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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grant Strother loves a good caprese sandwich from North Beach. On weekdays, he walks to Molinari Delicatessen on Columbus Avenue from his job in San Francisco’sFinancial District during his lunch break.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s such an easy walk,” he said. “Not too many hills to climb.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One day, on a particularly meandering walk, Strother passed by Saints Peter and Paul Church on Washington Square. It still offers bilingual mass in Italian, he noticed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was intrigued. Are there still Italian speakers in the neighborhood?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Immigration patterns have undoubtedly changed,” Strother said. Twenty years ago, he’d hear Italian spoken outside restaurants like Mario’s Bohemian Cafe and Caffe Trieste.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But nowadays, aside from all the restaurants, he wondered: “How Italian is it?”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The history of Italians in North Beach\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Since the Gold Rush, Italian immigrants have come to San Francisco in waves. The\u003ca href=\"https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-Italian-American-community-of-San-Francisco-:-a-descriptive-study/oclc/1393057217\"> height\u003c/a> of the Italian population was in 1930, when the ethnic community numbered just under 60,000 and made up nine percent of the overall population of San Francisco\u003ca href=\"https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-Italian-American-community-of-San-Francisco-:-a-descriptive-study/oclc/1393057217\">.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Northern Italians, from Liguria and Tuscany, first arrived in San Francisco, making up more than half of the ethnic enclave. Later, folks from southern regions like Sicily and Calabria started emigrating. Many Italians settled in North Beach, although the Excelsior District was also a cluster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071066\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071066\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Saints Peter and Paul Church, a Catholic church in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Steve Leveroni, board president of \u003ca href=\"https://www.italiancs.org/\">Italian Community Services\u003c/a> in North Beach, vice president of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and an insurance businessman, has deep roots in North Beach. His great-great-grandfather, Luigi, emigrated from Genoa in Northern Italy in the 1860s. When Steve was growing up in North Beach in the 1960s, descendants of the Genovese lived on Green Street, from Mason Street to Grant Avenue, and Sts. Peter and Paul Church was their centerpoint.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We all got baptized there, we all got married there, and unfortunately, our funerals are gonna be there,” Leveroni said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The church still towers above Washington Square Park, where residents bask in the sun, play with dogs and practice tai chi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Remnants of Italian culture are still all around the neighborhood. Liguria Bakery, on one corner of the park, has been going strong since 1911. Bay Area residents still flock there for mushroom or raisin focaccia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“After every mass, we were given a few dollars, and our duty was to pick up the focaccia to bring back to the house for lunch,” Leveroni remembered.[aside postID=news_12063643 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-01-BL.jpg']Now, as Steve walks down Columbus Avenue, the neighborhood is much more multicultural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>Now I can walk a block or two and not know somebody that I grew up with,” he said. And today, there’s no clear line between Chinatown and North Beach anymore. “At one time, Broadway Street, down here, was kind of the line of demarcation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Leveroni moved to the Richmond District on San Francisco’s West Side when he got married. While North Beach may not be where the descendants of Italian immigrants live anymore, he said, it’s where people come to celebrate and be with family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The North Beach area is the gathering place for all the Italians to come back to,” he said. “Where do they go? To the restaurants.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A changed neighborhood\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A look at the latest census data shows that only 4% of residents who reported ancestry in North Beach’s main ZIP code have any Italian roots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 1950s, Italian Americans joined many other San Franciscans in flight to the suburbs. Since then, North Beach morphed into a hangout for the Beat Generation, new residence for the Chinese community and a thriving tourist destination.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071064\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071064\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Michele Ferrante (center) sits with friends at Stella Pastry in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Nowadays, you have to look pretty hard to find old-time Italians in North Beach, but it’s not impossible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michele Ferrante and Frank Balistreri are two of a handful of Sicilians who gather at Stella Pastry & Cafe on Columbus Avenue every morning to drink espresso and talk sports and politics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[We] come out here and bullsh–t all day long,” said Balistreri, who used to own Portofino, a North Beach Italian restaurant. He speaks a Sicilian dialect with Ferrante, who also ran an Italian restaurant in North Beach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ferrante came to San Francisco as a young adult in the 1960s. He left Palermo for New York with his parents, but went further west by himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I heard about the Fisherman’s Wharf full of restaurants, full of Italians, mostly Sicilians, the Aliotos and others,” Ferrante said. Having learned how to cook in the Army and being Sicilian, he figured, “I can go there and get a job.”[aside postID=news_12059962 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Jello-Biafra-of-the-Dead-Kennedys-performing-at-the-Mabuhay-Gardens-.jpg']By the late 1960s, North Beach was already transforming. Beatnik culture was well established.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Those were the days of the hippie generation,” Ferrante said. “There were clubs all over Broadway. All kinds of shows, performances. You could not even walk on Broadway.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beat artists and Italians \u003ca href=\"https://www.foundsf.org/The_Emergence_of_the_North_Beach_Beat_Scene\">got along\u003c/a> perhaps better than expected. Italian property owners reportedly kept rents low and poets liked the cafes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1976, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Bookstore, took note of waning Italian culture in North Beach in his famous \u003ca href=\"https://www.scalponefamilytree.info/OldItaliansDyingPoem.htm\">poem\u003c/a>\u003cem> Old Italians are Dying\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>“For years the old Italians in faded felt hats have been sunning themselves and dying.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You have seen them on the benches in the park in Washington Square \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The old Italians in their high button shoes \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The old men in their felt fedoras with stained hatbands have been dying and dying day by day. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071071\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071071\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Clement Hudson plays the accordion on Columbus Avenue in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco on Jan. 23, 2026. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>By the early 1980s, Ferrante said, North Beach didn’t feel like an Italian enclave anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They all moved to Burlingame, San Mateo, Napa, St. Helena, Sonoma,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way I was raised here, you knew who was Italian and who wasn’t,” said Balistreri. “Now you don’t know who’s who.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Preserving history is good business\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In the 1990s, the North Beach Chamber of Commerce kicked off a\u003ca href=\"https://www.proquest.com/docview/304187079?%20Theses&accountid=13802&parentSessionId=OAtwzKcX6YzQPUr6brPkGvuKr4%2FF9YEmAoAyrh9mrIo%3D&parentSessionId=PVrf0rGU7WE%2BjHgKUIi7mzkDXo%2B5u5jwDXRNQdxuNI0%3D&pq-origsite=primo&searchKeywords=North%20Beach%20San%20Francisco%20ethnic%20neighborhood&sourcetype=Dissertations%20\"> marketing\u003c/a> campaign called “Little Italy of the West.” Light poles were painted with Italian flag colors. People could buy t-shirts that read: “\u003ca href=\"https://www.proquest.com/docview/304187079?accountid=13802&parentSessionId=PVrf0rGU7WE%2BjHgKUIi7mzkDXo%2B5u5jwDXRNQdxuNI0%3D&pq-origsite=primo&searchKeywords=North%20Beach%20San%20Francisco%20ethnic%20neighborhood&sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses\">I’m proud to be half- Italian\u003c/a>.” After all,\u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4287693/\"> research shows, \u003c/a>preserving a neighborhood’s ethnic identity is good for business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cultural groups, new and old, are coming up with new ways to keep Italian heritage alive in North Beach as well. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.sflittleitaly.us/\">San Francisco Little Italy Honor Walk\u003c/a> has installed five bronze plaques in the sidewalks around Washington Square that commemorate notable Italian immigrants in San Francisco, from Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini to former mayor George Moscone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071072\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071072\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Businesses line Green Street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco on Jan. 23, 2026. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It is the first time that we have multigenerational Italian Americans here, part of one group,” said the organization’s president, Gina Von Esmarch, at a ceremony to unveil the plaques. She’s a relative of both former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto and the owners of Alioto’s Restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Von Esmarch hopes the plaques will teach the next generation about the accomplishments of San Francisco’s early Italians. “Yes, it’s to pay homage or tribute,” she said, but the plaques will also be “a living classroom” to tourists and history buffs alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, new Italian immigrants are coming to San Francisco to work in\u003ca href=\"https://innovitsf.com/about/\"> tech\u003c/a>, and specifically to North Beach to open \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Italian-Homemade-Co-makes-S-F-s-only-piadine-6101783.php\">new\u003c/a> or take over \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/the-city/reopened-north-beach-restaurant-thriving-under-new-ownership/article_dd5fdd67-94b5-4f01-86f0-1374ef5a9181.html\">old restaurants\u003c/a>. Von Esmarch said it’s part of a “re-gentrification” of North Beach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfiac.org/\"> San Francisco Italian Athletic Club\u003c/a> on Washington Square, open only to people with Italian heritage, said it has doubled membership in the past decade. The new crop is younger and is a mix of Italians from first to fourth generation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While North Beach may not be home to as many Italians anymore, it’s still culturally at the heart of the community. Every year, people return for the Italian Heritage Parade on Columbus Avenue. But instead of living down the street, people commute here to enjoy pasta with friends and family — something everyone can enjoy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071067\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071067\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Steve Corbelli works at Liguria Bakery in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, on Nov. 18, 2025. The long-standing bakery specializes in traditional focaccia. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Facts in this story were sourced from historian Rose Scherini, author of The Italian American Community of San Francisco: a Descriptive Study \u003c/em>\u003cem>and many other works, as well as historians Dino Cinel and Sebastian Fichera.\u003c/em>\u003cem> Special thanks to the library at San Francisco State University.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Parade sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>San Francisco’s Italian Heritage parade creates a massive public party in North Beach every October. Streets are blocked off from Fisherman’s Wharf to Washington Square Park on Columbus Day weekend. Bystanders wave mini Italian flags and eat gelato as they watch the fancy floats and trolleys go by.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Parade music\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>At Saints Peter and Paul church, people play a salami toss game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Salami toss sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Word is, this is the longest-running Italian parade in the country – started back in 1869. Our question asker this week, Grant Strother [STRUH-ther]], says, he’s not Italian, but he’s walked these streets since he was a teenager.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Grant Strother:\u003c/strong> I do remember in high school in the early 2000s, you would still hear some Italian conversations on the street. I remember like hearing that at Mario’s and Trieste.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Now, as an adult, he works in the financial district and sometimes walks to North Beach for lunch, to grab a caprese sandwich at Molinari’s Deli. But during one of those walks, he wondered … Do Italian people still live in North Beach, or is it all just a tourist trap?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Grant Strother:\u003c/strong> Obviously, immigration patterns have undoubtedly changed since North Beach was populated. But I was just interested then in how Italian North Beach really is, aside from a lot of the restaurants that are still there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>I’m Olivia Allen-Price, and today on Bay Curious, we’ll look at the Italian roots of North Beach, track how things have changed and learn about some of the efforts to keep this history alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Located on San Francisco’s northeast side, North Beach is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city and has been home to immigrants from many backgrounds over the years. It sits right next to Chinatown and where Little Manilatown used to be. Now, it’s teeming with Italian cafes, restaurants and bakeries. KQED’s Pauline Bartolone went to find out whether any Italians still live in this neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of Columbus Avenue\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Remnants of Italian culture are still all around North Beach, but to spot them, it helps to have a guide. Someone like Steve Leveroni, who grew up in North Beach in the 50s and 60s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/strong>Way back when… home of the Genoveses lived on Green street from Green and Mason all the way up to Green and Grant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Steve gives me a tour of the neighborhood, his great-great-grandfather, Luigi, landed back in the 1860s. Like many Italian immigrants in North Beach, he came from Northern Italy, the Genoa region. In the decades that followed, other Italians came from Tuscany, Sicily and Calabria to escape poverty and seek new opportunities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>(Sound of walking up steps)\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>They settled around the Italian Cathedral, Sts. Peter and Paul Church…still a center point for later generations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/strong>So this is where you come for your baptism, you come for marriage, you also come for your funeral.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>The church towers above Washington Square Park, where residents bask in the sun, play with dogs, practice tai chi and blast music. Steve says when he was growing up, Italians used to hang out here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>You’d see groups sitting down of men and women and they would be speaking in Italian. So that is probably one thing that’s not as much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>You don’t hear Italian very much because not many Italians live here anymore. At its height in 1930, the Italian community numbered about 60,000 people, almost a tenth of the population of San Francisco. But as early as the 1950s, the Italians here joined many others in the flight to the suburbs. Now, only four percent of residents in North Beach’s main ZIP code have Italian heritage, that’s according to the latest census data of people who reported ancestry. But Steve says even if younger generations moved out of the city, they still come back to the neighborhood for celebrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>The North Beach area is the gathering place for all the Italians to come back to. But where do they go? They come, you know, to the restaurants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>The restaurants of North Beach are now the most visible and lasting legacy of the Italian enclave here. Graffeo’s coffee on Columbus, since 1935. Molinari’s Deli, our question-asker’s spot, Italian-owned since 1896. Liguria Bakery known for its mushroom or raisin focaccia since 1911.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Restaurant sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Steve wraps up our tour by taking me inside one of the city’s best seafood spots: Sotto Mare, owned by his grammar school friends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/strong>Their sauces are all, I can see all on the stovetop there, so we’re getting some aromas from that. And then probably one of those pots is their crab chipino, which is, which is excellent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Nowadays, you have to look pretty hard to find Italian old-timers in the neighborhood, but it’s not impossible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>People speaking Sicilian\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>After weeks of looking around, I finally heard some chatter at Stella’s pastry shop on Columbus Avenue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante:\u003c/strong> We come every morning, seven days a week. Just, you know, we just get a drink espresso and you know we talk Italian, Sicilian actually.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frank Balistreri:\u003c/strong> It’s a meeting spot. Come out here and bullshit all day long. That’s it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Michele Ferrante and Frank Balistreri both ran Italian restaurants in the neighborhood and still live here. They’re just two of the Sicilians who talk sports and politics here every morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante:\u003c/strong> We are known as the peccatore. We are all sinners.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frank Balistreri:\u003c/strong> Give him the Academy Award, please. Make him happy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>In fact, San Francisco’s Italian restaurants are what drew Michele here as a young adult in the 1960s. His parents left Palermo for New York, but Michele wanted to come further west.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante: \u003c/strong>I told my father, my mother says, Arrivederci, I’m going to California. I heard about the Fisherman Wharf full of restaurants, full of Italians, mostly Sicilians, the Aliotos and others. And also because I was hearing so much about North Beach, and being Sicilian, and being a cook, so well, I can go there and get a job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>By the late 1960s, North Beach’s reputation was evolving beyond an Italian neighborhood. Beatnik culture was well established by then.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante: \u003c/strong>Those were the days of the hippie generation, you know, ‘67 was the summer of love. Everything was going on. One of my favorite hangout was at La Rocca’s Corner, which is still here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>The beat culture, artists and Italians got along perhaps better than expected… Italian property owners reportedly kept rents low, and poets liked the cafes. In 1976, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Bookstore, took note of North Beach’s waning Italian culture in his famous poem “Old Italians are Dying.” Here’s a recording of him reading it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lawrence Ferlinghetti:\u003c/strong> For years the old Italians in faded felt hats have been sunning themselves and dying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You have seen them on the benches in the park in Washington Square\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The old Italians in their black high button shoes\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The old men in their felt fedoras with stained hatbands have been dying and dying day by day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>By the early 1980s, Michele says, North Beach didn’t feel like an Italian enclave anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante: \u003c/strong>They all move, Burlingame, San Mateo, Napa, San Helena, Sonoma. San Francisco, not too many living here anymore, very little.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frank Balistreri: \u003c/strong>Sure, we saw it change. There’s still some kind of flavor, but not originally what I grew up with. The way I was raised here, you knew who was Italian and who wasn’t. Now you don’t know who’s who. So, basically, you feel like nobody’s here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>That feeling of “no Italians” – didn’t sit well with the North Beach chamber of commerce. In the 1990s, they kicked off a marketing campaign for the neighborhood, “Little Italy of the West.” Light poles were painted with Italian flag colors. People could buy “I’m proud to be half Italian” t-shirts. Afterall, research shows, preserving a neighborhood’s ethnic identity is good for business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of kids singing in Italian\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Now, new initiatives are popping up to keep Italian heritage alive, like the Little Italy Honor Walk, a series of bronze sidewalk squares that memorialize notable Italians in San Francisco history. Five have been installed around Washington Square Park, and there’s more on the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Singing fades out and sounds of Italian being spoken fade in\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Back at Stella’s pastry shop, Michele and Frank say remembering North Beach’s Italian history is important, but they don’t need monuments to remind them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frank Balistreri: \u003c/strong>Times change, things change, I don’t worry about it, as long as I’m here where I want to be. Italians are no Italians, I know who I am, right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>North Beach’s original Italian enclave may be long gone, but the neighborhood’s history and food will keep bringing tourists…and locals with Italians heritage… back for years to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by KQED reporter Pauline Bartolone. Special thanks to the San Francisco State University library where Pauline researched some of North Beach’s history. Thanks also to Jim McKee of EarWax Productions for the recording of Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading “Old Italians Are Dying.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today’s question came from Grant Strother, and you could be next! Submit your question about the Bay Area at BayCurious.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen-Price.\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 Olivia Allen-Price. Have a wonderful week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood is known for its Italian restaurants, cafes and bakeries. But is it still an enclave for Northern California’s Italian immigrants?",
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"title": "Ciao Bella: Do Italians Still Live in San Francisco’s North Beach? | 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>Grant Strother loves a good caprese sandwich from North Beach. On weekdays, he walks to Molinari Delicatessen on Columbus Avenue from his job in San Francisco’sFinancial District during his lunch break.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s such an easy walk,” he said. “Not too many hills to climb.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One day, on a particularly meandering walk, Strother passed by Saints Peter and Paul Church on Washington Square. It still offers bilingual mass in Italian, he noticed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was intrigued. Are there still Italian speakers in the neighborhood?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Immigration patterns have undoubtedly changed,” Strother said. Twenty years ago, he’d hear Italian spoken outside restaurants like Mario’s Bohemian Cafe and Caffe Trieste.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But nowadays, aside from all the restaurants, he wondered: “How Italian is it?”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The history of Italians in North Beach\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Since the Gold Rush, Italian immigrants have come to San Francisco in waves. The\u003ca href=\"https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-Italian-American-community-of-San-Francisco-:-a-descriptive-study/oclc/1393057217\"> height\u003c/a> of the Italian population was in 1930, when the ethnic community numbered just under 60,000 and made up nine percent of the overall population of San Francisco\u003ca href=\"https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-Italian-American-community-of-San-Francisco-:-a-descriptive-study/oclc/1393057217\">.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Northern Italians, from Liguria and Tuscany, first arrived in San Francisco, making up more than half of the ethnic enclave. Later, folks from southern regions like Sicily and Calabria started emigrating. Many Italians settled in North Beach, although the Excelsior District was also a cluster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071066\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071066\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-12-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Saints Peter and Paul Church, a Catholic church in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Steve Leveroni, board president of \u003ca href=\"https://www.italiancs.org/\">Italian Community Services\u003c/a> in North Beach, vice president of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and an insurance businessman, has deep roots in North Beach. His great-great-grandfather, Luigi, emigrated from Genoa in Northern Italy in the 1860s. When Steve was growing up in North Beach in the 1960s, descendants of the Genovese lived on Green Street, from Mason Street to Grant Avenue, and Sts. Peter and Paul Church was their centerpoint.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We all got baptized there, we all got married there, and unfortunately, our funerals are gonna be there,” Leveroni said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The church still towers above Washington Square Park, where residents bask in the sun, play with dogs and practice tai chi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Remnants of Italian culture are still all around the neighborhood. Liguria Bakery, on one corner of the park, has been going strong since 1911. Bay Area residents still flock there for mushroom or raisin focaccia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“After every mass, we were given a few dollars, and our duty was to pick up the focaccia to bring back to the house for lunch,” Leveroni remembered.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Now, as Steve walks down Columbus Avenue, the neighborhood is much more multicultural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>Now I can walk a block or two and not know somebody that I grew up with,” he said. And today, there’s no clear line between Chinatown and North Beach anymore. “At one time, Broadway Street, down here, was kind of the line of demarcation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Leveroni moved to the Richmond District on San Francisco’s West Side when he got married. While North Beach may not be where the descendants of Italian immigrants live anymore, he said, it’s where people come to celebrate and be with family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The North Beach area is the gathering place for all the Italians to come back to,” he said. “Where do they go? To the restaurants.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A changed neighborhood\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A look at the latest census data shows that only 4% of residents who reported ancestry in North Beach’s main ZIP code have any Italian roots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 1950s, Italian Americans joined many other San Franciscans in flight to the suburbs. Since then, North Beach morphed into a hangout for the Beat Generation, new residence for the Chinese community and a thriving tourist destination.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071064\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071064\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-08-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Michele Ferrante (center) sits with friends at Stella Pastry in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Nowadays, you have to look pretty hard to find old-time Italians in North Beach, but it’s not impossible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michele Ferrante and Frank Balistreri are two of a handful of Sicilians who gather at Stella Pastry & Cafe on Columbus Avenue every morning to drink espresso and talk sports and politics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[We] come out here and bullsh–t all day long,” said Balistreri, who used to own Portofino, a North Beach Italian restaurant. He speaks a Sicilian dialect with Ferrante, who also ran an Italian restaurant in North Beach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ferrante came to San Francisco as a young adult in the 1960s. He left Palermo for New York with his parents, but went further west by himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I heard about the Fisherman’s Wharf full of restaurants, full of Italians, mostly Sicilians, the Aliotos and others,” Ferrante said. Having learned how to cook in the Army and being Sicilian, he figured, “I can go there and get a job.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>By the late 1960s, North Beach was already transforming. Beatnik culture was well established.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Those were the days of the hippie generation,” Ferrante said. “There were clubs all over Broadway. All kinds of shows, performances. You could not even walk on Broadway.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beat artists and Italians \u003ca href=\"https://www.foundsf.org/The_Emergence_of_the_North_Beach_Beat_Scene\">got along\u003c/a> perhaps better than expected. Italian property owners reportedly kept rents low and poets liked the cafes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1976, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Bookstore, took note of waning Italian culture in North Beach in his famous \u003ca href=\"https://www.scalponefamilytree.info/OldItaliansDyingPoem.htm\">poem\u003c/a>\u003cem> Old Italians are Dying\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>“For years the old Italians in faded felt hats have been sunning themselves and dying.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You have seen them on the benches in the park in Washington Square \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The old Italians in their high button shoes \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The old men in their felt fedoras with stained hatbands have been dying and dying day by day. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071071\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071071\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-02-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Clement Hudson plays the accordion on Columbus Avenue in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco on Jan. 23, 2026. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>By the early 1980s, Ferrante said, North Beach didn’t feel like an Italian enclave anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They all moved to Burlingame, San Mateo, Napa, St. Helena, Sonoma,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way I was raised here, you knew who was Italian and who wasn’t,” said Balistreri. “Now you don’t know who’s who.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Preserving history is good business\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In the 1990s, the North Beach Chamber of Commerce kicked off a\u003ca href=\"https://www.proquest.com/docview/304187079?%20Theses&accountid=13802&parentSessionId=OAtwzKcX6YzQPUr6brPkGvuKr4%2FF9YEmAoAyrh9mrIo%3D&parentSessionId=PVrf0rGU7WE%2BjHgKUIi7mzkDXo%2B5u5jwDXRNQdxuNI0%3D&pq-origsite=primo&searchKeywords=North%20Beach%20San%20Francisco%20ethnic%20neighborhood&sourcetype=Dissertations%20\"> marketing\u003c/a> campaign called “Little Italy of the West.” Light poles were painted with Italian flag colors. People could buy t-shirts that read: “\u003ca href=\"https://www.proquest.com/docview/304187079?accountid=13802&parentSessionId=PVrf0rGU7WE%2BjHgKUIi7mzkDXo%2B5u5jwDXRNQdxuNI0%3D&pq-origsite=primo&searchKeywords=North%20Beach%20San%20Francisco%20ethnic%20neighborhood&sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses\">I’m proud to be half- Italian\u003c/a>.” After all,\u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4287693/\"> research shows, \u003c/a>preserving a neighborhood’s ethnic identity is good for business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cultural groups, new and old, are coming up with new ways to keep Italian heritage alive in North Beach as well. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.sflittleitaly.us/\">San Francisco Little Italy Honor Walk\u003c/a> has installed five bronze plaques in the sidewalks around Washington Square that commemorate notable Italian immigrants in San Francisco, from Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini to former mayor George Moscone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071072\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071072\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260123-ITALIANNORTHBEACH-05-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Businesses line Green Street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco on Jan. 23, 2026. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It is the first time that we have multigenerational Italian Americans here, part of one group,” said the organization’s president, Gina Von Esmarch, at a ceremony to unveil the plaques. She’s a relative of both former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto and the owners of Alioto’s Restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Von Esmarch hopes the plaques will teach the next generation about the accomplishments of San Francisco’s early Italians. “Yes, it’s to pay homage or tribute,” she said, but the plaques will also be “a living classroom” to tourists and history buffs alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, new Italian immigrants are coming to San Francisco to work in\u003ca href=\"https://innovitsf.com/about/\"> tech\u003c/a>, and specifically to North Beach to open \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Italian-Homemade-Co-makes-S-F-s-only-piadine-6101783.php\">new\u003c/a> or take over \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/the-city/reopened-north-beach-restaurant-thriving-under-new-ownership/article_dd5fdd67-94b5-4f01-86f0-1374ef5a9181.html\">old restaurants\u003c/a>. Von Esmarch said it’s part of a “re-gentrification” of North Beach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfiac.org/\"> San Francisco Italian Athletic Club\u003c/a> on Washington Square, open only to people with Italian heritage, said it has doubled membership in the past decade. The new crop is younger and is a mix of Italians from first to fourth generation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While North Beach may not be home to as many Italians anymore, it’s still culturally at the heart of the community. Every year, people return for the Italian Heritage Parade on Columbus Avenue. But instead of living down the street, people commute here to enjoy pasta with friends and family — something everyone can enjoy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071067\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071067\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/251118-HOWITALIANISNORTHBEACH-20-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Steve Corbelli works at Liguria Bakery in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, on Nov. 18, 2025. The long-standing bakery specializes in traditional focaccia. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Facts in this story were sourced from historian Rose Scherini, author of The Italian American Community of San Francisco: a Descriptive Study \u003c/em>\u003cem>and many other works, as well as historians Dino Cinel and Sebastian Fichera.\u003c/em>\u003cem> Special thanks to the library at San Francisco State University.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Parade sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>San Francisco’s Italian Heritage parade creates a massive public party in North Beach every October. Streets are blocked off from Fisherman’s Wharf to Washington Square Park on Columbus Day weekend. Bystanders wave mini Italian flags and eat gelato as they watch the fancy floats and trolleys go by.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Parade music\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>At Saints Peter and Paul church, people play a salami toss game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Salami toss sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Word is, this is the longest-running Italian parade in the country – started back in 1869. Our question asker this week, Grant Strother [STRUH-ther]], says, he’s not Italian, but he’s walked these streets since he was a teenager.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Grant Strother:\u003c/strong> I do remember in high school in the early 2000s, you would still hear some Italian conversations on the street. I remember like hearing that at Mario’s and Trieste.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Now, as an adult, he works in the financial district and sometimes walks to North Beach for lunch, to grab a caprese sandwich at Molinari’s Deli. But during one of those walks, he wondered … Do Italian people still live in North Beach, or is it all just a tourist trap?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Grant Strother:\u003c/strong> Obviously, immigration patterns have undoubtedly changed since North Beach was populated. But I was just interested then in how Italian North Beach really is, aside from a lot of the restaurants that are still there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>I’m Olivia Allen-Price, and today on Bay Curious, we’ll look at the Italian roots of North Beach, track how things have changed and learn about some of the efforts to keep this history alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Located on San Francisco’s northeast side, North Beach is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city and has been home to immigrants from many backgrounds over the years. It sits right next to Chinatown and where Little Manilatown used to be. Now, it’s teeming with Italian cafes, restaurants and bakeries. KQED’s Pauline Bartolone went to find out whether any Italians still live in this neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of Columbus Avenue\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Remnants of Italian culture are still all around North Beach, but to spot them, it helps to have a guide. Someone like Steve Leveroni, who grew up in North Beach in the 50s and 60s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/strong>Way back when… home of the Genoveses lived on Green street from Green and Mason all the way up to Green and Grant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Steve gives me a tour of the neighborhood, his great-great-grandfather, Luigi, landed back in the 1860s. Like many Italian immigrants in North Beach, he came from Northern Italy, the Genoa region. In the decades that followed, other Italians came from Tuscany, Sicily and Calabria to escape poverty and seek new opportunities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>(Sound of walking up steps)\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>They settled around the Italian Cathedral, Sts. Peter and Paul Church…still a center point for later generations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/strong>So this is where you come for your baptism, you come for marriage, you also come for your funeral.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>The church towers above Washington Square Park, where residents bask in the sun, play with dogs, practice tai chi and blast music. Steve says when he was growing up, Italians used to hang out here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>You’d see groups sitting down of men and women and they would be speaking in Italian. So that is probably one thing that’s not as much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>You don’t hear Italian very much because not many Italians live here anymore. At its height in 1930, the Italian community numbered about 60,000 people, almost a tenth of the population of San Francisco. But as early as the 1950s, the Italians here joined many others in the flight to the suburbs. Now, only four percent of residents in North Beach’s main ZIP code have Italian heritage, that’s according to the latest census data of people who reported ancestry. But Steve says even if younger generations moved out of the city, they still come back to the neighborhood for celebrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>The North Beach area is the gathering place for all the Italians to come back to. But where do they go? They come, you know, to the restaurants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>The restaurants of North Beach are now the most visible and lasting legacy of the Italian enclave here. Graffeo’s coffee on Columbus, since 1935. Molinari’s Deli, our question-asker’s spot, Italian-owned since 1896. Liguria Bakery known for its mushroom or raisin focaccia since 1911.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Restaurant sounds\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Steve wraps up our tour by taking me inside one of the city’s best seafood spots: Sotto Mare, owned by his grammar school friends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Steve Leveroni: \u003c/strong>Their sauces are all, I can see all on the stovetop there, so we’re getting some aromas from that. And then probably one of those pots is their crab chipino, which is, which is excellent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Nowadays, you have to look pretty hard to find Italian old-timers in the neighborhood, but it’s not impossible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>People speaking Sicilian\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>After weeks of looking around, I finally heard some chatter at Stella’s pastry shop on Columbus Avenue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante:\u003c/strong> We come every morning, seven days a week. Just, you know, we just get a drink espresso and you know we talk Italian, Sicilian actually.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frank Balistreri:\u003c/strong> It’s a meeting spot. Come out here and bullshit all day long. That’s it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Michele Ferrante and Frank Balistreri both ran Italian restaurants in the neighborhood and still live here. They’re just two of the Sicilians who talk sports and politics here every morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante:\u003c/strong> We are known as the peccatore. We are all sinners.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frank Balistreri:\u003c/strong> Give him the Academy Award, please. Make him happy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>In fact, San Francisco’s Italian restaurants are what drew Michele here as a young adult in the 1960s. His parents left Palermo for New York, but Michele wanted to come further west.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante: \u003c/strong>I told my father, my mother says, Arrivederci, I’m going to California. I heard about the Fisherman Wharf full of restaurants, full of Italians, mostly Sicilians, the Aliotos and others. And also because I was hearing so much about North Beach, and being Sicilian, and being a cook, so well, I can go there and get a job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>By the late 1960s, North Beach’s reputation was evolving beyond an Italian neighborhood. Beatnik culture was well established by then.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante: \u003c/strong>Those were the days of the hippie generation, you know, ‘67 was the summer of love. Everything was going on. One of my favorite hangout was at La Rocca’s Corner, which is still here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>The beat culture, artists and Italians got along perhaps better than expected… Italian property owners reportedly kept rents low, and poets liked the cafes. In 1976, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Bookstore, took note of North Beach’s waning Italian culture in his famous poem “Old Italians are Dying.” Here’s a recording of him reading it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lawrence Ferlinghetti:\u003c/strong> For years the old Italians in faded felt hats have been sunning themselves and dying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You have seen them on the benches in the park in Washington Square\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The old Italians in their black high button shoes\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The old men in their felt fedoras with stained hatbands have been dying and dying day by day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>By the early 1980s, Michele says, North Beach didn’t feel like an Italian enclave anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michele Ferrante: \u003c/strong>They all move, Burlingame, San Mateo, Napa, San Helena, Sonoma. San Francisco, not too many living here anymore, very little.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frank Balistreri: \u003c/strong>Sure, we saw it change. There’s still some kind of flavor, but not originally what I grew up with. The way I was raised here, you knew who was Italian and who wasn’t. Now you don’t know who’s who. So, basically, you feel like nobody’s here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>That feeling of “no Italians” – didn’t sit well with the North Beach chamber of commerce. In the 1990s, they kicked off a marketing campaign for the neighborhood, “Little Italy of the West.” Light poles were painted with Italian flag colors. People could buy “I’m proud to be half Italian” t-shirts. Afterall, research shows, preserving a neighborhood’s ethnic identity is good for business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of kids singing in Italian\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Now, new initiatives are popping up to keep Italian heritage alive, like the Little Italy Honor Walk, a series of bronze sidewalk squares that memorialize notable Italians in San Francisco history. Five have been installed around Washington Square Park, and there’s more on the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Singing fades out and sounds of Italian being spoken fade in\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>Back at Stella’s pastry shop, Michele and Frank say remembering North Beach’s Italian history is important, but they don’t need monuments to remind them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Frank Balistreri: \u003c/strong>Times change, things change, I don’t worry about it, as long as I’m here where I want to be. Italians are no Italians, I know who I am, right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Pauline Bartolone: \u003c/strong>North Beach’s original Italian enclave may be long gone, but the neighborhood’s history and food will keep bringing tourists…and locals with Italians heritage… back for years to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by KQED reporter Pauline Bartolone. Special thanks to the San Francisco State University library where Pauline researched some of North Beach’s history. Thanks also to Jim McKee of EarWax Productions for the recording of Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading “Old Italians Are Dying.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today’s question came from Grant Strother, and you could be next! Submit your question about the Bay Area at BayCurious.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen-Price.\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 Olivia Allen-Price. Have a wonderful week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "the-rise-and-fall-of-bay-area-streetcar-transit-system",
"title": "The Rise and Fall of the Bay Area Streetcar Transit System",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the turn of the 20th century, streetcars crisscrossed the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bay-area\"> Bay Area\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For many people, they were the primary way to get around town —and to San Francisco for work. People would walk out their doors in Berkeley, Alameda, Oakland, hop on a streetcar that would take them to a ferry and be in downtown San Francisco in about 40 minutes. Remnants of these lines can be seen in many Bay Area streetscapes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious listener Vanessa Boehm grew up in Germany with efficient public transportation, and as she looked around her neighborhood near the UC Berkeley campus, she wondered: “What happened to the streetcars that used to be around Oakland and the East Bay?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s not the first or the last to ask questions along those lines. The history and disappearance of the Key System, which once served East Bay residents, has captured the imagination of many transit aficionados. And among the many similar questions we’ve gotten are some from people who want to know whether it would be possible to recreate the streetcar networks that have long since vanished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without knowing it, perhaps, Vanessa and other listeners have touched on a disputed piece of both East Bay and national transportation history, a conspiracy theory that involves some of the nation’s most powerful corporations and the role they played — or didn’t play — in the disappearance of streetcars in the East Bay. The story also encompasses a real-estate development scheme that shaped Oakland and Berkeley, the rise of suburban sprawl, and the dawn of the motor vehicle age.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Streetcars fundamentally shaped urban development\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Streetcars were essential to the growth of cities in the Bay Area and across the United States in the final years of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th. Electric railroads — either streetcar networks connecting neighborhoods or interurban lines connecting towns and cities — served all nine Bay Area counties in the early 20th century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The place where that electric streetcar legacy is most obvious is San Francisco, where several electric lines that operated in the 1920s — Muni’s J, K, L, M and N routes — are still essential parts of the city’s transportation system. Two other lines, the E and the F, feature tourist-oriented service using historic streetcars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073776\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 990px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-05-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073776\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-05-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"An electric train crossing the lower deck of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.\" width=\"990\" height=\"796\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-05-KQED.jpg 990w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-05-KQED-160x129.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 990px) 100vw, 990px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Key System “A” line train on a test run across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland in 1939. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of \u003ca href=\"https://www.foundsf.org/Key_System_and_March_of_Progress\">FoundSF.org\u003c/a>)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For the first four decades of the 20th century, the East Bay was served by two major electric streetcar systems: one run by Southern Pacific and a competitor known popularly as the Key System. Southern Pacific’s system, initially called the Oakland, Alameda and Berkeley Lines, ran transbay service using ferries that left from long causeways, or moles, in West Oakland and Alameda.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Key System was a collection of East Bay streetcar and transbay lines built or purchased and consolidated by Francis Marion Smith, known as “Borax” Smith because of his success mining and marketing the all-purpose mineral in the deserts of Nevada and southeastern California. Starting in the 1890s, Smith created a network of lines that eventually stretched from Richmond to San Leandro.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But creating a transit system wasn’t Smith’s main objective. He and partner Frank Havens had purchased about 13,000 acres, more than 20 square miles, under the aegis of a separate enterprise known as The Realty Syndicate. The streetcar and transbay train system Smith created was \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11925112/idora-park-and-playland-at-the-beach-bay-area-amusement-parks-of-a-bygone-era\">designed to serve the new neighborhoods\u003c/a> that would be developed on the syndicate’s properties.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oakland historian Mitchell Schwarzer said the streetcar network fundamentally changed the shape of the city. In his 2021 study of Oakland’s development, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ucpress.edu/books/hella-town/paper\">\u003cem>Hella Town,\u003c/em>\u003c/a> he said that by 1912, property subdividers had created more than 50,000 new residential lots close to streetcar routes.[aside postID=news_12068602 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00030_TV-KQED.jpg']The effect on what had been a compact East Bay community focused on downtown was dramatic, with streetcar lines triggering a sprawl of new neighborhoods in every direction and the creation of commercial districts like Grand Lake, Rockridge, Piedmont Avenue and along stretches of San Pablo Avenue and East 14th Street, now International Boulevard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The streetcar “affected everything — it affected where the residential areas developed, it affected where the commercial areas developed, it affected where industry moved pretty much,” Schwarzer said. Alongside the automobile, streetcars shaped the form Oakland took to this day, “both where things are located, how they’re distributed, how they’re built, what’s built, where they’re built,” Schwarzer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He adds that this early episode of sprawl also helped shape Oakland’s future demographic and class profile. The city’s vast residential expansion “allowed for the wealthier people to live on larger lots and to live separately and to erect barriers to minorities moving into their communities. Without the streetcar, they couldn’t have done that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Financial failures\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Although the Key System and other streetcar operations were useful in driving real estate development and despite the fact that they carried more than 100 million passengers a year at their peak in the 1920s, they were, for the most part, failures as money-making enterprises.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Key System was in deep financial trouble by 1913. According to the late transportation reporter and historian Harre W. Demoro, the Key’s early money troubles could be traced directly to Borax Smith’s risky and chaotic business practices. With the company deeply in debt, Smith was forced out in 1913. A series of crises ensued, with the company teetering on the edge of failure and being foreclosed on and reorganized in 1923 and 1930.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By this time, private automobiles had become a major presence in cities across the country, including those in the Bay Area. The growing popularity of car ownership is reflected in a steep decline in ridership for both the Southern Pacific and Key System after a peak recorded in the mid-1920s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drivers weren’t the only ones who were drawn to new motorized modes of transport. Starting before 1920, transit systems began to convert some of their train service to bus lines. By the mid-1920s, the Key System had joined in that trend, which accelerated through the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Demoro found in \u003ca href=\"https://archive.org/details/bulletinnational446nati\">a 1979 study\u003c/a> of the Key System published in the National Railway Bulletin that by 1937, its buses accounted for more than half of the company’s business in terms of miles of service delivered. “From then on, the bus dominated” Key’s operation, Demoro wrote in \u003ca href=\"https://archive.org/embed/keyroutetransbay0000demo\">his two-volume history\u003c/a> of the transbay service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073773\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073773\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"A two-car, orange-and-silver electric train shown in a car barn at the Western Railway Museum in Solano County.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Key System Bridge Unit 187, part of the fleet that provided service across the Bay Bridge from the East Bay to San Francisco between 1939 and 1958, at the Western Railway Museum in Solano County. \u003ccite>(Dan Brekke/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The decline accelerated after the Bay Bridge opened to drivers in November 1936. The planned railroad service on the bridge wasn’t ready when the bridge opened, creating an opportunity for East Bay residents to enjoy the ease of car travel. When train service on the bridge’s lower deck finally began in January 1939, it did little to reverse the ridership slump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s right here that the conspiracy theory mentioned earlier becomes part of the Key System story. Because as the car was becoming king, companies related to the automobile industry bought up dozens of streetcar lines and replaced them with buses. That effort was intended, the story goes, to undermine mass transit to such an extent that riders would desert it in preference for automobiles.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A kernel of truth to the myth\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>General Motors, Standard Oil of California (now known as Chevron), Firestone Rubber and Phillips Petroleum really did invest in a company called National City Lines and a pair of subsidiaries that were in the business of buying mostly financially troubled streetcar systems and immediately converting them to bus systems. That happened in 46 cities across the country, including a few big ones, like Los Angeles, St. Louis, and yes, Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The government really did take National City Lines, GM, its partners and their executives to court. In 1949, a jury in Chicago really did convict them of one count of violating federal antitrust law by conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses, fuel, tires and other supplies to the transit systems that National City Lines and its subsidiaries had taken over. The companies were acquitted on a second count alleging they had conspired to block competitors from doing business with the National City companies. In other words, the defendants were found guilty of trying to control the purchase of supplies that newly “motorized” transit agencies would need, not of any broader conspiracy to wreck mass transit.[aside postID=news_12065901 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-38-BL-KQED.jpg']The penalties the judge imposed were trivial: $5,000 for each corporate defendant — about $68,000 in 2026 dollars — and $1 for each of the executives who had played a part in the conspiracy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the story is more complex than the National City Lines case, said Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “It’s really a story of technology change.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The electric streetcar systems that started appearing everywhere in the 1890s were a big leap in speed and performance compared to the horse-drawn omnibuses and cable cars they replaced. But then the next big innovation in transportation arrived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In the early 20th century, the big, disruptive technology was the automobile, and people adopted it en masse very rapidly, and it made these streetcars for a vast majority of the population essentially obsolete,” Elkind said. Cars not only competed for riders, they also competed for space on the streets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you throw the automobile into that, and everybody’s driving now, these streetcars are getting stuck in traffic,” Elkind said. “They’re not really enjoyable for people to ride. And people are frustrated by the poor service, high fares, and they wanted the freedom and mobility that automobiles, private automobiles, represented.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The argument that GM’s National Cities gambit was chiefly responsible for the collapse of electric railways across the county has been widely criticized as little more than a myth, one that ignores other factors that made many streetcar systems vulnerable by the 1930s, including their often poor physical and financial condition and the fact that, as shown by the Key System, bus transportation was becoming steadily more popular and economical well before National City Lines appeared on the scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The Key System’s slow demise\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>After struggling through most of the 1930s, a surge in wartime ridership had made the company profitable and by 1945, it was sitting on a sizable surplus. Although it had struggled to upgrade its cars and tracks before the war, it had begun making plans to revamp service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company began to follow through on all of these initiatives, contracting for new streetcars and moving ahead with the purchase of trolley buses to run on College Avenue and on the Arlington Avenue-Euclid Avenue service in the Berkeley Hills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073797\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1020px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/494425878_1249028317224906_1645347311867449341_n-2.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073797\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/494425878_1249028317224906_1645347311867449341_n-2.jpg\" alt=\"Black-and-white image of people lined up to board commuter bus about 1960 in San Francisco's Transbay Terminal.\" width=\"1020\" height=\"734\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/494425878_1249028317224906_1645347311867449341_n-2.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/494425878_1249028317224906_1645347311867449341_n-2-160x115.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1020px) 100vw, 1020px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Berkeley-bound commuter line up to board a Key System “F” bus after San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal was reconfigured for bus service in 1959. AC Transit would take over the service the following year. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Western Railway Museum)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Then suddenly, all that work stopped. In May 1946, Key System management sold the company to National City Lines for $3 million ($52 million in 2026 dollars). By the end of the year, the company’s new owners decided to scrap all the remaining streetcar lines and replace trains with motor buses. The only trains the Key System still operated were the half-dozen transbay lines operating across the Bay Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1955, the company applied to the state Public Utilities Commission to abandon transbay service. The last trains ran over the bridge to San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal in April 1958. The Key System, now an all-bus operation, was purchased by a new public transit agency — AC Transit — in 1960.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The evolution of the Bay Area’s transit system\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Looking back on those events in 1979, Demoro speculated that without the National City Lines takeover, the East Bay’s transit system would likely have evolved into a hybrid featuring streetcars, trolley buses along with motor buses. Whether the transbay service would have survived was less clear, he said, because of the state’s interest in reconfiguring the bridge to accommodate more motor vehicles — a goal realized when the Key System tracks were removed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But he also marveled that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11986396/when-bart-was-built-people-and-houses-had-to-go\">the region managed to build BART\u003c/a>, an agency created in the 1950s as the Key System trains were in their twilight years and both California and the rest of the United States went all in on highway spending. “That accomplishment … seems astounding today, he wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073772\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073772\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"Black-and-white image of 1940s streetcars and automobiles in a traffic jam in Oakland, California.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1048\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED-160x84.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED-1536x805.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">As automobile traffic grew, streetcars — and streetcar riders — often found themselves tangled in traffic jams like this 1940s faceoff between Key System trains and cars at 47th Avenue and East 14th Street (now International Boulevard) in Oakland. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Western Railway Museum)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But in one sense, the Key System hasn’t gone away. When AC Transit took control of the Key’s bankrupt all-bus operation in 1960, it continued an East Bay transit legacy that stretched back nearly a century. AC Transit continues to be a vital transportation link for hundreds of thousands of East Bay residents, much the way the Key System was in its peak years. And for those who travel between the East Bay and San Francisco, BART now serves the riders the way the Key System’s trains and ferries once did, although maybe a lot less romantically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s still possible to ride some of the few surviving Key System trains at Solano County’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.wrm.org/\">Western Railway Museum\u003c/a>, on Highway 12 between Fairfield and Rio Vista. Muni offers \u003ca href=\"https://www.streetcar.org/rider-information-map-2/\">a daily vintage streetcar experience\u003c/a> on its F trolley car line, running along Market Street between the Castro and Steuart Street downtown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>At the turn of the 20th century, streetcars crisscrossed the Bay Area. Nowadays, though, you rarely see them. So you might even be thinking to yourself, what even is a streetcar?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Think of those old trolleys like the F line on Market Street in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Trolley dinging\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>It’s not a cable car, it’s not modern light rail. It’s an old-fashioned train, usually one or two cars, that runs above ground on a track, often with electric wires overhead to provide power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Electric streetcars were big in the East Bay before the automobile took off. For many people, they were the primary way to get around town – and to San Francisco for work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival video clip: \u003c/strong>Geared to the needs and dedicated to the service of the East Bay, Key System became one of the largest single businesses in the area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>People would walk out their doors in Berkeley, Alameda, Oakland, hop on a slick orange and silver Key System streetcar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival video clip: \u003c/strong>Transportation to San Francisco was by ferry, a convivial mode of travel that, particularly in the evening, had elements of fantasy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>That was the daily commute of many for decades. Our question asker this week, Vanessa Bohm, grew up in Germany and has seen some remnants of the Key system all around the East bay. She’s wondered…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Vanessa Bohm: \u003c/strong>What happened to the streetcars that used to be around Oakland and the East Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Vanessa is not alone. We get questions about what happened to the key system a lot. Some people even wonder if those old streetcar lines could be put to use again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here to help us understand the rise and fall of Bay Area streetcarts is the man, the myth, the legend, recently retired, but back, because he just can’t quit, KQED’s transportation editor emeritus, Dan Brekke. Hi Dan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Hi, Olivia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Can you start by painting a picture for us at its height? What would the East Bay have looked like during the streetcar era?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Well, you would have had dozens of streetcar lines, either running from neighborhood to neighborhood or from neighborhoods to downtowns, and you would’ve had a collection of trains that were starting at various nodes in the East Bay, like North Berkeley or Downtown Berkeley, University of California, Downtown Oakland, East Oakland, running to a little rail line that ran out into the middle of the bay where people would climb off their trains and catch ferries into the city. And those trains would get you from point A to point B in 35 or 40 minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>We know electric streetcars became common across the country and in all nine counties of the Bay Area starting in the 1890s, but tell us more about how the key system in particular got started.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Early in the 20th century, in the very first years, real estate investors, led by somebody named Francis Marion Smith, whose nickname was Borax Smith, because he’d made a fortune in borax mining in the southwest. He was part of what was called the Realty Syndicate. And they owned something like 20 square miles of East Bay real estate. And it would make this property so much more valuable if there was an easy way for people to get to and from these areas that would then be ripe for development. And pretty much that’s what happened. These streetcar lines got built, and if you see a route map, there are tendrils stretching throughout what we think of as East Oakland today and north into Berkeley, with many lines that were both neighborhood lines where people could ride, say, from their neighborhood to downtown Oakland, and many lines that were traveling from the East Bay to San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>So sort of a situation where if you build it, they will come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>They built it and they did come and much of the streetscape and the way neighborhoods are put together in Berkeley and Oakland really comes from that early streetcar development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>One thing I find interesting is that these were not public works projects in the sense that the public owned them or they were, you know, done with tax dollars. These were private companies running these these streetcars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Yeah, that’s right. Those streetcar lines we’re talking about and wherever we’re talking about them, you know, it would be hard to go to a town of any size in the early 20th century and find no street railroad, right? And, of course, Los Angeles was one of the places where they were most prevalent. But all of this was done through private capital that had some kind of investment goal in mind. And often it had to do with developing real estate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>They didn’t own the street, so logistically, how did that even work?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Yeah, they would get a license from the cities where they wanted to operate and part of the license would be access to the street and also some agreement about who would take care of the tracks in the street because as you know, if you’ve been anywhere where there’s a railroad track in a street, there are usually some kind of pavement problems and so that would be part of the deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Tell me about the experience of actually riding one of these cars. What would it have been like as a commuter to step foot on one?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>If you want to experience what these trains were like, you don’t have to rely on imagination. If you go out to the Western Railway Museum, which is near Rio Vista, there’s an amazing collection of streetcars from all different eras.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke in scene: \u003c/strong>This is so cool. This one used to run in Oakland, going to the ballpark. And this is a Key System one too, this one that says E.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>When they heard what I was up to, what I was interested in finding out about, they said, well, we can take one of those bridge units out and run it for you. Unbelievable. They roll out this retro, streamlined, two-car, orange and silver train, which is instantly a throwback to what people would have experienced their first day riding on the Bay Bridge in 1939. So then you know we’re on the platform waiting for this train to start up, we climb aboard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Conductor:\u003c/strong> Welcome aboard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>First thing I notice is the windows don’t open, but that’s okay. There’s ventilation through a front door and we roll out down this, kind of beautifully recreated streetcar line, electrified streetcar line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Trolley bell\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>In the middle of nowhere, but here’s this train going through this kind of pristine-looking ranch environment, and you come to a little crossroad, you have to slow to a stop, sound the horn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Horn blares\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Conductor: \u003c/strong>Hey, we’ve got a car for once!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Because you don’t want to interfere with any crossing ranch traffic, and then you proceed to a little stop really out in the middle of nowhere. And get off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Conductor: \u003c/strong>Okay, thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>The motorman changes ends of the car and then you head back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>That sounds pretty fun. We’re going to take a quick break here, but we’ll get into why this system started to fall apart when we come back. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>So, Dan, the scene that you’ve painted so far, it’s very idyllic with all these streetcars whisking people from Berkeley and Oakland to Ferries and maybe taking them into the city. And that goes on for what, 40 odd years? When does it all start to change and what factors were behind the changes?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Well, the 1930s were a very rough decade for streetcar companies in general. You had the Great Depression, of course, that started in 1929 and deepened throughout the first half of the decade. The transit industry itself either recovered very slowly or not at all. A lot of that was because they were private companies that were locked into pretty disadvantageous contracts with the cities they served. Right? They could only raise fares so much. And they didn’t receive public subsidies. There was a big shift going on toward private automobiles that was also taking away some of their customers. In the Bay Area itself, you know, the relationship between the East Bay and the city of San Francisco changed dramatically in 1936 with the opening of the Bay Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival video clip: \u003c/strong>A six-lane double deck bridge, eight miles long, connecting San Francisco with the Oakland-Berkeley area, spanning the largest major navigable body of water ever bridged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>I mean, there was an incredible influx of traffic across the bridge into San Francisco, basically as soon as the bridge opened, and it just didn’t slow down. And one of the unfortunate things that happened at the same time was that while part of developing the Bay Bridge was to build railroad tracks across it so that these interurban trains could come in from the East Bay, but it wasn’t ready to use until early 1939. One of the factors that people point to in the demise of the key system, is that delay of more than two years where people got to experience that it was much easier to drive into the city and faster, perhaps, than it had been to take the train. Their habits changed, and the key systems never really recovered. And we also had this phenomenon of the slow transition in the key-system itself away from streetcars for their local service to buses. And by the late 1930s, buses were carrying most of the ridership. So all of those things together really started to dim the outlook for the streetcar companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>One narrative that I’ve heard over and over is that a big reason that streetcars failed was that essentially car companies bought the key system and then would intentionally run the company into the ground so people would be forced to buy more cars. Is there any truth to that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>There’s a kernel of truth to it. You know, when I talked to Ethan Elkind from UC Berkeley, you know, he talked about the effect of one particular movie in the 1980s on this view of history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind: \u003c/strong>Well, in L.A., the conspiracy was really put on steroids by the movie who framed Roger Rabbit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judge Doom from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”: \u003c/strong>I see a place where people get off and off the freeway. On and off, off and on, all day, all night! Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oh, it’s so great to hear Christopher Lloyd in that. He was so good! And the character he was playing was Judge Doom and his masterplan was to destroy Toon Town, where Roger Rabbit lived, and a key part of the plot is to kill the streetcar system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Who Framed Roger Rabbit clip: \u003c/strong>C’mon, Nobody’s gonna drive this lousy freeway when they can take the red car for a nickel. Well, they’ll drive. They’ll have to. You see, I bought the red car so I could dismantle it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind: \u003c/strong>Not an exaggeration that, you know, this 1989 semi-cartoon really fed this idea that it was highway interests that gobbled up the streetcar lines. And the story is much more complex than that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>The complexity people are talking about and the grain of truth to Roger Rabbit is because of a lawsuit that was filed against a company that was called National City Lines and some of its investors in the 1940s. And National City Lines was a company that went around the country buying up streetcar systems and they would convert those to bus systems, basically. That’s the long and the short of it. And by doing that, they were really helping out their investors who were General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone Rubber, Phillips 66, companies like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>National City Lines showed up in Oakland in 1946 and took control of the Key System. And while the Key system had laid plans to sort of keep streetcars going and also keep them running into San Francisco. Across the Bay Bridge, the national city lines scrapped most of these development plans, let’s call them, right away. So within a very short amount of time, the streetcar lines in the East Bay turned into bus lines. The streetcar lines were abandoned. The exception was the inter-urban line into San Francisco. That continued running until the late 1950s, but it ran at a loss. It ran with fewer and fewer passengers every year, and the last key system cars ran across the Bay Bridge in 1958.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>When we start talking about public transportation, I’ve noticed that people are often very nostalgic for the past, and it can, you know, sort of become a little idealized, you know, oh, dreaming about riding across the Bay Bridge and the train, but there were some realities to the Key System that people forget about. Can you tell us about some of the drawbacks of the Key System, even when it was sort of at its height?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>So there’s very definitely a paradise lost tone to the way people discuss the Key system. If we only hadn’t abandoned this beautiful streetcar system, just think how much better our world would be. I think that ignores the reality that they had huge power plants to supply the electricity for their systems. In the case of the Key System, they had a huge powerhouse in Emeryville. Kind of close to where Ikea is today. There was a gigantic smokestack there and they were burning coal. Sure, electric trains were much cleaner in terms of the environment around the lines themselves, but they still had an environmental footprint as all of our transportation choices do. And I talked to Mitchell Schwarzer, who’s a professor of architectural and urban history at the California College of the Arts about the social effects of the streetcar system. He wrote a book a few years ago called \u003cem>Hella Oakland\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mitchell Schwartzer: \u003c/strong>What the technology allowed for was a vast residential expansion outside of the inner areas of Oakland. And that allowed for the wealthier people to live on larger lots and to live separately and to erect barriers to minorities moving into their communities. Without the streetcar, they couldn’t have done that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>I will say also that there was some outrage about the lack of safety for streetcars. The years I’ve looked at were between 1906 and 1910. It’s absolutely hair-raising to see how many people were getting killed in streetcar accidents. The newspapers relished these stories. I mean, they were told in sometimes excruciating detail what happened to the victims.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Definitely not insignificant safety and environmental concerns that you’ve brought up. But I do wanna say times are different now, right? We know how to run trains on green energy. We know to put safety protocols in place that will keep people more safe. One of our question askers wanted to know, could the old Key System sort of be a model for public transportation of the future?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Well I talked to Ethan Elkind from UC Berkeley Law School about this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind: \u003c/strong>Well, I think you run into the same problems that the streetcars were running into in the old days, which is that a lot of them ran down highway medians. They would get stuck in traffic. They would hit red lights. They would have to wait for cars to pass. And they weren’t necessarily that fast. You need to have a dedicated separate right of way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>You have to deal with all the other street traffic. That’s a real problem in imagining streetcar lines flourishing again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind: \u003c/strong>And then to really make transit make sense, you have to be able to serve dense concentrations of jobs and housing where people can easily walk or bike to the rail station. And unfortunately, what we’ve seen too often, especially in the higher income areas in the Bay area, they don’t allow new development. They don’t wanna see new apartment buildings come into their neighborhoods. And that’s what you would need to have to have the ridership really make sense. And so that these streetcar lines could actually have enough ridership where they wouldn’t require as much public subsidy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>The other thing is they’re really damn expensive to build. Lots of transportation experts say that the workaround is right in front of us if we only had the political will to do it. And that is to dedicate more street space as bus only space, right? Mostly we’re talking about bus rapid transit where you have dedicated lanes for buses. You have signals that are set so they prioritize the bus traffic. Those are much, much less expensive to build, but they take a lot of planning, and there is an upfront investment that sometimes is difficult.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Dan Brekke, thank you so much, as always, for reporting on this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>You’re very welcome. And as I conclude here, I want to make a couple of acknowledgements. One is, there’s kind of an amazing community of transit historians in the Bay Area, including some who are very painstakingly documenting some of this history of the key system. So that’s one acknowledgement. The other one is, thanks to you and Katrina. You guys are wonderful to work with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Listeners should know that Dan was one of my first editors here at KQED when I started out as a wee baby reporter. And, he’s reported some of my favorite Bay Curious episodes over the years. Like those mysterious East Bay walls, why there are so many crows in the bay area and he’s answered dozens of your transportation questions over the years. We’ll link to a few of his stories in our show notes, so go check those out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dan, thank you, thank you, thank you. You are the best. I hope you have a happy retirement, but also, I have a feeling you’ll be back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you value what you hear on our show, consider becoming a KQED member. You can choose the level of support that works for your budget by going to \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/donate\">kqed.org/donate\u003c/a>. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale, and me, Olivia Allen-Price. Extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and the whole KQED team.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Olivia Allen-Price: 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. Have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "All nine counties of the Bay Area had robust streetcar systems at the start of the 20th century. In the East Bay, rumors swirl about how and why the Key System failed.",
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"title": "The Rise and Fall of the Bay Area Streetcar Transit System | KQED",
"description": "All nine counties of the Bay Area had robust streetcar systems at the start of the 20th century. In the East Bay, rumors swirl about how and why the Key System failed.",
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"headline": "The Rise and Fall of the Bay Area Streetcar Transit System",
"datePublished": "2026-02-19T03:00:44-08:00",
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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>At the turn of the 20th century, streetcars crisscrossed the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bay-area\"> Bay Area\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For many people, they were the primary way to get around town —and to San Francisco for work. People would walk out their doors in Berkeley, Alameda, Oakland, hop on a streetcar that would take them to a ferry and be in downtown San Francisco in about 40 minutes. Remnants of these lines can be seen in many Bay Area streetscapes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious listener Vanessa Boehm grew up in Germany with efficient public transportation, and as she looked around her neighborhood near the UC Berkeley campus, she wondered: “What happened to the streetcars that used to be around Oakland and the East Bay?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s not the first or the last to ask questions along those lines. The history and disappearance of the Key System, which once served East Bay residents, has captured the imagination of many transit aficionados. And among the many similar questions we’ve gotten are some from people who want to know whether it would be possible to recreate the streetcar networks that have long since vanished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without knowing it, perhaps, Vanessa and other listeners have touched on a disputed piece of both East Bay and national transportation history, a conspiracy theory that involves some of the nation’s most powerful corporations and the role they played — or didn’t play — in the disappearance of streetcars in the East Bay. The story also encompasses a real-estate development scheme that shaped Oakland and Berkeley, the rise of suburban sprawl, and the dawn of the motor vehicle age.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Streetcars fundamentally shaped urban development\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Streetcars were essential to the growth of cities in the Bay Area and across the United States in the final years of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th. Electric railroads — either streetcar networks connecting neighborhoods or interurban lines connecting towns and cities — served all nine Bay Area counties in the early 20th century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The place where that electric streetcar legacy is most obvious is San Francisco, where several electric lines that operated in the 1920s — Muni’s J, K, L, M and N routes — are still essential parts of the city’s transportation system. Two other lines, the E and the F, feature tourist-oriented service using historic streetcars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073776\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 990px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-05-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073776\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-05-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"An electric train crossing the lower deck of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.\" width=\"990\" height=\"796\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-05-KQED.jpg 990w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-05-KQED-160x129.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 990px) 100vw, 990px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Key System “A” line train on a test run across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland in 1939. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of \u003ca href=\"https://www.foundsf.org/Key_System_and_March_of_Progress\">FoundSF.org\u003c/a>)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For the first four decades of the 20th century, the East Bay was served by two major electric streetcar systems: one run by Southern Pacific and a competitor known popularly as the Key System. Southern Pacific’s system, initially called the Oakland, Alameda and Berkeley Lines, ran transbay service using ferries that left from long causeways, or moles, in West Oakland and Alameda.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Key System was a collection of East Bay streetcar and transbay lines built or purchased and consolidated by Francis Marion Smith, known as “Borax” Smith because of his success mining and marketing the all-purpose mineral in the deserts of Nevada and southeastern California. Starting in the 1890s, Smith created a network of lines that eventually stretched from Richmond to San Leandro.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But creating a transit system wasn’t Smith’s main objective. He and partner Frank Havens had purchased about 13,000 acres, more than 20 square miles, under the aegis of a separate enterprise known as The Realty Syndicate. The streetcar and transbay train system Smith created was \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11925112/idora-park-and-playland-at-the-beach-bay-area-amusement-parks-of-a-bygone-era\">designed to serve the new neighborhoods\u003c/a> that would be developed on the syndicate’s properties.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oakland historian Mitchell Schwarzer said the streetcar network fundamentally changed the shape of the city. In his 2021 study of Oakland’s development, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ucpress.edu/books/hella-town/paper\">\u003cem>Hella Town,\u003c/em>\u003c/a> he said that by 1912, property subdividers had created more than 50,000 new residential lots close to streetcar routes.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The effect on what had been a compact East Bay community focused on downtown was dramatic, with streetcar lines triggering a sprawl of new neighborhoods in every direction and the creation of commercial districts like Grand Lake, Rockridge, Piedmont Avenue and along stretches of San Pablo Avenue and East 14th Street, now International Boulevard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The streetcar “affected everything — it affected where the residential areas developed, it affected where the commercial areas developed, it affected where industry moved pretty much,” Schwarzer said. Alongside the automobile, streetcars shaped the form Oakland took to this day, “both where things are located, how they’re distributed, how they’re built, what’s built, where they’re built,” Schwarzer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He adds that this early episode of sprawl also helped shape Oakland’s future demographic and class profile. The city’s vast residential expansion “allowed for the wealthier people to live on larger lots and to live separately and to erect barriers to minorities moving into their communities. Without the streetcar, they couldn’t have done that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Financial failures\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Although the Key System and other streetcar operations were useful in driving real estate development and despite the fact that they carried more than 100 million passengers a year at their peak in the 1920s, they were, for the most part, failures as money-making enterprises.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Key System was in deep financial trouble by 1913. According to the late transportation reporter and historian Harre W. Demoro, the Key’s early money troubles could be traced directly to Borax Smith’s risky and chaotic business practices. With the company deeply in debt, Smith was forced out in 1913. A series of crises ensued, with the company teetering on the edge of failure and being foreclosed on and reorganized in 1923 and 1930.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By this time, private automobiles had become a major presence in cities across the country, including those in the Bay Area. The growing popularity of car ownership is reflected in a steep decline in ridership for both the Southern Pacific and Key System after a peak recorded in the mid-1920s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drivers weren’t the only ones who were drawn to new motorized modes of transport. Starting before 1920, transit systems began to convert some of their train service to bus lines. By the mid-1920s, the Key System had joined in that trend, which accelerated through the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Demoro found in \u003ca href=\"https://archive.org/details/bulletinnational446nati\">a 1979 study\u003c/a> of the Key System published in the National Railway Bulletin that by 1937, its buses accounted for more than half of the company’s business in terms of miles of service delivered. “From then on, the bus dominated” Key’s operation, Demoro wrote in \u003ca href=\"https://archive.org/embed/keyroutetransbay0000demo\">his two-volume history\u003c/a> of the transbay service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073773\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073773\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"A two-car, orange-and-silver electric train shown in a car barn at the Western Railway Museum in Solano County.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-02-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Key System Bridge Unit 187, part of the fleet that provided service across the Bay Bridge from the East Bay to San Francisco between 1939 and 1958, at the Western Railway Museum in Solano County. \u003ccite>(Dan Brekke/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The decline accelerated after the Bay Bridge opened to drivers in November 1936. The planned railroad service on the bridge wasn’t ready when the bridge opened, creating an opportunity for East Bay residents to enjoy the ease of car travel. When train service on the bridge’s lower deck finally began in January 1939, it did little to reverse the ridership slump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s right here that the conspiracy theory mentioned earlier becomes part of the Key System story. Because as the car was becoming king, companies related to the automobile industry bought up dozens of streetcar lines and replaced them with buses. That effort was intended, the story goes, to undermine mass transit to such an extent that riders would desert it in preference for automobiles.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A kernel of truth to the myth\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>General Motors, Standard Oil of California (now known as Chevron), Firestone Rubber and Phillips Petroleum really did invest in a company called National City Lines and a pair of subsidiaries that were in the business of buying mostly financially troubled streetcar systems and immediately converting them to bus systems. That happened in 46 cities across the country, including a few big ones, like Los Angeles, St. Louis, and yes, Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The government really did take National City Lines, GM, its partners and their executives to court. In 1949, a jury in Chicago really did convict them of one count of violating federal antitrust law by conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses, fuel, tires and other supplies to the transit systems that National City Lines and its subsidiaries had taken over. The companies were acquitted on a second count alleging they had conspired to block competitors from doing business with the National City companies. In other words, the defendants were found guilty of trying to control the purchase of supplies that newly “motorized” transit agencies would need, not of any broader conspiracy to wreck mass transit.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The penalties the judge imposed were trivial: $5,000 for each corporate defendant — about $68,000 in 2026 dollars — and $1 for each of the executives who had played a part in the conspiracy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the story is more complex than the National City Lines case, said Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “It’s really a story of technology change.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The electric streetcar systems that started appearing everywhere in the 1890s were a big leap in speed and performance compared to the horse-drawn omnibuses and cable cars they replaced. But then the next big innovation in transportation arrived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In the early 20th century, the big, disruptive technology was the automobile, and people adopted it en masse very rapidly, and it made these streetcars for a vast majority of the population essentially obsolete,” Elkind said. Cars not only competed for riders, they also competed for space on the streets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you throw the automobile into that, and everybody’s driving now, these streetcars are getting stuck in traffic,” Elkind said. “They’re not really enjoyable for people to ride. And people are frustrated by the poor service, high fares, and they wanted the freedom and mobility that automobiles, private automobiles, represented.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The argument that GM’s National Cities gambit was chiefly responsible for the collapse of electric railways across the county has been widely criticized as little more than a myth, one that ignores other factors that made many streetcar systems vulnerable by the 1930s, including their often poor physical and financial condition and the fact that, as shown by the Key System, bus transportation was becoming steadily more popular and economical well before National City Lines appeared on the scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The Key System’s slow demise\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>After struggling through most of the 1930s, a surge in wartime ridership had made the company profitable and by 1945, it was sitting on a sizable surplus. Although it had struggled to upgrade its cars and tracks before the war, it had begun making plans to revamp service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company began to follow through on all of these initiatives, contracting for new streetcars and moving ahead with the purchase of trolley buses to run on College Avenue and on the Arlington Avenue-Euclid Avenue service in the Berkeley Hills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073797\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1020px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/494425878_1249028317224906_1645347311867449341_n-2.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073797\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/494425878_1249028317224906_1645347311867449341_n-2.jpg\" alt=\"Black-and-white image of people lined up to board commuter bus about 1960 in San Francisco's Transbay Terminal.\" width=\"1020\" height=\"734\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/494425878_1249028317224906_1645347311867449341_n-2.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/494425878_1249028317224906_1645347311867449341_n-2-160x115.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1020px) 100vw, 1020px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Berkeley-bound commuter line up to board a Key System “F” bus after San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal was reconfigured for bus service in 1959. AC Transit would take over the service the following year. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Western Railway Museum)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Then suddenly, all that work stopped. In May 1946, Key System management sold the company to National City Lines for $3 million ($52 million in 2026 dollars). By the end of the year, the company’s new owners decided to scrap all the remaining streetcar lines and replace trains with motor buses. The only trains the Key System still operated were the half-dozen transbay lines operating across the Bay Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1955, the company applied to the state Public Utilities Commission to abandon transbay service. The last trains ran over the bridge to San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal in April 1958. The Key System, now an all-bus operation, was purchased by a new public transit agency — AC Transit — in 1960.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The evolution of the Bay Area’s transit system\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Looking back on those events in 1979, Demoro speculated that without the National City Lines takeover, the East Bay’s transit system would likely have evolved into a hybrid featuring streetcars, trolley buses along with motor buses. Whether the transbay service would have survived was less clear, he said, because of the state’s interest in reconfiguring the bridge to accommodate more motor vehicles — a goal realized when the Key System tracks were removed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But he also marveled that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11986396/when-bart-was-built-people-and-houses-had-to-go\">the region managed to build BART\u003c/a>, an agency created in the 1950s as the Key System trains were in their twilight years and both California and the rest of the United States went all in on highway spending. “That accomplishment … seems astounding today, he wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073772\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073772\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"Black-and-white image of 1940s streetcars and automobiles in a traffic jam in Oakland, California.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1048\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED-160x84.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/260218-KEY-SYSTEM-01-KQED-1536x805.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">As automobile traffic grew, streetcars — and streetcar riders — often found themselves tangled in traffic jams like this 1940s faceoff between Key System trains and cars at 47th Avenue and East 14th Street (now International Boulevard) in Oakland. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Western Railway Museum)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But in one sense, the Key System hasn’t gone away. When AC Transit took control of the Key’s bankrupt all-bus operation in 1960, it continued an East Bay transit legacy that stretched back nearly a century. AC Transit continues to be a vital transportation link for hundreds of thousands of East Bay residents, much the way the Key System was in its peak years. And for those who travel between the East Bay and San Francisco, BART now serves the riders the way the Key System’s trains and ferries once did, although maybe a lot less romantically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s still possible to ride some of the few surviving Key System trains at Solano County’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.wrm.org/\">Western Railway Museum\u003c/a>, on Highway 12 between Fairfield and Rio Vista. Muni offers \u003ca href=\"https://www.streetcar.org/rider-information-map-2/\">a daily vintage streetcar experience\u003c/a> on its F trolley car line, running along Market Street between the Castro and Steuart Street downtown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>At the turn of the 20th century, streetcars crisscrossed the Bay Area. Nowadays, though, you rarely see them. So you might even be thinking to yourself, what even is a streetcar?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Think of those old trolleys like the F line on Market Street in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Trolley dinging\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>It’s not a cable car, it’s not modern light rail. It’s an old-fashioned train, usually one or two cars, that runs above ground on a track, often with electric wires overhead to provide power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Electric streetcars were big in the East Bay before the automobile took off. For many people, they were the primary way to get around town – and to San Francisco for work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival video clip: \u003c/strong>Geared to the needs and dedicated to the service of the East Bay, Key System became one of the largest single businesses in the area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>People would walk out their doors in Berkeley, Alameda, Oakland, hop on a slick orange and silver Key System streetcar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival video clip: \u003c/strong>Transportation to San Francisco was by ferry, a convivial mode of travel that, particularly in the evening, had elements of fantasy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>That was the daily commute of many for decades. Our question asker this week, Vanessa Bohm, grew up in Germany and has seen some remnants of the Key system all around the East bay. She’s wondered…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Vanessa Bohm: \u003c/strong>What happened to the streetcars that used to be around Oakland and the East Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Vanessa is not alone. We get questions about what happened to the key system a lot. Some people even wonder if those old streetcar lines could be put to use again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here to help us understand the rise and fall of Bay Area streetcarts is the man, the myth, the legend, recently retired, but back, because he just can’t quit, KQED’s transportation editor emeritus, Dan Brekke. Hi Dan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Hi, Olivia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Can you start by painting a picture for us at its height? What would the East Bay have looked like during the streetcar era?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Well, you would have had dozens of streetcar lines, either running from neighborhood to neighborhood or from neighborhoods to downtowns, and you would’ve had a collection of trains that were starting at various nodes in the East Bay, like North Berkeley or Downtown Berkeley, University of California, Downtown Oakland, East Oakland, running to a little rail line that ran out into the middle of the bay where people would climb off their trains and catch ferries into the city. And those trains would get you from point A to point B in 35 or 40 minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>We know electric streetcars became common across the country and in all nine counties of the Bay Area starting in the 1890s, but tell us more about how the key system in particular got started.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Early in the 20th century, in the very first years, real estate investors, led by somebody named Francis Marion Smith, whose nickname was Borax Smith, because he’d made a fortune in borax mining in the southwest. He was part of what was called the Realty Syndicate. And they owned something like 20 square miles of East Bay real estate. And it would make this property so much more valuable if there was an easy way for people to get to and from these areas that would then be ripe for development. And pretty much that’s what happened. These streetcar lines got built, and if you see a route map, there are tendrils stretching throughout what we think of as East Oakland today and north into Berkeley, with many lines that were both neighborhood lines where people could ride, say, from their neighborhood to downtown Oakland, and many lines that were traveling from the East Bay to San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>So sort of a situation where if you build it, they will come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>They built it and they did come and much of the streetscape and the way neighborhoods are put together in Berkeley and Oakland really comes from that early streetcar development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>One thing I find interesting is that these were not public works projects in the sense that the public owned them or they were, you know, done with tax dollars. These were private companies running these these streetcars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Yeah, that’s right. Those streetcar lines we’re talking about and wherever we’re talking about them, you know, it would be hard to go to a town of any size in the early 20th century and find no street railroad, right? And, of course, Los Angeles was one of the places where they were most prevalent. But all of this was done through private capital that had some kind of investment goal in mind. And often it had to do with developing real estate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>They didn’t own the street, so logistically, how did that even work?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Yeah, they would get a license from the cities where they wanted to operate and part of the license would be access to the street and also some agreement about who would take care of the tracks in the street because as you know, if you’ve been anywhere where there’s a railroad track in a street, there are usually some kind of pavement problems and so that would be part of the deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Tell me about the experience of actually riding one of these cars. What would it have been like as a commuter to step foot on one?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>If you want to experience what these trains were like, you don’t have to rely on imagination. If you go out to the Western Railway Museum, which is near Rio Vista, there’s an amazing collection of streetcars from all different eras.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke in scene: \u003c/strong>This is so cool. This one used to run in Oakland, going to the ballpark. And this is a Key System one too, this one that says E.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>When they heard what I was up to, what I was interested in finding out about, they said, well, we can take one of those bridge units out and run it for you. Unbelievable. They roll out this retro, streamlined, two-car, orange and silver train, which is instantly a throwback to what people would have experienced their first day riding on the Bay Bridge in 1939. So then you know we’re on the platform waiting for this train to start up, we climb aboard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Conductor:\u003c/strong> Welcome aboard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>First thing I notice is the windows don’t open, but that’s okay. There’s ventilation through a front door and we roll out down this, kind of beautifully recreated streetcar line, electrified streetcar line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Trolley bell\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>In the middle of nowhere, but here’s this train going through this kind of pristine-looking ranch environment, and you come to a little crossroad, you have to slow to a stop, sound the horn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Horn blares\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Conductor: \u003c/strong>Hey, we’ve got a car for once!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Because you don’t want to interfere with any crossing ranch traffic, and then you proceed to a little stop really out in the middle of nowhere. And get off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Conductor: \u003c/strong>Okay, thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>The motorman changes ends of the car and then you head back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>That sounds pretty fun. We’re going to take a quick break here, but we’ll get into why this system started to fall apart when we come back. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>So, Dan, the scene that you’ve painted so far, it’s very idyllic with all these streetcars whisking people from Berkeley and Oakland to Ferries and maybe taking them into the city. And that goes on for what, 40 odd years? When does it all start to change and what factors were behind the changes?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Well, the 1930s were a very rough decade for streetcar companies in general. You had the Great Depression, of course, that started in 1929 and deepened throughout the first half of the decade. The transit industry itself either recovered very slowly or not at all. A lot of that was because they were private companies that were locked into pretty disadvantageous contracts with the cities they served. Right? They could only raise fares so much. And they didn’t receive public subsidies. There was a big shift going on toward private automobiles that was also taking away some of their customers. In the Bay Area itself, you know, the relationship between the East Bay and the city of San Francisco changed dramatically in 1936 with the opening of the Bay Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival video clip: \u003c/strong>A six-lane double deck bridge, eight miles long, connecting San Francisco with the Oakland-Berkeley area, spanning the largest major navigable body of water ever bridged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>I mean, there was an incredible influx of traffic across the bridge into San Francisco, basically as soon as the bridge opened, and it just didn’t slow down. And one of the unfortunate things that happened at the same time was that while part of developing the Bay Bridge was to build railroad tracks across it so that these interurban trains could come in from the East Bay, but it wasn’t ready to use until early 1939. One of the factors that people point to in the demise of the key system, is that delay of more than two years where people got to experience that it was much easier to drive into the city and faster, perhaps, than it had been to take the train. Their habits changed, and the key systems never really recovered. And we also had this phenomenon of the slow transition in the key-system itself away from streetcars for their local service to buses. And by the late 1930s, buses were carrying most of the ridership. So all of those things together really started to dim the outlook for the streetcar companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>One narrative that I’ve heard over and over is that a big reason that streetcars failed was that essentially car companies bought the key system and then would intentionally run the company into the ground so people would be forced to buy more cars. Is there any truth to that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>There’s a kernel of truth to it. You know, when I talked to Ethan Elkind from UC Berkeley, you know, he talked about the effect of one particular movie in the 1980s on this view of history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind: \u003c/strong>Well, in L.A., the conspiracy was really put on steroids by the movie who framed Roger Rabbit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judge Doom from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”: \u003c/strong>I see a place where people get off and off the freeway. On and off, off and on, all day, all night! Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oh, it’s so great to hear Christopher Lloyd in that. He was so good! And the character he was playing was Judge Doom and his masterplan was to destroy Toon Town, where Roger Rabbit lived, and a key part of the plot is to kill the streetcar system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Who Framed Roger Rabbit clip: \u003c/strong>C’mon, Nobody’s gonna drive this lousy freeway when they can take the red car for a nickel. Well, they’ll drive. They’ll have to. You see, I bought the red car so I could dismantle it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind: \u003c/strong>Not an exaggeration that, you know, this 1989 semi-cartoon really fed this idea that it was highway interests that gobbled up the streetcar lines. And the story is much more complex than that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>The complexity people are talking about and the grain of truth to Roger Rabbit is because of a lawsuit that was filed against a company that was called National City Lines and some of its investors in the 1940s. And National City Lines was a company that went around the country buying up streetcar systems and they would convert those to bus systems, basically. That’s the long and the short of it. And by doing that, they were really helping out their investors who were General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone Rubber, Phillips 66, companies like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>National City Lines showed up in Oakland in 1946 and took control of the Key System. And while the Key system had laid plans to sort of keep streetcars going and also keep them running into San Francisco. Across the Bay Bridge, the national city lines scrapped most of these development plans, let’s call them, right away. So within a very short amount of time, the streetcar lines in the East Bay turned into bus lines. The streetcar lines were abandoned. The exception was the inter-urban line into San Francisco. That continued running until the late 1950s, but it ran at a loss. It ran with fewer and fewer passengers every year, and the last key system cars ran across the Bay Bridge in 1958.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>When we start talking about public transportation, I’ve noticed that people are often very nostalgic for the past, and it can, you know, sort of become a little idealized, you know, oh, dreaming about riding across the Bay Bridge and the train, but there were some realities to the Key System that people forget about. Can you tell us about some of the drawbacks of the Key System, even when it was sort of at its height?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>So there’s very definitely a paradise lost tone to the way people discuss the Key system. If we only hadn’t abandoned this beautiful streetcar system, just think how much better our world would be. I think that ignores the reality that they had huge power plants to supply the electricity for their systems. In the case of the Key System, they had a huge powerhouse in Emeryville. Kind of close to where Ikea is today. There was a gigantic smokestack there and they were burning coal. Sure, electric trains were much cleaner in terms of the environment around the lines themselves, but they still had an environmental footprint as all of our transportation choices do. And I talked to Mitchell Schwarzer, who’s a professor of architectural and urban history at the California College of the Arts about the social effects of the streetcar system. He wrote a book a few years ago called \u003cem>Hella Oakland\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mitchell Schwartzer: \u003c/strong>What the technology allowed for was a vast residential expansion outside of the inner areas of Oakland. And that allowed for the wealthier people to live on larger lots and to live separately and to erect barriers to minorities moving into their communities. Without the streetcar, they couldn’t have done that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>I will say also that there was some outrage about the lack of safety for streetcars. The years I’ve looked at were between 1906 and 1910. It’s absolutely hair-raising to see how many people were getting killed in streetcar accidents. The newspapers relished these stories. I mean, they were told in sometimes excruciating detail what happened to the victims.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Definitely not insignificant safety and environmental concerns that you’ve brought up. But I do wanna say times are different now, right? We know how to run trains on green energy. We know to put safety protocols in place that will keep people more safe. One of our question askers wanted to know, could the old Key System sort of be a model for public transportation of the future?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>Well I talked to Ethan Elkind from UC Berkeley Law School about this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind: \u003c/strong>Well, I think you run into the same problems that the streetcars were running into in the old days, which is that a lot of them ran down highway medians. They would get stuck in traffic. They would hit red lights. They would have to wait for cars to pass. And they weren’t necessarily that fast. You need to have a dedicated separate right of way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>You have to deal with all the other street traffic. That’s a real problem in imagining streetcar lines flourishing again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind: \u003c/strong>And then to really make transit make sense, you have to be able to serve dense concentrations of jobs and housing where people can easily walk or bike to the rail station. And unfortunately, what we’ve seen too often, especially in the higher income areas in the Bay area, they don’t allow new development. They don’t wanna see new apartment buildings come into their neighborhoods. And that’s what you would need to have to have the ridership really make sense. And so that these streetcar lines could actually have enough ridership where they wouldn’t require as much public subsidy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>The other thing is they’re really damn expensive to build. Lots of transportation experts say that the workaround is right in front of us if we only had the political will to do it. And that is to dedicate more street space as bus only space, right? Mostly we’re talking about bus rapid transit where you have dedicated lanes for buses. You have signals that are set so they prioritize the bus traffic. Those are much, much less expensive to build, but they take a lot of planning, and there is an upfront investment that sometimes is difficult.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Dan Brekke, thank you so much, as always, for reporting on this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan Brekke: \u003c/strong>You’re very welcome. And as I conclude here, I want to make a couple of acknowledgements. One is, there’s kind of an amazing community of transit historians in the Bay Area, including some who are very painstakingly documenting some of this history of the key system. So that’s one acknowledgement. The other one is, thanks to you and Katrina. You guys are wonderful to work with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Listeners should know that Dan was one of my first editors here at KQED when I started out as a wee baby reporter. And, he’s reported some of my favorite Bay Curious episodes over the years. Like those mysterious East Bay walls, why there are so many crows in the bay area and he’s answered dozens of your transportation questions over the years. We’ll link to a few of his stories in our show notes, so go check those out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dan, thank you, thank you, thank you. You are the best. I hope you have a happy retirement, but also, I have a feeling you’ll be back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you value what you hear on our show, consider becoming a KQED member. You can choose the level of support that works for your budget by going to \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/donate\">kqed.org/donate\u003c/a>. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale, and me, Olivia Allen-Price. Extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and the whole KQED team.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Olivia Allen-Price: 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. Have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "is-it-crow-maggedon-why-crows-are-flocking-to-bay-area-cities-each-winter",
"title": "Is It Crow-maggedon? Why Crows Are Flocking to Bay Area Cities Each Winter",
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"headTitle": "Is It Crow-maggedon? Why Crows Are Flocking to Bay Area Cities Each Winter | 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>Around sunset on winter evenings, hordes of crows choke the night sky over the Bay Area, often flocking to the same favorite spots night after night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious listener Matteo Clark-Hurley asked: “Is there a crow-maggedon happening in downtown areas of Oakland and San Francisco? Hundreds come out at dusk. Sections of streets with trees are covered in bird poop. Are there more crows now?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Clark-Hurley’s not the only one — many Bay Curious fans have written to ask why there are so many crows, where they’re going and why they’ve chosen to congregate in certain locations in Oakland and San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The short answer is yes, there are more crows now. The crow population in the Bay Area has been on a steady increase since about 1975, but really exploded after 2000 or so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every December, \u003ca href=\"https://goldengatebirdalliance.org/birding-resources/birding-information/christmas-bird-counts/\">volunteers \u003c/a>head out on one particular day and count as many birds as they can to get an approximation of the winter population. In 2025, populations in San Francisco and Oakland both doubled. Volunteers counted \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/crow-populations-san-francisco-21316117.php\">more than 3,000 crows in San Francisco alone\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073969\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2090px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073969\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047.jpg\" alt=\"Three black birds perch on a concrete wall looking at the ocean.\" width=\"2090\" height=\"1434\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047.jpg 2090w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047-2000x1372.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047-160x110.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047-1536x1054.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047-2048x1405.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2090px) 100vw, 2090px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Three crows at perch on a wall at Ocean Beach. Crows used to live more rurally, but have increasingly been flocking to urban areas where food is plentiful. \u003ccite>(Auseklis/iStock)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“There’s been basically logarithmic growth, which is sort of what you would expect in an unchecked system,” said Glenn Phillips, executive director of the \u003ca href=\"https://goldengatebirdalliance.org/\">Golden Gate Bird Alliance\u003c/a>, which runs the count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why so many more crows, you ask? Well, many bird experts think that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11800958/crows-are-crowding-your-bay-area-skies-why-2\">their range has shifted\u003c/a>. Crows used to be found in more rural areas, where they could have a damaging effect on crops. Even though it’s illegal to kill crows — the Migratory Bird Treaty Act protects them — farmers can get a special permit to hunt them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Crows are not only very smart, they have amazing memory,” Phillips said. “So crows learn who is trouble … and they can share that information with their peers and their offspring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crows have learned to stay away from rural areas where they’re being hunted and have instead discovered that cities are \u003cem>great\u003c/em> places to find food. Because crows will eat almost anything — from bugs to roadkill, baby birds and cherries — the backyards and streets of the Bay Area offer abundant food for them. They also don’t have many predators, which is why their numbers have grown so steadily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They are susceptible to some diseases, though.[aside postID=news_12072333 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/Milan-Cortina-Olympics-cropped-2000x1125.jpg']“All the crows and their relatives are really susceptible to West Nile,” Phillips said. “The crow populations have some years where they crash and other years when they keep booming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, while we \u003cem>are\u003c/em> seeing more crows in the Bay Area, overall, the crow population is not dramatically increasing in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, onto the dramatic roosting behavior people have noticed in December, January and February.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a seasonal phenomenon that crows gather in large roosts during the winter,” Phillips said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists believe it happens for two reasons. First, there is protection in numbers. Any bigger bird that wants to attack a crow will be overwhelmed by its brethren. Second, crows gather and share information about where to find food, which can be harder to forage in the wintertime. And, after they gather and share information, they sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of us think of birds and nests, assuming the nest is a bird’s home. But Phillips said that’s a common misperception.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11752335\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/06/47607919412_9471ea2cf2_o-e1559676823145.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11752335\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/06/47607919412_9471ea2cf2_o-e1559676823145.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1246\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A power trio of crows hanging out in Berkeley. \u003ccite>(Dan Brekke/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The nest is only used during the breeding season for the vast majority of birds,” he said. “They don’t use it when they’re not raising their young. It’s the nursery, not the home. And so most birds sleep in trees, on cliffs, on buildings.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those big gatherings of crows people have seen near Lake Merritt in Oakland or by the East Cut in San Francisco, or even out by San Francisco International Airport, are where the crows roost and sleep for the night in winter. They’re usually looking for a place with good perches, that has vantage points to spot predators and that’s protected from wind and rain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You could almost set your watch by it,” Phillips said. “They’re really consistent when they come.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Always at sunset, no matter when sunset is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious listener Kevin Branch has another question we hear a lot about crows: “There are so many crows around nowadays. Are they pushing out the old normal birds that I grew up with — the bluejays, the mockingbirds, the redwing blackbird?”[aside postID=news_12071437 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250919-UKRAINIANFARM_01564_TV-KQED.jpg']Crows are opportunistic eaters and there’s no doubt that they will raid nests of other birds and eat their young. But they don’t target other birds intentionally. Phillips said so far, there’s no evidence that the increased number of crows is responsible for declines in other species. Crows also aren’t the only critters that raid nests — squirrels, gulls and cats do a lot of damage too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s part of the cycle,” Phillips said. He often reminds folks worried about songbirds that certain species adapt to being prey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[For example], robins can lay six to eight eggs and they can have two or three clutches a year. So if every robin grew up to be an adult, we would be up to our eyeballs in robins.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crows also behave differently in the spring and summer when it’s time to breed. Rather than large roosts, they’ll split into smaller groups, dividing up territory so that each bird can feed its young. Come springtime, you’ll be far less likely to see a horde of crows darkening the sky at sunset.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Have more questions about why the crow population has increased and what scientists say we should do about it? Check out this \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11800958/crows-are-crowding-your-bay-area-skies-why-2\">excellent feature from KQED’s Dan Brekke\u003c/a>.\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;\">Bay Curious in your feed on a Monday? It’s true. We’re dropping two episodes each week for a while — and experimenting with some new things along the way. Let us know what you think! Our email is \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"mailto:baycurious@kqed.org\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">baycurious@kqed.org\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Now on to the episode…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sounds of crows\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Chances are good, that is a familiar sound.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Crow sounds\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those would be “Corvus brachyrhynchos” aka crows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our often \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">unwanted\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> urban neighbors. Crows are thought to be loud, pesky, aggressive — even sinister. No matter what you think of them, they’re hard not to notice. They really demand our attention. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Olivia Allen-Price. This is Bay Curious and recently several listeners have written to us observing there’s a “crow-maggedon” happening in downtown Oakland and San Francisco. Listeners are seeing huge flocks of crows flying across the sky around sunset, congregating in the same locations night after night after night. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Glenn Phillips: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is a seasonal phenomenon that crows gather in large roosts during the winter. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Glenn Phillips is the executive director of the Golden Gate Bird Alliance. They count the crows every winter. The most recent count happened in December 2025 and in Oakland and San Francisco, the crow population basically doubled from the year before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Glenn Phillips: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One reason for roosting in large numbers is that there’s safety in numbers. Any predator that would be wanting to take out a crow is gonna have to deal with not just one crow but thousands.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But also, crows are social animals. They share information about where to find food when they gather to sleep at night. And they certainly have some favorite places to sleep.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They’re looking for good places to perch, with views of predators, shelter from wind and rain…\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A place they can let their metaphorical hair down – or, in a crow’s world, let their claws tighten.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Glenn Phillips: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you relax your hand, it’s loose. When a bird relaxes its claw, it is firm and tight. So that they actually have to actively open their feet in order to let go of something. So when they’re sleeping, they aren’t gonna fall off because that grip is tight.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pretty wild! \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So that answers some of your questions about crows. But for the rest of today’s episode we’ll focus on this one sent in from San Mateo listener Kevin Branch in 2019. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kevin Branch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There are so many crows around nowadays. Are they pushing out the old normal birds that I grew up with — the bluejays, the mockingbirds, the redwing blackbird — the birds I used to grow up listening to in the morning. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Kevin also wanted to know if there\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">is a plan to,\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> ahem,\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> reduce their populations. We asked KQED’s Dan Brekke, who has a fascination with just about everything including the natural world, to take a stab at answering them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So Dan, what have you got for us? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Let’s just say Kevin isn’t imagining things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sounds of birds\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I visited him at work — a theatrical rigging company down in Redwood City —\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and he says it’s the same thing every day — crows. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kevin Branch: I see ‘em in the morning, I see ‘em in the afternoon, I see ‘em up in trees, I see ‘em on top of buildings. They’re everywhere. I kind of feel like the crow has taken over big time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And after hearing all those crows, Kevin has a pretty good crow caw himself.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kevin Branch:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> CAW CAW!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kevin’s right — we’re seeing more crows these days. How many more? The numbers are surprising. I spoke with Bob Lewis, who helps run the Golden Gate Audubon Society’s Annual Christmas Bird Count. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bob Lewis: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So, I just took a look at the count today, and starting with 2000, year 2000, there were 167 crows in our circle.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That ‘circle’ covers Oakland and a large part of the East Bay shoreline and hills. Around Christmastime, 300 volunteers canvas the area and tally the birds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bob Lewis: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It’s the biggest count in the U.S. Actually, it’s the biggest count in the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So, we started in 2000 with 167 crows. And since then?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bob Lewis: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 2002, there were 250, it went up significantly. In 2005 there were 400. At 2010, there was over a thousand. 2015 almost fifteen hundred. And in 2018, there were almost twenty-five hundred crows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From 167 crows to twenty-five hundred in less than 20 years. That’s fifteen times as many!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Not everywhere in the Bay Area has seen that kind of spike. For instance, South Bay crow populations have fallen in the Christmas Bird Count over the last decade, apparently because of a spike in West Nile virus that killed many of the birds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But John Marzluff, a University of Washington wildlife biologist, says the pattern of increasing crow populations is a familiar one.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> That’s a common trend for a lot of corvids across the western U.S., for sure.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That word he said is “corvids.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s a family of birds that includes crows and ravens — another species whose Bay Area population has soared in recent decades. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> OK, so we clearly have more crows, at least in most parts of the Bay Area. Kevin also wanted to know why?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The people who watch the birds point to an equation with two major parts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The first part has to do with where crows are not very welcome. Here’s Bob Lewis again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bob Lewis:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> One argument, which may be true, is that crows are smart birds, and crows have historically inhabited the countryside. Farmers put up scarecrows and crows eat corn. But in the country, crows get shot, too, and crows have perhaps discovered in the cities and towns that it’s a much safer place to be.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sounds of a hunting video sneak up\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s sound from one of the many, many crow hunt videos you can find online. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You can’t really blame crows for feeling like they’re not wanted out there in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Shotgun sound in the clear\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One hundred years ago this year a company in the ammunition industry launched a “national crow shoot,” ostensibly to get rid of a threat to crops and other birds. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And this wasn’t just a “country activity.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park employed a hunter — usually a city cop — to shoot crows and other unwanted animals, like jays and coyotes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Crow shoot with hunter voices: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“Take him,” (laughter) “I think you hit him that one.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And here in California, crows are fair game in most rural areas from December 1st to the beginning of April. In 2015, California hunters reported killing about 35,000 crows. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Hunting video: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nice! There you go!”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But unfriendly humans are just one factor that has led to more crows becoming city dwellers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> I think it’s kind of simple myself. Basically, we’ve provided more food for them. Now, the reasons for that may be more complex, because it includes things like garbage, like fast-food restaurant waste, like road kill, so there are a lot of ways we provide them food. But that’s the bottom line. That’s why they’re more abundant.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But haven’t we city dwellers have always been pretty messy. Look at the giant open garbage dumps that used to be on the edge of every big city. If garbage is attracting crows — where were they before?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> You don’t have to have a dump. I mean, I think actually in terms of territoriality and increasing the breeding population, it’s better to have food more uniformly distributed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our urbanized area is much, much larger than it used to be. And we’re providing rich, dependable sources of food — from lawns to leftovers. More food allows crow populations to become more dense.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> They only defend enough space that’s necessary to get enough food to raise their young and survive. So as more food is available, they can live in tighter and tighter quarters and you can fit more of them into the place.\u003c/span>\u003cb>\u003ci>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003ci>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When we return, we get to the bloody truth. Are these crows killing other birds? 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>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So now we know that we do have more crows, and we have some ideas about why. The next question is: Are they killing other species of birds? Like those songbirds Kevin remembers?\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Songbird sounds\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> One of the “crow people” I talked to is named Kaeli Swift, a wildlife scientist who has done lots of research on crows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She said there are limited instances where crows — abetted by humans, typically — can pose an unusual threat to endangered species like snowy plovers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kaeli Swift:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> But your standard suburban backyard like L.A. or Seattle or New York or anywhere else in the country — not so much. Most people that contact me feeling like crows wiped away all of the birds in their neighborhood — and just have this perception that if you see a flock of crows it means none of your songbirds aren’t going to reproduce, that everything is doomed — the science just does not back that up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So research does not show that crows are remorseless killers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And if there are in fact fewer songbirds than when Kevin grew up, it could be for many reasons — loss of habitat, those pesky squirrels or even our domestic cats. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Swift points to a long list of the birds’ winning qualities.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kaeli Swift:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> There’s a lot of qualities that I don’t think you can help but find really attractive — like their ability to learn our faces and be pretty excited to see us when you’ve built up a positive relationship with them by feeding them, for example. They play, so you can watch them play games, particularly the young birds. And they’re just kind of charismatic and goofy in the way that a dog with a really strong personality is. For me, crows have the same sort of quality where if you watch them you just see them do all these things that are so interesting that you just kind of can’t help falling in love with them if you just open yourself up to that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> They sound like humans.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Kaeli Swift says many of our problems with crows may stem from how much we share in common with them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kaeli Swift: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They’re clever, so they’re able to outsmart some of the ways we try to keep them out of our garbage or out of our property. They are social, so they are really noisy. They are protective parents, so they can be aggressive around their babies when they feel like they’re being a threat.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> I keep coming back to this thing John Marzluff said, that it’s important to remember crows are “sentient beings,” like us, and that we ought to learn to use our big human brains to discover and address the problems we have with a growing crow population. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> I do end every one of my talks about crows with a slide that’s like, ‘OK, these things can get under our skin. Why? And what should we do?’ And my take-home is that we should celebrate them for being successful, and if we need to control them in places, we need to think hard about it. Like they think about how to live with us, we need to think about how to live with them and come up with strategies that will have meaningful effects on their populations — not just kill a bunch of them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Things like better managing our waste and being faster about removing roadkill.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> But mostly, it sounds like we need to just learn to co-exist with crows. And see the good in them?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Exactly. While I was doing research for this story I came across a poetry collection about crows.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Sounds good. We will listen to one of those poems on the way out. But first, thank you — reporter Dan Brekke — for your reporting this week.\u003c/span>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You’re welcome\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And also a big thanks to our question asker, Kevin Branch. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Kevin Branch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at KQED. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This episode was produced by Amanda Font, Christopher Beale, Katie McMurran, Katrina Schwartz and me, Olivia Allen-Price. Special thanks this week to Pauline Bartolone. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And now the poem we promised you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sasha Khokha reads “Early Morning Crow” by Jim Natal: \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Crows have no shame. They caw at 6 a.m., \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">expect a response from the windows reflecting\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">overcast skies, wait for an echo\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">to return across the canyon, for the bottle \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">to wash up on shore, the telephone\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">to ring, the empty half of the bed to fill.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You cannot throw\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a boot at them like sex-struck cartoon cats\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">yowling backlit by the moon, cannot\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">shoo them like pie-faced pasture cows ruminating\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">with the intensity of low-watt bulbs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The crows wake you\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">too early. And there you are, an overdue \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">bill, over-ripe melon, alone with your thoughts sluicing\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">back through the gates you had to lower by hand\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the night before, cranking rusty cogs and wheels\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">so you could get some sleep.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The bed floods\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and you rise, afloat with black wings spread\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">like oil upon the surface, a near-fatality\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the cold almost got, wet through and hearing \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a solitary crow that croaks: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is anybody there?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is anybody there?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">then flies away before you can form \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a suitable answer. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Have a wonderful week.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Have you seen the huge gatherings of crows near Oakland’s Lake Merritt or in downtown San Francisco? There’s an explanation for their behavior.",
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"title": "Is It Crow-maggedon? Why Crows Are Flocking to Bay Area Cities Each Winter | 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>Around sunset on winter evenings, hordes of crows choke the night sky over the Bay Area, often flocking to the same favorite spots night after night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious listener Matteo Clark-Hurley asked: “Is there a crow-maggedon happening in downtown areas of Oakland and San Francisco? Hundreds come out at dusk. Sections of streets with trees are covered in bird poop. Are there more crows now?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Clark-Hurley’s not the only one — many Bay Curious fans have written to ask why there are so many crows, where they’re going and why they’ve chosen to congregate in certain locations in Oakland and San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The short answer is yes, there are more crows now. The crow population in the Bay Area has been on a steady increase since about 1975, but really exploded after 2000 or so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every December, \u003ca href=\"https://goldengatebirdalliance.org/birding-resources/birding-information/christmas-bird-counts/\">volunteers \u003c/a>head out on one particular day and count as many birds as they can to get an approximation of the winter population. In 2025, populations in San Francisco and Oakland both doubled. Volunteers counted \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/crow-populations-san-francisco-21316117.php\">more than 3,000 crows in San Francisco alone\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12073969\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2090px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12073969\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047.jpg\" alt=\"Three black birds perch on a concrete wall looking at the ocean.\" width=\"2090\" height=\"1434\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047.jpg 2090w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047-2000x1372.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047-160x110.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047-1536x1054.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/02/iStock-1223536047-2048x1405.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2090px) 100vw, 2090px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Three crows at perch on a wall at Ocean Beach. Crows used to live more rurally, but have increasingly been flocking to urban areas where food is plentiful. \u003ccite>(Auseklis/iStock)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“There’s been basically logarithmic growth, which is sort of what you would expect in an unchecked system,” said Glenn Phillips, executive director of the \u003ca href=\"https://goldengatebirdalliance.org/\">Golden Gate Bird Alliance\u003c/a>, which runs the count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why so many more crows, you ask? Well, many bird experts think that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11800958/crows-are-crowding-your-bay-area-skies-why-2\">their range has shifted\u003c/a>. Crows used to be found in more rural areas, where they could have a damaging effect on crops. Even though it’s illegal to kill crows — the Migratory Bird Treaty Act protects them — farmers can get a special permit to hunt them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Crows are not only very smart, they have amazing memory,” Phillips said. “So crows learn who is trouble … and they can share that information with their peers and their offspring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crows have learned to stay away from rural areas where they’re being hunted and have instead discovered that cities are \u003cem>great\u003c/em> places to find food. Because crows will eat almost anything — from bugs to roadkill, baby birds and cherries — the backyards and streets of the Bay Area offer abundant food for them. They also don’t have many predators, which is why their numbers have grown so steadily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They are susceptible to some diseases, though.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“All the crows and their relatives are really susceptible to West Nile,” Phillips said. “The crow populations have some years where they crash and other years when they keep booming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, while we \u003cem>are\u003c/em> seeing more crows in the Bay Area, overall, the crow population is not dramatically increasing in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, onto the dramatic roosting behavior people have noticed in December, January and February.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a seasonal phenomenon that crows gather in large roosts during the winter,” Phillips said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists believe it happens for two reasons. First, there is protection in numbers. Any bigger bird that wants to attack a crow will be overwhelmed by its brethren. Second, crows gather and share information about where to find food, which can be harder to forage in the wintertime. And, after they gather and share information, they sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of us think of birds and nests, assuming the nest is a bird’s home. But Phillips said that’s a common misperception.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11752335\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/06/47607919412_9471ea2cf2_o-e1559676823145.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11752335\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/06/47607919412_9471ea2cf2_o-e1559676823145.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1246\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A power trio of crows hanging out in Berkeley. \u003ccite>(Dan Brekke/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The nest is only used during the breeding season for the vast majority of birds,” he said. “They don’t use it when they’re not raising their young. It’s the nursery, not the home. And so most birds sleep in trees, on cliffs, on buildings.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those big gatherings of crows people have seen near Lake Merritt in Oakland or by the East Cut in San Francisco, or even out by San Francisco International Airport, are where the crows roost and sleep for the night in winter. They’re usually looking for a place with good perches, that has vantage points to spot predators and that’s protected from wind and rain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You could almost set your watch by it,” Phillips said. “They’re really consistent when they come.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Always at sunset, no matter when sunset is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious listener Kevin Branch has another question we hear a lot about crows: “There are so many crows around nowadays. Are they pushing out the old normal birds that I grew up with — the bluejays, the mockingbirds, the redwing blackbird?”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Crows are opportunistic eaters and there’s no doubt that they will raid nests of other birds and eat their young. But they don’t target other birds intentionally. Phillips said so far, there’s no evidence that the increased number of crows is responsible for declines in other species. Crows also aren’t the only critters that raid nests — squirrels, gulls and cats do a lot of damage too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s part of the cycle,” Phillips said. He often reminds folks worried about songbirds that certain species adapt to being prey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[For example], robins can lay six to eight eggs and they can have two or three clutches a year. So if every robin grew up to be an adult, we would be up to our eyeballs in robins.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crows also behave differently in the spring and summer when it’s time to breed. Rather than large roosts, they’ll split into smaller groups, dividing up territory so that each bird can feed its young. Come springtime, you’ll be far less likely to see a horde of crows darkening the sky at sunset.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Have more questions about why the crow population has increased and what scientists say we should do about it? Check out this \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11800958/crows-are-crowding-your-bay-area-skies-why-2\">excellent feature from KQED’s Dan Brekke\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bay Curious in your feed on a Monday? It’s true. We’re dropping two episodes each week for a while — and experimenting with some new things along the way. Let us know what you think! Our email is \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"mailto:baycurious@kqed.org\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">baycurious@kqed.org\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Now on to the episode…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sounds of crows\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Chances are good, that is a familiar sound.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Crow sounds\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those would be “Corvus brachyrhynchos” aka crows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our often \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">unwanted\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> urban neighbors. Crows are thought to be loud, pesky, aggressive — even sinister. No matter what you think of them, they’re hard not to notice. They really demand our attention. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Olivia Allen-Price. This is Bay Curious and recently several listeners have written to us observing there’s a “crow-maggedon” happening in downtown Oakland and San Francisco. Listeners are seeing huge flocks of crows flying across the sky around sunset, congregating in the same locations night after night after night. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Glenn Phillips: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is a seasonal phenomenon that crows gather in large roosts during the winter. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Glenn Phillips is the executive director of the Golden Gate Bird Alliance. They count the crows every winter. The most recent count happened in December 2025 and in Oakland and San Francisco, the crow population basically doubled from the year before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Glenn Phillips: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One reason for roosting in large numbers is that there’s safety in numbers. Any predator that would be wanting to take out a crow is gonna have to deal with not just one crow but thousands.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But also, crows are social animals. They share information about where to find food when they gather to sleep at night. And they certainly have some favorite places to sleep.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They’re looking for good places to perch, with views of predators, shelter from wind and rain…\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A place they can let their metaphorical hair down – or, in a crow’s world, let their claws tighten.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Glenn Phillips: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you relax your hand, it’s loose. When a bird relaxes its claw, it is firm and tight. So that they actually have to actively open their feet in order to let go of something. So when they’re sleeping, they aren’t gonna fall off because that grip is tight.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pretty wild! \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So that answers some of your questions about crows. But for the rest of today’s episode we’ll focus on this one sent in from San Mateo listener Kevin Branch in 2019. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kevin Branch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There are so many crows around nowadays. Are they pushing out the old normal birds that I grew up with — the bluejays, the mockingbirds, the redwing blackbird — the birds I used to grow up listening to in the morning. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Kevin also wanted to know if there\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">is a plan to,\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> ahem,\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> reduce their populations. We asked KQED’s Dan Brekke, who has a fascination with just about everything including the natural world, to take a stab at answering them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So Dan, what have you got for us? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Let’s just say Kevin isn’t imagining things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sounds of birds\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I visited him at work — a theatrical rigging company down in Redwood City —\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and he says it’s the same thing every day — crows. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kevin Branch: I see ‘em in the morning, I see ‘em in the afternoon, I see ‘em up in trees, I see ‘em on top of buildings. They’re everywhere. I kind of feel like the crow has taken over big time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And after hearing all those crows, Kevin has a pretty good crow caw himself.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kevin Branch:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> CAW CAW!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kevin’s right — we’re seeing more crows these days. How many more? The numbers are surprising. I spoke with Bob Lewis, who helps run the Golden Gate Audubon Society’s Annual Christmas Bird Count. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bob Lewis: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So, I just took a look at the count today, and starting with 2000, year 2000, there were 167 crows in our circle.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That ‘circle’ covers Oakland and a large part of the East Bay shoreline and hills. Around Christmastime, 300 volunteers canvas the area and tally the birds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bob Lewis: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It’s the biggest count in the U.S. Actually, it’s the biggest count in the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So, we started in 2000 with 167 crows. And since then?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bob Lewis: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 2002, there were 250, it went up significantly. In 2005 there were 400. At 2010, there was over a thousand. 2015 almost fifteen hundred. And in 2018, there were almost twenty-five hundred crows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From 167 crows to twenty-five hundred in less than 20 years. That’s fifteen times as many!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Not everywhere in the Bay Area has seen that kind of spike. For instance, South Bay crow populations have fallen in the Christmas Bird Count over the last decade, apparently because of a spike in West Nile virus that killed many of the birds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But John Marzluff, a University of Washington wildlife biologist, says the pattern of increasing crow populations is a familiar one.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> That’s a common trend for a lot of corvids across the western U.S., for sure.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That word he said is “corvids.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s a family of birds that includes crows and ravens — another species whose Bay Area population has soared in recent decades. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> OK, so we clearly have more crows, at least in most parts of the Bay Area. Kevin also wanted to know why?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The people who watch the birds point to an equation with two major parts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The first part has to do with where crows are not very welcome. Here’s Bob Lewis again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bob Lewis:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> One argument, which may be true, is that crows are smart birds, and crows have historically inhabited the countryside. Farmers put up scarecrows and crows eat corn. But in the country, crows get shot, too, and crows have perhaps discovered in the cities and towns that it’s a much safer place to be.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sounds of a hunting video sneak up\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s sound from one of the many, many crow hunt videos you can find online. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You can’t really blame crows for feeling like they’re not wanted out there in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Shotgun sound in the clear\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One hundred years ago this year a company in the ammunition industry launched a “national crow shoot,” ostensibly to get rid of a threat to crops and other birds. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And this wasn’t just a “country activity.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park employed a hunter — usually a city cop — to shoot crows and other unwanted animals, like jays and coyotes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Crow shoot with hunter voices: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“Take him,” (laughter) “I think you hit him that one.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And here in California, crows are fair game in most rural areas from December 1st to the beginning of April. In 2015, California hunters reported killing about 35,000 crows. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Hunting video: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nice! There you go!”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But unfriendly humans are just one factor that has led to more crows becoming city dwellers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> I think it’s kind of simple myself. Basically, we’ve provided more food for them. Now, the reasons for that may be more complex, because it includes things like garbage, like fast-food restaurant waste, like road kill, so there are a lot of ways we provide them food. But that’s the bottom line. That’s why they’re more abundant.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But haven’t we city dwellers have always been pretty messy. Look at the giant open garbage dumps that used to be on the edge of every big city. If garbage is attracting crows — where were they before?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> You don’t have to have a dump. I mean, I think actually in terms of territoriality and increasing the breeding population, it’s better to have food more uniformly distributed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our urbanized area is much, much larger than it used to be. And we’re providing rich, dependable sources of food — from lawns to leftovers. More food allows crow populations to become more dense.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> They only defend enough space that’s necessary to get enough food to raise their young and survive. So as more food is available, they can live in tighter and tighter quarters and you can fit more of them into the place.\u003c/span>\u003cb>\u003ci>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003ci>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When we return, we get to the bloody truth. Are these crows killing other birds? 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>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So now we know that we do have more crows, and we have some ideas about why. The next question is: Are they killing other species of birds? Like those songbirds Kevin remembers?\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Songbird sounds\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> One of the “crow people” I talked to is named Kaeli Swift, a wildlife scientist who has done lots of research on crows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She said there are limited instances where crows — abetted by humans, typically — can pose an unusual threat to endangered species like snowy plovers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kaeli Swift:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> But your standard suburban backyard like L.A. or Seattle or New York or anywhere else in the country — not so much. Most people that contact me feeling like crows wiped away all of the birds in their neighborhood — and just have this perception that if you see a flock of crows it means none of your songbirds aren’t going to reproduce, that everything is doomed — the science just does not back that up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So research does not show that crows are remorseless killers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And if there are in fact fewer songbirds than when Kevin grew up, it could be for many reasons — loss of habitat, those pesky squirrels or even our domestic cats. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Swift points to a long list of the birds’ winning qualities.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kaeli Swift:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> There’s a lot of qualities that I don’t think you can help but find really attractive — like their ability to learn our faces and be pretty excited to see us when you’ve built up a positive relationship with them by feeding them, for example. They play, so you can watch them play games, particularly the young birds. And they’re just kind of charismatic and goofy in the way that a dog with a really strong personality is. For me, crows have the same sort of quality where if you watch them you just see them do all these things that are so interesting that you just kind of can’t help falling in love with them if you just open yourself up to that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> They sound like humans.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Kaeli Swift says many of our problems with crows may stem from how much we share in common with them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kaeli Swift: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They’re clever, so they’re able to outsmart some of the ways we try to keep them out of our garbage or out of our property. They are social, so they are really noisy. They are protective parents, so they can be aggressive around their babies when they feel like they’re being a threat.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> I keep coming back to this thing John Marzluff said, that it’s important to remember crows are “sentient beings,” like us, and that we ought to learn to use our big human brains to discover and address the problems we have with a growing crow population. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Marzluff:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> I do end every one of my talks about crows with a slide that’s like, ‘OK, these things can get under our skin. Why? And what should we do?’ And my take-home is that we should celebrate them for being successful, and if we need to control them in places, we need to think hard about it. Like they think about how to live with us, we need to think about how to live with them and come up with strategies that will have meaningful effects on their populations — not just kill a bunch of them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Things like better managing our waste and being faster about removing roadkill.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> But mostly, it sounds like we need to just learn to co-exist with crows. And see the good in them?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dan Brekke:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Exactly. While I was doing research for this story I came across a poetry collection about crows.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Sounds good. We will listen to one of those poems on the way out. But first, thank you — reporter Dan Brekke — for your reporting this week.\u003c/span>\u003cb>Dan Brekke: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You’re welcome\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And also a big thanks to our question asker, Kevin Branch. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Kevin Branch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at KQED. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This episode was produced by Amanda Font, Christopher Beale, Katie McMurran, Katrina Schwartz and me, Olivia Allen-Price. Special thanks this week to Pauline Bartolone. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And now the poem we promised you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sasha Khokha reads “Early Morning Crow” by Jim Natal: \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Crows have no shame. They caw at 6 a.m., \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">expect a response from the windows reflecting\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">overcast skies, wait for an echo\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">to return across the canyon, for the bottle \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">to wash up on shore, the telephone\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">to ring, the empty half of the bed to fill.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You cannot throw\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a boot at them like sex-struck cartoon cats\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">yowling backlit by the moon, cannot\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">shoo them like pie-faced pasture cows ruminating\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">with the intensity of low-watt bulbs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The crows wake you\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">too early. And there you are, an overdue \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">bill, over-ripe melon, alone with your thoughts sluicing\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">back through the gates you had to lower by hand\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the night before, cranking rusty cogs and wheels\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">so you could get some sleep.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The bed floods\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and you rise, afloat with black wings spread\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">like oil upon the surface, a near-fatality\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the cold almost got, wet through and hearing \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a solitary crow that croaks: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is anybody there?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is anybody there?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">then flies away before you can form \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a suitable answer. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Have a wonderful week.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "how-a-remarkable-19th-century-revolutionary-priest-from-ukraine-ended-up-in-hayward",
"title": "How a Remarkable 19th-Century Revolutionary Priest From Ukraine Ended Up in Hayward",
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"headTitle": "How a Remarkable 19th-Century Revolutionary Priest From Ukraine Ended Up in Hayward | 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>It’s hard not to feel glum reading the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12070573/a-generation-orphaned-by-war-ukrainian-children-grow-up-amid-loss-and-recovery\">news headlines from Ukraine\u003c/a> these days, even if you’re not Ukrainian or Ukrainian American.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But at the same time, the conflict can feel far away. And yet, in the late 19th century, the Bay Area was home to a Ukrainian man who was exactly the type of revolutionary dissident Russia wanted to silence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a historical marker commemorating him in, of all places, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ebparks.org/sites/default/files/garin_honcharenkos_santuary.pdf\">Garin Regional Park\u003c/a>. Tony Divito of San Mateo passed a road sign nearby on his commute, calling attention to that marker and wondered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just wanted to know the backstory,” he told Bay Curious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The answer leads to a man of many disparate layers; a devout Orthodox priest, a relentless dissident and outlaw, a groundbreaking publisher, and subsistence farmer. The life of Agapius Honcharenko reads like an epic thriller, albeit one that ends improbably on a quiet hilltop farm tucked high in the Hayward Hills. But let’s start at the very beginning.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A keen intellect and empathetic soul\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The man who came to be known in the Bay Area as Agapius Honcharenko was born Andrii Humnytsky in 1832. The son of an Orthodox priest, he displayed a keen intellect at a young age and caught the attention of the highest-ranking church official in Ukraine at the time, becoming his personal assistant. As a consequence, young Humnytsky bore witness to the hardships endured by peasants and serfs, agricultural laborers bound to their lords’ estates. The very word “slave” comes from the word “Slav.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He was appalled by the poverty in these villages,” said Jars Balan, a researcher at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta\u003cstrong>. \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12057937\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12057937\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Father Oleg Kepeshchuk of the Greek Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception video calls a friend to show them the view of the burial site where Ukrainian patriot and exiled orthodox priest Agapius Honcharenko and his wife Albina are buried at Garin Regional Park in Hayward on Sept. 27, 2025. \u003ccite>(Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When Humnytsky delivered his ordination sermon, Balan said, he called on the church to melt down all the gold and precious jewels, “and use the money to feed, to help the poor.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This kind of talk did not go over well in 19th-century Ukraine. Still, Humnytsky would not cool his revolutionary jets. He got acquainted with — and radicalized by — fellow countrymen who, decades before, were involved in a failed attempt to overthrow the czar, the emperor of Russia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Humnytsky’s boss saw trouble brewing, so he sent him out of the country. Because Ukraine was part of Russia at the time, he sent Humnytsky to serve in the chapel of the Imperial Russian Consulate in Greece.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there, too, Humnytsky fell in with like-minded revolutionaries. He started writing for a dissident journal called \u003cem>Kolokol\u003c/em>, in English, \u003cem>The Bell\u003c/em>.[aside postID=news_12070415 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-15_qed.jpg']After publishing searing articles calling for the emancipation of serfs and criticizing the Orthodox Church’s support for tsarist autocracy, Humnytsky was arrested.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Russian authorities imprisoned him in the hold of a warship, which set sail for what is now Istanbul. According to his later recollections, Humnytsky arranged a daring escape with the help of his family back in Moscow. He would recall years later, “I escaped for an eternal glory, to be a Kozak in the free world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This episode marked the start of a life on the run from Russian justice. Repeatedly over the years that followed, Humnytsky would pop up in a new location, work all sorts of odd hustles, make friends with anarchists, dissidents, and revolutionaries, and then the Russians would catch up with him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At one point, he returned to Greece for additional professional spiritual training on the remote peninsula of Mount Athos, home to the world’s largest monastic community. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site today. Back then, it was an excellent place to hide from the Russians. He had a facility with languages, so in London, he was a Russian language tutor to Greeks, and a specialist in old coins at the British Museum. In Cairo, he organized sightseeing tours — and survived a knifing paid for by the local Russian consulate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By his early thirties, Humnytsky decided to try his luck on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A new life in America\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1865, he landed in Boston, headed to New York, then New Orleans. Around this time, Andrii Humnytsky changed his name to Agapius, or Ahapi, Honcharenko, to seem more Greek and avoid detection from the Russians. But even in the United States, wherever he went, local Russians eventually figured out Father Agapius was not actually a Greek with remarkably good command of Russian. Balan, who wrote a \u003ca href=\"https://ia800309.us.archive.org/25/items/journalofukraini3334cana/journalofukraini3334cana.pdf\">well-regarded study\u003c/a> of Honcharenko’s life, calls him a “renegade monastic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While in New York, Honcharenko married the daughter of one of the Italian radicals he met, a young school teacher named Albina Citi. The match was not to the liking of her anti-religious family, Balan said, “but they were in love, and they wanted to go to the West Coast.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071447\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1289px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a.jpeg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071447\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1289\" height=\"2090\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a.jpeg 1289w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a-160x259.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a-947x1536.jpeg 947w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a-1263x2048.jpeg 1263w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1289px) 100vw, 1289px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of the photos used to illustrate the book Ahapius Honcharenko “Alaska Man,” by Wasyl Luciw, Ph.D. And Theodore Luciw, M. A., published in Toronto by Slavia Library in 1963. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Jars Balan)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And so it was that Honcharenko arrived in San Francisco in the 1860s, bringing with him typesetting skills he had honed in London. He purchased Cyrillic fonts and launched the \u003ca href=\"https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/13652/file.pdf\">\u003cem>Alaska Herald\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, which included a Ukrainian-language supplement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper became a vital resource for Ukrainian and Russian émigrés alike, providing news to people living far from home. But Honcharenko couldn’t resist publishing some biting commentary as well. Here’s an excerpt of an issue celebrating the publication’s second year:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>From the day of its birth it assumed a certain attitude, and it has unflinchingly maintained its position and consistency during these two years. It has struggled hard and bitterly because it was on the side of right and justice, and they who champion the oppressed seldom find their work either cheerful or remunerative.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem for Honcharenko was that he was a critic of imperial malfeasance wherever he saw it. Eventually, he bit the hand that fed him, which in this case was none other than the U.S. government, a primary backer of the \u003cem>Alaska Herald\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Because the administration that the Americans set up had problems with corruption,” Balan explained. “[Honcharenko] was critical of the way the American administration treated Native people. He had some environmental concerns. When he became critical of what was going on in Alaska, they pulled the funding.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church relocated its U.S. base of operations from Sitka in Alaska to San Francisco in California. It came to their attention that a renegade priest was holding services in the city, and that’s when Honcharenko and his wife decided to decamp for Alameda County.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A quieter life\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Honcharenko sold his printing press, bought a 40-acre farm in the hills above \u003ca href=\"https://www.haywardareahistory.org/agapius-honcharenko\">Hayward\u003c/a>, named the place “Ukraina,” and settled into a relatively calm life for the next 40-odd years. He led weekly Orthodox church services on the farm for local and visiting Slavic immigrants, conducted baptisms and weddings. His homestead became a small but significant hub for Ukrainian-American life on the West Coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The last years of his life were hard. The couple’s daughter died when she was just ten years old. The subsistence farm didn’t produce enough food to live on. However, Agapius and Albina Hocharenko had given so much to so many over the decades that when they were in need, a lot of locals returned the favor.[aside postID=news_12068602 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00030_TV-KQED.jpg']Still, Honcharenko continued to write, publish, and mentor émigrés. His farm briefly hosted a utopian colony, a dream of community that ultimately failed, but further cemented his reputation among the diaspora.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The couple also gardened. They sent numerous samples of plants and vegetables to the editors of the \u003cem>California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine\u003c/em>, who wrote back to praise the “monster squash,” and “some of the finest sugar table corn and nutmeg melons we have ever tasted.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“His life was amazing,” Balan said. “He was eccentric, he was quirky. He had strange ideas about some things; there’s no doubt. But when you look at the trajectory of his life, it’s an amazing story.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Honcharenko died in 1916 at the age of 84, shortly after his wife. Although his passing was noted in the local papers and inspired a couple of \u003ca href=\"https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/17172/file.pdf\">biographies\u003c/a>, it wasn’t until 1997 that the California Historical Resources Commission designated his farm and gravesite as a state historical landmark. A cairn and plaque followed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, there’s a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11906285/ukrainians-in-california-devastated-by-russian-invasion\">sizable\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11942336/despite-a-year-of-suffering-some-silicon-valley-companies-tied-to-ukraine-remain-optimistic\">organized\u003c/a> local Ukrainian-American community in the Bay Area, some of whom gather on a mile-long hike every year to \u003ca href=\"https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/ListedResources/Detail/1025\">\u003cem>Ukraina\u003c/em>\u003c/a> to honor Honcharenko’s memory. They sing in Ukrainian and offer prayers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12057938\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12057938\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Taras Turiv’s (left) daughter, Victoria (right), wears a Ukrainian flag at the burial site where Ukrainian patriot and exiled orthodox priest Agapius Honcharenko and his wife Albina are buried at Garin Regional Park in Hayward on Sept. 27, 2025. \u003ccite>(Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Software engineer Alla Kashaba was among the 20 or so in attendance the last time. She lives in Los Altos now, but comes originally from Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine. “He was [a] very interesting person, and I hope someday, someone will make an interesting movie about him, like, adventure movie,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This whole story was news to Bay Curious question asker Tony Divito.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we’re incredibly fortunate and lucky to have him as part of Bay Area history,” Divito said. “It goes with our history of allowing refuge, of allowing people from desperate situations to come here and thrive here and contribute to our society, our community,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/gglueck\">\u003cem>Gabriela Glueck\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed reporting to this story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>We start today’s episode in Garin Regional Park – high in the hills overlooking Hayward. If you drive over this way, you might pass by an intriguing sign. That’s what happened to Tony Divito of San Mateo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony Divito: \u003c/strong>I saw a sign for a Ukrainian farm in Hayward. I just wanted to know the backstory.\u003cbr>\n\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\nOlivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Deep in the park is California registered historical landmark #1025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VOICE: “Ukraina” is the site of the farm and burial place of the Ukrainian patriot and exiled orthodox priest Agapius Honcharenko (1832-1916) and his wife Albina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Olivia Allen-Price: It’s a serene setting now, but the life of this guy – Agapius Honcharenko – was anything but. He spent much of his life fleeing Russian forces, traveling the globe and stirring up revolutionary inklings in his wake. Not exactly the image you might expect from an orthodox priest. Today on the show, we’ll delve into what made Honcharenko so notable that more than 100 years after his death, he’s still celebrated by local communities. Buckle up, it’s a wild ride! I’m Olivia Allen-Price. You’re listening to Bay Curious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sponsor Message\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>In the 19th century, all sorts of curious characters washed up on California’s shores, looking for fortune, a fresh start, or in the case of Father Agapius Honcharenko … a safe place to hide. KQED’s Rachael Myrow found a group of people who gather every year to honor him. She went to find out why…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Singing in Ukrainian\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>The mood was contemplative, even somber, at the 9th annual Park Ukraina Hike and Panahdya — a memorial service for Honcharenko. Representatives from local Ukrainian churches hiked a mile to offer prayers over the grave of a remarkable man who established a farm here on this hilltop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Man reading a prayer in Ukrainian\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Software engineer, Alla Kashaba was among the 20 or so in attendance. She lives in Los Altos now, but comes originally from Karghiv, in eastern Ukraine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alla Kashaba: \u003c/strong>He was very interesting person, and I hope someday someone will make an interesting movie about him, like, adventure movie. All about how he hide from Russian forces? I don’t know how to translate this. All across the globe. So he was running from them in London, in Egypt, in Jerusalem, and ended up in America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Intriguing, no?? Let’s step back in time to understand what exactly this man was running from. Born Andrii Humnytsky in what is now central Ukraine in 1832, this guy was destined to become an Orthodox priest like his father. He certainly caught the eye of the highest-ranking church leader in Ukraine at the time, a man named Metropolitan Philaret.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>The Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine at that time, Metropolitan Philaret, saw that this guy was smart and capable, and made him his personal assistant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>That’s Jars Balan, a researcher at the Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. He’s written the definitive research paper on our man Humnytsky, and he spoke at the unveiling of that plaque in Hayward. Balan says, from childhood, Humnytsky felt a fierce pride in his Ukrainian ancestry and his Christian spirituality. He took the monastic name Agapius, derived from the Greek word \u003cem>agape\u003c/em>, meaning selfless love, and pretty much from the start, his politics leaned progressive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>Because he got to travel around with the Metropolitan, he visited a lot of communities, and he was appalled by the poverty in these villages. This is still a time of serfdom, and the church even had serfs, and he found that appalling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>The word SLAV is where English speakers get the word slave, because Slavs became synonymous with enslavement in the Middle Ages. A serf, for those of you not up on your Eastern European history, is an agricultural laborer bound to work on their lord’s estate. Humnytsky hated the practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>In fact, when he was [in] his first level of ordination, and he gave his ordination sermon, he called on the church to melt down all the gold and precious jewels, all the golden precious metals, and use the money to feed, to help the poor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Sounds Christian in the OG sense, but this talk did not go over well in mid-19th-century Ukraine. Still, Humnytsky would not cool his revolutionary jets. He got acquainted with – and radicalized by – locals who, decades before, were involved in a failed attempt to overthrow the czar, the emperor of Russia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Humnytsky’s boss, the Metropolitan, saw trouble brewing, so he sent him out of the country. Because Ukraine was part of Russia at the time, he sent Humnytsky to serve in the chapel of the Imperial Russian Consulate in Greece. But there, too, Humnytsky fell in with like-minded revolutionaries. He started writing for a dissident journal called \u003cem>Kolokol\u003c/em>. In English, \u003cem>The Bell\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After publishing searing articles calling for the emancipation of serfs and criticizing the Orthodox Church’s support for Tsarist autocracy, Humnytsky was arrested and imprisoned in the hold of the Russian warship, which set sail for what is now Istanbul.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>He managed to arrange an escape when they were holding him in Istanbul. He had an aunt who was in Moscow. She had some connections, managed to pull a few strings, maybe pay a few bribes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>In his memoirs written decades later, the dissident priest recalled his optimism as a young man:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor reading from Humnytsky’s memoirs: \u003c/strong>“I escaped for an eternal glory, to be a Kozak in the free world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Things didn’t quite pan out that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>In point of fact, this episode was just the start of a life on the run from Russian justice. Repeatedly over the years that followed, he’d pop up in a new location, work all sorts of odd hustles, and then the Russians would catch up with him. For instance, he had a facility with languages, so in London, he was a Russian language tutor to Greeks, and a specialist in old coins at the British Museum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>How he picked up the specialty, I’m not sure, but I said he was a very bright guy and interested in history and archeology and theology and all kinds of things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>It’s around this time that Humnytsky began using “Honcharenko” as his nom de plume. And – I mean, you can’t make this stuff up, this guy was extraordinarily bright – he picked up a craft – typesetting – that would come in handy later in his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan:\u003c/strong> …in a printer shop and learned how to print. He translated a rare sort of, I think it was a 15th century book called Stoflau // calling for reforms in the Orthodox Church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Troublemaker, right? And remember, everywhere Humnytsky goes, he makes friends with anarchists, dissidents and revolutionaries. But he never lost his passion for spirituality. In fact, he returned to Greece for additional professional training.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of monks chanting\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>…on a remote peninsula in the northeast. It’s home to the largest monastic community in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site today, and an excellent place to hide from the Russians.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This meant Humnytsky was now able to lead prayers, conduct marriages and baptisms, and otherwise tend to lay people’s spiritual needs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Humnytsky bounced around for years. Jerusalem, the mountains of Lebanon, Cairo, where he survived a knifing paid for by the local Russian consulate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not long after, he decided to make a break for the New World, quite likely because he wanted to put as much space as he could between himself and the Russians. In 1865, in his early thirties, he landed in Boston, headed to New York, then New Orleans. But even on this side of the Atlantic, local Russians would eventually figure out Father Agapius was not actually a Greek with remarkably good command of Russian.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, Andrii Humnytsky changed his name – not just his nom de plum – to Agapius, or Ahapi, Honcharenko, to avoid detection from the Russians.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, while in New York, he married the daughter of one of the Italian radicals he met in the U.S., a young school teacher named Albina Citi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>Not to the liking, particularly of her family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Her deeply anti-religious family was put off by this…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>… bearded orthodox priest in wearing cassocks and things. But they were in love, and they wanted to go to the West Coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>So, in his mid-30s, Honcharenko landed in San Francisco with his wife, Albina. Remember how he learned about printing in London? He bought a set of Cyrillic fonts and launched the \u003cem>Alaska Herald\u003c/em> — with a Ukrainian-language supplement. That was one of the very first Ukrainian publications in North America, and a must-read for Ukrainian expats from New York to Siberia. A must-read for a lot of Russian expats, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>He was successful in getting the paper going. He got funding from the American government initially.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Here’s an excerpt of an issue celebrating the publication’s second year:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading from newspaper article: \u003c/strong>From the day of its birth it assumed a certain attitude, and it has unflinchingly maintained its position and consistency during these two years. It has struggled hard and bitterly because it was on the side of right and justice, and they who champion the oppressed seldom find their work either cheerful or remunerative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>OK, so Honcharenko could get a little strident and self-aggrandizing…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading from newspaper article: \u003c/strong>Of course, it has encountered severe hostility at the hands of those whom it has exposed; of course, it has made enemies for itself by the score.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>The problem for Honcharenko was that he was a critic of imperial malfeasance wherever he saw it, and eventually, he bit the hand that fed him, none other than the U.S. government, a primary backer of the Alaska Herald.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>Because the administration that the Americans set up had problems with corruption. He was critical of the way the American administration treated Native people. He had some environmental concerns. When he became critical of what was going on in Alaska, they pulled the funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church relocated its U.S. base of operations from Sitka in Alaska to San Francisco in California. And it came to their attention that a renegade priest was holding services in the city. And that’s when the couple decided to decamp for Alameda County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Honcharenko sold his printing press, bought a 40-acre farm in the hills above Hayward, named the place “Ukraina,” and settled into a relatively calmer life for the next 40-odd years. He led weekly Orthodox church services on the farm for local and visiting Slavic immigrants, conducted baptisms, and weddings. The couple also gardened. They sent numerous samples of plants and vegetables to the editors of the \u003cem>California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine\u003c/em>, who wrote back to praise the “monster squash,” and “some of the finest sugar table corn and nutmeg melons we have ever tasted.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>His life was amazing. He was eccentric, he was quirky. He had strange ideas about some things; there’s no doubt. But when you look at the trajectory of his life, it’s an amazing story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>He continued to publish articles and even a memoir in 1894. His homestead became a stopping place for fellow countrymen passing through. For half a minute, a small group of dreamers tried a utopian colony on his land. The venture failed, but it burnished Honcharenko’s reputation and ensured his lasting memory in the Ukrainian diaspora.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>There are stories that say, no, no, he exaggerated or that he made up stories about his life and everything like that. He might have exaggerated certain things, but there are a lot of things that my research has shown actually were based in fact.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>The last years were hard. Their daughter died when she was just ten years old. The subsistence farming wasn’t enough to subsist on. But they’d given so much to so many over the decades, a lot of locals returned the favor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>They were very poor at the end, and really dependent on the charity of ranchers in the surrounding community who took an interest in him and helped the two of them out in their last years. So his life wasn’t any easy life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Honcharenko died at the age of 84 in 1916, a little over a year after his wife. His death was front-page news in several papers, and his life inspired a couple of biographies, but it wasn’t until 1997 that the California Historical Resources Commission designated his ranch and gravesite a state historical landmark, and a couple years later, a cairn and plaque honoring Honcharenko were unveiled there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sounds from the celebration: \u003c/strong>Odyn, dva, tray. Slava Ukraini! Slava Ukraini! Hey, I want to hear it again! Slava Ukraini! Slava Ukraini! OK, that’s better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Back at Garin Regional Park, the group of Ukrainian-Americans we met at the start of this story takes a group photo, with the Ukrainian national salute that translates to “Glory to Ukraine!” This bucolic hilltop with its historic marker and park panels tells the broad arc: émigré priest, dissident publisher, gentleman farmer. Ukrainians here and abroad remember, but what about the rest of us? This whole story is certainly news to our question-asker, Tony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony Divito: \u003c/strong>I think we’re incredibly fortunate and lucky to have him as part of Bay Area history. It goes with our history of allowing refuge, of allowing people from desperate situations to come here and thrive here and contribute to our community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>His story was just, like, epic. Right? Like it’s, you know…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony Divito: \u003c/strong>It deserves, you know, a series. Like a television mini-series or an audiobook of some sort.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Hit me up for the writers’ room, guys!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>That was KQED’s Rachael Myrow. Special thanks to Gabriela Glueck, who literally went the extra mile up that hill to help us report this story, and to Dan Brekke, who read Honcharenko’s archival writings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tony Divito sent in today’s question, and I want you to be like Tony! Head to \u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">BayCurious.org\u003c/a> to submit a question you’ve been wondering about. We are always on the lookout for great questions and yours could be what we tackle on next! Again, head to \u003ca href=\"http://baycuious.org\">BayCurious.org\u003c/a> to ask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen-Price.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey, Dan Brekke 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 time.\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>It’s hard not to feel glum reading the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12070573/a-generation-orphaned-by-war-ukrainian-children-grow-up-amid-loss-and-recovery\">news headlines from Ukraine\u003c/a> these days, even if you’re not Ukrainian or Ukrainian American.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But at the same time, the conflict can feel far away. And yet, in the late 19th century, the Bay Area was home to a Ukrainian man who was exactly the type of revolutionary dissident Russia wanted to silence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a historical marker commemorating him in, of all places, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ebparks.org/sites/default/files/garin_honcharenkos_santuary.pdf\">Garin Regional Park\u003c/a>. Tony Divito of San Mateo passed a road sign nearby on his commute, calling attention to that marker and wondered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just wanted to know the backstory,” he told Bay Curious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The answer leads to a man of many disparate layers; a devout Orthodox priest, a relentless dissident and outlaw, a groundbreaking publisher, and subsistence farmer. The life of Agapius Honcharenko reads like an epic thriller, albeit one that ends improbably on a quiet hilltop farm tucked high in the Hayward Hills. But let’s start at the very beginning.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A keen intellect and empathetic soul\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The man who came to be known in the Bay Area as Agapius Honcharenko was born Andrii Humnytsky in 1832. The son of an Orthodox priest, he displayed a keen intellect at a young age and caught the attention of the highest-ranking church official in Ukraine at the time, becoming his personal assistant. As a consequence, young Humnytsky bore witness to the hardships endured by peasants and serfs, agricultural laborers bound to their lords’ estates. The very word “slave” comes from the word “Slav.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He was appalled by the poverty in these villages,” said Jars Balan, a researcher at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta\u003cstrong>. \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12057937\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12057937\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01005_TV-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Father Oleg Kepeshchuk of the Greek Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception video calls a friend to show them the view of the burial site where Ukrainian patriot and exiled orthodox priest Agapius Honcharenko and his wife Albina are buried at Garin Regional Park in Hayward on Sept. 27, 2025. \u003ccite>(Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When Humnytsky delivered his ordination sermon, Balan said, he called on the church to melt down all the gold and precious jewels, “and use the money to feed, to help the poor.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This kind of talk did not go over well in 19th-century Ukraine. Still, Humnytsky would not cool his revolutionary jets. He got acquainted with — and radicalized by — fellow countrymen who, decades before, were involved in a failed attempt to overthrow the czar, the emperor of Russia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Humnytsky’s boss saw trouble brewing, so he sent him out of the country. Because Ukraine was part of Russia at the time, he sent Humnytsky to serve in the chapel of the Imperial Russian Consulate in Greece.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there, too, Humnytsky fell in with like-minded revolutionaries. He started writing for a dissident journal called \u003cem>Kolokol\u003c/em>, in English, \u003cem>The Bell\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>After publishing searing articles calling for the emancipation of serfs and criticizing the Orthodox Church’s support for tsarist autocracy, Humnytsky was arrested.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Russian authorities imprisoned him in the hold of a warship, which set sail for what is now Istanbul. According to his later recollections, Humnytsky arranged a daring escape with the help of his family back in Moscow. He would recall years later, “I escaped for an eternal glory, to be a Kozak in the free world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This episode marked the start of a life on the run from Russian justice. Repeatedly over the years that followed, Humnytsky would pop up in a new location, work all sorts of odd hustles, make friends with anarchists, dissidents, and revolutionaries, and then the Russians would catch up with him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At one point, he returned to Greece for additional professional spiritual training on the remote peninsula of Mount Athos, home to the world’s largest monastic community. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site today. Back then, it was an excellent place to hide from the Russians. He had a facility with languages, so in London, he was a Russian language tutor to Greeks, and a specialist in old coins at the British Museum. In Cairo, he organized sightseeing tours — and survived a knifing paid for by the local Russian consulate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By his early thirties, Humnytsky decided to try his luck on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A new life in America\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1865, he landed in Boston, headed to New York, then New Orleans. Around this time, Andrii Humnytsky changed his name to Agapius, or Ahapi, Honcharenko, to seem more Greek and avoid detection from the Russians. But even in the United States, wherever he went, local Russians eventually figured out Father Agapius was not actually a Greek with remarkably good command of Russian. Balan, who wrote a \u003ca href=\"https://ia800309.us.archive.org/25/items/journalofukraini3334cana/journalofukraini3334cana.pdf\">well-regarded study\u003c/a> of Honcharenko’s life, calls him a “renegade monastic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While in New York, Honcharenko married the daughter of one of the Italian radicals he met, a young school teacher named Albina Citi. The match was not to the liking of her anti-religious family, Balan said, “but they were in love, and they wanted to go to the West Coast.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12071447\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1289px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a.jpeg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12071447\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1289\" height=\"2090\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a.jpeg 1289w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a-160x259.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a-947x1536.jpeg 947w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/E6B7271A-ABCD-48CC-AE56-C2102783C328_1_201_a-1263x2048.jpeg 1263w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1289px) 100vw, 1289px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of the photos used to illustrate the book Ahapius Honcharenko “Alaska Man,” by Wasyl Luciw, Ph.D. And Theodore Luciw, M. A., published in Toronto by Slavia Library in 1963. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Jars Balan)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And so it was that Honcharenko arrived in San Francisco in the 1860s, bringing with him typesetting skills he had honed in London. He purchased Cyrillic fonts and launched the \u003ca href=\"https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/13652/file.pdf\">\u003cem>Alaska Herald\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, which included a Ukrainian-language supplement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper became a vital resource for Ukrainian and Russian émigrés alike, providing news to people living far from home. But Honcharenko couldn’t resist publishing some biting commentary as well. Here’s an excerpt of an issue celebrating the publication’s second year:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>From the day of its birth it assumed a certain attitude, and it has unflinchingly maintained its position and consistency during these two years. It has struggled hard and bitterly because it was on the side of right and justice, and they who champion the oppressed seldom find their work either cheerful or remunerative.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem for Honcharenko was that he was a critic of imperial malfeasance wherever he saw it. Eventually, he bit the hand that fed him, which in this case was none other than the U.S. government, a primary backer of the \u003cem>Alaska Herald\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Because the administration that the Americans set up had problems with corruption,” Balan explained. “[Honcharenko] was critical of the way the American administration treated Native people. He had some environmental concerns. When he became critical of what was going on in Alaska, they pulled the funding.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church relocated its U.S. base of operations from Sitka in Alaska to San Francisco in California. It came to their attention that a renegade priest was holding services in the city, and that’s when Honcharenko and his wife decided to decamp for Alameda County.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A quieter life\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Honcharenko sold his printing press, bought a 40-acre farm in the hills above \u003ca href=\"https://www.haywardareahistory.org/agapius-honcharenko\">Hayward\u003c/a>, named the place “Ukraina,” and settled into a relatively calm life for the next 40-odd years. He led weekly Orthodox church services on the farm for local and visiting Slavic immigrants, conducted baptisms and weddings. His homestead became a small but significant hub for Ukrainian-American life on the West Coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The last years of his life were hard. The couple’s daughter died when she was just ten years old. The subsistence farm didn’t produce enough food to live on. However, Agapius and Albina Hocharenko had given so much to so many over the decades that when they were in need, a lot of locals returned the favor.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Still, Honcharenko continued to write, publish, and mentor émigrés. His farm briefly hosted a utopian colony, a dream of community that ultimately failed, but further cemented his reputation among the diaspora.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The couple also gardened. They sent numerous samples of plants and vegetables to the editors of the \u003cem>California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine\u003c/em>, who wrote back to praise the “monster squash,” and “some of the finest sugar table corn and nutmeg melons we have ever tasted.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“His life was amazing,” Balan said. “He was eccentric, he was quirky. He had strange ideas about some things; there’s no doubt. But when you look at the trajectory of his life, it’s an amazing story.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Honcharenko died in 1916 at the age of 84, shortly after his wife. Although his passing was noted in the local papers and inspired a couple of \u003ca href=\"https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/17172/file.pdf\">biographies\u003c/a>, it wasn’t until 1997 that the California Historical Resources Commission designated his farm and gravesite as a state historical landmark. A cairn and plaque followed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, there’s a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11906285/ukrainians-in-california-devastated-by-russian-invasion\">sizable\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11942336/despite-a-year-of-suffering-some-silicon-valley-companies-tied-to-ukraine-remain-optimistic\">organized\u003c/a> local Ukrainian-American community in the Bay Area, some of whom gather on a mile-long hike every year to \u003ca href=\"https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/ListedResources/Detail/1025\">\u003cem>Ukraina\u003c/em>\u003c/a> to honor Honcharenko’s memory. They sing in Ukrainian and offer prayers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12057938\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12057938\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/250927-UKRAINIANFARM01016_TV-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Taras Turiv’s (left) daughter, Victoria (right), wears a Ukrainian flag at the burial site where Ukrainian patriot and exiled orthodox priest Agapius Honcharenko and his wife Albina are buried at Garin Regional Park in Hayward on Sept. 27, 2025. \u003ccite>(Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Software engineer Alla Kashaba was among the 20 or so in attendance the last time. She lives in Los Altos now, but comes originally from Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine. “He was [a] very interesting person, and I hope someday, someone will make an interesting movie about him, like, adventure movie,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This whole story was news to Bay Curious question asker Tony Divito.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we’re incredibly fortunate and lucky to have him as part of Bay Area history,” Divito said. “It goes with our history of allowing refuge, of allowing people from desperate situations to come here and thrive here and contribute to our society, our community,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/gglueck\">\u003cem>Gabriela Glueck\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed reporting to this story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>We start today’s episode in Garin Regional Park – high in the hills overlooking Hayward. If you drive over this way, you might pass by an intriguing sign. That’s what happened to Tony Divito of San Mateo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony Divito: \u003c/strong>I saw a sign for a Ukrainian farm in Hayward. I just wanted to know the backstory.\u003cbr>\n\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\nOlivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Deep in the park is California registered historical landmark #1025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VOICE: “Ukraina” is the site of the farm and burial place of the Ukrainian patriot and exiled orthodox priest Agapius Honcharenko (1832-1916) and his wife Albina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Olivia Allen-Price: It’s a serene setting now, but the life of this guy – Agapius Honcharenko – was anything but. He spent much of his life fleeing Russian forces, traveling the globe and stirring up revolutionary inklings in his wake. Not exactly the image you might expect from an orthodox priest. Today on the show, we’ll delve into what made Honcharenko so notable that more than 100 years after his death, he’s still celebrated by local communities. Buckle up, it’s a wild ride! I’m Olivia Allen-Price. You’re listening to Bay Curious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sponsor Message\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>In the 19th century, all sorts of curious characters washed up on California’s shores, looking for fortune, a fresh start, or in the case of Father Agapius Honcharenko … a safe place to hide. KQED’s Rachael Myrow found a group of people who gather every year to honor him. She went to find out why…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Singing in Ukrainian\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>The mood was contemplative, even somber, at the 9th annual Park Ukraina Hike and Panahdya — a memorial service for Honcharenko. Representatives from local Ukrainian churches hiked a mile to offer prayers over the grave of a remarkable man who established a farm here on this hilltop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Man reading a prayer in Ukrainian\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Software engineer, Alla Kashaba was among the 20 or so in attendance. She lives in Los Altos now, but comes originally from Karghiv, in eastern Ukraine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alla Kashaba: \u003c/strong>He was very interesting person, and I hope someday someone will make an interesting movie about him, like, adventure movie. All about how he hide from Russian forces? I don’t know how to translate this. All across the globe. So he was running from them in London, in Egypt, in Jerusalem, and ended up in America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Intriguing, no?? Let’s step back in time to understand what exactly this man was running from. Born Andrii Humnytsky in what is now central Ukraine in 1832, this guy was destined to become an Orthodox priest like his father. He certainly caught the eye of the highest-ranking church leader in Ukraine at the time, a man named Metropolitan Philaret.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>The Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine at that time, Metropolitan Philaret, saw that this guy was smart and capable, and made him his personal assistant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>That’s Jars Balan, a researcher at the Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. He’s written the definitive research paper on our man Humnytsky, and he spoke at the unveiling of that plaque in Hayward. Balan says, from childhood, Humnytsky felt a fierce pride in his Ukrainian ancestry and his Christian spirituality. He took the monastic name Agapius, derived from the Greek word \u003cem>agape\u003c/em>, meaning selfless love, and pretty much from the start, his politics leaned progressive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>Because he got to travel around with the Metropolitan, he visited a lot of communities, and he was appalled by the poverty in these villages. This is still a time of serfdom, and the church even had serfs, and he found that appalling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>The word SLAV is where English speakers get the word slave, because Slavs became synonymous with enslavement in the Middle Ages. A serf, for those of you not up on your Eastern European history, is an agricultural laborer bound to work on their lord’s estate. Humnytsky hated the practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>In fact, when he was [in] his first level of ordination, and he gave his ordination sermon, he called on the church to melt down all the gold and precious jewels, all the golden precious metals, and use the money to feed, to help the poor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Sounds Christian in the OG sense, but this talk did not go over well in mid-19th-century Ukraine. Still, Humnytsky would not cool his revolutionary jets. He got acquainted with – and radicalized by – locals who, decades before, were involved in a failed attempt to overthrow the czar, the emperor of Russia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Humnytsky’s boss, the Metropolitan, saw trouble brewing, so he sent him out of the country. Because Ukraine was part of Russia at the time, he sent Humnytsky to serve in the chapel of the Imperial Russian Consulate in Greece. But there, too, Humnytsky fell in with like-minded revolutionaries. He started writing for a dissident journal called \u003cem>Kolokol\u003c/em>. In English, \u003cem>The Bell\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After publishing searing articles calling for the emancipation of serfs and criticizing the Orthodox Church’s support for Tsarist autocracy, Humnytsky was arrested and imprisoned in the hold of the Russian warship, which set sail for what is now Istanbul.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>He managed to arrange an escape when they were holding him in Istanbul. He had an aunt who was in Moscow. She had some connections, managed to pull a few strings, maybe pay a few bribes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>In his memoirs written decades later, the dissident priest recalled his optimism as a young man:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor reading from Humnytsky’s memoirs: \u003c/strong>“I escaped for an eternal glory, to be a Kozak in the free world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Things didn’t quite pan out that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>In point of fact, this episode was just the start of a life on the run from Russian justice. Repeatedly over the years that followed, he’d pop up in a new location, work all sorts of odd hustles, and then the Russians would catch up with him. For instance, he had a facility with languages, so in London, he was a Russian language tutor to Greeks, and a specialist in old coins at the British Museum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>How he picked up the specialty, I’m not sure, but I said he was a very bright guy and interested in history and archeology and theology and all kinds of things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>It’s around this time that Humnytsky began using “Honcharenko” as his nom de plume. And – I mean, you can’t make this stuff up, this guy was extraordinarily bright – he picked up a craft – typesetting – that would come in handy later in his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan:\u003c/strong> …in a printer shop and learned how to print. He translated a rare sort of, I think it was a 15th century book called Stoflau // calling for reforms in the Orthodox Church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Troublemaker, right? And remember, everywhere Humnytsky goes, he makes friends with anarchists, dissidents and revolutionaries. But he never lost his passion for spirituality. In fact, he returned to Greece for additional professional training.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of monks chanting\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>…on a remote peninsula in the northeast. It’s home to the largest monastic community in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site today, and an excellent place to hide from the Russians.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This meant Humnytsky was now able to lead prayers, conduct marriages and baptisms, and otherwise tend to lay people’s spiritual needs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Humnytsky bounced around for years. Jerusalem, the mountains of Lebanon, Cairo, where he survived a knifing paid for by the local Russian consulate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not long after, he decided to make a break for the New World, quite likely because he wanted to put as much space as he could between himself and the Russians. In 1865, in his early thirties, he landed in Boston, headed to New York, then New Orleans. But even on this side of the Atlantic, local Russians would eventually figure out Father Agapius was not actually a Greek with remarkably good command of Russian.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, Andrii Humnytsky changed his name – not just his nom de plum – to Agapius, or Ahapi, Honcharenko, to avoid detection from the Russians.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, while in New York, he married the daughter of one of the Italian radicals he met in the U.S., a young school teacher named Albina Citi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>Not to the liking, particularly of her family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Her deeply anti-religious family was put off by this…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>… bearded orthodox priest in wearing cassocks and things. But they were in love, and they wanted to go to the West Coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>So, in his mid-30s, Honcharenko landed in San Francisco with his wife, Albina. Remember how he learned about printing in London? He bought a set of Cyrillic fonts and launched the \u003cem>Alaska Herald\u003c/em> — with a Ukrainian-language supplement. That was one of the very first Ukrainian publications in North America, and a must-read for Ukrainian expats from New York to Siberia. A must-read for a lot of Russian expats, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>He was successful in getting the paper going. He got funding from the American government initially.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Here’s an excerpt of an issue celebrating the publication’s second year:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading from newspaper article: \u003c/strong>From the day of its birth it assumed a certain attitude, and it has unflinchingly maintained its position and consistency during these two years. It has struggled hard and bitterly because it was on the side of right and justice, and they who champion the oppressed seldom find their work either cheerful or remunerative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>OK, so Honcharenko could get a little strident and self-aggrandizing…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading from newspaper article: \u003c/strong>Of course, it has encountered severe hostility at the hands of those whom it has exposed; of course, it has made enemies for itself by the score.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>The problem for Honcharenko was that he was a critic of imperial malfeasance wherever he saw it, and eventually, he bit the hand that fed him, none other than the U.S. government, a primary backer of the Alaska Herald.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>Because the administration that the Americans set up had problems with corruption. He was critical of the way the American administration treated Native people. He had some environmental concerns. When he became critical of what was going on in Alaska, they pulled the funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church relocated its U.S. base of operations from Sitka in Alaska to San Francisco in California. And it came to their attention that a renegade priest was holding services in the city. And that’s when the couple decided to decamp for Alameda County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Honcharenko sold his printing press, bought a 40-acre farm in the hills above Hayward, named the place “Ukraina,” and settled into a relatively calmer life for the next 40-odd years. He led weekly Orthodox church services on the farm for local and visiting Slavic immigrants, conducted baptisms, and weddings. The couple also gardened. They sent numerous samples of plants and vegetables to the editors of the \u003cem>California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine\u003c/em>, who wrote back to praise the “monster squash,” and “some of the finest sugar table corn and nutmeg melons we have ever tasted.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>His life was amazing. He was eccentric, he was quirky. He had strange ideas about some things; there’s no doubt. But when you look at the trajectory of his life, it’s an amazing story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>He continued to publish articles and even a memoir in 1894. His homestead became a stopping place for fellow countrymen passing through. For half a minute, a small group of dreamers tried a utopian colony on his land. The venture failed, but it burnished Honcharenko’s reputation and ensured his lasting memory in the Ukrainian diaspora.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>There are stories that say, no, no, he exaggerated or that he made up stories about his life and everything like that. He might have exaggerated certain things, but there are a lot of things that my research has shown actually were based in fact.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>The last years were hard. Their daughter died when she was just ten years old. The subsistence farming wasn’t enough to subsist on. But they’d given so much to so many over the decades, a lot of locals returned the favor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jars Balan: \u003c/strong>They were very poor at the end, and really dependent on the charity of ranchers in the surrounding community who took an interest in him and helped the two of them out in their last years. So his life wasn’t any easy life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Honcharenko died at the age of 84 in 1916, a little over a year after his wife. His death was front-page news in several papers, and his life inspired a couple of biographies, but it wasn’t until 1997 that the California Historical Resources Commission designated his ranch and gravesite a state historical landmark, and a couple years later, a cairn and plaque honoring Honcharenko were unveiled there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sounds from the celebration: \u003c/strong>Odyn, dva, tray. Slava Ukraini! Slava Ukraini! Hey, I want to hear it again! Slava Ukraini! Slava Ukraini! OK, that’s better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Back at Garin Regional Park, the group of Ukrainian-Americans we met at the start of this story takes a group photo, with the Ukrainian national salute that translates to “Glory to Ukraine!” This bucolic hilltop with its historic marker and park panels tells the broad arc: émigré priest, dissident publisher, gentleman farmer. Ukrainians here and abroad remember, but what about the rest of us? This whole story is certainly news to our question-asker, Tony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony Divito: \u003c/strong>I think we’re incredibly fortunate and lucky to have him as part of Bay Area history. It goes with our history of allowing refuge, of allowing people from desperate situations to come here and thrive here and contribute to our community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>His story was just, like, epic. Right? Like it’s, you know…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony Divito: \u003c/strong>It deserves, you know, a series. Like a television mini-series or an audiobook of some sort.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rachael Myrow: \u003c/strong>Hit me up for the writers’ room, guys!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>That was KQED’s Rachael Myrow. Special thanks to Gabriela Glueck, who literally went the extra mile up that hill to help us report this story, and to Dan Brekke, who read Honcharenko’s archival writings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tony Divito sent in today’s question, and I want you to be like Tony! Head to \u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">BayCurious.org\u003c/a> to submit a question you’ve been wondering about. We are always on the lookout for great questions and yours could be what we tackle on next! Again, head to \u003ca href=\"http://baycuious.org\">BayCurious.org\u003c/a> to ask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen-Price.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey, Dan Brekke 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 time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"title": "Inside the San Francisco Church Where John Coltrane is a Saint",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13892202/watch-saint-coltrane-a-short-film-about-the-san-francisco-church-built-on-a-love-supreme\">Saint John Coltrane \u003c/a>African Orthodox Church Global Spiritual Community begins \u003ca href=\"https://www.coltranechurch.org/\">Sunday mass\u003c/a> with the blow of a conch shell. Then the saxophone comes in, blaring the opening notes of John Coltrane’s jazz masterpiece, \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Byzantine-style portrait of Coltrane is displayed on the altar. He’s wearing a white robe and clutching his soprano saxophone, a gold halo glittering above his head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the service, the church band alternates between saxophone, bass and drum solos in a kind of makeshift jazz concert. Later, the sermon offered by His Eminence Archbishop Franzo W. King is a mix of traditional Christian teachings and references to Coltrane. It’s a fusion that King and his wife, the Most Reverend Mother Marina King, call “Coltrane Consciousness.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Coltrane Consciousness is acknowledging that the music and the sound of John Coltrane is that anointed sound that leaped down from the throne of heaven,” King said. “We want everybody to become aware of the power of this music, of this man, that testimony.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Coltrane Church, as it’s often called, is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/Item%202e.%20LBR-2021-22-019%20St.%20John%20Coltrane%20Church.pdf\">oldest \u003c/a>Black jazz organization in San Francisco now. And it has taken a windy path to achieve that longevity.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A baptism of sound\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Coltrane Church’s origins date back to the 1960s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings had recently moved to San Francisco as a young couple in love. Upon arrival they were met with a vibrant music scene, with jazz venues dotting the city. The Fillmore District became known as “The Harlem of the West” for its abundance of Black-owned nightclubs and restaurants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068339\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1999px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068339\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Supreme Mother Rev. Marina King sings during Sunday mass at the St. John Coltrane Church at Fort Mason in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The music was as hip as you could get, and we were trying to be hipsters and being into this music,” King said. “You could leave your house on a Friday night and you wouldn’t have to come home until Sunday afternoon.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Sept. 18, 1965, the Kings celebrated their first wedding anniversary by going to see The John Coltrane Quartet at a North Beach club called The Jazz Workshop. King knew the doorman, who seated them in the front row despite them being underage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As soon as Coltrane and his band entered the room, King said he felt the energy around him shift, “like [the band was] walking on a carpet of air.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was immediate,” Mother Marina agreed. “You could feel the presence, that energy. And then [Coltrane] lifted his horn. We were right in front, and he pointed right at our table.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings said they were rendered speechless throughout Coltrane’s set, hardly touching their drinks as they were transported to a spiritual realm beyond the jazz club.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAgJ-igwuSQ\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were caught in a windstorm of the spirit of the Holy Ghost. It was a powerful thing,” King said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings call this experience their “sound baptism.” From then on, their calling would be to spread John Coltrane’s gospel.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>From fans to worshippers\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>They started out by hosting listening sessions with friends in their home. They’d cook up a pot of beans and some cornbread to share, then pour over music, interviews and liner notes from jazz greats like John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On July 17, 1967, Archbishop King was out at a jazz club when he learned that Coltrane had died. The Kings’ daughter, Pastor Wanika King-Stephens, remembers walking into the living room the next morning to find that her dad and uncle had stayed up all night listening to Coltrane’s music.[aside postID=news_11954252 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/062723-Wanda-Salvatto-07-RT-KQED-e1687904264135-1020x680.jpg']“They killed John,” King-Stephens recalled her father saying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Coltrane died from liver cancer, most likely fueled by his drug and alcohol addiction in the earlier years of his fame. But Archbishop King believed Coltrane’s death symbolized the systems of racism that targeted Black men in America. This was a time of heightened tension for San Francisco’s Black population. Throughout the 1960s, the city’s so-called “\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11825401/how-urban-renewal-decimated-the-fillmore-district-and-took-jazz-with-it\">redevelopment for urban renewal\u003c/a>” ” program targeted low-income neighborhoods with minority residents for demolition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The redevelopment came in with the Negro removal and devastated the community,” King said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco’s redevelopment project brought an end to the “Harlem of the West” that had once defined the Fillmore District. Jazz clubs shuttered, minority and elderly residents were forced from their homes, and the city’s Black-owned music scene was decimated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings, though, were passionate that people still needed to hear this music. Motivated by an era of Black consciousness and political activity, they opened “The Yardbird Club,” a jazz club based out of their basement. The name paid homage to the jazz musician Charlie “Yardbird” Parker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This makeshift venue functioned as a space where artists visiting San Francisco could experiment with new sounds, much like the city’s jazz clubs had once done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But around 1969, something shifted for the Kings. It wasn’t just about saving the music or the culture anymore. It was about saving souls.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After years of studying Coltrane, they came to believe that his music, his activism — his whole belief system — was really a declaration of faith.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068329\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068329\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">His Eminence Archbishop Franzo W. King greets congregants after Sunday mass at the St. John Coltrane Church at Fort Mason in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“We hear John Coltrane saying, ‘My music is the spiritual expression of what I am, my faith, my knowledge, my being,” King-Stephens said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings went all in on their devotion. “The Yardbird Club” became “The Yardbird Temple.” They didn’t just revere Coltrane anymore — they worshiped him, believed him to be the second coming of Christ and cited \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em> as his most sacred text.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A higher power\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Coltrane composed \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em> in the aftermath of heroin and alcohol addiction. Though he had risen to fame by the 1950s, Coltrane’s substance abuse made him unreliable. Miles Davis famously fired Coltrane from his band because of it. Coltrane had hit rock bottom and his music career was foundering because of it. So, he got clean — went cold turkey — and heard the voice of God.[aside postID=news_11881696 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/07/E-40.DeFremery-1020x682.jpg']Coltrane described this experience in the album’s liner notes: \u003cem>“During the year 1957, I experienced by the grace of God a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly ask to be given the means and the privilege to make others happy through music.”\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>, which came out in 1965, marked a turning point in Coltrane’s career. The album was his declaration to God and an expression of his commitment to love and the divine. For 32 minutes and 47 seconds, Coltrane’s saxophone pulses and intertwines with piano and drums — a four-note bassline bedded beneath the sound. It’s played in all 12 keys, sending a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2000/10/23/148148986/a-love-supreme\">message\u003c/a> that you can find \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em> everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We hear the Lord speaking to us in this music,” King said. “I’ve had John Coltrane through the music call my name. So we have revelations that come through the music.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mother Marina agreed. “Every time I hear it, there’s something new,” she said. “There’s always life there. It’s in the music. The magic is in the music.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068328\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068328\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rev. Marlee-I Mystic and His Eminence Archbishop Franzo W. King pause to speak with churchgoers following Sunday mass at the St. John Coltrane Church in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Kings say the album’s four song titles — \u003cem>Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance \u003c/em>and \u003cem>Psalm\u003c/em> — offer a formula for how to reach a higher power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way his notes are moving and the way the sounds are connected, it’s almost like a rumble. It’s like a war. Sometimes he’s pleading your case. It’s many different feelings,” Mother Marina said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The 1970s: A period of transformation\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Now a religious community, the Kings surrendered themselves to Coltrane. They prayed, meditated and fasted for days at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Everything was falling into place, and the Kings “felt like we were in the right place at the right time, and that the spirit of God was really heavy in this part of the world,” King said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068333\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Music memorabilia adorns the space in preparation for Sunday mass at the St. John Coltrane Church at Fort Mason in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Black Panther Party also became supporters of the church. Its co-founder, Huey P. Newton had become a mentor to Archbishop King and encouraged him to fuse politics, culture and religion. After moving to a storefront on Divisadero Street, the church began hosting programs that mirrored The Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>King-Stephens said the church’s free food program was “one of my [her] favorite things in the whole world.” Seven days a week, church members would prepare free vegetarian meals for hundreds of people. The lines snaked around the block.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We would go to Safeways and the supermarkets and the stuff that they would throw out, we’d take it out, put it in a tub, clean it, and serve it to the people,” King said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings believed that to be right with God was to be right with the people. Inspired by San Francisco’s hippie movement in the 1970s, they also hosted free yoga classes, practiced vegetarianism, and started borrowing from Eastern spirituality, led by Coltrane’s music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“John Coltrane has an album entitled \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwrV0qCX1LU&list=RDGwrV0qCX1LU&start_radio=1\">\u003cem>Om\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, and we literally took that as John saying, ‘I am Om,’” Mother Marina said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They studied the Sufi mystic, Inayat Khan, who believed music and sound to be the world’s life source, and incorporated Sanskrit chanting in their service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We embrace the unity of religious ideas,” King said. “If you want to say that Buddha is the light, we don’t have a problem with that.”\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12070432\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-74258876-scaled-e1768939107671.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12070432\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-74258876-scaled-e1768939107671.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1420\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">American jazz musician and composer Alice Coltrane in 1970. \u003ccite>(Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In 1974, the Kings met Alice Coltrane, John’s widow. She had converted to Hinduism after her husband’s death and came to San Francisco to deepen her practice. The Kings joined her spiritual community in San Francisco, the Vedantic Center, and began worshipping her as the wife of God. They adopted Hindu names and sang backup on her early devotional \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=759TXOUIpjQ\">records\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in 1981, Coltrane filed a $7.5 million \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/24/nyregion/notes-on-people-coltrane-s-widow-sues-san-francisco-church.html\">lawsuit\u003c/a> against the Coltrane Church for copyright infringement and using her husband’s name and likeness without permission. She eventually dropped the lawsuit, but it set the Kings on a new path. The incident drew the attention of the African Orthodox Church, which wanted to expand to the West Coast. To join, the Kings had to recharacterize Coltrane from their God incarnate to a patron saint. They agreed.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Culture keepers\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The church joined the A.O.C and became the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in 1982. Now part of an organized religious movement, the Coltrane church leaned into its status as public-facing leaders and keepers of San Francisco culture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think this is something people need to understand that this church has been an ambassador for this city,” King said.[aside postID=news_12059962 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Jello-Biafra-of-the-Dead-Kennedys-performing-at-the-Mabuhay-Gardens-.jpg']They have traveled around the world, including to the \u003ca href=\"https://jazzajuan.com/en/\">Antibes Jazz Festival\u003c/a> in France — where Coltrane himself famously \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWuhPVb175Y&list=RDlWuhPVb175Y&start_radio=1\">performed\u003c/a> A Love Supreme in 1965. The Kings were joined onstage by Carlos Santana, an early supporter of the church. Several travel guides even named them a top destination when visiting San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings and their church were vocal advocates on issues including environmental racism and police brutality, continuing the work that had long been part of their ethos. But the year 2000 marked yet another shift for the Coltrane Church. They were forced to leave their Divisadero storefront, the church’s home for nearly 30 years, after their rent more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/coltrane-church-holds-last-service-at-longtime-3239485.php\">doubled\u003c/a>. They also had to end their free food program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That was our home,” King-Stephens said. “And then, I watched that whole community change. And I tell you, I couldn’t drive through that neighborhood without crying for a whole year.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Looking to the future\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>They’ve relocated a few times since then. First, to the Fillmore, where they were one of just a handful of jazz institutions left. But they were evicted from that space too, before moving to their current location out of Fort Mason’s Magic Theater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, King and Mother Marina see the church as a kind of Mecca, where Coltrane disciples from around the world can worship together. At the end of Sunday mass, Archbishop King and Mother Marina asked the community for donations. They’re trying to raise money to buy a building — what they hope will be a permanent home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068330\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068330\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rev. Marlee-I Mystic (center) closes Sunday mass in a burst of joy and laughter at the St. John Coltrane Church in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Kings are in their eighties and looking towards the future of the church. Their daughter plans to usher the church into its next chapter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the first sound baptism in 1965, the Coltrane Church has had different names, locations and philosophies. In fact, King often said that as the seasons change, so do the needs of the people. Change, he said, is baked into the very essence of the church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And then at the same time, the church never changes,” King said. ”It remains constantly rooted in love and \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> John Coltrane on the saxophone is like nothing else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of Coltrane playing\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>He grew up in North Carolina in the 1930s…where the church was a big part of his life. Both of his grandfathers were ministers. But his calling was different. After high school, he moved to Philadelphia with his mother, where his music career started to take off. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music plays\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>By the mid-1950s, Coltrane was gaining recognition among other jazz musicians for the way he played, skipping scales in a style that became known as “sheets of sound.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music plays\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Here’s Coltrane in a 1960 radio interview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Coltrane: \u003c/strong>There’s some set things I know, some harmonic devices that I know that will take me out of the ordinary path if I use these. But I haven’t played them enough, and I”m not familiar enough, to take the one familiar line, so I play all of them so I can acclimate my ear. So I can hear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>He was a famously hard worker, practicing fingering, breath control…even specific notes for hours at a time. He was even said to fall asleep with his horn in his mouth. He caught the attention of some of the most famous jazz artists of his day… playing with folks like Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Coltrane: \u003c/strong>When I started it it was a little different because I started through Miles Davis and he was an accepted musician, you see. They got used to me in the States now when they first heard me when I was here they did not like it I remember. It’s a little different. They’re going to reject it at first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>But throughout these years of success, Coltrane struggled with alcohol and heroin addiction. Miles Davis famously fired him from his band for it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so, the story goes, Coltrane got clean, cold turkey, an experience he describes in the liner notes of his masterpiece, \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>, which came out in 1965. Here’s Denzel Washington reading them in the documentary \u003cem>Chasing Trane\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Denzel Washington reading Coltrane: \u003c/strong>During the year 1957, I experienced by the grace of Gd a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly ask to be given the means and the privilege to make others happy through music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>A Love Supreme marked a turning point in Coltrane’s career. The album was Coltrane’s declaration to God, his commitment to love and the divine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it has become the sacred text of a church in San Francisco — the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, Global Spiritual Community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Opening riff of A Love Supreme plays\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Today on Bay Curious, we’re going to church to learn how a jazz musician came to be revered as a saint and how the Coltrane Church has been a part of many cultural movements over the decades, transforming alongside the city. I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Don’t go away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>The Coltrane Church has been worshipping John Coltrane’s music, philosophy, and at times, even the man himself for 60 years. Reporter Asal Ehsanipour takes us to Sunday mass to learn more about what that sounds like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of Coltrane Church Mass\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church opens Sunday mass with the blow of a conch shell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of conch shell blowing\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Then the saxophone comes in, blaring the opening notes of John Coltrane’s \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A Love Supreme plays\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>On the altar is a Byzantine-style portrait of John Coltrane. He’s wearing a white robe and clutching his soprano saxophone. A gold halo glitters above his head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the service, the band alternates between sax, bass, and drum solos in a kind of makeshift jazz concert. Later, the sermon offered by His Eminence the Most Reverend Franzo W. King is a mix of traditional Christian teachings, and references to Coltrane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King during mass: \u003c/strong>Jesus is the Lord of lords and the king of kings. And that one John Will.i.am Coltrane is that anointed sound that leaped down from the throne of heaven.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>For Archbishop King and his wife, the Most Reverend Mother Marina, the music and their worship is one and the same.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>The mission of the church is to paint the globe with Coltrane Consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Coltrane Consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>Coltrane Consciousness is acknowledging that the music and the sound of John Coltraine is that anointed sound. So we want everybody to become aware of the power of this music, of this man, that testimony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The Kings first heard the power of that testimony in 1960s San Francisco — as a young couple in love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>The music was as hip as you could get, and we were trying to be hipsters and being into this music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>One weekend, 1965, Franzo and Marina planned to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. They wanted to see The John Coltrane Quartet at a club in North Beach called The Jazz Workshop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>You had to be 21 and we were both underage, but I knew the doorman. And he took us right up front.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>As soon as Coltrane entered the room, the Kings felt the energy around them shift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>When they walked out, it was almost like they were walking on a carpet of air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina: \u003c/strong>It was immediate. You could feel the presence, that energy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Coltrane music starts here\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>And then he lifted his horn. We were right in front, and he pointed right at our table.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>From the first note, we were lifted into another place beyond the confines of that jazz club. And when we finished, our drinks were still on the table, the ice had melted. I don’t remember us even talking to each other.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>I didn’t know exactly how to react to it. I was just in the moment of experiencing a new experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We were caught in a windstorm of the spirit of the Holy Ghost. It was a powerful thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They call this experience their “sound baptism.” From then on, their calling would be to spread John Coltrane’s gospel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We couldn’t keep it to ourselves. We had to give testimony, we had to tell people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>And tell people they did. Franzo and Marina had actually created a space to share their favorite music with friends — in a way, their first iteration of the Coltrane Church. Pastor Wanika King-Stephens still remembers those evenings her parents used to host.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>Really what that entailed was our listening clinic that took place in my parents’ living room. My mom would put on a pot of beans and make some cornbread and have people come over and they would sit and listen to the music of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Franzo and Marina poured over liner notes and interviews, spent hours absorbed in the music, analyzing it together. Then came July 17, 1967.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>When John Coltrane died I came into the living room to find my dad and my uncle and they had been up all night. Listening to Trane and just talking about him and the music and so when I came in the room, I’m like, “what’s what’s wrong?” You know, they said, you know, “they killed John.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Coltrane died from liver cancer, most likely fueled by his drug and alcohol addiction. But to Franzo, his death symbolized the systems of racism that targeted Black men in America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was a time of heightened tension for San Francisco’s Black population. The city’s so-called “urban renewal” project was in full swing and it targeted low-income neighborhoods with minority residents for demolition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>The redevelopment came in with the Negro removal and devastated the community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Redevelopment brought an end to the “Harlem of the West” that defined the Fillmore in the 40s and 50s. Jazz clubs shuttered. Minority and elderly residents were forced from their homes. And the city’s Black-owned music scene was decimated. Franzo, though, was passionate that people needed to hear this music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>And it was during that period, too, where so-called black consciousness was coming out. It was just a very high cultural, political things going on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>So he and Marina mobilized. They opened what was essentially an underground jazz club — from their basement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Coltrane had spoken out about the corporatization of jazz. It was just \u003cu>one\u003c/u> example of how he’d grown into an icon for the Black Power movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Coltrane’s song Alabama plays \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Here’s Coltrane’s 1963 song, Alabama, about the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four African American girls. Coltrane composed it to the rhythm of Martin Luther King Jr.’s eulogy following the attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>So we’re living in these times of turmoil, yes it comes out in the music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>But eventually, something shifted. For the Kings, the work stopped being about saving the music or the culture. It was about saving souls. Because after years of studying Coltrane, it had become clear to them that his music, his activism — his whole belief system — was really a declaration of faith.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>And we hear John Coltrane saying, my music is the spiritual expression of what I am, my faith, my knowledge, my being.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The Kings went all in on their devotion. They converted the jazz club into a temple. Now they didn’t just revere Coltrane. They worshipped him. Believed he was the second coming of Christ.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>That he’s more than just a musician, but he is a prophet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>And that \u003cem>A Love Supreme \u003c/em>was his sacred text — his doctrine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A Love Supreme starts playing\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>For 32 minutes and 47 seconds, Coltrane’s saxophone pulses and intertwines with piano and drums, a four note bassline bedded beneath the sound. It’s played in all 12 keys, sending a message that you can find A Love Supreme everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We hear the Lord speaking to us in this music. I’ve had John Coltrane through the music call my name. So we have revelations that come through the music. And you find that in the sound of the music, you find it in the name of the compositions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Archbishop King and Mother Marina say the album’s four song titles — \u003cem>Acknowledgment, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm —\u003c/em> offer a formula for how to reach a higher power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>The way his notes are moving and the way the sounds are connected, it’s almost like a rumble. It’s like a war. Sometimes he’s pleading your case. Every time I hear it, there’s something new. There’s always life there. It’s in the music, the magic is in the music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Franzo and Marina surrendered themselves to Coltrane. They prayed, meditated, and fasted for days at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>And we just felt like we were in the right place at the right time, and that the Spirit of God was really heavy in this part of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Around this time, The Black Panther Party was gaining traction. Started in Oakland in 1966 its co-founder Huey P. Newton had become a kind of mentor to Franzo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Huey P. Newton: \u003c/strong>The Black Panther Party for self defense is organized now throughout the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Here’s Newton in 1968 describing the mission of the Panthers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Huey P Newton: \u003c/strong>And we advocate that all Black people in America are taught what politics is all about and what our history is all about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Newton encouraged the Coltrane Church to fuse politics and culture with religion. And in 1971, the Kings opened their first permanent location in a storefront on Divisadero St. From there, they started hosting social programs, similar to the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>The food program was one of my favorite things in the whole world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Pastor Wanika says that seven days a week, they’d give free vegetarian meals to hundreds of people. The lines snaked around the block.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>We would sing songs, you know, \u003cem>‘Serving the people makes me mighty glad. [fade under] \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We would go to Safeways and the supermarkets and the stuff that they would throw out. We’d take it out, put it in a tub, clean it, and serve it to the people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Franzo and Marina believed that to be right with God was to be \u003cem>\u003cu>right\u003c/u>\u003c/em> with the people. So they also hosted free yoga classes and donated clothes to the community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We kind of learned that stuff from the hippies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The vibe was Flower Power, psychedelics…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>The Grateful Dead…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Utopian communes based out of old Victorian houses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>The so-called hippie movement was a powerful thing and we were very much a part of that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>And like the hippies, the Kings started borrowing from Eastern spirituality, led by Coltrane’s music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Opening notes of “Om” by John Coltrane – 00:00\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>John Coltrane has an album entitled Om. I thought of that as far as one of the albums that meant so much to us, especially early on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of Coltrane’s “Om” playing \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>And we literally took that as John saying, “I am Om.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>By the mid-70s, the Kings began shifting away from Christianity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We embrace the unity of religious ideas. If you want to say that Buddha is the light, we don’t have a problem with that.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>They incorporated Sanskrit chanting in their service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King chanting\u003cem>: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>That’s something that we learned from Alice Coltrane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Alice Coltrane, John’s widow, had been immersed in Hindu spirituality for years and had come to San Francisco to deepen her practice. The Kings met her here and eventually joined her \u003cu>new\u003c/u> religious community called the Vedantic Center. Franzo and Marina began worshipping Alice as the wife of God and adopted Hindu names.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pastor Wanika remembers when her parents made that shift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>So we go from jazz to Sanskrit and chanting and singing, you know, Hare Krishna and Shiva, Lord Shiva.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The Kings sang backup on Alice’s early devotional records, like this one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Singing \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>But in the early 80s, their relationship splintered. Alice filed a 7.5 million dollar lawsuit against the Coltrane Church for copyright infringement and using her husband’s name and likeness without permission. Alice eventually dropped the lawsuit, but the incident drew the attention of the African Orthodox Church, who wanted to expand to the West Coast. For the Kings, it was actually kind of similar to the temple they’d first opened except they had to recharacterize Coltrane from their God incarnate to a patron saint. They agreed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>For me, John was always just sort of evolving in my consciousness. So for him to go from God to Saint was not a big stretch for me. It’s like, great, okay. I can swing with that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>So in 1982, they became the \u003cem>\u003cu>Saint\u003c/u>\u003c/em> John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. Now part of an organized religious movement, the Coltrane Church leaned into its status as public facing leaders. Keepers, if you will, of San Francisco culture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>I think this is something people need to understand that this church has been an ambassador for this city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>They traveled around the world. Like to the Antibes Jazz Festival in France — where Coltrane himself famously performed \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em> in 1965.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>Carlos Santana joined us on the stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>And even on airlines, we would say, hey, I saw your church advertised on United Airlines, and it would, you know, it was like a goal of places you need to see in San Francisco, and it would be the St. John Coltrane Church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>But the year 2000 marked yet another shift for the Coltrane Church when they were forced out of their Divisadero storefront. Their home of nearly 30 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>It was awful, it was awful. I mean, I know I never saw it coming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Their rent more than doubled, and they had to end their free food program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>We had to leave, and that was our home. That was our home. And then I watched that whole community change. And I just, I tell you, I couldn’t drive through that neighborhood without crying for, like, a whole year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>They’ve relocated a few times since then. First to the Fillmore where they were one of just a handful of jazz institutions left. But they were evicted from that space too, before moving to their current location out of Fort Mason’s Magic Theater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of Coltrane Church mass: Hallelujah! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King during service: \u003c/strong>This next composition is entitled Tune Gene, and it means “He who comes in the glory of the Lord.” So I want you to clap your hands, pick up your tambourines. Do we have any dancers? You know, King David danced before the Lord with all the power of his might.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Now, Archbishop King and Mother Marina see the church as a kind of Mecca, where Coltrane disciples from just about anywhere can worship together. On the day I visit, they’ve come from New York, Seattle, and closer to home, Redwood City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King in the service: \u003c/strong>This is the St. John Will-i-am Coltrane African Orthodox Church Global Spiritual Community. Amen. So we all are family, amen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>At the end of Sunday mass Archbishop King and Mother Marina asked for donations. They’re trying to raise money to buy a building. What they hope will be a permanent home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>So this church needs your money. Amen. Some of y’all are holding on to God’s money now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Archbishop King and Mother Marina are in their 80s and are looking towards the future of the church, how it can live beyond them. Their daughter, Pastor Wanika, plans to take it over, to continue sharing the church’s message.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>So Coltrane Consciousness is a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme. That’s what this coltrane consciousness is all about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Since Archbishop King and Mother Marina’s sound baptism in 1965, the Coltrane Church has had different names, locations, philosophies. In fact, Archbishop King often says that as the seasons change, so do the needs of the people. Change, he says, is baked into the very essence of the church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>And then at the same time, the church never changes. It remains constantly rooted in love and \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music fades out\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> That story was reported by Asal Ehsanipour. You can attend mass at the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church every Sunday at the Magic Theater at Fort Mason.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen-Price.\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 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>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13892202/watch-saint-coltrane-a-short-film-about-the-san-francisco-church-built-on-a-love-supreme\">Saint John Coltrane \u003c/a>African Orthodox Church Global Spiritual Community begins \u003ca href=\"https://www.coltranechurch.org/\">Sunday mass\u003c/a> with the blow of a conch shell. Then the saxophone comes in, blaring the opening notes of John Coltrane’s jazz masterpiece, \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Byzantine-style portrait of Coltrane is displayed on the altar. He’s wearing a white robe and clutching his soprano saxophone, a gold halo glittering above his head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the service, the church band alternates between saxophone, bass and drum solos in a kind of makeshift jazz concert. Later, the sermon offered by His Eminence Archbishop Franzo W. King is a mix of traditional Christian teachings and references to Coltrane. It’s a fusion that King and his wife, the Most Reverend Mother Marina King, call “Coltrane Consciousness.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Coltrane Consciousness is acknowledging that the music and the sound of John Coltrane is that anointed sound that leaped down from the throne of heaven,” King said. “We want everybody to become aware of the power of this music, of this man, that testimony.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Coltrane Church, as it’s often called, is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/Item%202e.%20LBR-2021-22-019%20St.%20John%20Coltrane%20Church.pdf\">oldest \u003c/a>Black jazz organization in San Francisco now. And it has taken a windy path to achieve that longevity.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A baptism of sound\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Coltrane Church’s origins date back to the 1960s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings had recently moved to San Francisco as a young couple in love. Upon arrival they were met with a vibrant music scene, with jazz venues dotting the city. The Fillmore District became known as “The Harlem of the West” for its abundance of Black-owned nightclubs and restaurants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068339\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1999px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068339\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-1_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Supreme Mother Rev. Marina King sings during Sunday mass at the St. John Coltrane Church at Fort Mason in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The music was as hip as you could get, and we were trying to be hipsters and being into this music,” King said. “You could leave your house on a Friday night and you wouldn’t have to come home until Sunday afternoon.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Sept. 18, 1965, the Kings celebrated their first wedding anniversary by going to see The John Coltrane Quartet at a North Beach club called The Jazz Workshop. King knew the doorman, who seated them in the front row despite them being underage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As soon as Coltrane and his band entered the room, King said he felt the energy around him shift, “like [the band was] walking on a carpet of air.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was immediate,” Mother Marina agreed. “You could feel the presence, that energy. And then [Coltrane] lifted his horn. We were right in front, and he pointed right at our table.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings said they were rendered speechless throughout Coltrane’s set, hardly touching their drinks as they were transported to a spiritual realm beyond the jazz club.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/MAgJ-igwuSQ'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/MAgJ-igwuSQ'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>“We were caught in a windstorm of the spirit of the Holy Ghost. It was a powerful thing,” King said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings call this experience their “sound baptism.” From then on, their calling would be to spread John Coltrane’s gospel.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>From fans to worshippers\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>They started out by hosting listening sessions with friends in their home. They’d cook up a pot of beans and some cornbread to share, then pour over music, interviews and liner notes from jazz greats like John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On July 17, 1967, Archbishop King was out at a jazz club when he learned that Coltrane had died. The Kings’ daughter, Pastor Wanika King-Stephens, remembers walking into the living room the next morning to find that her dad and uncle had stayed up all night listening to Coltrane’s music.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“They killed John,” King-Stephens recalled her father saying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Coltrane died from liver cancer, most likely fueled by his drug and alcohol addiction in the earlier years of his fame. But Archbishop King believed Coltrane’s death symbolized the systems of racism that targeted Black men in America. This was a time of heightened tension for San Francisco’s Black population. Throughout the 1960s, the city’s so-called “\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11825401/how-urban-renewal-decimated-the-fillmore-district-and-took-jazz-with-it\">redevelopment for urban renewal\u003c/a>” ” program targeted low-income neighborhoods with minority residents for demolition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The redevelopment came in with the Negro removal and devastated the community,” King said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco’s redevelopment project brought an end to the “Harlem of the West” that had once defined the Fillmore District. Jazz clubs shuttered, minority and elderly residents were forced from their homes, and the city’s Black-owned music scene was decimated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings, though, were passionate that people still needed to hear this music. Motivated by an era of Black consciousness and political activity, they opened “The Yardbird Club,” a jazz club based out of their basement. The name paid homage to the jazz musician Charlie “Yardbird” Parker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This makeshift venue functioned as a space where artists visiting San Francisco could experiment with new sounds, much like the city’s jazz clubs had once done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But around 1969, something shifted for the Kings. It wasn’t just about saving the music or the culture anymore. It was about saving souls.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After years of studying Coltrane, they came to believe that his music, his activism — his whole belief system — was really a declaration of faith.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068329\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068329\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-6_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">His Eminence Archbishop Franzo W. King greets congregants after Sunday mass at the St. John Coltrane Church at Fort Mason in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“We hear John Coltrane saying, ‘My music is the spiritual expression of what I am, my faith, my knowledge, my being,” King-Stephens said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings went all in on their devotion. “The Yardbird Club” became “The Yardbird Temple.” They didn’t just revere Coltrane anymore — they worshiped him, believed him to be the second coming of Christ and cited \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em> as his most sacred text.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A higher power\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Coltrane composed \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em> in the aftermath of heroin and alcohol addiction. Though he had risen to fame by the 1950s, Coltrane’s substance abuse made him unreliable. Miles Davis famously fired Coltrane from his band because of it. Coltrane had hit rock bottom and his music career was foundering because of it. So, he got clean — went cold turkey — and heard the voice of God.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Coltrane described this experience in the album’s liner notes: \u003cem>“During the year 1957, I experienced by the grace of God a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly ask to be given the means and the privilege to make others happy through music.”\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>, which came out in 1965, marked a turning point in Coltrane’s career. The album was his declaration to God and an expression of his commitment to love and the divine. For 32 minutes and 47 seconds, Coltrane’s saxophone pulses and intertwines with piano and drums — a four-note bassline bedded beneath the sound. It’s played in all 12 keys, sending a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2000/10/23/148148986/a-love-supreme\">message\u003c/a> that you can find \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em> everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We hear the Lord speaking to us in this music,” King said. “I’ve had John Coltrane through the music call my name. So we have revelations that come through the music.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mother Marina agreed. “Every time I hear it, there’s something new,” she said. “There’s always life there. It’s in the music. The magic is in the music.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068328\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068328\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-5_qed-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rev. Marlee-I Mystic and His Eminence Archbishop Franzo W. King pause to speak with churchgoers following Sunday mass at the St. John Coltrane Church in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Kings say the album’s four song titles — \u003cem>Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance \u003c/em>and \u003cem>Psalm\u003c/em> — offer a formula for how to reach a higher power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way his notes are moving and the way the sounds are connected, it’s almost like a rumble. It’s like a war. Sometimes he’s pleading your case. It’s many different feelings,” Mother Marina said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The 1970s: A period of transformation\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Now a religious community, the Kings surrendered themselves to Coltrane. They prayed, meditated and fasted for days at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Everything was falling into place, and the Kings “felt like we were in the right place at the right time, and that the spirit of God was really heavy in this part of the world,” King said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068333\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-12_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Music memorabilia adorns the space in preparation for Sunday mass at the St. John Coltrane Church at Fort Mason in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Black Panther Party also became supporters of the church. Its co-founder, Huey P. Newton had become a mentor to Archbishop King and encouraged him to fuse politics, culture and religion. After moving to a storefront on Divisadero Street, the church began hosting programs that mirrored The Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>King-Stephens said the church’s free food program was “one of my [her] favorite things in the whole world.” Seven days a week, church members would prepare free vegetarian meals for hundreds of people. The lines snaked around the block.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We would go to Safeways and the supermarkets and the stuff that they would throw out, we’d take it out, put it in a tub, clean it, and serve it to the people,” King said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings believed that to be right with God was to be right with the people. Inspired by San Francisco’s hippie movement in the 1970s, they also hosted free yoga classes, practiced vegetarianism, and started borrowing from Eastern spirituality, led by Coltrane’s music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“John Coltrane has an album entitled \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwrV0qCX1LU&list=RDGwrV0qCX1LU&start_radio=1\">\u003cem>Om\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, and we literally took that as John saying, ‘I am Om,’” Mother Marina said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They studied the Sufi mystic, Inayat Khan, who believed music and sound to be the world’s life source, and incorporated Sanskrit chanting in their service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We embrace the unity of religious ideas,” King said. “If you want to say that Buddha is the light, we don’t have a problem with that.”\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12070432\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-74258876-scaled-e1768939107671.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12070432\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-74258876-scaled-e1768939107671.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1420\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">American jazz musician and composer Alice Coltrane in 1970. \u003ccite>(Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In 1974, the Kings met Alice Coltrane, John’s widow. She had converted to Hinduism after her husband’s death and came to San Francisco to deepen her practice. The Kings joined her spiritual community in San Francisco, the Vedantic Center, and began worshipping her as the wife of God. They adopted Hindu names and sang backup on her early devotional \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=759TXOUIpjQ\">records\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in 1981, Coltrane filed a $7.5 million \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/24/nyregion/notes-on-people-coltrane-s-widow-sues-san-francisco-church.html\">lawsuit\u003c/a> against the Coltrane Church for copyright infringement and using her husband’s name and likeness without permission. She eventually dropped the lawsuit, but it set the Kings on a new path. The incident drew the attention of the African Orthodox Church, which wanted to expand to the West Coast. To join, the Kings had to recharacterize Coltrane from their God incarnate to a patron saint. They agreed.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Culture keepers\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The church joined the A.O.C and became the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in 1982. Now part of an organized religious movement, the Coltrane church leaned into its status as public-facing leaders and keepers of San Francisco culture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think this is something people need to understand that this church has been an ambassador for this city,” King said.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>They have traveled around the world, including to the \u003ca href=\"https://jazzajuan.com/en/\">Antibes Jazz Festival\u003c/a> in France — where Coltrane himself famously \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWuhPVb175Y&list=RDlWuhPVb175Y&start_radio=1\">performed\u003c/a> A Love Supreme in 1965. The Kings were joined onstage by Carlos Santana, an early supporter of the church. Several travel guides even named them a top destination when visiting San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Kings and their church were vocal advocates on issues including environmental racism and police brutality, continuing the work that had long been part of their ethos. But the year 2000 marked yet another shift for the Coltrane Church. They were forced to leave their Divisadero storefront, the church’s home for nearly 30 years, after their rent more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/coltrane-church-holds-last-service-at-longtime-3239485.php\">doubled\u003c/a>. They also had to end their free food program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That was our home,” King-Stephens said. “And then, I watched that whole community change. And I tell you, I couldn’t drive through that neighborhood without crying for a whole year.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Looking to the future\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>They’ve relocated a few times since then. First, to the Fillmore, where they were one of just a handful of jazz institutions left. But they were evicted from that space too, before moving to their current location out of Fort Mason’s Magic Theater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, King and Mother Marina see the church as a kind of Mecca, where Coltrane disciples from around the world can worship together. At the end of Sunday mass, Archbishop King and Mother Marina asked the community for donations. They’re trying to raise money to buy a building — what they hope will be a permanent home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068330\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068330\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/20251221_JohnColtraneChurch_December_GH-8_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rev. Marlee-I Mystic (center) closes Sunday mass in a burst of joy and laughter at the St. John Coltrane Church in San Francisco on Dec. 21, 2025. \u003ccite>(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Kings are in their eighties and looking towards the future of the church. Their daughter plans to usher the church into its next chapter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the first sound baptism in 1965, the Coltrane Church has had different names, locations and philosophies. In fact, King often said that as the seasons change, so do the needs of the people. Change, he said, is baked into the very essence of the church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And then at the same time, the church never changes,” King said. ”It remains constantly rooted in love and \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> John Coltrane on the saxophone is like nothing else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of Coltrane playing\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>He grew up in North Carolina in the 1930s…where the church was a big part of his life. Both of his grandfathers were ministers. But his calling was different. After high school, he moved to Philadelphia with his mother, where his music career started to take off. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music plays\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>By the mid-1950s, Coltrane was gaining recognition among other jazz musicians for the way he played, skipping scales in a style that became known as “sheets of sound.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music plays\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Here’s Coltrane in a 1960 radio interview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Coltrane: \u003c/strong>There’s some set things I know, some harmonic devices that I know that will take me out of the ordinary path if I use these. But I haven’t played them enough, and I”m not familiar enough, to take the one familiar line, so I play all of them so I can acclimate my ear. So I can hear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>He was a famously hard worker, practicing fingering, breath control…even specific notes for hours at a time. He was even said to fall asleep with his horn in his mouth. He caught the attention of some of the most famous jazz artists of his day… playing with folks like Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Coltrane: \u003c/strong>When I started it it was a little different because I started through Miles Davis and he was an accepted musician, you see. They got used to me in the States now when they first heard me when I was here they did not like it I remember. It’s a little different. They’re going to reject it at first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>But throughout these years of success, Coltrane struggled with alcohol and heroin addiction. Miles Davis famously fired him from his band for it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so, the story goes, Coltrane got clean, cold turkey, an experience he describes in the liner notes of his masterpiece, \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>, which came out in 1965. Here’s Denzel Washington reading them in the documentary \u003cem>Chasing Trane\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Denzel Washington reading Coltrane: \u003c/strong>During the year 1957, I experienced by the grace of Gd a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly ask to be given the means and the privilege to make others happy through music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>A Love Supreme marked a turning point in Coltrane’s career. The album was Coltrane’s declaration to God, his commitment to love and the divine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it has become the sacred text of a church in San Francisco — the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, Global Spiritual Community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Opening riff of A Love Supreme plays\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Today on Bay Curious, we’re going to church to learn how a jazz musician came to be revered as a saint and how the Coltrane Church has been a part of many cultural movements over the decades, transforming alongside the city. I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Don’t go away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>The Coltrane Church has been worshipping John Coltrane’s music, philosophy, and at times, even the man himself for 60 years. Reporter Asal Ehsanipour takes us to Sunday mass to learn more about what that sounds like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of Coltrane Church Mass\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church opens Sunday mass with the blow of a conch shell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of conch shell blowing\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Then the saxophone comes in, blaring the opening notes of John Coltrane’s \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A Love Supreme plays\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>On the altar is a Byzantine-style portrait of John Coltrane. He’s wearing a white robe and clutching his soprano saxophone. A gold halo glitters above his head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the service, the band alternates between sax, bass, and drum solos in a kind of makeshift jazz concert. Later, the sermon offered by His Eminence the Most Reverend Franzo W. King is a mix of traditional Christian teachings, and references to Coltrane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King during mass: \u003c/strong>Jesus is the Lord of lords and the king of kings. And that one John Will.i.am Coltrane is that anointed sound that leaped down from the throne of heaven.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>For Archbishop King and his wife, the Most Reverend Mother Marina, the music and their worship is one and the same.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>The mission of the church is to paint the globe with Coltrane Consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Coltrane Consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>Coltrane Consciousness is acknowledging that the music and the sound of John Coltraine is that anointed sound. So we want everybody to become aware of the power of this music, of this man, that testimony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The Kings first heard the power of that testimony in 1960s San Francisco — as a young couple in love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>The music was as hip as you could get, and we were trying to be hipsters and being into this music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>One weekend, 1965, Franzo and Marina planned to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. They wanted to see The John Coltrane Quartet at a club in North Beach called The Jazz Workshop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>You had to be 21 and we were both underage, but I knew the doorman. And he took us right up front.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>As soon as Coltrane entered the room, the Kings felt the energy around them shift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>When they walked out, it was almost like they were walking on a carpet of air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina: \u003c/strong>It was immediate. You could feel the presence, that energy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Coltrane music starts here\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>And then he lifted his horn. We were right in front, and he pointed right at our table.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>From the first note, we were lifted into another place beyond the confines of that jazz club. And when we finished, our drinks were still on the table, the ice had melted. I don’t remember us even talking to each other.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>I didn’t know exactly how to react to it. I was just in the moment of experiencing a new experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We were caught in a windstorm of the spirit of the Holy Ghost. It was a powerful thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They call this experience their “sound baptism.” From then on, their calling would be to spread John Coltrane’s gospel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We couldn’t keep it to ourselves. We had to give testimony, we had to tell people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>And tell people they did. Franzo and Marina had actually created a space to share their favorite music with friends — in a way, their first iteration of the Coltrane Church. Pastor Wanika King-Stephens still remembers those evenings her parents used to host.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>Really what that entailed was our listening clinic that took place in my parents’ living room. My mom would put on a pot of beans and make some cornbread and have people come over and they would sit and listen to the music of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Franzo and Marina poured over liner notes and interviews, spent hours absorbed in the music, analyzing it together. Then came July 17, 1967.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>When John Coltrane died I came into the living room to find my dad and my uncle and they had been up all night. Listening to Trane and just talking about him and the music and so when I came in the room, I’m like, “what’s what’s wrong?” You know, they said, you know, “they killed John.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Coltrane died from liver cancer, most likely fueled by his drug and alcohol addiction. But to Franzo, his death symbolized the systems of racism that targeted Black men in America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was a time of heightened tension for San Francisco’s Black population. The city’s so-called “urban renewal” project was in full swing and it targeted low-income neighborhoods with minority residents for demolition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>The redevelopment came in with the Negro removal and devastated the community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Redevelopment brought an end to the “Harlem of the West” that defined the Fillmore in the 40s and 50s. Jazz clubs shuttered. Minority and elderly residents were forced from their homes. And the city’s Black-owned music scene was decimated. Franzo, though, was passionate that people needed to hear this music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>And it was during that period, too, where so-called black consciousness was coming out. It was just a very high cultural, political things going on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>So he and Marina mobilized. They opened what was essentially an underground jazz club — from their basement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Coltrane had spoken out about the corporatization of jazz. It was just \u003cu>one\u003c/u> example of how he’d grown into an icon for the Black Power movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Coltrane’s song Alabama plays \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Here’s Coltrane’s 1963 song, Alabama, about the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four African American girls. Coltrane composed it to the rhythm of Martin Luther King Jr.’s eulogy following the attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>So we’re living in these times of turmoil, yes it comes out in the music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>But eventually, something shifted. For the Kings, the work stopped being about saving the music or the culture. It was about saving souls. Because after years of studying Coltrane, it had become clear to them that his music, his activism — his whole belief system — was really a declaration of faith.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>And we hear John Coltrane saying, my music is the spiritual expression of what I am, my faith, my knowledge, my being.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The Kings went all in on their devotion. They converted the jazz club into a temple. Now they didn’t just revere Coltrane. They worshipped him. Believed he was the second coming of Christ.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>That he’s more than just a musician, but he is a prophet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>And that \u003cem>A Love Supreme \u003c/em>was his sacred text — his doctrine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A Love Supreme starts playing\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>For 32 minutes and 47 seconds, Coltrane’s saxophone pulses and intertwines with piano and drums, a four note bassline bedded beneath the sound. It’s played in all 12 keys, sending a message that you can find A Love Supreme everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We hear the Lord speaking to us in this music. I’ve had John Coltrane through the music call my name. So we have revelations that come through the music. And you find that in the sound of the music, you find it in the name of the compositions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Archbishop King and Mother Marina say the album’s four song titles — \u003cem>Acknowledgment, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm —\u003c/em> offer a formula for how to reach a higher power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>The way his notes are moving and the way the sounds are connected, it’s almost like a rumble. It’s like a war. Sometimes he’s pleading your case. Every time I hear it, there’s something new. There’s always life there. It’s in the music, the magic is in the music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Franzo and Marina surrendered themselves to Coltrane. They prayed, meditated, and fasted for days at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>And we just felt like we were in the right place at the right time, and that the Spirit of God was really heavy in this part of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Around this time, The Black Panther Party was gaining traction. Started in Oakland in 1966 its co-founder Huey P. Newton had become a kind of mentor to Franzo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Huey P. Newton: \u003c/strong>The Black Panther Party for self defense is organized now throughout the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Here’s Newton in 1968 describing the mission of the Panthers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Huey P Newton: \u003c/strong>And we advocate that all Black people in America are taught what politics is all about and what our history is all about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Newton encouraged the Coltrane Church to fuse politics and culture with religion. And in 1971, the Kings opened their first permanent location in a storefront on Divisadero St. From there, they started hosting social programs, similar to the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>The food program was one of my favorite things in the whole world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Pastor Wanika says that seven days a week, they’d give free vegetarian meals to hundreds of people. The lines snaked around the block.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>We would sing songs, you know, \u003cem>‘Serving the people makes me mighty glad. [fade under] \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We would go to Safeways and the supermarkets and the stuff that they would throw out. We’d take it out, put it in a tub, clean it, and serve it to the people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Franzo and Marina believed that to be right with God was to be \u003cem>\u003cu>right\u003c/u>\u003c/em> with the people. So they also hosted free yoga classes and donated clothes to the community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We kind of learned that stuff from the hippies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The vibe was Flower Power, psychedelics…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>The Grateful Dead…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Utopian communes based out of old Victorian houses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>The so-called hippie movement was a powerful thing and we were very much a part of that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>And like the hippies, the Kings started borrowing from Eastern spirituality, led by Coltrane’s music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Opening notes of “Om” by John Coltrane – 00:00\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>John Coltrane has an album entitled Om. I thought of that as far as one of the albums that meant so much to us, especially early on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound of Coltrane’s “Om” playing \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>And we literally took that as John saying, “I am Om.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>By the mid-70s, the Kings began shifting away from Christianity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>We embrace the unity of religious ideas. If you want to say that Buddha is the light, we don’t have a problem with that.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>They incorporated Sanskrit chanting in their service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King chanting\u003cem>: \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>That’s something that we learned from Alice Coltrane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Alice Coltrane, John’s widow, had been immersed in Hindu spirituality for years and had come to San Francisco to deepen her practice. The Kings met her here and eventually joined her \u003cu>new\u003c/u> religious community called the Vedantic Center. Franzo and Marina began worshipping Alice as the wife of God and adopted Hindu names.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pastor Wanika remembers when her parents made that shift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>So we go from jazz to Sanskrit and chanting and singing, you know, Hare Krishna and Shiva, Lord Shiva.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>The Kings sang backup on Alice’s early devotional records, like this one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Singing \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>But in the early 80s, their relationship splintered. Alice filed a 7.5 million dollar lawsuit against the Coltrane Church for copyright infringement and using her husband’s name and likeness without permission. Alice eventually dropped the lawsuit, but the incident drew the attention of the African Orthodox Church, who wanted to expand to the West Coast. For the Kings, it was actually kind of similar to the temple they’d first opened except they had to recharacterize Coltrane from their God incarnate to a patron saint. They agreed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>For me, John was always just sort of evolving in my consciousness. So for him to go from God to Saint was not a big stretch for me. It’s like, great, okay. I can swing with that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>So in 1982, they became the \u003cem>\u003cu>Saint\u003c/u>\u003c/em> John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. Now part of an organized religious movement, the Coltrane Church leaned into its status as public facing leaders. Keepers, if you will, of San Francisco culture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>I think this is something people need to understand that this church has been an ambassador for this city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>They traveled around the world. Like to the Antibes Jazz Festival in France — where Coltrane himself famously performed \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em> in 1965.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>Carlos Santana joined us on the stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King: \u003c/strong>And even on airlines, we would say, hey, I saw your church advertised on United Airlines, and it would, you know, it was like a goal of places you need to see in San Francisco, and it would be the St. John Coltrane Church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>But the year 2000 marked yet another shift for the Coltrane Church when they were forced out of their Divisadero storefront. Their home of nearly 30 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>It was awful, it was awful. I mean, I know I never saw it coming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Their rent more than doubled, and they had to end their free food program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Wanika King-Stephens: \u003c/strong>We had to leave, and that was our home. That was our home. And then I watched that whole community change. And I just, I tell you, I couldn’t drive through that neighborhood without crying for, like, a whole year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>They’ve relocated a few times since then. First to the Fillmore where they were one of just a handful of jazz institutions left. But they were evicted from that space too, before moving to their current location out of Fort Mason’s Magic Theater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of Coltrane Church mass: Hallelujah! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mother Marina King during service: \u003c/strong>This next composition is entitled Tune Gene, and it means “He who comes in the glory of the Lord.” So I want you to clap your hands, pick up your tambourines. Do we have any dancers? You know, King David danced before the Lord with all the power of his might.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Now, Archbishop King and Mother Marina see the church as a kind of Mecca, where Coltrane disciples from just about anywhere can worship together. On the day I visit, they’ve come from New York, Seattle, and closer to home, Redwood City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King in the service: \u003c/strong>This is the St. John Will-i-am Coltrane African Orthodox Church Global Spiritual Community. Amen. So we all are family, amen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>At the end of Sunday mass Archbishop King and Mother Marina asked for donations. They’re trying to raise money to buy a building. What they hope will be a permanent home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>So this church needs your money. Amen. Some of y’all are holding on to God’s money now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Archbishop King and Mother Marina are in their 80s and are looking towards the future of the church, how it can live beyond them. Their daughter, Pastor Wanika, plans to take it over, to continue sharing the church’s message.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>So Coltrane Consciousness is a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme. That’s what this coltrane consciousness is all about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asal Ehsanipour: \u003c/strong>Since Archbishop King and Mother Marina’s sound baptism in 1965, the Coltrane Church has had different names, locations, philosophies. In fact, Archbishop King often says that as the seasons change, so do the needs of the people. Change, he says, is baked into the very essence of the church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archbishop King: \u003c/strong>And then at the same time, the church never changes. It remains constantly rooted in love and \u003cem>A Love Supreme\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music fades out\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> That story was reported by Asal Ehsanipour. You can attend mass at the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church every Sunday at the Magic Theater at Fort Mason.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen-Price.\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 great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "how-the-bay-areas-gay-bars-became-a-battleground-for-lgtbq-rights-in-the-1950s",
"title": "How the Bay Area’s Gay Bars Became a Battleground for LGBTQ+ Rights in the 1950s",
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"headTitle": "How the Bay Area’s Gay Bars Became a Battleground for LGBTQ+ Rights in the 1950s | 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> has an international reputation as a haven of freedom and culture for the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/lgbtq\">LGBTQ+\u003c/a> community. And with good reason.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco elected \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11706248/40-years-after-assassinations-assessing-the-legacies-of-harvey-milk-and-george-moscone\">Harvey Milk\u003c/a>, California’s first openly gay public official. It’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11876846/never-take-it-down-the-original-1978-rainbow-flag-returns-to-sf\">the birthplace of the rainbow pride flag\u003c/a>, now a global symbol. The city has also long had an iconic drag queen scene and legendary nightlife with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13930323/san-francisco-gay-bars-history-silver-rail-febes-black-cat\">a long history of bustling gay\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13929998/historic-lesbian-bars-san-francisco-mauds-pegs-front-anns-monas-440-tommy-vasu\">lesbian bars\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the Bay Area was not always this way. The LGBTQ+ community had to fight for these freedoms and safe spaces. Often, this fight was against oppressive policing from the state and local government. And some important moments in that fight happened in unexpected places, like Pacifica.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was like, whoa, it says this was in Pacifica! Why have I never heard of it?” Bay Curious listener Henry Lie asked. He’d stumbled across mention of a 1956 police raid at a bar called Hazel’s Inn, where nearly a hundred queer folks were arrested. He wanted to know more.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Progress and repression of LGBTQ+ rights\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“The early 1950s, I would say it was the heyday of gay nightlife in San Francisco,” said Nan Alamilla Boyd, an oral historian at the UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. As a longtime researcher of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ history, Boyd has interviewed dozens of queer individuals who frequented gay bars during this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her interviews uncover stories of the Bay Area’s history, especially the repression queer people faced in the 1950s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12069459\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12069459\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1171\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED-160x94.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED-1536x899.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The building once housed Hazel’s Inn. This photo was taken in 1966, when the city condemned the building. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of The Pacifica Historical Society)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“A lot of these people [I interviewed] witnessed front row seats to [this repressive era], and kept being as out and proud as possible and survived to tell about it,” Boyd said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1951, the California State Board of Equalization revoked the liquor license of the Black Cat Cafe, a popular gay bar, because the establishment was “injurious to public morals.” The Black Cat owner, Sol Stouman, appealed the move to the California Supreme Court. The court ruled in his favor, affirming that the presence of LGBTQ+ people in a bar was allowable, as long as there were no “immoral acts” taking place. The case is known as Stoumen v. Reilly and many historians see it as the first legal victory for the LGBTQ+ community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The argument was that it’s not illegal to be a homosexual, it’s illegal to do homosexual acts,” Boyd explained. “I know it seems really regressive now, but the decision was liberating because the conclusion was that it wasn’t status that was illegal, it was behavior.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first time, LGBTQ+ people had the protected right to gather at bars without facing prosecution for simply being a queer person in public. And so queer nightlife blossomed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There were maybe four or five ‘lesbian bars’ in North Beach within walking distance of each other at any point in time between 1948 and 1955,” Boyd said.[aside postID=news_12029551 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/250205-WildSideWest-21-BL_qed-1020x680.jpg']But just a few years later, the U.S. government started targeting the LGBTQ+ community. Now known as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.history.com/articles/state-department-gay-employees-outed-fired-lavender-scare\">Lavender Scare\u003c/a>, many of the freedoms enjoyed in the early 50s came under attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order in 1953 banning gay people from federal work for immoral conduct and “sexual perversion.” And in California, a new state agency called the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control was created in 1955. Known as the ABC, its job was to ensure that licensed bars abided by legal and \u003cem>moral \u003c/em>codes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Things really changed in 1955,” Boyd said. The ABC began waging a war against gay bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency found ways to undermine the protections previously won by the LGBTQ+ community in Stouman v. Reilly. Since “homosexual acts” were still illegal, suddenly the state was very concerned about specific actions taking place in bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was a question about what exactly [were] the behaviors that [were] illegal,” Boyd said. “Do you have to see someone having sex in the bar? Or is it kissing? What about fondling? What about sitting on a lap? What about dancing close? So, all this stuff then started being hashed out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With each enforcement action against queer bar patrons, the ABC expanded the definition of illegal acts. Soon, even dancing with someone of the same sex was punishable. The ABC even collaborated with local law enforcement agencies to conduct undercover surveillance operations that identified and monitored LGBTQ gathering spots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By 1955, the gay bars in San Francisco were getting less and less safe. And as harassment and policing increased, the LGBTQ+ community began looking for new places to gather outside of San Francisco, away from well-known gay bars. The community ended up down the coast, where they made Hazel’s Inn their spot.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Hazel’s Inn raid\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In the early hours of Feb. 19, 1956, a group of 35 ABC and San Mateo County Sheriff’s officers stormed into a full and bustling Hazel’s Inn. There were around 200 patrons present in the bar, mostly men, when the sheriff jumped onto the bar and announced, “This is a raid!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ninety people were arrested that night, including the bar’s owner, Hazel Nikola, a straight woman in her 60’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12069461\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2125px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12069461\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2125\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-scaled.jpg 2125w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-2000x2409.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-160x193.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-1275x1536.jpg 1275w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-1700x2048.jpg 1700w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2125px) 100vw, 2125px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Coverage of the Hazel’s Inn raid from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1956. It was common, at the time, for newspapers to use derogatory language in reference to the LGBTQ community. \u003ccite>(The San Francisco Chronicle via Newsbank)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Hazel’s Inn had been under state surveillance for months, and patrons were forced to walk past a line of agents who had been watching them. One by one, agents picked out those they had seen showing queer affection. Most of those arrested faced vagrancy charges. Nikola’s liquor license was quickly revoked for knowingly hosting a hangout for queer people and for serving an underage person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-times-20-february-1956-smt-hazels-i/10556199/\">\u003cem>The San Mateo Times\u003c/em>\u003c/a> asked Sheriff Earl Whitmore about the raid, he said, “Let it be known that we are not going to tolerate gatherings of homosexuals in the county.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The full extent of the ABC’s operation at Hazel’s Inn became clear as the case was brought before\u003ca href=\"https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AHSI&u=glbths&id=GALE%7CMDRLJF555849529&v=2.1&it=r&sid=bookmark-AHSI&sPage=11&asid=6014d9b9\"> the ABC Board\u003c/a> and the \u003ca href=\"https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-court-of-appeal/1810632.html\">court\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In court documents, Laurence E. Strong, an ABC agent, described the scene at Hazel’s Inn the night of the raid and in the months leading up to it. Strong described how one male patron sat on another man’s lap and how two others were seen holding hands. In the corner of the bar, a couple was seen embracing as one nestled his head into the other’s shoulder. Some men pinched each other’s butts and fondled each other while dancing. Women danced close together with other women. Men were seen powdering their faces and women wore slacks and sports coats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These scenes of queerness would be used in court to justify the revocation of Nikola’s liquor license for being a “resort for sexual perverts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While most of those arrested that night were cleared of charges, the damage had already been done. Newspapers caught wind of the raid, and patrons were publicly outed, with their names, occupations and home addresses published for all to see.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were so fearful,” Boyd said. “There were [LGBTQ+ people] who would never go out because they were afraid of getting arrested. And then [their] name would be in the paper and [their] life would be ruined.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Hazel’s Inn raid became a playbook for the state to target the queer community over the following 15 years. Surveillance, raids, and the revocation of liquor licenses were all part of a strategy to push LGBTQ+ people out of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Resistance amidst repression\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Looking back at this history of aggressive policing against queer people and their bars, it’s no surprise that queer nightlife continues to be central to the LGBTQ+ community. For many, gay bars were the only spaces they were afforded the freedom to be openly queer. They were also the battlegrounds where civil rights were won and lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the fight for LGBTQ+ rights continues. As the federal government uses its power to withhold \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12049666/nowhere-else-to-go-sf-families-protest-kaisers-new-limits-on-gender-affirming-care\">gender-affirming healthcare\u003c/a> and to target\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12047432/us-sues-california-over-its-refusal-to-ban-transgender-athletes-from-girls-sports\"> transgender youth in sports\u003c/a>, Boyd said it can be hard to keep hope alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068581\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068581\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nan Alamilla Boyd, a historian, poses for a portrait at the GLBT Historical Society Archives in San Francisco on Jan. 2, 2026. \u003ccite>(Tâm Vũ / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The hits [to LGBTQ+ rights] keep coming and in many different ways,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, her work has taught her that in times of repression, powerful political organizing and cultural innovation can emerge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“By the early 1960s, [queer] bartenders and the bar owners had pretty elaborate methods to resist the policing agencies,” Boyd said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They created a resistance movement powerful enough to outlast the government’s efforts to eradicate queer nightlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You can’t really make cultural innovation illegal because it happens,” Boyd said. “It’s everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s the thing that’s our spirit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s because of that indomitable spirit that the Bay Area looks and feels the way it does today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[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>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>San Francisco and its surrounding Bay Area have long been known as a gay capital of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After all, it’s here, where the first lesbian civil rights group was formed, the Daughters of Bilitis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And where Harvey Milk became an iconic gay public official! [tape]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Harvey Milk:\u003c/strong> I will fight to represent my constituents. I will fight to represent the city and county of San Francisco. I will fight to give those people who once walked away hope, so that those people will walk back in. Thank you very much. [clapping]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>It was the birthplace of the Gay pride flag. And it’s where city hall is lit up in a rainbow for pride month. This is the Bay Area that our question asker, Henry Lie, knows well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music stops\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie: \u003c/strong>I’m originally from Pacifica…went to high school at Terranova High School.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Henry always thought of Pacifica as an extension of San Francisco — it’s just a few miles south, after all. And, there’s not a whole lot that surprises Henry about his hometown. That is until he learned about a moment in Pacifica’s history that left him with a ton of questions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie:\u003c/strong> We have this museum.. I think I was there and saw like a footnote or something and it just said like, oh yeah, Hazel’s Inn raid where, you know, there was a large gathering of LGBTQ+ identifying people and a bunch of people were arrested, couple of people charged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Henry had stumbled across a forgotten moment in history — a massive police raid that took place in 1956, part of a crusade to push LGBTQ people out of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ominous music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Local newspapers documented the raid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice Over 1: \u003c/strong>San Francisco Examiner: Ninety persons, mostly men, were booked at the San Mateo County jail yesterday after a vice raid on a tavern suspected of being a gathering place for sex deviates.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice Over 2: \u003c/strong>San Mateo Times: The raid, according to Sheriff Whitmore, “was to let homosexuals know we’re not going to tolerate their congregation in this county.” \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice Over 3: \u003c/strong>Redwood City Tribune: Mrs. Nicola, owner of Hazel’s Inn, is charged with operating a resort for sexual deviates. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> Big questions began surfacing for Henry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie:\u003c/strong> And I was like, whoa, I’ve never even heard of Hazel’s Inn. This says this was in Pacifica. Why have I never heard of it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> So he came to Bay Curious, hoping to find out more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie:\u003c/strong> Could you dive deeper into the Hazel’s Inn raid in Pacifica and the effects that it had on the LGBTQ plus community in the greater Bay area in the late 1950s?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Bay Curious theme music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>I’m Olivia Allen-Price and this is Bay Curious. This week, we’re going back to the gay bars of the 1950s to learn about a moment in time when the San Francisco Bay Area was far less welcoming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All that coming right up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Theme music ends\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor Break\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>To dig deeper into Bay Area queer history, KQED’s Ana De Almeida Amaral takes us to Pacifica.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral:\u003c/strong> Pacifica is a beautiful place, with sprawling views of the ocean and stunning beaches. It has that small town feel, complete with a\u003cem> tiny\u003c/em> museum showcasing its history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> This is our little museum…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Laura Del Rosso was born and raised in Pacifica, and serves as a docent and board member for the Pacifica Coastside Museum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> This whole area around here was full of speakeasies, taverns, restaurants, and brothels during Prohibition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>It seems hard to imagine now, but this small town was once infamous for its nightlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso: \u003c/strong>Some people think that San Mateo County coast was actually the wettest place in the whole United States, meaning there was more booze here and in Half Moon Bay area than anywhere else in the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>While the historical society has long been aware of the clandestine nightlife during Prohibition, it wasn’t until a few years ago that they started uncovering the history of a hushed queer nightlife scene that took hold right here, in the 1950’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jazzy music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Hazel’s Inn was a tavern in Sharp Park, now a neighborhood in Pacifica. ^The bar is long gone^, but in 1956 the Pacifica Tribune, described it as a large and homey space, with knick-nacks above a mahogany bar, a shuffle board, a dance floor and a jukebox.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hazel’s Inn was owned and run by Hazel Nikola, a straight woman in her 60s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> From what we understand then, after she got a divorce she was running the place by herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And the place was popular! Sometimes there were up to 500 patrons in a weekend. For a long time it catered mostly to locals and tourists on holiday at the beach, but then in 1955 and 56, the LGBT community made it \u003cem>their\u003c/em> spot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> When the gay men started coming from San Francisco, she welcomed them. And she was non-judgmental. However, it’s obvious that somebody was not happy and did contact the sheriff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>But before we can get to that night — the night of the Hazel’s Inn raid — we have to ask why here? Miles from San Francisco, hidden in a small town, far from any other gay nightlife, why was Hazel’s Inn the place that attracted hundreds of LGBTQ people?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>To answer this question, I went to the archives at the GLBT historical society — where collections documenting the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Trans community are housed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There, I met Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd. She’s an oral historian with the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd: \u003c/strong>I was professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State for decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>She’s one of the few people who has researched queer nightlife in the 1950’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> 1956, 90 persons, mostly men were booked at the San Mateo county jail…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>At the archives we read some of the newspaper clippings about Hazel’s Inn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> Suspected of being a gathering place for sex deviates…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>She did a lot of her research back in the 1990s and was able to interview dozens of queer people who lived in the Bay Area in the 1940s and 50s. Most of them have since passed away, so her work and these archives are some of the last links to this story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Piano music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Back in the 1940s, San Francisco already had a queer nightlife scene, but at the time it was illegal to be gay. And bars that were caught serving queer people… that was illegal too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> If you were not a legal kind of person, then you couldn’t like buy a drink in a bar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>But the law changed in 1951— when the Black Cat Cafe, in San Francisco, had its liquor license suspended for serving members of the LGBT community. The owner appealed the decision to the California Supreme court. The case is known as Stouman vs. Riley and it’s a big moment in queer civil rights history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> The argument was that it’s not illegal to be a homosexual, it’s illegal to do homosexual acts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>The court agreed. And the ruling became one of the first civil rights protections for LGBTQ people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music ends\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>For the first time, they had the protected right to assemble. Gay men and lesbian women could buy drinks at bars and hang out with other queer friends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is as long as there were no homosexual acts taking place that were deemed “illegal or immoral.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many legal decisions, it was a vague but powerful protection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> I know it seems really regressive now, right? But the decision was liberating because the conclusion was that it wasn’t Status that was illegal, it was behavior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And so queer nightlife in the Bay Area blossomed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> In the early 1950s, I would say it was the heyday of gay nightlife in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And really iconic gay bars came into the picture. The Black Cat Cafe was running again, Tommy’s Place and Ann’s 440 opened. And these places became sanctuaries for the LGBT community to be \u003cem>together. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> There were maybe four or five quote unquote lesbian bars in North Beach in walking distance of each other at any point in time between like, let’s say, 1948 and 1955. So it’s like a really interesting community that evolved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And this was really important because in the 1950s it was still not super safe to be gay. Many queer folks were closeted by day in order to keep their jobs. But at night…at the bar…there was a freedom that didn’t really exist anywhere else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> And it was before the state caught wind of what was happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>But then a panic started to take hold in the United States…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Senator McCarthy archival tape:\u003c/strong> Are you a member of the communist conspiracy as of this moment?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>A conservative mindset took hold in American politics and culture — ushering in a time of suspicion and fear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Senator McCarthy archival tape:\u003c/strong> Our nation may very well die, and I ask you caused it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And quickly, LGBT people become \u003cu>targets\u003c/u> at the federal, state and local level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>President Eisenhower signed an executive order in 1953 banning gay people from federal work, labeling them as having immoral conduct and “sexual perversion.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, in 1955 \u003cem>California\u003c/em> created a new state agency called the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control or the ABC. An agency whose sole job was to ensure that licensed bars abided by legal and \u003cem>moral\u003c/em> codes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And from the moment the department of Alcoholic Beverage control was created a top priority for them was to…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd: \u003c/strong>Shut down the gay bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And they did this by finding ways around those vague protections won in the Stouman v. Riley case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While queer people were granted the right to assemble, “homosexual acts” were still illegal, so authorities started taking an interest in the specifics of what that meant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> There’s a question about like, well then what exactly are the behaviors that are illegal? Like, do you have to like see someone, having sex in the bar? Or is it kissing? What about fondling? What about sitting on a lap? What about holding hands? What about dancing close? So all this stuff was like, then started being hashed out, you know, this is an illegal act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control started collaborating with a bunch of law enforcement agencies throughout the Bay Area to ferret out people engaged in those acts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By 1955, the gay bars in San Francisco were getting less and less safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And as harassment and policing increased, the LGBT community began looking for new places to gather outside of San Francisco, away from well-known gay bars, and they ended up down the coast, at Hazel’s Inn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound design of a raucous bar scene\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The only testimonies about what happened on Feb. 19, 1956, the night that Hazel’s Inn was raided, come from court documents and hearings at the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Laurence E. Strong, an ABC agent, described in detail what was happening at the bar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That night, the dance floor was alive, and the bar was filled with around 200 patrons, mostly men. These men wrapped their arms around each other and embraced one another while dancing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also described how one patron sat on another man’s lap and how two other men held hands. In the corner of the bar, a couple embraced as one nestled his head into the other’s shoulder. Some men pinched each other’s butts and fondled each other while dancing. Women danced close together with other women. Men were seen powdering their faces and women wore slacks and sports coats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It sounds like a scene of queer joy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music turns tense\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Suddenly, 35 law enforcement agents stormed the bar — a mix of San Mateo county sheriff’s officers and ABC agents began arresting people. The sheriff jumped on to the bar and announced:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice over:\u003c/strong> “This is a raid!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Patrons were forced to walk past a line of agents. And one by one, agents picked out people they had seen showing queer affection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Boyd says that the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board had been watching Hazel’s Inn for months, gathering evidence and building a case that behavior there was “illegal and immoral.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd: \u003c/strong>They had undercover agents in the bars. And they would go in twos or threes and they would watch each other. And somebody would get an interested person, and then would sort of lead them on, until there was some kind of physical, sexual, or flirtatious engagement that involved touching. It was entrapment. And that was a common and acceptable practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Ninety people were arrested that night at Hazel’s Inn, including Hazel Nikola — the owner. The bar’s liquor license was quickly revoked for being quote “a resort for sexual perverts” and for serving someone underaged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The mass arrest caught the attention of a variety of civil rights groups, including the ACLU who represented 30 defendants. Most of those arrested were cleared of charges, but the damage had already been done. People were outed in the newspapers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> There would be a list of the people and their address and sometimes their occupation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice over: \u003c/strong>The San Mateo Times: Local persons arrested were: Iris Ann Glasgow, 24 years old. Clerk. 1515 James Street, Redwood City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Many of these people were publicly named as “sexual perverts”. That often meant being ostracized or losing their job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> People were so fearful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Cello music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>As for the bar, Hazel fought the revocation of her liquor license for\u003cem> two years \u003c/em>but the court ultimately sided with the ABC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> I think she was just really bitter about what happened here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music ends\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Back in the Pacifica Coastside museum, Laura reflected on what the raid did to Hazel Nikola.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> She lost her liquor license and things just kind of went downhill for her. You have that information on the thing. And she ended up, she ended closing. She was very, very bitter at the end. She felt like she was really an important part of the community and that they had kind of betrayed her. She left Sharp Park and went to live somewhere else. And never came back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>For the queer community, the effects were even more devastating. The Hazel’s Inn Raid became a playbook for the state to target the queer community over the next 15 years. (Surveillance, raids, and the revocation of liquor licenses.) It was a strategy to push LGBTQ people out of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it didn’t work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite this aggressive policing and repression, the gay bars never died.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Queer patrons, and bartenders, and bar owners found ways to keep going. They found ways to spot surveillance in their bars, they organized and worked to keep the police out of their spaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historian Dr. Boyd again:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> My takeaway from history as a historian is that during these times of repression. There’s cultural innovation that happens. You can’t really name it yet, right? But it’s taking shape you know, that there’s something coming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>During those years of extreme repression, queer activists were making connections, organizing, and laying the groundwork for the next several decades of activism that would see LGBTQ rights expand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area has changed a lot since the raid at Hazel’s Inn. But still, a fearless commitment to community and authenticity — the spirit that kept these gay bars alive — lives on here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>That was reporter Ana De Almeida Amaral. Featuring the voices of Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman, Carly Severn, Christopher Beale and Paul Lancour for archival material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Did you know that Bay Curious listeners help choose which questions we answer on the podcast? Each month we have a new voting round up at \u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">BayCurious.org\u003c/a>, with three fascinating questions to choose from. This month…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Question 1: \u003c/strong>Did the Navy airship America crash land into several houses? What happened to the crew?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Question 2:\u003c/strong> Why is San Francisco home to so many federal and statewide courts? Why aren’t they in Sacramento or Los Angeles?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Question 3: \u003c/strong>I want to learn more about San Francisco upzoning and how people feel about it in the Richmond and Sunset districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Cast your vote with one click at \u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">BayCurious.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie:\u003c/strong> Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Become a member today at \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/donate\">kqed.org/donate\u003c/a>. Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me Olivia Allen-Price. With extra support from Katie Sprenger, Matt Morales, Tim Olsen, Maha Sanad, 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. Have a wonderful 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>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a> has an international reputation as a haven of freedom and culture for the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/lgbtq\">LGBTQ+\u003c/a> community. And with good reason.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco elected \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11706248/40-years-after-assassinations-assessing-the-legacies-of-harvey-milk-and-george-moscone\">Harvey Milk\u003c/a>, California’s first openly gay public official. It’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11876846/never-take-it-down-the-original-1978-rainbow-flag-returns-to-sf\">the birthplace of the rainbow pride flag\u003c/a>, now a global symbol. The city has also long had an iconic drag queen scene and legendary nightlife with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13930323/san-francisco-gay-bars-history-silver-rail-febes-black-cat\">a long history of bustling gay\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13929998/historic-lesbian-bars-san-francisco-mauds-pegs-front-anns-monas-440-tommy-vasu\">lesbian bars\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the Bay Area was not always this way. The LGBTQ+ community had to fight for these freedoms and safe spaces. Often, this fight was against oppressive policing from the state and local government. And some important moments in that fight happened in unexpected places, like Pacifica.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was like, whoa, it says this was in Pacifica! Why have I never heard of it?” Bay Curious listener Henry Lie asked. He’d stumbled across mention of a 1956 police raid at a bar called Hazel’s Inn, where nearly a hundred queer folks were arrested. He wanted to know more.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Progress and repression of LGBTQ+ rights\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“The early 1950s, I would say it was the heyday of gay nightlife in San Francisco,” said Nan Alamilla Boyd, an oral historian at the UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. As a longtime researcher of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ history, Boyd has interviewed dozens of queer individuals who frequented gay bars during this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her interviews uncover stories of the Bay Area’s history, especially the repression queer people faced in the 1950s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12069459\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12069459\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1171\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED-160x94.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/HAZEL_S-BUILDING_1966-KQED-1536x899.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The building once housed Hazel’s Inn. This photo was taken in 1966, when the city condemned the building. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of The Pacifica Historical Society)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“A lot of these people [I interviewed] witnessed front row seats to [this repressive era], and kept being as out and proud as possible and survived to tell about it,” Boyd said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1951, the California State Board of Equalization revoked the liquor license of the Black Cat Cafe, a popular gay bar, because the establishment was “injurious to public morals.” The Black Cat owner, Sol Stouman, appealed the move to the California Supreme Court. The court ruled in his favor, affirming that the presence of LGBTQ+ people in a bar was allowable, as long as there were no “immoral acts” taking place. The case is known as Stoumen v. Reilly and many historians see it as the first legal victory for the LGBTQ+ community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The argument was that it’s not illegal to be a homosexual, it’s illegal to do homosexual acts,” Boyd explained. “I know it seems really regressive now, but the decision was liberating because the conclusion was that it wasn’t status that was illegal, it was behavior.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first time, LGBTQ+ people had the protected right to gather at bars without facing prosecution for simply being a queer person in public. And so queer nightlife blossomed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There were maybe four or five ‘lesbian bars’ in North Beach within walking distance of each other at any point in time between 1948 and 1955,” Boyd said.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>But just a few years later, the U.S. government started targeting the LGBTQ+ community. Now known as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.history.com/articles/state-department-gay-employees-outed-fired-lavender-scare\">Lavender Scare\u003c/a>, many of the freedoms enjoyed in the early 50s came under attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order in 1953 banning gay people from federal work for immoral conduct and “sexual perversion.” And in California, a new state agency called the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control was created in 1955. Known as the ABC, its job was to ensure that licensed bars abided by legal and \u003cem>moral \u003c/em>codes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Things really changed in 1955,” Boyd said. The ABC began waging a war against gay bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency found ways to undermine the protections previously won by the LGBTQ+ community in Stouman v. Reilly. Since “homosexual acts” were still illegal, suddenly the state was very concerned about specific actions taking place in bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was a question about what exactly [were] the behaviors that [were] illegal,” Boyd said. “Do you have to see someone having sex in the bar? Or is it kissing? What about fondling? What about sitting on a lap? What about dancing close? So, all this stuff then started being hashed out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With each enforcement action against queer bar patrons, the ABC expanded the definition of illegal acts. Soon, even dancing with someone of the same sex was punishable. The ABC even collaborated with local law enforcement agencies to conduct undercover surveillance operations that identified and monitored LGBTQ gathering spots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By 1955, the gay bars in San Francisco were getting less and less safe. And as harassment and policing increased, the LGBTQ+ community began looking for new places to gather outside of San Francisco, away from well-known gay bars. The community ended up down the coast, where they made Hazel’s Inn their spot.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Hazel’s Inn raid\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In the early hours of Feb. 19, 1956, a group of 35 ABC and San Mateo County Sheriff’s officers stormed into a full and bustling Hazel’s Inn. There were around 200 patrons present in the bar, mostly men, when the sheriff jumped onto the bar and announced, “This is a raid!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ninety people were arrested that night, including the bar’s owner, Hazel Nikola, a straight woman in her 60’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12069461\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2125px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12069461\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2125\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-scaled.jpg 2125w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-2000x2409.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-160x193.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-1275x1536.jpg 1275w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/San_Francisco_Chronicle__February_20_1956__Hazel_s-Inn-KQED-1-1700x2048.jpg 1700w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2125px) 100vw, 2125px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Coverage of the Hazel’s Inn raid from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1956. It was common, at the time, for newspapers to use derogatory language in reference to the LGBTQ community. \u003ccite>(The San Francisco Chronicle via Newsbank)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Hazel’s Inn had been under state surveillance for months, and patrons were forced to walk past a line of agents who had been watching them. One by one, agents picked out those they had seen showing queer affection. Most of those arrested faced vagrancy charges. Nikola’s liquor license was quickly revoked for knowingly hosting a hangout for queer people and for serving an underage person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-times-20-february-1956-smt-hazels-i/10556199/\">\u003cem>The San Mateo Times\u003c/em>\u003c/a> asked Sheriff Earl Whitmore about the raid, he said, “Let it be known that we are not going to tolerate gatherings of homosexuals in the county.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The full extent of the ABC’s operation at Hazel’s Inn became clear as the case was brought before\u003ca href=\"https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AHSI&u=glbths&id=GALE%7CMDRLJF555849529&v=2.1&it=r&sid=bookmark-AHSI&sPage=11&asid=6014d9b9\"> the ABC Board\u003c/a> and the \u003ca href=\"https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-court-of-appeal/1810632.html\">court\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In court documents, Laurence E. Strong, an ABC agent, described the scene at Hazel’s Inn the night of the raid and in the months leading up to it. Strong described how one male patron sat on another man’s lap and how two others were seen holding hands. In the corner of the bar, a couple was seen embracing as one nestled his head into the other’s shoulder. Some men pinched each other’s butts and fondled each other while dancing. Women danced close together with other women. Men were seen powdering their faces and women wore slacks and sports coats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These scenes of queerness would be used in court to justify the revocation of Nikola’s liquor license for being a “resort for sexual perverts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While most of those arrested that night were cleared of charges, the damage had already been done. Newspapers caught wind of the raid, and patrons were publicly outed, with their names, occupations and home addresses published for all to see.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were so fearful,” Boyd said. “There were [LGBTQ+ people] who would never go out because they were afraid of getting arrested. And then [their] name would be in the paper and [their] life would be ruined.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Hazel’s Inn raid became a playbook for the state to target the queer community over the following 15 years. Surveillance, raids, and the revocation of liquor licenses were all part of a strategy to push LGBTQ+ people out of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Resistance amidst repression\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Looking back at this history of aggressive policing against queer people and their bars, it’s no surprise that queer nightlife continues to be central to the LGBTQ+ community. For many, gay bars were the only spaces they were afforded the freedom to be openly queer. They were also the battlegrounds where civil rights were won and lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the fight for LGBTQ+ rights continues. As the federal government uses its power to withhold \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12049666/nowhere-else-to-go-sf-families-protest-kaisers-new-limits-on-gender-affirming-care\">gender-affirming healthcare\u003c/a> and to target\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12047432/us-sues-california-over-its-refusal-to-ban-transgender-athletes-from-girls-sports\"> transgender youth in sports\u003c/a>, Boyd said it can be hard to keep hope alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12068581\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12068581\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260102-hazelsinnraid00178_TV_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nan Alamilla Boyd, a historian, poses for a portrait at the GLBT Historical Society Archives in San Francisco on Jan. 2, 2026. \u003ccite>(Tâm Vũ / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The hits [to LGBTQ+ rights] keep coming and in many different ways,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, her work has taught her that in times of repression, powerful political organizing and cultural innovation can emerge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“By the early 1960s, [queer] bartenders and the bar owners had pretty elaborate methods to resist the policing agencies,” Boyd said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They created a resistance movement powerful enough to outlast the government’s efforts to eradicate queer nightlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You can’t really make cultural innovation illegal because it happens,” Boyd said. “It’s everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s the thing that’s our spirit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s because of that indomitable spirit that the Bay Area looks and feels the way it does today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>San Francisco and its surrounding Bay Area have long been known as a gay capital of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After all, it’s here, where the first lesbian civil rights group was formed, the Daughters of Bilitis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And where Harvey Milk became an iconic gay public official! [tape]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Harvey Milk:\u003c/strong> I will fight to represent my constituents. I will fight to represent the city and county of San Francisco. I will fight to give those people who once walked away hope, so that those people will walk back in. Thank you very much. [clapping]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>It was the birthplace of the Gay pride flag. And it’s where city hall is lit up in a rainbow for pride month. This is the Bay Area that our question asker, Henry Lie, knows well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music stops\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie: \u003c/strong>I’m originally from Pacifica…went to high school at Terranova High School.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Henry always thought of Pacifica as an extension of San Francisco — it’s just a few miles south, after all. And, there’s not a whole lot that surprises Henry about his hometown. That is until he learned about a moment in Pacifica’s history that left him with a ton of questions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie:\u003c/strong> We have this museum.. I think I was there and saw like a footnote or something and it just said like, oh yeah, Hazel’s Inn raid where, you know, there was a large gathering of LGBTQ+ identifying people and a bunch of people were arrested, couple of people charged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Henry had stumbled across a forgotten moment in history — a massive police raid that took place in 1956, part of a crusade to push LGBTQ people out of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ominous music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Local newspapers documented the raid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice Over 1: \u003c/strong>San Francisco Examiner: Ninety persons, mostly men, were booked at the San Mateo County jail yesterday after a vice raid on a tavern suspected of being a gathering place for sex deviates.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice Over 2: \u003c/strong>San Mateo Times: The raid, according to Sheriff Whitmore, “was to let homosexuals know we’re not going to tolerate their congregation in this county.” \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice Over 3: \u003c/strong>Redwood City Tribune: Mrs. Nicola, owner of Hazel’s Inn, is charged with operating a resort for sexual deviates. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> Big questions began surfacing for Henry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie:\u003c/strong> And I was like, whoa, I’ve never even heard of Hazel’s Inn. This says this was in Pacifica. Why have I never heard of it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> So he came to Bay Curious, hoping to find out more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie:\u003c/strong> Could you dive deeper into the Hazel’s Inn raid in Pacifica and the effects that it had on the LGBTQ plus community in the greater Bay area in the late 1950s?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Bay Curious theme music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>I’m Olivia Allen-Price and this is Bay Curious. This week, we’re going back to the gay bars of the 1950s to learn about a moment in time when the San Francisco Bay Area was far less welcoming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All that coming right up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Theme music ends\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor Break\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>To dig deeper into Bay Area queer history, KQED’s Ana De Almeida Amaral takes us to Pacifica.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral:\u003c/strong> Pacifica is a beautiful place, with sprawling views of the ocean and stunning beaches. It has that small town feel, complete with a\u003cem> tiny\u003c/em> museum showcasing its history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> This is our little museum…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Laura Del Rosso was born and raised in Pacifica, and serves as a docent and board member for the Pacifica Coastside Museum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> This whole area around here was full of speakeasies, taverns, restaurants, and brothels during Prohibition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>It seems hard to imagine now, but this small town was once infamous for its nightlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso: \u003c/strong>Some people think that San Mateo County coast was actually the wettest place in the whole United States, meaning there was more booze here and in Half Moon Bay area than anywhere else in the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>While the historical society has long been aware of the clandestine nightlife during Prohibition, it wasn’t until a few years ago that they started uncovering the history of a hushed queer nightlife scene that took hold right here, in the 1950’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jazzy music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Hazel’s Inn was a tavern in Sharp Park, now a neighborhood in Pacifica. ^The bar is long gone^, but in 1956 the Pacifica Tribune, described it as a large and homey space, with knick-nacks above a mahogany bar, a shuffle board, a dance floor and a jukebox.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hazel’s Inn was owned and run by Hazel Nikola, a straight woman in her 60s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> From what we understand then, after she got a divorce she was running the place by herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And the place was popular! Sometimes there were up to 500 patrons in a weekend. For a long time it catered mostly to locals and tourists on holiday at the beach, but then in 1955 and 56, the LGBT community made it \u003cem>their\u003c/em> spot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> When the gay men started coming from San Francisco, she welcomed them. And she was non-judgmental. However, it’s obvious that somebody was not happy and did contact the sheriff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>But before we can get to that night — the night of the Hazel’s Inn raid — we have to ask why here? Miles from San Francisco, hidden in a small town, far from any other gay nightlife, why was Hazel’s Inn the place that attracted hundreds of LGBTQ people?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>To answer this question, I went to the archives at the GLBT historical society — where collections documenting the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Trans community are housed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There, I met Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd. She’s an oral historian with the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd: \u003c/strong>I was professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State for decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>She’s one of the few people who has researched queer nightlife in the 1950’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> 1956, 90 persons, mostly men were booked at the San Mateo county jail…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>At the archives we read some of the newspaper clippings about Hazel’s Inn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> Suspected of being a gathering place for sex deviates…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>She did a lot of her research back in the 1990s and was able to interview dozens of queer people who lived in the Bay Area in the 1940s and 50s. Most of them have since passed away, so her work and these archives are some of the last links to this story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Piano music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Back in the 1940s, San Francisco already had a queer nightlife scene, but at the time it was illegal to be gay. And bars that were caught serving queer people… that was illegal too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> If you were not a legal kind of person, then you couldn’t like buy a drink in a bar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>But the law changed in 1951— when the Black Cat Cafe, in San Francisco, had its liquor license suspended for serving members of the LGBT community. The owner appealed the decision to the California Supreme court. The case is known as Stouman vs. Riley and it’s a big moment in queer civil rights history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> The argument was that it’s not illegal to be a homosexual, it’s illegal to do homosexual acts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>The court agreed. And the ruling became one of the first civil rights protections for LGBTQ people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music ends\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>For the first time, they had the protected right to assemble. Gay men and lesbian women could buy drinks at bars and hang out with other queer friends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is as long as there were no homosexual acts taking place that were deemed “illegal or immoral.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many legal decisions, it was a vague but powerful protection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> I know it seems really regressive now, right? But the decision was liberating because the conclusion was that it wasn’t Status that was illegal, it was behavior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And so queer nightlife in the Bay Area blossomed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> In the early 1950s, I would say it was the heyday of gay nightlife in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And really iconic gay bars came into the picture. The Black Cat Cafe was running again, Tommy’s Place and Ann’s 440 opened. And these places became sanctuaries for the LGBT community to be \u003cem>together. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> There were maybe four or five quote unquote lesbian bars in North Beach in walking distance of each other at any point in time between like, let’s say, 1948 and 1955. So it’s like a really interesting community that evolved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And this was really important because in the 1950s it was still not super safe to be gay. Many queer folks were closeted by day in order to keep their jobs. But at night…at the bar…there was a freedom that didn’t really exist anywhere else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> And it was before the state caught wind of what was happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>But then a panic started to take hold in the United States…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Senator McCarthy archival tape:\u003c/strong> Are you a member of the communist conspiracy as of this moment?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>A conservative mindset took hold in American politics and culture — ushering in a time of suspicion and fear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Senator McCarthy archival tape:\u003c/strong> Our nation may very well die, and I ask you caused it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And quickly, LGBT people become \u003cu>targets\u003c/u> at the federal, state and local level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>President Eisenhower signed an executive order in 1953 banning gay people from federal work, labeling them as having immoral conduct and “sexual perversion.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, in 1955 \u003cem>California\u003c/em> created a new state agency called the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control or the ABC. An agency whose sole job was to ensure that licensed bars abided by legal and \u003cem>moral\u003c/em> codes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And from the moment the department of Alcoholic Beverage control was created a top priority for them was to…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd: \u003c/strong>Shut down the gay bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And they did this by finding ways around those vague protections won in the Stouman v. Riley case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While queer people were granted the right to assemble, “homosexual acts” were still illegal, so authorities started taking an interest in the specifics of what that meant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> There’s a question about like, well then what exactly are the behaviors that are illegal? Like, do you have to like see someone, having sex in the bar? Or is it kissing? What about fondling? What about sitting on a lap? What about holding hands? What about dancing close? So all this stuff was like, then started being hashed out, you know, this is an illegal act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>And the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control started collaborating with a bunch of law enforcement agencies throughout the Bay Area to ferret out people engaged in those acts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By 1955, the gay bars in San Francisco were getting less and less safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And as harassment and policing increased, the LGBT community began looking for new places to gather outside of San Francisco, away from well-known gay bars, and they ended up down the coast, at Hazel’s Inn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sound design of a raucous bar scene\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The only testimonies about what happened on Feb. 19, 1956, the night that Hazel’s Inn was raided, come from court documents and hearings at the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Laurence E. Strong, an ABC agent, described in detail what was happening at the bar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That night, the dance floor was alive, and the bar was filled with around 200 patrons, mostly men. These men wrapped their arms around each other and embraced one another while dancing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also described how one patron sat on another man’s lap and how two other men held hands. In the corner of the bar, a couple embraced as one nestled his head into the other’s shoulder. Some men pinched each other’s butts and fondled each other while dancing. Women danced close together with other women. Men were seen powdering their faces and women wore slacks and sports coats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It sounds like a scene of queer joy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music turns tense\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Suddenly, 35 law enforcement agents stormed the bar — a mix of San Mateo county sheriff’s officers and ABC agents began arresting people. The sheriff jumped on to the bar and announced:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice over:\u003c/strong> “This is a raid!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Patrons were forced to walk past a line of agents. And one by one, agents picked out people they had seen showing queer affection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Boyd says that the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board had been watching Hazel’s Inn for months, gathering evidence and building a case that behavior there was “illegal and immoral.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd: \u003c/strong>They had undercover agents in the bars. And they would go in twos or threes and they would watch each other. And somebody would get an interested person, and then would sort of lead them on, until there was some kind of physical, sexual, or flirtatious engagement that involved touching. It was entrapment. And that was a common and acceptable practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Ninety people were arrested that night at Hazel’s Inn, including Hazel Nikola — the owner. The bar’s liquor license was quickly revoked for being quote “a resort for sexual perverts” and for serving someone underaged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The mass arrest caught the attention of a variety of civil rights groups, including the ACLU who represented 30 defendants. Most of those arrested were cleared of charges, but the damage had already been done. People were outed in the newspapers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> There would be a list of the people and their address and sometimes their occupation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice over: \u003c/strong>The San Mateo Times: Local persons arrested were: Iris Ann Glasgow, 24 years old. Clerk. 1515 James Street, Redwood City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Many of these people were publicly named as “sexual perverts”. That often meant being ostracized or losing their job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> People were so fearful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Cello music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>As for the bar, Hazel fought the revocation of her liquor license for\u003cem> two years \u003c/em>but the court ultimately sided with the ABC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> I think she was just really bitter about what happened here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music ends\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>Back in the Pacifica Coastside museum, Laura reflected on what the raid did to Hazel Nikola.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Del Rosso:\u003c/strong> She lost her liquor license and things just kind of went downhill for her. You have that information on the thing. And she ended up, she ended closing. She was very, very bitter at the end. She felt like she was really an important part of the community and that they had kind of betrayed her. She left Sharp Park and went to live somewhere else. And never came back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>For the queer community, the effects were even more devastating. The Hazel’s Inn Raid became a playbook for the state to target the queer community over the next 15 years. (Surveillance, raids, and the revocation of liquor licenses.) It was a strategy to push LGBTQ people out of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it didn’t work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite this aggressive policing and repression, the gay bars never died.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Queer patrons, and bartenders, and bar owners found ways to keep going. They found ways to spot surveillance in their bars, they organized and worked to keep the police out of their spaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historian Dr. Boyd again:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nan Alamilla Boyd:\u003c/strong> My takeaway from history as a historian is that during these times of repression. There’s cultural innovation that happens. You can’t really name it yet, right? But it’s taking shape you know, that there’s something coming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music starts\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/strong>During those years of extreme repression, queer activists were making connections, organizing, and laying the groundwork for the next several decades of activism that would see LGBTQ rights expand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area has changed a lot since the raid at Hazel’s Inn. But still, a fearless commitment to community and authenticity — the spirit that kept these gay bars alive — lives on here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>That was reporter Ana De Almeida Amaral. Featuring the voices of Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman, Carly Severn, Christopher Beale and Paul Lancour for archival material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Did you know that Bay Curious listeners help choose which questions we answer on the podcast? Each month we have a new voting round up at \u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">BayCurious.org\u003c/a>, with three fascinating questions to choose from. This month…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Question 1: \u003c/strong>Did the Navy airship America crash land into several houses? What happened to the crew?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Question 2:\u003c/strong> Why is San Francisco home to so many federal and statewide courts? Why aren’t they in Sacramento or Los Angeles?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Question 3: \u003c/strong>I want to learn more about San Francisco upzoning and how people feel about it in the Richmond and Sunset districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Cast your vote with one click at \u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">BayCurious.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Henry Lie:\u003c/strong> Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Become a member today at \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/donate\">kqed.org/donate\u003c/a>. Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me Olivia Allen-Price. With extra support from Katie Sprenger, Matt Morales, Tim Olsen, Maha Sanad, 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. Have a wonderful week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "san-franciscos-historic-relief-cottages-built-after-the-1906-earthquake-are-hidden-in-plain-sight",
"title": "San Francisco’s Historic ‘Relief Cottages,’ Built After the 1906 Earthquake, Are Hidden in Plain Sight",
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"headTitle": "San Francisco’s Historic ‘Relief Cottages,’ Built After the 1906 Earthquake, Are Hidden in Plain Sight | 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>Jane Cryan walked into a leasing agency on Geary Boulevard in\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\"> San Francisco\u003c/a> just before closing one evening in 1982.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was looking for an apartment that could accommodate her grand piano. The flat she was inquiring about had already been rented, but the agent asked if she’d be interested in a cottage out in the Sunset District.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That started everything,” Cryan said. “That, to me, is my golden moment in all my 44 years in San Francisco.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cottage at 1227 24th Ave. felt like her own artist retreat. She moved in and played her grand piano night and day for the first several weeks, happy to have her own space where she could do what she liked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“An elderly gentleman from across the street came over and shook his finger at me, and he said, ‘Young lady, do you know that you’re living in a couple of relief houses pasted together?’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12066194\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12066194\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00174_TV-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00174_TV-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00174_TV-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00174_TV-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An earthquake cottage stands on 211 Mullen Ave. in San Francisco on December 4, 2025. The original shelter was built after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and some still house city residents. \u003ccite>(Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Cryan was confused. What did he mean by “relief houses?” She had moved from Milwaukee in the 1960s because she was enamored with the Beat Movement and had been writing letters to Jack Kerouac. When she got to San Francisco, all of 18 years old, she threw herself into writing and playing jazz piano, although she made her money as an executive assistant. She’d never heard of the history her neighbor was describing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had lived in the city all those years and never heard of the [19]06 quake or ‘the fire,’ as everybody who survived it called it,” Cryan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was curious to know everything she could about the natural disaster that devastated San Francisco at the start of the 20th century, knocking down 80% of the buildings and displacing thousands of people. She spent nights and weekends obsessively going through newspaper archives to learn all she could about these so-called “relief cottages.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The history Cryan discovered\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“After the 1906 Earthquake and fire, more than a quarter of a million people are at least temporarily displaced,” said Woody LaBounty, president and CEO of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfheritage.org/\">San Francisco Heritage\u003c/a>, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving San Francisco history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those who had the means left the city to stay with relatives or friends elsewhere. But many poor San Franciscans didn’t have that option. The military temporarily set up tent camps to house refugees in the short term. Women cooked meals on stoves set up in the streets, children went to school in makeshift tent classrooms and people tried to figure out what to do next.[aside postID=news_12065901 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251016-NIMITZHOUSE-38-BL-KQED.jpg']After a few months, city leaders became concerned about sanitation in the tent camps and they worried what would happen when winter rains came. They commissioned union carpenters to build small cottages out of redwood, cedar and fir to house the refugees. They painted the cottages the same green as city park benches, which became known as “park bench green.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You basically are talking about the working class,” LaBounty said. “People who don’t have property, don’t have other resources, and need to find work and find shelter.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Overseeing this effort was the San Francisco Relief Corporation, which also coordinated distribution of clothes, food and other aid to the refugees — many of whom the city relied upon to help rebuild the city. The 5,610 cottages were mostly set up in the city’s neighborhood parks like Jefferson Square, Precita Park (then known as Bernal Park) and Portsmouth Square. There were also a large number of cottages where Park Presidio Boulevard is now — back then, it was newly acquired parkland with nothing much around it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/places/000/1906-earthquake-cottages.htm\">cottages\u003c/a> came in several sizes. The smallest was 10×14 feet — these “Type A” shacks are the most commonly seen today, in part because they are so modular and people combined them to make larger residences. But there were also 14×18 feet and 18×24-feet-sized shacks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Relief Corporation charged people a few dollars per month in rent for the cottages, but soon it started receiving pressure from Superintendent of Parks John McLaren and other city residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063864\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1950px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063864\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1950\" height=\"2000\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED.jpg 1950w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED-160x164.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED-1498x1536.jpg 1498w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1950px) 100vw, 1950px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Richmond District, on San Francisco’s northwest side, was largely uninhabited sand dunes at the time of the 1906 earthquake and fires. There was a lot of open space to build refugee cottages like these at the Richmond District refugee camp between Lake and Geary streets. Some surviving earthquake cottages can still be found in the Richmond and Sunset districts. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“They wanted their parks back,” LaBounty said. “As other San Franciscans were ready to move on from the disaster, they didn’t like the idea that their parks had a community, a village of working-class people living in the middle of their parks.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under pressure to move cottages out of the parks as quickly as possible, the Relief Corporation ended up returning all the rent it collected to residents when they moved their cottages out of the parks and onto land somewhere else. And just a year and a half after the earthquake and fire, most cottage camps were gone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It gave people who never would have dreamed, I think, of owning a home a chance to get into that American dream,” LaBounty said. “So, you get the earthquake cottage, you’re a refugee who has nothing, and now suddenly you buy a lot for 100 bucks in the sand dunes of the Richmond, you have pretty much a free house.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063862\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063862\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1545\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED-160x124.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED-1536x1187.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">After several months, residents were encouraged to move their cottages out of the parks and onto a plot of land. Here, a horse gets ready to move a shack out of Precita Park. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many of the cottages ended up in the Richmond and Sunset districts of San Francisco because of that large camp along Park Presidio and the prevalence of unclaimed land on the western side of the city. Another hot spot for cottages is Bernal Heights, where people moved their cottages from Precita Park at the bottom of the hill, up onto vacant plots on the hill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was sort of a stigma of having an earthquake cottage for a few years because it sort of signified you were a refugee, you needed help, you were poor,” LaBounty said. “So, people often quickly tried to hide the pedigree of their houses and cover them with shingles.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>People built fences around their cottages, added additional rooms and generally tried to \u003ca href=\"https://www.foundsf.org/1906_Earthquake_Shack_Survivors\">personalize\u003c/a> them. Many people painted over that telling park bench green color, hiding the provenance of their homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcXCRZEkzx4\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The city moved on, too. Just nine years after the Great Earthquake and Fire, San Francisco \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/upload/PPIE-Brochure-FINAL-for-Web.pdf\">hosted\u003c/a> the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition to show the city was back and celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a spectacle that spread over much of what is now the Marina District, the Exposition drew more than 18 million visitors and boasted innovations in science, technology and art. Whole buildings were erected for the Exposition, including the Palace of Fine Arts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>An era of ‘shacktivism’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>When Jane Cryan learned all this history and realized that her little cottage sanctuary was actually three and a half earthquake cottages connected together, she was in awe. She loved that she was living in a piece of San Francisco history, one hidden in plain sight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around the time of her research, Cryan got word from her landlord that he wanted to sell her cottage — or worse, knock it down and sell the lot.[aside postID=news_12063643 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251008-GirlintheFishbowl-01-BL.jpg']“I had to do something,” Cryan said. So, she called City Hall. “And this is exactly what I said, I said, ‘Can you connect me with somebody at City Hall who can tell me how to save a pair of cottages, very important cottages, that are under threat of demolition.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That call led her to the Landmarks Preservation office. She learned how to apply for a historic landmark designation and brought her research on the importance of the earthquake cottages to the Planning Commission. Along the way, the media caught wind of what she was doing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The media came to me, and they made what I was doing one of the most important things that ever hit San Francisco,” Cryan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cryan started a \u003ca href=\"https://sfpl.org/pdf/libraries/main/sfhistory/archives-and-manuscripts/SPASFRS.pdf\">nonprofit\u003c/a> organization,\u003ca href=\"https://sfpl.org/pdf/libraries/main/sfhistory/archives-and-manuscripts/SPASFRS.pdf\"> The Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of San Francisco Refugee Shacks\u003c/a>, and made it her mission to educate people about the earthquake shacks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually, she won historic status for her little 24th Avenue cottage, but it was a bittersweet victory. Because historic status limits what a property owner can do with a building, the planning commission also ruled that Cryan had to move out as compensation. From then on, she moved from apartment to apartment, ultimately finding herself priced out of San Francisco once she was retired. She moved back to Wisconsin, where she is originally from, in 2007 after 44 years in the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She continues the fight to save earthquake cottages from afar when developers threaten them.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A very San Francisco treasure hunt\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>It’s still possible to \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/earthquake-shacks-sf-map/\">find\u003c/a> earthquake cottages when walking around San Francisco. Woody LaBounty suggested looking for a shallow roof line, like a Boy Scout tent. That’s often a good indicator that a small house might be an earthquake cottage. Many other small buildings have much sharper rooflines or flat roofs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LaBounty estimates that there are somewhere between \u003ca href=\"https://www.outsidelands.org/shack-list.php\">30 and 50 cottages\u003c/a> sprinkled throughout the city. But it’s hard to know because so many of them have been incorporated into larger houses or are used as sheds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063861\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063861\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1446\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED-160x116.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED-1536x1111.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An earthquake cottage being moved through the streets of San Francisco circa 1906. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Historical conservationists \u003ca href=\"https://www.outsidelands.org/kirkham_shacks.php\">successfully\u003c/a> saved several earthquake cottages from demolition over the years. Two of them are owned by the Presidio Trust and used to be open to visitors, although they have recently been moved to an out-of-the-way location. Another is in the San Francisco Zoo, part of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfzoo.org/greenies-conservation-corner/\">Greenie’s Conservation Corner\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As San Francisco continues to change, it is this visual touchstone to our past,” LaBounty said. “And not only our past, but the most significant event that happened in our past, outside of maybe the Gold Rush.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> I want to talk about architecture for a moment – specifically residential architecture. In San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You expect to see stately Victorian homes with their bright colors and fancy decorative trim.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there’s Marina style homes with their big windows and stucco facades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But sprinkled in amidst these grander homes you might spot a few tiny cottages — the original tiny homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Charity Vargas:\u003c/strong> I did see two over in the sunset. There was like two close together and I thought maybe they might be them, but I’m not sure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Charity Vargas, our question asker this week, has seen some of these small dwellings dotted around the Richmond and Sunset districts near her home. And she’s heard that the cottages are holdovers from the Great 1906 earthquake and fire, but wants to know more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Charity Vargas: \u003c/strong>How many earthquake cottages are left and you know, are they still used and where they are?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Today on the show, we’ll dig into the history of San Francisco’s earthquake cottages. We’ll learn how critical they were in sheltering a vulnerable…but vital.. population and learn about modern efforts to save them. I’m Olivia Allen-Price and you’re listening to Bay Curious. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>We set out to answer Charity’s question by searching for “earthquake shacks”…tiny homes built out of redwood and cedar after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Bay Curious editor and producer Katrina Schwartz found one high on a hill in Bernal Heights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joan Hunter: \u003c/strong>You want a little tour? Ok, this is our tiny kitchen and I believe this rectangle room is the original earthquake shack and this part is added on, but it’s kind of hard to say exactly. I’m Joan Hunter. I live in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, California in an earthquake cottage or earthquake shack, as some would like to say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>I’m standing with Joan in her light filled living room…all that’s left of the original cottage. It’s a modestly sized room, but has tall ceilings and windows that look out over a sweeping view of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What started out as a one room cottage has been expanded quite a bit…it’s about 620 square feet now, still small by modern standards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joan Hunter: \u003c/strong>Okay, so this is a little bedroom we have in the front and all of our rooms, this is a theme for the house, everything is small, very, very small.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Joan’s got two kids…so the house can feel like a tight squeeze at times. But she fell in love with the history of the place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joan Hunter: \u003c/strong>what I do know is that the guy who bought it, he was a little kind of like a bachelor. And he met someone who was also single and they moved together and they got married. And it was just a love story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Joan likes thinking that after they survived the worst natural disaster San Francisco has ever experienced…and been homeless for months because of it…that they finally found some tranquility here, a little piece of San Francisco to call their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music to help us transition\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>The Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire leveled 80 percent of San Francisco. The morning of April 18, 1906 Bay Area residents awoke early in the morning to a temblor they’d never forget.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of shaking\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kathleen Norris: \u003c/strong>Every picture on the wall is going tack, tack, tack. Everything movable in the house is keeping up that unearthly clatter. You could hear up and down the roads, earthquake. It’s an earthquake. Oh, God help us, it’s an earthquake. of course, it changed the world for all of us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Kathleen Norris shared her oral history with the Bancroft Library in 1960. There was no audio recorded during the disaster, but anyone who survived it remembered the trauma of it clearly…even fifty years later. Kathleen was in Mill Valley when the earthquake hit…where the damage wasn’t too bad. But she and her brother were curious about how San Francisco had fared…so they found a boat that took them to the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joan Hunter: \u003c/strong>It was something to see. The great, heavy, slow rolls of smoke that were joining hands as they went up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Kathleen describes refugees fleeing homes that had been leveled, toting their belongings in baby carriages and wheel barrows.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kathleen Norris: \u003c/strong>We walked over the hot, hot rocks of Market Street. And of course, the cable car lines were twisted hairpins. And the houses were all down. There was nothing saved. Nothing was accepted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>And yet, the image that lingered in her mind…even as the smoke lay heavy over the hills… was of people getting to work to repair their city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kathleen Norris: \u003c/strong>And already there were people helping out and organizing, scraping bricks. The bricks were hot. And they were working away. Nobody felt for an instant, oh, let’s go somewhere else. Everyone knew that the city was going to come back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>As indeed it would. Just nine years after the earthquake and fire, San Francisco hosted the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition…the reason the Palace of Fine Arts was built…a spectacle that 18 million people visited by the time it closed.. Headlines trumpeted the achievement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Voice over reading archival newspaper headline:\u003c/em> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Big Fair is Opened. All eyes on San Francisco. President Flashes Signal\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Fair Draws Myriad; All Records For Crowds Fall\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Marvelous Exhibits From All Parts of the Earth Assembled by 42 Countries for the Hugest Conclave of Nations in History\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>It was a signal to the world that San Francisco was still \u003cem>the most important\u003c/em> city in the West…one full of invention and achievement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice over reading archival newspaper headline: \u003c/strong>Tower of Jewels Wreathed in Flames. But it’s only to thrill visitors\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Art Smith Sets Hearts Leaping: Aviator’s Loop-the-Loops at Night Traced By Trail of Smoke\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>But how did San Francisco go from the absolute devastation of 1906 to showing off the latest advances in science and art on the world stage just nine years later? This is where the earthquake cottages… or shacks as they’re affectionately called…come into the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>So after the 1906 earthquake and fire, more than a quarter of a million people are at least temporarily displaced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Woody LaBounty is President and CEO of San Francisco Heritage, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving San Francisco history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>And now, the powers that be have to decide not only how to take care of all these people, but also who’s gonna rebuild the city?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Immediately after the earthquake and fire, the military stepped in and established tent camps in the city’s parks. But soon a new organization…the San Francisco Relief Corporation…was formed to distribute food, clothes and other aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>That covered many aspects of what you have to do when people are refugees, but also a specific housing effort, and that was the earthquake relief cottages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Officials were worried about sanitation in the tent camps when winter rains came. So, they decided to build 5,610 relief cottages…built with redwood, fir and cedar… to house people. They were painted “park bench green”…literally the color used on Golden Gate Park benches… and clustered in neighborhood parks like Jefferson Square, Precita Park, and Portsmouth Square. Around 17,000 people lived in them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>If you owned property or you had a property that had been destroyed in the earthquake, you rebuilt or you figured out a way to move on. But there was a vast number of people who didn’t have any other resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>These were San Francisco’s poor, folks who had lived in boarding houses or shared rooms downtown before the fire. City leaders wanted to keep these laborers with the skills to rebuild the city close by. But they didn’t plan to give away the cottages for free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>So for all of wanting to take care of the refugees, there was also a fear at the time of creeping socialism. People in power did not want to give anybody anything for nothing. So they thought it would create indigence. And so you were supposed to pay some sort of rent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Here’s how it worked. Shack residents paid monthly rent of a few dollars while their shacks were in the parks. But the relief corporation returned that money when a resident bought some land and moved the shack out of the park and onto their own property.That generosity was spurred by pressure to move refugees and their cottages out of the parks as soon as possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>As other San Franciscans were ready to move on from the disaster, they didn’t like the idea that their parks had a community, a village of working-class people. Living in the middle of their park. They wanted their parks back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>About a year and a half after the earthquake, in the summer of 1907, most of the shacks had been removed from the parks. Newspapers at the time described the surreal image of tiny homes on wagons moving across the city with people still in them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice over reading archival newspaper excerpt:\u003c/strong> It is a strange sight to see a procession of these refugee cottages moving down fashionable Van Ness Avenue or busy Fillmore Street, faces peering from the windows, and men, women and children going about their household tasks as if their little home was securely perched upon a cement foundation and surrounded by a garden and a fence.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Back in 1907, the Richmond District, a northwestern neighborhood, was mostly undeveloped sand dunes, with lots of empty land. So many shack owners moved their cottages to vacant plots there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Woody says the earthquake shack program not only got the city working again…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>\u003cspan style=\"text-decoration: line-through\">I\u003c/span>t also gave people who never would have dreamed, I think, of owning a home a chance to get into that American dream. So you get the earthquake cottage, you’re a refugee who has nothing, and now suddenly you buy a lot for 100 bucks in the sand dunes of the Richmond, you have pretty much a free house.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Bernal Heights is another place with many earthquake cottages…people just moved their shacks from Precita Park to open land up the hill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And some of them are still there…like the house we toured at the beginning of this episode.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>The one sort of key touchstone that you can tell about a cottage is the roof line. It has a very shallow pitched roof, kind of like a pup tent, like a Boy Scout tent. And then that is like your first hint because a lot of small buildings you’ll see have very steep pitched or flat roofs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Woody says many shack owners quickly made improvements to their new homes — painting, building fences, adding additional rooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>There was sort of a stigma of having an earthquake cottage for a few years because it sort of signified you were a refugee, you needed help, you were poor. So people often, they quickly tried to hide sort of the pedigree of their houses and cover them with shingles quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>They wanted to hide that telling park bench green color. Most existing earthquake cottages are surrounded by modern additions. Or sometimes they’re a couple shacks placed together. That’s one reason it’s really hard to know how many still exist in San Francisco, they’re hidden. But Woody estimates between 30 and 50 earthquake cottages are dotted across the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>The cottage in the front is made up of three and a half shacks, and then there’s a free-standing mid-size shack in the backyard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>This is Jane Cryan. She rented one of these preserved earthquake shacks in the outer Sunset in the 1980s. Jane is best known as a “shacktivist”…fighting to preserve earthquake cottages from development. But if it weren’t for the Beat movement in the 1950s, she never would have moved here in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>The only reason I ended up in San Francisco is that Jack Kerouac, with whom I had correspondence from the time I was 16 years old told me that Milwaukee was no place for a poet. You should be in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>By day she was an executive assistant, but writing and jazz piano were her passions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>And I moved in and I played piano for about six weeks, day and night, and an elderly gentleman from across the street came over and shook his finger at me and he said, young lady, do you know that you’re living in a couple of relief houses pasted together?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Her three room cottage was actually three earthquake shacks pasted together. This was 1982 and Jane had lived in San Francisco almost 20 years. But she’d never even heard of the 1906 earthquake and fire. Her neighbor’s passing comment sparked her curiosity. She spent nights and weekends obsessively going through old newspaper archives to learn as much as she could about the disaster and the earthquake cottages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, her landlord made it known that he planned to sell her cottage…or worse demolish it and sell the lot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>Take down our history. So I had to do something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Preserving these cottages — tangible pieces of such important history — became her life’s work. She took inspiration from one of the 1906 earthquake refugees she learned about in her research, a woman named Mary Kelly. Mary was an agitator, constantly questioning how the relief corporation dolled out aid and whether it was fair. She was such a pain to them they eventually evicted her from her cottage. But she refused to leave, famously saying:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice over portraying Mary Kelly:\u003c/strong> They can’t bluff me. I’ll stay with the house if they take it to the end of the earth.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>She rode in her cottage as men hauled it onto a wagon and trucked it away. She stayed inside as they dismantled the cottage board by board. Jane finds Mary’s tenacity — and willingness to stand up to power — endearing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>She was exactly the way I was. If I saw something, I said something. And if I saw something that was not right, I said something louder.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Jane started a nonprofit called The Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of San Francisco Refugee Shacks. She fought hard to get the planning commission to designate her little shack a historic landmark.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And she was successful!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>Landmark number 171.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>But it was a bittersweet victory. The commission also said that Jane had to vacate the cottage in order to compensate the landlord for putting restrictions on his property. Jane bounced around from place to place after that, eventually moving back to Wisconsin, where she’s originally from.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina in the tape: \u003c/strong>What do you miss most about San Francisco?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>Oh, everything! Oh my god, San Francisco is the queen of the Golden West, for heaven’s sake!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Historian Woody LaBounty says there are probably more earthquake cottages than we know. They’re hiding in people’s backyards, incorporated into bigger houses or used as sheds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>They’re the last sort of most visible, tangible sign of one of the biggest things that ever happened to the city of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Increasingly these little cottages are being bought and torn down to make room for larger homes. But the ones that remain are a reminder of a refugee relief program that not only got people back on their feet, but made them homeowners. An example of San Franciscans coming together to repair and resurrect a beloved city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> That was Bay Curious editor and producer Katrina Schwartz. Special thanks this week to \u003ca href=\"https://californiarevealed.org/\">California Revealed\u003c/a>, an online database of oral histories and other archival materials. They helped us find Kathleen Norris’ oral history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Right now your membership means more than ever, give at \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/donate\">KQED.org/donate\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale, Katrina Schwartz 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>Have a wonderful week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "After the 1906 Earthquake and fire, San Francisco leaders built relief cottages to house the homeless. Some of those tiny dwellings can still be found thanks to historic preservation efforts.\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>Jane Cryan walked into a leasing agency on Geary Boulevard in\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\"> San Francisco\u003c/a> just before closing one evening in 1982.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was looking for an apartment that could accommodate her grand piano. The flat she was inquiring about had already been rented, but the agent asked if she’d be interested in a cottage out in the Sunset District.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That started everything,” Cryan said. “That, to me, is my golden moment in all my 44 years in San Francisco.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cottage at 1227 24th Ave. felt like her own artist retreat. She moved in and played her grand piano night and day for the first several weeks, happy to have her own space where she could do what she liked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“An elderly gentleman from across the street came over and shook his finger at me, and he said, ‘Young lady, do you know that you’re living in a couple of relief houses pasted together?’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12066194\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12066194\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00174_TV-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00174_TV-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00174_TV-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/12/251204-EARTHQUAKECOTTAGES00174_TV-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An earthquake cottage stands on 211 Mullen Ave. in San Francisco on December 4, 2025. The original shelter was built after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and some still house city residents. \u003ccite>(Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Cryan was confused. What did he mean by “relief houses?” She had moved from Milwaukee in the 1960s because she was enamored with the Beat Movement and had been writing letters to Jack Kerouac. When she got to San Francisco, all of 18 years old, she threw herself into writing and playing jazz piano, although she made her money as an executive assistant. She’d never heard of the history her neighbor was describing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had lived in the city all those years and never heard of the [19]06 quake or ‘the fire,’ as everybody who survived it called it,” Cryan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was curious to know everything she could about the natural disaster that devastated San Francisco at the start of the 20th century, knocking down 80% of the buildings and displacing thousands of people. She spent nights and weekends obsessively going through newspaper archives to learn all she could about these so-called “relief cottages.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The history Cryan discovered\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“After the 1906 Earthquake and fire, more than a quarter of a million people are at least temporarily displaced,” said Woody LaBounty, president and CEO of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfheritage.org/\">San Francisco Heritage\u003c/a>, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving San Francisco history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those who had the means left the city to stay with relatives or friends elsewhere. But many poor San Franciscans didn’t have that option. The military temporarily set up tent camps to house refugees in the short term. Women cooked meals on stoves set up in the streets, children went to school in makeshift tent classrooms and people tried to figure out what to do next.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>After a few months, city leaders became concerned about sanitation in the tent camps and they worried what would happen when winter rains came. They commissioned union carpenters to build small cottages out of redwood, cedar and fir to house the refugees. They painted the cottages the same green as city park benches, which became known as “park bench green.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You basically are talking about the working class,” LaBounty said. “People who don’t have property, don’t have other resources, and need to find work and find shelter.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Overseeing this effort was the San Francisco Relief Corporation, which also coordinated distribution of clothes, food and other aid to the refugees — many of whom the city relied upon to help rebuild the city. The 5,610 cottages were mostly set up in the city’s neighborhood parks like Jefferson Square, Precita Park (then known as Bernal Park) and Portsmouth Square. There were also a large number of cottages where Park Presidio Boulevard is now — back then, it was newly acquired parkland with nothing much around it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/places/000/1906-earthquake-cottages.htm\">cottages\u003c/a> came in several sizes. The smallest was 10×14 feet — these “Type A” shacks are the most commonly seen today, in part because they are so modular and people combined them to make larger residences. But there were also 14×18 feet and 18×24-feet-sized shacks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Relief Corporation charged people a few dollars per month in rent for the cottages, but soon it started receiving pressure from Superintendent of Parks John McLaren and other city residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063864\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1950px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063864\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1950\" height=\"2000\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED.jpg 1950w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED-160x164.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/RichmondCamp-SFPL-KQED-1498x1536.jpg 1498w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1950px) 100vw, 1950px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Richmond District, on San Francisco’s northwest side, was largely uninhabited sand dunes at the time of the 1906 earthquake and fires. There was a lot of open space to build refugee cottages like these at the Richmond District refugee camp between Lake and Geary streets. Some surviving earthquake cottages can still be found in the Richmond and Sunset districts. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“They wanted their parks back,” LaBounty said. “As other San Franciscans were ready to move on from the disaster, they didn’t like the idea that their parks had a community, a village of working-class people living in the middle of their parks.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under pressure to move cottages out of the parks as quickly as possible, the Relief Corporation ended up returning all the rent it collected to residents when they moved their cottages out of the parks and onto land somewhere else. And just a year and a half after the earthquake and fire, most cottage camps were gone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It gave people who never would have dreamed, I think, of owning a home a chance to get into that American dream,” LaBounty said. “So, you get the earthquake cottage, you’re a refugee who has nothing, and now suddenly you buy a lot for 100 bucks in the sand dunes of the Richmond, you have pretty much a free house.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063862\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063862\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1545\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED-160x124.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/PrecitaPark-SFPL-KQED-1536x1187.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">After several months, residents were encouraged to move their cottages out of the parks and onto a plot of land. Here, a horse gets ready to move a shack out of Precita Park. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many of the cottages ended up in the Richmond and Sunset districts of San Francisco because of that large camp along Park Presidio and the prevalence of unclaimed land on the western side of the city. Another hot spot for cottages is Bernal Heights, where people moved their cottages from Precita Park at the bottom of the hill, up onto vacant plots on the hill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was sort of a stigma of having an earthquake cottage for a few years because it sort of signified you were a refugee, you needed help, you were poor,” LaBounty said. “So, people often quickly tried to hide the pedigree of their houses and cover them with shingles.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>People built fences around their cottages, added additional rooms and generally tried to \u003ca href=\"https://www.foundsf.org/1906_Earthquake_Shack_Survivors\">personalize\u003c/a> them. Many people painted over that telling park bench green color, hiding the provenance of their homes.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/DcXCRZEkzx4'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/DcXCRZEkzx4'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>The city moved on, too. Just nine years after the Great Earthquake and Fire, San Francisco \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/upload/PPIE-Brochure-FINAL-for-Web.pdf\">hosted\u003c/a> the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition to show the city was back and celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a spectacle that spread over much of what is now the Marina District, the Exposition drew more than 18 million visitors and boasted innovations in science, technology and art. Whole buildings were erected for the Exposition, including the Palace of Fine Arts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>An era of ‘shacktivism’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>When Jane Cryan learned all this history and realized that her little cottage sanctuary was actually three and a half earthquake cottages connected together, she was in awe. She loved that she was living in a piece of San Francisco history, one hidden in plain sight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around the time of her research, Cryan got word from her landlord that he wanted to sell her cottage — or worse, knock it down and sell the lot.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“I had to do something,” Cryan said. So, she called City Hall. “And this is exactly what I said, I said, ‘Can you connect me with somebody at City Hall who can tell me how to save a pair of cottages, very important cottages, that are under threat of demolition.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That call led her to the Landmarks Preservation office. She learned how to apply for a historic landmark designation and brought her research on the importance of the earthquake cottages to the Planning Commission. Along the way, the media caught wind of what she was doing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The media came to me, and they made what I was doing one of the most important things that ever hit San Francisco,” Cryan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cryan started a \u003ca href=\"https://sfpl.org/pdf/libraries/main/sfhistory/archives-and-manuscripts/SPASFRS.pdf\">nonprofit\u003c/a> organization,\u003ca href=\"https://sfpl.org/pdf/libraries/main/sfhistory/archives-and-manuscripts/SPASFRS.pdf\"> The Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of San Francisco Refugee Shacks\u003c/a>, and made it her mission to educate people about the earthquake shacks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually, she won historic status for her little 24th Avenue cottage, but it was a bittersweet victory. Because historic status limits what a property owner can do with a building, the planning commission also ruled that Cryan had to move out as compensation. From then on, she moved from apartment to apartment, ultimately finding herself priced out of San Francisco once she was retired. She moved back to Wisconsin, where she is originally from, in 2007 after 44 years in the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She continues the fight to save earthquake cottages from afar when developers threaten them.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A very San Francisco treasure hunt\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>It’s still possible to \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/earthquake-shacks-sf-map/\">find\u003c/a> earthquake cottages when walking around San Francisco. Woody LaBounty suggested looking for a shallow roof line, like a Boy Scout tent. That’s often a good indicator that a small house might be an earthquake cottage. Many other small buildings have much sharper rooflines or flat roofs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LaBounty estimates that there are somewhere between \u003ca href=\"https://www.outsidelands.org/shack-list.php\">30 and 50 cottages\u003c/a> sprinkled throughout the city. But it’s hard to know because so many of them have been incorporated into larger houses or are used as sheds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12063861\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12063861\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1446\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED-160x116.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/Moving-Cottage-KQED-1536x1111.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An earthquake cottage being moved through the streets of San Francisco circa 1906. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Historical conservationists \u003ca href=\"https://www.outsidelands.org/kirkham_shacks.php\">successfully\u003c/a> saved several earthquake cottages from demolition over the years. Two of them are owned by the Presidio Trust and used to be open to visitors, although they have recently been moved to an out-of-the-way location. Another is in the San Francisco Zoo, part of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfzoo.org/greenies-conservation-corner/\">Greenie’s Conservation Corner\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As San Francisco continues to change, it is this visual touchstone to our past,” LaBounty said. “And not only our past, but the most significant event that happened in our past, outside of maybe the Gold Rush.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> I want to talk about architecture for a moment – specifically residential architecture. In San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You expect to see stately Victorian homes with their bright colors and fancy decorative trim.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there’s Marina style homes with their big windows and stucco facades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But sprinkled in amidst these grander homes you might spot a few tiny cottages — the original tiny homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Charity Vargas:\u003c/strong> I did see two over in the sunset. There was like two close together and I thought maybe they might be them, but I’m not sure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Charity Vargas, our question asker this week, has seen some of these small dwellings dotted around the Richmond and Sunset districts near her home. And she’s heard that the cottages are holdovers from the Great 1906 earthquake and fire, but wants to know more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Charity Vargas: \u003c/strong>How many earthquake cottages are left and you know, are they still used and where they are?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>Today on the show, we’ll dig into the history of San Francisco’s earthquake cottages. We’ll learn how critical they were in sheltering a vulnerable…but vital.. population and learn about modern efforts to save them. I’m Olivia Allen-Price and you’re listening to Bay Curious. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/strong>We set out to answer Charity’s question by searching for “earthquake shacks”…tiny homes built out of redwood and cedar after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Bay Curious editor and producer Katrina Schwartz found one high on a hill in Bernal Heights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joan Hunter: \u003c/strong>You want a little tour? Ok, this is our tiny kitchen and I believe this rectangle room is the original earthquake shack and this part is added on, but it’s kind of hard to say exactly. I’m Joan Hunter. I live in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, California in an earthquake cottage or earthquake shack, as some would like to say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>I’m standing with Joan in her light filled living room…all that’s left of the original cottage. It’s a modestly sized room, but has tall ceilings and windows that look out over a sweeping view of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What started out as a one room cottage has been expanded quite a bit…it’s about 620 square feet now, still small by modern standards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joan Hunter: \u003c/strong>Okay, so this is a little bedroom we have in the front and all of our rooms, this is a theme for the house, everything is small, very, very small.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Joan’s got two kids…so the house can feel like a tight squeeze at times. But she fell in love with the history of the place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joan Hunter: \u003c/strong>what I do know is that the guy who bought it, he was a little kind of like a bachelor. And he met someone who was also single and they moved together and they got married. And it was just a love story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Joan likes thinking that after they survived the worst natural disaster San Francisco has ever experienced…and been homeless for months because of it…that they finally found some tranquility here, a little piece of San Francisco to call their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music to help us transition\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>The Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire leveled 80 percent of San Francisco. The morning of April 18, 1906 Bay Area residents awoke early in the morning to a temblor they’d never forget.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of shaking\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kathleen Norris: \u003c/strong>Every picture on the wall is going tack, tack, tack. Everything movable in the house is keeping up that unearthly clatter. You could hear up and down the roads, earthquake. It’s an earthquake. Oh, God help us, it’s an earthquake. of course, it changed the world for all of us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Kathleen Norris shared her oral history with the Bancroft Library in 1960. There was no audio recorded during the disaster, but anyone who survived it remembered the trauma of it clearly…even fifty years later. Kathleen was in Mill Valley when the earthquake hit…where the damage wasn’t too bad. But she and her brother were curious about how San Francisco had fared…so they found a boat that took them to the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joan Hunter: \u003c/strong>It was something to see. The great, heavy, slow rolls of smoke that were joining hands as they went up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Kathleen describes refugees fleeing homes that had been leveled, toting their belongings in baby carriages and wheel barrows.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kathleen Norris: \u003c/strong>We walked over the hot, hot rocks of Market Street. And of course, the cable car lines were twisted hairpins. And the houses were all down. There was nothing saved. Nothing was accepted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>And yet, the image that lingered in her mind…even as the smoke lay heavy over the hills… was of people getting to work to repair their city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kathleen Norris: \u003c/strong>And already there were people helping out and organizing, scraping bricks. The bricks were hot. And they were working away. Nobody felt for an instant, oh, let’s go somewhere else. Everyone knew that the city was going to come back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>As indeed it would. Just nine years after the earthquake and fire, San Francisco hosted the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition…the reason the Palace of Fine Arts was built…a spectacle that 18 million people visited by the time it closed.. Headlines trumpeted the achievement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Voice over reading archival newspaper headline:\u003c/em> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Big Fair is Opened. All eyes on San Francisco. President Flashes Signal\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Fair Draws Myriad; All Records For Crowds Fall\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Marvelous Exhibits From All Parts of the Earth Assembled by 42 Countries for the Hugest Conclave of Nations in History\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>It was a signal to the world that San Francisco was still \u003cem>the most important\u003c/em> city in the West…one full of invention and achievement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice over reading archival newspaper headline: \u003c/strong>Tower of Jewels Wreathed in Flames. But it’s only to thrill visitors\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Art Smith Sets Hearts Leaping: Aviator’s Loop-the-Loops at Night Traced By Trail of Smoke\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>But how did San Francisco go from the absolute devastation of 1906 to showing off the latest advances in science and art on the world stage just nine years later? This is where the earthquake cottages… or shacks as they’re affectionately called…come into the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>So after the 1906 earthquake and fire, more than a quarter of a million people are at least temporarily displaced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Woody LaBounty is President and CEO of San Francisco Heritage, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving San Francisco history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>And now, the powers that be have to decide not only how to take care of all these people, but also who’s gonna rebuild the city?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Immediately after the earthquake and fire, the military stepped in and established tent camps in the city’s parks. But soon a new organization…the San Francisco Relief Corporation…was formed to distribute food, clothes and other aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>That covered many aspects of what you have to do when people are refugees, but also a specific housing effort, and that was the earthquake relief cottages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Officials were worried about sanitation in the tent camps when winter rains came. So, they decided to build 5,610 relief cottages…built with redwood, fir and cedar… to house people. They were painted “park bench green”…literally the color used on Golden Gate Park benches… and clustered in neighborhood parks like Jefferson Square, Precita Park, and Portsmouth Square. Around 17,000 people lived in them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>If you owned property or you had a property that had been destroyed in the earthquake, you rebuilt or you figured out a way to move on. But there was a vast number of people who didn’t have any other resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>These were San Francisco’s poor, folks who had lived in boarding houses or shared rooms downtown before the fire. City leaders wanted to keep these laborers with the skills to rebuild the city close by. But they didn’t plan to give away the cottages for free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>So for all of wanting to take care of the refugees, there was also a fear at the time of creeping socialism. People in power did not want to give anybody anything for nothing. So they thought it would create indigence. And so you were supposed to pay some sort of rent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Here’s how it worked. Shack residents paid monthly rent of a few dollars while their shacks were in the parks. But the relief corporation returned that money when a resident bought some land and moved the shack out of the park and onto their own property.That generosity was spurred by pressure to move refugees and their cottages out of the parks as soon as possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>As other San Franciscans were ready to move on from the disaster, they didn’t like the idea that their parks had a community, a village of working-class people. Living in the middle of their park. They wanted their parks back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>About a year and a half after the earthquake, in the summer of 1907, most of the shacks had been removed from the parks. Newspapers at the time described the surreal image of tiny homes on wagons moving across the city with people still in them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice over reading archival newspaper excerpt:\u003c/strong> It is a strange sight to see a procession of these refugee cottages moving down fashionable Van Ness Avenue or busy Fillmore Street, faces peering from the windows, and men, women and children going about their household tasks as if their little home was securely perched upon a cement foundation and surrounded by a garden and a fence.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Back in 1907, the Richmond District, a northwestern neighborhood, was mostly undeveloped sand dunes, with lots of empty land. So many shack owners moved their cottages to vacant plots there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Woody says the earthquake shack program not only got the city working again…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>\u003cspan style=\"text-decoration: line-through\">I\u003c/span>t also gave people who never would have dreamed, I think, of owning a home a chance to get into that American dream. So you get the earthquake cottage, you’re a refugee who has nothing, and now suddenly you buy a lot for 100 bucks in the sand dunes of the Richmond, you have pretty much a free house.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Bernal Heights is another place with many earthquake cottages…people just moved their shacks from Precita Park to open land up the hill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And some of them are still there…like the house we toured at the beginning of this episode.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>The one sort of key touchstone that you can tell about a cottage is the roof line. It has a very shallow pitched roof, kind of like a pup tent, like a Boy Scout tent. And then that is like your first hint because a lot of small buildings you’ll see have very steep pitched or flat roofs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Woody says many shack owners quickly made improvements to their new homes — painting, building fences, adding additional rooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>There was sort of a stigma of having an earthquake cottage for a few years because it sort of signified you were a refugee, you needed help, you were poor. So people often, they quickly tried to hide sort of the pedigree of their houses and cover them with shingles quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>They wanted to hide that telling park bench green color. Most existing earthquake cottages are surrounded by modern additions. Or sometimes they’re a couple shacks placed together. That’s one reason it’s really hard to know how many still exist in San Francisco, they’re hidden. But Woody estimates between 30 and 50 earthquake cottages are dotted across the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>The cottage in the front is made up of three and a half shacks, and then there’s a free-standing mid-size shack in the backyard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>This is Jane Cryan. She rented one of these preserved earthquake shacks in the outer Sunset in the 1980s. Jane is best known as a “shacktivist”…fighting to preserve earthquake cottages from development. But if it weren’t for the Beat movement in the 1950s, she never would have moved here in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>The only reason I ended up in San Francisco is that Jack Kerouac, with whom I had correspondence from the time I was 16 years old told me that Milwaukee was no place for a poet. You should be in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>By day she was an executive assistant, but writing and jazz piano were her passions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>And I moved in and I played piano for about six weeks, day and night, and an elderly gentleman from across the street came over and shook his finger at me and he said, young lady, do you know that you’re living in a couple of relief houses pasted together?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Her three room cottage was actually three earthquake shacks pasted together. This was 1982 and Jane had lived in San Francisco almost 20 years. But she’d never even heard of the 1906 earthquake and fire. Her neighbor’s passing comment sparked her curiosity. She spent nights and weekends obsessively going through old newspaper archives to learn as much as she could about the disaster and the earthquake cottages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, her landlord made it known that he planned to sell her cottage…or worse demolish it and sell the lot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>Take down our history. So I had to do something.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Preserving these cottages — tangible pieces of such important history — became her life’s work. She took inspiration from one of the 1906 earthquake refugees she learned about in her research, a woman named Mary Kelly. Mary was an agitator, constantly questioning how the relief corporation dolled out aid and whether it was fair. She was such a pain to them they eventually evicted her from her cottage. But she refused to leave, famously saying:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Voice over portraying Mary Kelly:\u003c/strong> They can’t bluff me. I’ll stay with the house if they take it to the end of the earth.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>She rode in her cottage as men hauled it onto a wagon and trucked it away. She stayed inside as they dismantled the cottage board by board. Jane finds Mary’s tenacity — and willingness to stand up to power — endearing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>She was exactly the way I was. If I saw something, I said something. And if I saw something that was not right, I said something louder.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Jane started a nonprofit called The Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of San Francisco Refugee Shacks. She fought hard to get the planning commission to designate her little shack a historic landmark.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And she was successful!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>Landmark number 171.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>But it was a bittersweet victory. The commission also said that Jane had to vacate the cottage in order to compensate the landlord for putting restrictions on his property. Jane bounced around from place to place after that, eventually moving back to Wisconsin, where she’s originally from.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina in the tape: \u003c/strong>What do you miss most about San Francisco?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jane Cryan: \u003c/strong>Oh, everything! Oh my god, San Francisco is the queen of the Golden West, for heaven’s sake!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Historian Woody LaBounty says there are probably more earthquake cottages than we know. They’re hiding in people’s backyards, incorporated into bigger houses or used as sheds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Woody LaBounty: \u003c/strong>They’re the last sort of most visible, tangible sign of one of the biggest things that ever happened to the city of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>Increasingly these little cottages are being bought and torn down to make room for larger homes. But the ones that remain are a reminder of a refugee relief program that not only got people back on their feet, but made them homeowners. An example of San Franciscans coming together to repair and resurrect a beloved city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/strong> That was Bay Curious editor and producer Katrina Schwartz. Special thanks this week to \u003ca href=\"https://californiarevealed.org/\">California Revealed\u003c/a>, an online database of oral histories and other archival materials. They helped us find Kathleen Norris’ oral history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Right now your membership means more than ever, give at \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/donate\">KQED.org/donate\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale, Katrina Schwartz 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>Have a wonderful week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "theres-a-grand-historic-house-hiding-under-the-bay-bridge",
"title": "There’s a Grand Historic House Hiding Under the Bay Bridge",
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"headTitle": "There’s a Grand Historic House Hiding Under the Bay Bridge | 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>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-content post-body\">\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>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "san-franciscos-love-hate-relationship-with-big-box-stores",
"title": "San Francisco’s 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-content post-body\">\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>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "the-girl-in-the-fishbowl-the-secret-behind-san-franciscos-quirkiest-nightclub-act",
"title": "The Girl in the Fishbowl: The Secret Behind San Francisco's Quirkiest Nightclub Act",
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"headTitle": "The Girl in the Fishbowl: The Secret Behind San Francisco’s Quirkiest Nightclub Act | 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>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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"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-content post-body\">\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>\n\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-content post-body\">\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>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "who-killed-jane-stanford-inside-a-120-year-old-mystery",
"title": "Who Killed Jane Stanford? Inside a 120-Year-Old Mystery",
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"headTitle": "Who Killed Jane Stanford? Inside a 120-Year-Old Mystery | KQED",
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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-content post-body\">\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>\n\u003c/div>"
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},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
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"order": 1
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"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"order": 9
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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},
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"id": "fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"hidden-brain": {
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
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"how-i-built-this": {
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"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"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. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"order": 15
},
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"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
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},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
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"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
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"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/432309616/perspectives",
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},
"planet-money": {
"id": "planet-money",
"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
"subscribe": {
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