to the shortest and longest stairways and my legs are officially warmed up. Time for part three of the question. What is the steepest stair? Or, as our question asker George reframed it, what’s the most challenging one?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is where I started to run into some \u003cem>real\u003c/em> trouble.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin: \u003c/strong>This is a thing that people debate. What is the steepest Street in San Francisco? I can find 10 articles on the internet right now telling me different streets are the steepest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>There are a lot of close contenders and not a lot of accurate measuring going on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I asked Public Works about the steepest stairway, one representative said that quote, “We don’t track the steepest but likely will capture that in a longer-term asset management initiative.” Translation: they don’t know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this seemed like the kind of problem you could answer, if only you had a digital mapping specialist in your corner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>OK, the analysis question that I’m trying to answer is, which San Francisco City staircase is the steepest?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>David Medeiros is a geospatial reference and instruction specialist at Stanford. Basically, a map expert.Which is why I sent him a city data set dedicated to structures in the public right-of-way, including stairs. Then I asked him for help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>So, from a technical standpoint, the process is not difficult. So, you just need one other piece of data, and that’s an elevation model for the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>David’s plan? Take a map of all the stairs and overlay it on a map of the city’s peaks and valleys and boom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>OK, I have QGIS open, and I’m going to add the data sets now. … I’m going to bring in the 1-meter digital elevation model for San Francisco. \u003cem>(Fades under)\u003c/em> First, I’m going to go grab the SF stairs, or the stairs structures, line features and overlay them on the digital elevation model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>I’m fast forwarding here, but once he’s got the two maps, it’s a simple slope calculation. Rise over run.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>So now I have a list or a table of the slope, the percent slopes for all of these things that the city has in this structures data set, that includes stairs and viaducts and retaining walls and that sort of stuff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> And what is the steepest stair? What did you find?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If you thought this was gonna be the payoff moment — so did I. But no.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As we started looking at our top steep contenders on Google Street View, many of them just didn’t look that steep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>The more difficult part of it is the data itself. It’s the staircase data is a mess.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>David says the lengths weren’t precise enough. That the public right-of-way info is more like a rough sketch. Not the kind of picture you could build a case on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>So I feel like, I feel like I failed a little bit, in a sense, like the all the work that we did, all the information it, the the actual workflow is fine. It works. The underlying elevation data is a good resource. It’s just that we don’t have good data for the stairs, the real stairs, what they really look like in the real world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>According to David, this data-to-real-world gap is a pretty common digital mapping challenge. Sometimes there’s no substitute for just going to see for yourself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> So I’m at the first stop on the steepest stair tour, and we are at the Glendale street stairs, and they look pretty, pretty steep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>With the help of David’s data, Alex’s real-world experience, and countless internet searches, I compiled a list of top five \u003cem>potentially\u003c/em> — and I emphasize potentially — steepest stairs in the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, I devoted an entire day to \u003cem>walking all of them.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first one? Glendale street stairs in Twin Peaks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> They’re kind of boring. …They’re in between two apartment buildings, and below it is this really steep road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of walking\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> OK, so I’m at the second stair stop on this steep stairs journey, and I’m at the Normandy terrace stairs in Pacific Heights. They’re very grand, they kind of zigzag up a vertical wall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of walking up steps\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene, out of breath:\u003c/strong> You can see the bay and kind of the whole expanse of the city stretching out before you. And it is a pretty good view. And recommend you\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> All right, I’m walking over to our next stair stop, and it’s 22nd Street and Vicksburg.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>These stairs are in Noe Valley… a small stretch of the 22nd street incline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene: \u003c/strong>So these are pretty amazing. It’s on an extremely steep San Francisco street, and the … basically, the sidewalk is a staircase. They’ve carved out stairs in the concrete because it’s just … it’s just too steep to walk by yourself. So here goes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This block is one of the steepest streets in the city. The grade? An estimated 31.5%. As local resident Laura tells me, it’s enough to make drivers change their plans. Also, she says it’s a prime spot for shenanigans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura: \u003c/strong>Halloween? People roll pumpkins down the hill. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> So I’m here at the Iron Alley stairways in the Twin Peaks neighborhood, and this one looks pretty steep, not gonna lie, goes straight down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Iron Alley is no joke. Averaging numbers from one stair website and my own online mapping endeavors, I’m estimating something around a 46- to-51% grade slope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene and out of breath: \u003c/strong>\u003cem>1.2.3.4.5.6. …\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Given the information available and my experience walking them, I think Iron Alley might be the steepest stairway. Some neighborhood gardeners I met on the stairs seemed to agree.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Neighbor: \u003c/strong>Man, you take a tumble, you could be going all the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>I have to say that defining the longest, shortest, and steepest stairs in San Francisco ended up being a lot harder than I’d imagined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in some ways, besides the point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>First stair love note:\u003c/strong> Really, I love stairs because they are a vital part of urban infrastructure, they are beautiful, they are a great workout, they give you a sense of accomplishment when you climb them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Second stair love note: \u003c/strong>It feels like I’m living in a game or story universe where I’m discovering new pieces of the map\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Third stair love note:\u003c/strong> My favorite hike is starting in the Forest Knolls neighborhood. The stairs are green and floating and surrounded by eucalyptus trees\u003cspan style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fourth stair love note:\u003c/strong> they are so beautiful and surprising and mysterious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Those were stair love notes from Bay Curious listeners.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That story was brought to you by producer Gabriela Glueck. If you were listening closely, you may have noticed that Gabriela said she was going to walk the five steepest stairways, but she only talked about 4. You’re right! The fifth contender was the Filbert Street steps, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11907457/how-the-filbert-steps-came-to-be-an-oasis-in-san-francisco\">we have an entire episode about the history of that stairway \u003c/a>and the beautiful garden that runs next to it. I’ll put a link in our show notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003cbr>\nWith extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening. Have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "San Francisco neighborhoods are known for steep hills and stairways to help residents navigate. Whether it’s Bernal Heights, Mount Sutro, Noe Valley or Telegraph Hill, we went on an adventure to find the shortest, longest and steepest stairways.",
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"title": "Stairways Crisscross the Hills of San Francisco. Here's Why People Love Them | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a> is widely considered \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/CITY-OF-HILLS-With-50-plus-hills-it-s-no-2676064.php\">one of the hilliest cities in the world.\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cbr>\nBut all this elevation gain comes with a price: stairs. The city boasts more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/201107221000/urban-stairs-of-the-bay-area\">900 public stairways\u003c/a> — everything from winding wooden paths to mosaiced climbs. It’s a charming urban feature that’s given rise to a community of stair enthusiasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week’s question asker, George Krause, is one of many San Francisco stair admirers. He’s a photographer, and he stumbled upon the stairways during his work trips to the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Between shoots in San Francisco … [I’d] ride public transportation to a neighborhood that I had not been to before, and then just walk the streets with my camera doing street photography,” Krause said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every neighborhood in San Francisco has got these hidden stairway walks, Castro and Potrero Hill and Excelsior and you name it … they’re everywhere. So it’s like a free, fun thing to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12053514\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12053514\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0008_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The twists and turns of Oakhurst Lane snake up the hillside, offering one of San Francisco’s longest and most hidden climbs on July 30, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>All this got him wondering. What’s the shortest stairway in San Francisco? What’s the longest? What’s the steepest?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Shortest Stairway\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>When it comes to measuring the city’s stairways, there’s a lot more debate than data. I sat down with one of the city’s leading stair enthusiasts, Alexandra Kenin, to try to get to the bottom of it all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kenin claims to have walked 99.99% of all the city’s stairs. She’s also compiled a \u003ca href=\"https://www.urbanhikersf.com/sfstairmap\">digital stairway map.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>According to Kenin, San Francisco’s shortest stair is a single step in the city’s Financial District. It’s on Sansome Street, between Broadway and Pacific.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s literally railings like you would have on a multi-step stairway, yet there is just one stair,” Kenin said. “So it kind of looks like a stairway, because there’s stairway infrastructure.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some people would not call this one step a stairway; others would swear that it is. San Francisco Public Works, which maintains public rights of way, including stairs, offers an alternative. They list the city’s shortest stair as a five-stepper at \u003ca href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/yTWf4T9d8a7XXxHD6\">14th Avenue and Fanning Way.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Longest Stairway\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If you ask most San Franciscans to name the city’s longest stairway, they’ll probably point you towards \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11907457/how-the-filbert-steps-came-to-be-an-oasis-in-san-francisco\">the famous Filbert or Greenwich steps\u003c/a>. Located in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood, they both offer scenic climbs up to Coit Tower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there’s a catch: those stairways are broken up by roads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12053513\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12053513\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250730_BAY-CURIOUS_-STAIRS_-0005_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alex Kenin pauses at the top of Oakhurst Lane, the longest staircase in San Francisco, on July 30, 2025. The staircase winds through the Forest Knolls neighborhood. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“So we should debate, is it the longest continuous stairway?” Kenin queried. Or is it the most total steps?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Public Works, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfstairways.com/stairways/oakhurst-lane/\">Oakhurst Lane stairs\u003c/a> are actually the longest. They’re on the sloping hillside of Mount Sutro near Laguna Honda Hospital. Unlike the Telegraph Hill steps, Oakhurst Lane is uninterrupted — a steady climb that amounts to an estimated 290 feet. That’s roughly 10 feet higher than the Filbert and Greenwich steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Steepest Stairway\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Nailing down San Francisco’s steepest staircase is even trickier. Public works doesn’t track the steepest stairways, and it’s hard to pull together accurate data about the city’s stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But based on some Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping endeavors and Kenin’s real-life experience, here are a few top contenders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Filbert Street Steps:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThese steps are scenic and punishing, climbing through lush gardens up Telegraph Hill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11907460\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11907460\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized.jpg\" alt=\"A man in a red t-shirt, sunglasses and backpack poses on a set of wooden steps with a lush garden to his right.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/03/Eric-Johnson-sized-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bay Curious listener Eric Johnson poses on the Filbert steps. \u003ccite>(Katrina Schwartz/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Normandie Terrace Steps:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThis little-known but dizzying flight of stairs connects one street to a cul-de-sac far above.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12056079\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12056079\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0015_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stairs connect Vallejo Street between Divisadero and Scott streets to the north end of Normandie Terrace in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood on Sept. 10, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>22nd Street and Vicksburg Steps:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThis block is one of the steepest streets in the city. The grade? An estimated 31.5%. The sidewalk is a stairway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12056076\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12056076\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0002_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A man makes his way up the staircase at 22nd and Vicksburg streets on Sept. 10, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Iron Alley Steps:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThis steep stairway is no joke. One stair \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfstairways.com/stairways/iron-alley-clayton-street-to-corbett-avenue/\">database \u003c/a>lists measurements that amount to a 51% grade slope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12056078\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12056078\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250911_BAY-CURIOUS-STAIRS-0011_GH-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wooden stairs connect Clayton Street near Market Street to Corbett Avenue at Iron Alley in San Francisco’s Upper Market/Twin Peaks neighborhood on Sept. 10, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Why People Love San Francisco’s Stairs\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For Kenin, stairway walks aren’t just about exercise or views. They’re about connecting with the city in a more mindful way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You get a visceral experience,” she said. “It all of a sudden becomes quieter. You can see beauty with your eyes. You might smell a jasmine plant that is blooming in someone’s lawn right next to the stairway. … You could hear a hummingbird float by.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The stairs also offer a link to San Francisco’s history. Back in the day, when people got around on horseback, stairs were a practical pedestrian solution. Some streets were just too steep for horse-drawn carriages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s kind of a cool connection to the past because people have been going up and down these stairways, probably some of them since the 1800s,” Kenin said. “So I like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re interested in walking some of San Francisco’s most iconic stairs, \u003ca href=\"https://www.urbanhikersf.com/sfstairmap\">check out Kenin’s stairway map to chart out a route of your own.\u003c/a> And, October happens to be \u003ca href=\"https://sanfranciscoparksalliance.org/our-work/programs-events/sf-stairway-month/\">“SF Stairway Month,”\u003c/a> a new thing that started in 2024. So, it’s the perfect time to get out and explore!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Almost every day when I get home from work I strap on a baby carrier and take my one year old daughter, Esme, out for a walk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz in scene: \u003c/strong>So, Esme and I are walking up the Franconia Street Steps in Bernal Heights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of Esme humming\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz in scene: \u003c/strong>Look at that, Esme, you can see the fog comin’ in. Isn’t it beautiful?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Esme babbling sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Some of the stairways we take have swings on them. Others are beautifully cared for, with terraced gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz in scene: \u003c/strong>Hello. We love your steps, they’re so beautiful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>All have sweeping views.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz in scene: \u003c/strong>Phew, at the top of the hill now\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Esme sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>San Francisco has countless winding pathways like this, from simple wooden stairs to mosaiced climbs and utilitarian concrete steps. It’s incredibly charming and a delightful surprise to many visitors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>George Krause: \u003c/strong>Every neighborhood in San Francisco has got these hidden stairway watch Castro and Potrero Hill and Excelsior and you name it. You know, there’s, they’re everywhere. So it’s like a free, fun thing to do, you know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Our question asker this week, George Krause, is a photographer. He often comes to the city for work and likes to spend time on the stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>George Krause: \u003c/strong>When I wasn’t shooting, you know, between shoots in San Francisco. That’s basically what I did — ride public transportation to a neighborhood that I had not been to before, and then just walk the streets with my camera, doing street photography.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>San Francisco is one of the hilliest cities in the world — and stairs are often the most direct way to get from A to B.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All this got George wondering. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>George Krause:\u003c/strong> What is the longest stairway in San Francisco? What is the shortest? What is the steepest?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>George’s question won a Bay Curious voting round, so we know many of you are stair-curious too!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, we’re devoting the show to walking San Francisco’s iconic stairways. We’ll meet some stair lovers and see what’s powering their uphill devotion. Then we’ll talk with a map expert to try and answer some basic questions about the city’s stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m Katrina Schwartz, you’re listening to Bay Curious. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>With more than 900 public stairways, it’s safe to say that San Francisco is a city of stairs. But when it comes to measuring them, there’s a lot more debate than data. Pinpointing the longest, the shortest, and the steepest stairways turned out to be a bigger challenge than we imagined, but Bay Curious producer Gabriela Glueck was up to the job. She met up with one stair fanatic to get some answers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck:\u003c/strong> Alexandra Kenin is a quintessential stair enthusiast. She claims to have hiked 99.99% of all the city’s stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s an obsession that started back in 2007, when she first moved to San Francisco and started leafing through some guidebooks her dad had given her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> So he gave me, at the time, what was popular, which was a Zagat guide for restaurants, and he gave me Stairway Walks in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>\u003cem>Stairway Walks in San Francisco \u003c/em>was written by Adah Bakalinsky, the so-called Queen of San Francisco’s stairs. It’s got step-by-step directions to find hidden stairways, gives background info on neighborhood history and generally celebrates this unique side of San Francisco life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Alex, that book became a lifesaver when the coronavirus pandemic hit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> You know, we were stuck at home, and I was kind of going stir crazy. My partner and I found ourselves juggling a one and a half year old between meetings, and it was really stressful, and we needed a stress release.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>So, she started walking, following Adah’s directions. Her quest? Walk \u003cem>all\u003c/em> of the city’s stairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> You get a visceral experience …It all of a sudden becomes quieter. You can see beauty with your eyes. You might smell a jasmine plant that is blooming in someone’s lawn right next to the stairway. You could hear a hummingbird float by.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The stairs also offer a window into the city’s past. Back in the day, when people got around on horseback, stairs were a practical pedestrian solution. Some streets were just too steep for horse-drawn carriages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin: \u003c/strong>And it’s kind of a cool connection to the past, because people have been going up and down these stairways, probably, some of them, since the 1800s, so I like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But Alex has also brought stair walking into the 21st century with an online map that features many of Adah’s favorites as well as some new ones. If there’s anyone who can help me figure out the longest, shortest and steepest stairway — it’s Alex.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ll start with the shortest. Sansome Street, between Broadway and Pacific\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> There is literally a random one step, which makes me laugh. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Sansome Street step is on the edge of the city’s Financial District, with a nice view of the Transamerica Pyramid in the background. And then, the single stair.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin: \u003c/strong>There’s literally railings like you would have on a multi-step stairway, yet there is just one stair. So it kind of looks like a stairway, because there’s stairway infrastructure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> So here I am at the shortest staircase in San Francisco. It is just one step. For the sake of journalism, I’m gonna walk it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of taking a step\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>I feel like this is a good place to talk about the definition of a stairway. Some people would \u003cem>not\u003c/em> call this one-step a staircase … others would swear that it is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> It really depends on your definition of a stairway. So I didn’t know if I should put that in there, but it is a stair. So I did want to include it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Many people define a stairway as two or more steps. Alex says there are plenty of two-steppers throughout the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But according to San Francisco Public Works — which maintains public rights of way, including stairs — the shortest stair is a five-stepper at 14th Avenue and Fanning Way. Do with that what you will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Next, the longest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> So I think it’s either the Filbert or Greenwich Street steps going up to Telegraph Hill. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Filbert and Greenwich Street steps are many people’s first guesses. They both offer scenic climbs up to Coit Tower. The lush Filbert Street steps are also home to a famous flock of parrots featured in film, “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Parrot sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But — and this is where things started to get even trickier — how do you define “the longest?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin: OK\u003c/strong>, so we should debate, is it the longest continuous stairway? So when you do the Filbert or Greenwich Street steps, you are crossing various roads. So does that count?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Or is it the most total steps?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> Those two stairways, Greenwich Street steps, Filbert Street steps, are around 380 to 390.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>According to Public Works, the Oakhurst Lane stairs — on Mount Sutro near Laguna Honda Hospital — are actually the longest. That’s because, unlike Filbert and Greenwich, the lane is a continuous stairway; there aren’t roads in the middle breaking it apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has fewer total steps, but climbs an estimated 290 feet. Making it the longest continuous stairway in the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, Alex and I headed to Mount Sutro to check it out for ourselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> Alright, here we go. We’re climbing the first flight of stairs. We’ve got some concrete steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of climbing stairs\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin:\u003c/strong> It’s a foggy day. The eucalyptus trees are swaying. It’s a very atmospheric day. And if you take a look, it’s kind of funny. There’s moss growing on the stairs. I’m pretty sure it’s foggy here a lot of the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As we make our way up the steps, the city kind of fades away. It feels like an isolated residential path, sandwiched between houses. And, like many San Francisco stairs, it’s cared for by community members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rick:\u003c/strong> I’m just clipping the poison oak so people can walk up and down Oakhurst Lane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This is Rick, Alex and I ran into him on our walk. He lives in the neighborhood and has been walking the lane for 30 years. He’s seen all kinds of people on these steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rick: \u003c/strong>There was one guy, he was training to go up Mount Whitney, and he put on this really heavy pack, and I think he went up and down like 15 times. But this guy was sweating, and he was just like, step by step by step. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>OK, we’ve been to the shortest and longest stairways and my legs are officially warmed up. Time for part three of the question. What is the steepest stair? Or, as our question asker George reframed it, what’s the most challenging one?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is where I started to run into some \u003cem>real\u003c/em> trouble.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexandra Kenin: \u003c/strong>This is a thing that people debate. What is the steepest Street in San Francisco? I can find 10 articles on the internet right now telling me different streets are the steepest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>There are a lot of close contenders and not a lot of accurate measuring going on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I asked Public Works about the steepest stairway, one representative said that quote, “We don’t track the steepest but likely will capture that in a longer-term asset management initiative.” Translation: they don’t know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this seemed like the kind of problem you could answer, if only you had a digital mapping specialist in your corner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>OK, the analysis question that I’m trying to answer is, which San Francisco City staircase is the steepest?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>David Medeiros is a geospatial reference and instruction specialist at Stanford. Basically, a map expert.Which is why I sent him a city data set dedicated to structures in the public right-of-way, including stairs. Then I asked him for help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>So, from a technical standpoint, the process is not difficult. So, you just need one other piece of data, and that’s an elevation model for the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>David’s plan? Take a map of all the stairs and overlay it on a map of the city’s peaks and valleys and boom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>OK, I have QGIS open, and I’m going to add the data sets now. … I’m going to bring in the 1-meter digital elevation model for San Francisco. \u003cem>(Fades under)\u003c/em> First, I’m going to go grab the SF stairs, or the stairs structures, line features and overlay them on the digital elevation model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>I’m fast forwarding here, but once he’s got the two maps, it’s a simple slope calculation. Rise over run.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>So now I have a list or a table of the slope, the percent slopes for all of these things that the city has in this structures data set, that includes stairs and viaducts and retaining walls and that sort of stuff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> And what is the steepest stair? What did you find?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If you thought this was gonna be the payoff moment — so did I. But no.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As we started looking at our top steep contenders on Google Street View, many of them just didn’t look that steep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>The more difficult part of it is the data itself. It’s the staircase data is a mess.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>David says the lengths weren’t precise enough. That the public right-of-way info is more like a rough sketch. Not the kind of picture you could build a case on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Medeiros: \u003c/strong>So I feel like, I feel like I failed a little bit, in a sense, like the all the work that we did, all the information it, the the actual workflow is fine. It works. The underlying elevation data is a good resource. It’s just that we don’t have good data for the stairs, the real stairs, what they really look like in the real world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>According to David, this data-to-real-world gap is a pretty common digital mapping challenge. Sometimes there’s no substitute for just going to see for yourself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> So I’m at the first stop on the steepest stair tour, and we are at the Glendale street stairs, and they look pretty, pretty steep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>With the help of David’s data, Alex’s real-world experience, and countless internet searches, I compiled a list of top five \u003cem>potentially\u003c/em> — and I emphasize potentially — steepest stairs in the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, I devoted an entire day to \u003cem>walking all of them.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first one? Glendale street stairs in Twin Peaks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> They’re kind of boring. …They’re in between two apartment buildings, and below it is this really steep road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of walking\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> OK, so I’m at the second stair stop on this steep stairs journey, and I’m at the Normandy terrace stairs in Pacific Heights. They’re very grand, they kind of zigzag up a vertical wall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of walking up steps\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene, out of breath:\u003c/strong> You can see the bay and kind of the whole expanse of the city stretching out before you. And it is a pretty good view. And recommend you\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> All right, I’m walking over to our next stair stop, and it’s 22nd Street and Vicksburg.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>These stairs are in Noe Valley… a small stretch of the 22nd street incline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene: \u003c/strong>So these are pretty amazing. It’s on an extremely steep San Francisco street, and the … basically, the sidewalk is a staircase. They’ve carved out stairs in the concrete because it’s just … it’s just too steep to walk by yourself. So here goes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This block is one of the steepest streets in the city. The grade? An estimated 31.5%. As local resident Laura tells me, it’s enough to make drivers change their plans. Also, she says it’s a prime spot for shenanigans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura: \u003c/strong>Halloween? People roll pumpkins down the hill. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene:\u003c/strong> So I’m here at the Iron Alley stairways in the Twin Peaks neighborhood, and this one looks pretty steep, not gonna lie, goes straight down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Iron Alley is no joke. Averaging numbers from one stair website and my own online mapping endeavors, I’m estimating something around a 46- to-51% grade slope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck in scene and out of breath: \u003c/strong>\u003cem>1.2.3.4.5.6. …\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Given the information available and my experience walking them, I think Iron Alley might be the steepest stairway. Some neighborhood gardeners I met on the stairs seemed to agree.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Neighbor: \u003c/strong>Man, you take a tumble, you could be going all the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>I have to say that defining the longest, shortest, and steepest stairs in San Francisco ended up being a lot harder than I’d imagined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in some ways, besides the point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>First stair love note:\u003c/strong> Really, I love stairs because they are a vital part of urban infrastructure, they are beautiful, they are a great workout, they give you a sense of accomplishment when you climb them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Second stair love note: \u003c/strong>It feels like I’m living in a game or story universe where I’m discovering new pieces of the map\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Third stair love note:\u003c/strong> My favorite hike is starting in the Forest Knolls neighborhood. The stairs are green and floating and surrounded by eucalyptus trees\u003cspan style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fourth stair love note:\u003c/strong> they are so beautiful and surprising and mysterious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Those were stair love notes from Bay Curious listeners.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That story was brought to you by producer Gabriela Glueck. If you were listening closely, you may have noticed that Gabriela said she was going to walk the five steepest stairways, but she only talked about 4. You’re right! The fifth contender was the Filbert Street steps, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11907457/how-the-filbert-steps-came-to-be-an-oasis-in-san-francisco\">we have an entire episode about the history of that stairway \u003c/a>and the beautiful garden that runs next to it. I’ll put a link in our show notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003cbr>\nWith extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening. Have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America",
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"info": "Geopolitical turmoil. A warming planet. Authoritarians on the rise. We live in a chaotic world that’s rapidly shifting around us. “On Shifting Ground with Ray Suarez” explores international fault lines and how they impact us all. Each week, NPR veteran Ray Suarez hosts conversations with journalists, leaders and policy experts to help us read between the headlines – and give us hope for human resilience.",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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