• Vallejo police arrested 10 people suspected of soliciting sex from sex workers during an enforcement operation Friday. One suspect fled the scene, initiating a chase with police before his tires were blown out by spike strips. [KRON4]
• DNA analysis determined that the coyote that made it ashore to Alcatraz swam there from Angel Island, which is even further away than San Francisco. Scientists are unsure where the coyote went after it stepped foot on the island as they never saw traces of it again. [KRON4]
• As the state moves to phase out the sale of natural gas appliances across the Bay Area, officials are considering offering certain households one-time exemptions. [KPIX]

National:

• Senate Republicans have proposed $1 billion in funding, largely for White House security upgrades, and Democrats say it’s effectively subsidizing President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom, as some of the funds would go toward helping secure it. [Associated Press]
• For the first time since World War II, the US’s national debt, which hit $31.27 trillion at the end of April, now exceeds its gross domestic product at $31.22 trillion. [CBS]
• An alleged con artist named Vladimir Sklarov, 63, who also goes by “Gregory Mitchell” and “Mark Simon Bentley,” was arrested in Chicago Saturday and is scheduled to appear in federal court Friday on charges that he duped a Mexican billionaire out of $450 million. [Associated Press]

Video of the Day:

San Francisco may have bar crawls dedicated to Brides and Mrs Roper, but what this city really needs is a bunch of Angela Lansburys hitting the streets, like this delightful-looking Murder She Wrote festival that recently took place in Mendocino.

Coincidentally, there’s currently a touring Murder She Wrote sing-along at Great Star Theater in Chinatown this week, running Wednesday through Saturday.

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

• A man and a woman were found dead Sunday morning inside a car at Aquatic Park in West Berkeley, and there were signs of possible overdoses. [Berkeley Scanner]
• Tours to Alcatraz Island have been paused for a week while the dock undergoes repairs, and additional improvements to the dock and pilings will be implemented later in the year. [SFGate]
• The FBI was investigating a robbery in Oakland that occurred at the Wells Fargo Bank Monday afternoon on the 100 block of 40th Street near Piedmont Avenue. [Chronicle]

National:

• The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Alabama on 11 counts of wire and bank fraud charges over the group's investigations into extremist groups. The charges stem from when the group previously paid confidential informants to infiltrate far-right groups, as the Justice Department has accused the nonprofit of “manufacturing extremism.” [CBS News]
• The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas ruled that state lawmakers can require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, ruling that the law did not violate the First Amendment. [Associated Press]
• One of the mothers whose three children were among the eight killed in the mass shooting in Shreveport, Louisiana, Sunday still has a bullet lodged in her face, and she’s suffering from memory loss. [NBC News]

Video of the Day:

Let Joshua Jackson, winner of the Delaware Marathon, serve as a reminder to wait until after the finish line to cheer one’s victory.

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

President Trump has, in fact, allocated $152 million in taxpayer money in his proposed budget to fund the first year of "project expenses" for his asinine, entirely impractical, and likely-to-be-abandoned plan to reopen Alcatraz as a prison, because he thinks it's a neat idea.

President Trump released his 2027 budget proposal today, which is more a wishlist and a political document than it is any actual, executable sort of budget. But in it he includes $152 million, as the Associated Press reports, for his project to renovate and reestablish Alcatraz as a prison — a project that by some estimates would cost around $2 billion, and would cost more in annual upkeep than it would be worth, which is largely why it was decommissioned for carceral use 60 years ago.

Trump first floated the idea last May, musing on Truth Social one weekend that it would be terrific to reopen Alcatraz "to house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders," adding, "When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm."

A clever sleuth at the Hollywood Reporter quicly put together the fact that Trump was likely watching the Clint Eastwood movie Escape From Alcatraz on Sunday morning, May 4, as it was playing on the local Palm Beach PBS affiliate that day, when he shot off his tweet about reopening the prison.

But very quickly it was made to look like serious business, with now-fired Attorney General Pam Bondi flying to San Francisco in July to tour Alcatraz, likely as a distraction from the Epstein Files uproar that was just beginning at that time.

State Senator Scott Wiener, who is also running for Congress, quickly denounced Trump's suggestion as "absurd on its face," pointing out first that Alcatraz is now a very lucrative tourist attaction that "generates significant revenue for the federal government and supports many jobs," and turning it into a "domestic gulag" would be nothing more than a boondoggle and waste of money.

After the release of Trump's budget proposal today, with the Alcatraz line item, Wiener reiterated that saying in a tweet, "Last summer, when Trump first floated his deranged idea to destroy Alcatraz & turn it into a prison gulag, many dismissed the idea as the rantings of a lunatic. I cautioned at the time that Trump often acts on even his most unhinged musings. Just ask Iran, Venezuela, the White House east wing or the people of Minneapolis."

Wiener continues, "He’s now back, asking Congress for billions to waste on destroying a top tourist attraction to turn it back into a failed exorbitantly expensive prison.  We won’t let him get away with this idiocy."

Alcatraz closed in 1963, largely because it cost three times as much as all other federal prisons to operate because all supplies and staff had to come in and out by boat.

In reaction to Trump's plan last year, Mayor Daniel Lurie told local station KTVU, "This is not a serious proposal."

Previously: Trump Still Barreling Forward With Certifiably Insane Plan to Reopen Alcatraz as a Prison

Photo by Aldric Rivat

• The coyote that made it onto Alcatraz Island earlier this month appears to be thriving there, as rangers reported seeing carcasses from prey that it caught. Authorities were worried about the safety of the visitors the coyote was attracting due to the media attention, but local expert Janet Kessler said the coyote is used to humans, as it was born and raised in SF. [Coyote Yips/Instagram]

• A cute, new mascot called “Maverick,” who’s a descendant of Ma Sheng, the Horse God, has been unveiled for the 2026 Chinese New Year Parade in celebration of the rare Year of the Fire Horse, which only comes around every 60 years. [KGO]

• The ongoing swarm of earthquakes near San Ramon, which have been striking in clusters for over a month, hit the region again Friday with a 3.4M quake, followed by a 2.9. [KPIX]
• The National Football League reportedly told San Jose officials, including Mayor Matt Mahan, that ICE agents will not be targeting Super Bowl events, but leaders are remaining vigilant in case of a surge. [NBC Bay Area]

• San Mateo County authorities are investigating the death of a 31-year-old woman who was found inside a detached garage that was on fire early Friday morning in Fair Oaks and was pronounced dead at the scene. [KRON4]
• Check out this aerial view showing the massive turnout at Friday's walkout and anti-ICE rally at SF's Dolores Park, with more protests to come over the weekend.

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

A coyote recently made its way to Alcatraz Island for the first time in documented history, most likely from SF’s Coit Tower area, after it perhaps got caught up in the Bay’s current, which was much stronger than usual due to recent storms.

Yes, the coyotes around here are pretty good swimmers.

As SFGate reports, Aidan Moore, who works for Alcatraz City Cruises, shared some videos on Facebook featuring a lone coyote furiously doggy-paddling its way to Alcatraz as nearby tourists watched in amazement. While coyotes are common on nearby Angel Island, where around 14 to 17 coyotes live by way of Tiburon, as SFist reported last fall, this is the first documented sighting of them on Alcatraz Island.

“I didn’t believe them to start with,” Moore told SFGate, until he saw the video footage, which was filmed by a guest. Per SFGate, the coyote came ashore along the southern edge of the island near the Agave Trail, reportedly “panting and shivering.”

The coyote appeared a lot like its cartoon counterpart, as it struggled to gain its bearings while navigating the rocky terrain, as can be seen in the videos and accompanying screenshots.

Then the coyote quickly disappeared after it hit land.

A spokesperson for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Julian Espinoza, confirmed the sighting. “Coyotes can be commonly seen throughout our San Francisco and Marin parklands but never before on Alcatraz,” he told SFGate. “This was the first time our park biologists observed anything like this.”

SFGate spoke to a captain with Alcatraz City Cruises, who said the run-off from recent storms was entering the bay at eight or nine knots that day, or around eight miles an hour, making it impossible for the animal to outswim it.

“I suspect he fell into the water chasing something and was swept away,” Moore told SFGate.

Christine Wilkinson, a conservation scientist and carnivore ecologist who has researched coyotes for University of California Berkeley and the California Academy of Sciences, told SFGate the coyote, which she said appeared very weak, may have ventured from SF’s Coit Tower area in search of more green space to claim new territory — choosing the risky bay currents over the deadly Interstate 280 in the other direction.

Wilkinson told SFGate she wondered if the coyote will try to claim the territory and call over a mate, like the coyotes on Angel Island did. “But it is a much smaller island and I am not sure if I’ve heard of a coyote pack ever establishing such a tiny territory,” she said.

It’s unknown if the coyote is still on the island or whether it made its way back to where it came from. “We’ve been wandering around the island looking for him, but no one has been able to spot him,” Moore told SFGate. “It’s possible he might not be seen for a while.”  

Images: Screenshot from videos

Previously: Coyotes Are Now Swimming More Than a Mile Back and Forth From Tiburon to Angel Island

The Board of Supervisors hosted a mock hearing Wednesday, where seven student legislators from local elementary schools reviewed proposals from four of their peers for alternative uses of Alcatraz Island, challenging the federal government’s laughable plan to reopen it as a prison.

As Mission Local reports, a group of third- through fifth-graders from San Francisco’s Tenderloin Community School, Bessie Carmichael Elementary, and Redding Elementary School, who all attend the 826 Valencia writing program, held court at City Hall Wednesday for the first time in the board’s history. The meeting was even recorded by the award-winning SFGovTV, but SFist was unable to find the video footage.

In addition to the seven child legislators, District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar and District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey (whose district covers Alcatraz) were also in attendance, along with the four kid presenters and the remaining students testifying in support of the proposals. Melgar, Dorsey, and the board clerk’s office staff educated the students on how a real hearing operates, including which buttons to push and protocol surrounding public comment and question-and-answer sessions, per Mission Local.

As to be expected, the four highly creative proposals involved a water park, a giant playground, and animal sanctuaries. Nine-year-old Allen Truong suggested that the island be turned into a bird sanctuary. “We need to keep them safe from vehicles that can crush them,” Truong said. “The birds deserve to have their babies in peace.”

“Our city animal is the parrot. What other birds do you think need protection?” Melgar asked Truong.

“Pigeons, I would say,” Truong responded. Indeed.

Dorsey mused that the proposed options were much more appealing than the reality. “I will say, I’m glad I don’t have to make a choice which one I would pick,” Dorsey said. “But I can confidently say that all of these are better ideas than what we have in the Trump administration right now.”

Image: Kārlis Dambrāns/Flickr

Related: Trump Still Barreling Forward With Certifiably Insane Plan to Reopen Alcatraz as a Prison

California Fifth Graders Take On Harmful “Sephora Kids” Skincare Trend, Challenge Lawmakers

It was 50 years ago this Thursday that San Francisco’s own annual ‘Unthanksgiving’ started on Alcatraz Island, and as always, this year’s sunrise ceremony will be streaming online if you can’t make it to Alcatraz at 6 am.

We are reminded that this is Yelamu, Ohlone Territory on Thanksgiving morning when Alcatraz Island is the site of this Thursday’s 50th anniversary Indigenous Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering. The first of these ceremonies was exactly 50 years ago Thursday, on Thanksgiving Day 1975 (which also happened to be on November 27 that year, too). The Indigenous Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering was meant as a counter-celebration to Thanksgiving itself, known as “Unthanksgiving,” and paying homage to the Indigenous peoples who’ve survived centuries of lasting harms on their unceded land.

This close to the event, it is exceedingly difficult to get boat tickets to Alcatraz in person for the ceremony, though it is still possible. You can also just stream the event live online.

The ceremony will be streaming live on the International Indian Treaty Council Facebook page, the KPFA website and on the radio at KPFA 94.1 FM. Those live broadcasts will be from 6 am - 8 am on Thursday, November 27.

If you do really want to try and go in person, you’d better be prepared to get to Pier 33 at about 3:30 am or earlier Thursday morning. All of the Alcatraz City Cruises for the morning are sold out, but organizers say that “online ferry tickets are sold out but there will be 500 available at the box office on the day of the event.” You can get more information about the Alcatraz Cruise at Pier 33 here.

While Thursday is the 50th anniversary Indigenous Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering, the genesis of the event dates even earlier. It was established as a tribute to the November 1969 – June 1971 occupation of Alcatraz by Native American activists. A Lakota Sioux activist at the time argued that because the federal government gave up the former prison island and deemed it “surplus property,” by treaty, it should have been offered to Native Americans.

The activists did not get any of their demands met (they demanded deed and ownership of Alcatraz Island), but their 19-month occupation became a media cause célèbre and elevated the Native American rights movement to national prominence. It also eventually won a number of Native rights policy concessions out of the Nixon administration.  

That occupation served as the inspiration for the Indigenous Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering that started in 1975, and still continues 50 years later.

“In the late 1960s and early 70s, the Chippewa started the Thanksgiving, what we called ‘Unthanksgiving,” said Bill Means, a surviving Lakota member who was at the original 1969-71 occupation, on KPFA’s Unthanksgiving podcast last year. “We began to promote it as Indigenous Peoples Day.”

Eventually, many states and municipalities renamed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. Then-President Joe Biden officially made Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples Day with a 2024 declaration.

“That’s how the Alcatraz activities started,” Means explained. “There’s two of them. Of course, the one on Columbus Day, and then there’s the one on Thanksgiving which is a national prayer day, which we go there and have a sunrise ceremony. So there’s two major events there every year since that time in the early 70s.”

“We’ve been going there every year, and of course, it’s become quite a cultural event, especially on Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving,” Means added.

And 50 years later, it’s still quite the cultural event, and one that we should all experience (if even just via webcast) on some Thanksgiving during our time in the Bay Area.

Related: 'Unthanksgiving': Scenes From The Annual Native American Ceremony On Alcatraz [SFist]

Image: @treatycouncil via Twitter

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

• The Mosswood Meltdown punk rock festival returns to Oakland this weekend, with John Waters taking the stage yet again as host. The cult filmmaker says he keeps coming back because “punks are my people.” [KQED]
• Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber of Full House fame are visiting San Francisco next weekend for a live podcast taping at the Palace of Fine Arts. Side note: Sweetin has been an active presence at recent ICE and trans rights protests. [KRON4, Daily Mail]
• Staff and supporters of Oakland event venue, For the Culture, are aiming to get 10,000 signatures on their petition demanding the city stop targeting the business with the intention of forcing them to shut down. The group cited numerous other Black-owned venues that have received the same treatment. [Change.org]

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• Harding Park, San Francisco’s flagship municipal golf course, marks its 100th anniversary. The course has hosted major champions and local amateurs alike while weathering decades of city budget challenges. [Chronicle]
• Senator Scott Wiener warned fellow politicians to take Trump’s Alcatraz prison talk more seriously, pointing out that while the whole thing sounds absurd, Trump has been known to follow through on many of his "warped and destructive" ideas. [KRON4]
• A San Jose martial arts instructor was arrested earlier this month after police say they found child sexual abuse material in his possession and evidence he may have been communicating with underage girls online. [Bay Area News Group]

National:

• The Trump administration has ended federal funding for the specialized 988 hotline option that connected LGBTQ+ youth with trained crisis counselors, shutting down a service that helped over 1.5 million callers in just three years. While the Trevor Project continues to offer 24/7 crisis support and peer programs, advocates warn that the loss of this targeted lifeline leaves many queer youth without the tailored care they need. [Slate]

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• Ten detained Americans were released by Venezuela as part of a three-country deal that also repatriated 250 Venezuelan migrants from El Salvador’s CECOT prison. The men were reunited with their families after undergoing medical evaluations. [Associated Press]
• A 61-year-old man died after being pulled into an MRI machine while wearing a large metal chain at a medical building in Westbury, New York. Police say he entered an unauthorized MRI room during a scan, and the strong magnetic field caused the metal chain to pull him into the machine, leading to critical injuries. [ABC News]

Video of the Day:

• A trash can hill bomb race takes over Potrero Hill.

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

The clown show continues today with the Trump administration waving its hands in the direction of Alcatraz in an attempt to distract the more distractable members of the public from all the terrible shit they're doing.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum were up bright and early Thursday getting a private tour of Alcatraz before any tourists showed up. As the Chronicle reports via a spokesperson for House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi — who is in Washington today because Congress is in session — Bondi and Burgum were also expected to make a visit to the Presidio.

But where will they be having lunch?

It's not clear if Bondi is going to make some sort of public announcement about Trump's asinine idea for reopening Alcatraz as some sort of symbol of restored law and order, and stocking the Bay waters around it with sharks — which he claims are featured in a rendering he had drawn up. Because he's a child.

At 10 am Thursday, Burgum posted photos of the visit to Xitter, saying, "Spent the day on Alcatraz Island, a @NatlParkService site, to start the work to renovate and reopen the site to house the most dangerous criminals and illegals." Burgum added, "This administration is restoring safety, justice, and order to our streets."

Update: Bondi posted her own photos around 11 am, saying, "A great morning at Alcatraz... Under President Trump, we are Making America Safe Again."

Governor Gavin Newsom put out a statement saying, "Pam Bondi will reopen Alcatraz the same day Trump lets her release the Epstein files. So... never."

Pelosi was characteristically dismissive Wednesday when she issued a statement about Bondi's planned visit and the president's continued focus on the highly impractical and wildly expensive plan to make Alcatraz a great prison again.

"The planned announcement to reopen Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary is the Trump Administration’s stupidest initiative yet," Pelosi said. "It should concern us all that clearly the only intellectual resources the Administration has drawn upon for this foolish notion are decades-old fictional Hollywood movies."

The decades-old movie Pelosi was referring to was 1979's Escape From Alcatraz starring Clint Eastwood, which the Hollywood Reporter noted was playing on the local PBS affliate in Palm Beach, Florida when Trump was at Mar a Lago the May weekend he first posted his idea about reopening the prison to Truth Social.

Out of nowhere that Sunday he announced that he was going to be directing "the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders."

Ironically, the Eastwood movie depicts the true story of a 1962 escape from the prison that may have actually been successful. Hardened criminal Frank Morris and two other men concocted a plan to use an improvised raft to cross the Bay after escaping their cells, and they were never seen again and their bodies were never found.

Any process of reopening Alcatraz would require new electric, water, and plumbing infrastructure on the island, not to mention extraordinarily high operating costs that were ultimately the reason that the prison was closed in 1963. As a tourist attraction, Alcatraz generates around $60 million annually for the National Park Service.

Pelosi has added, regarding Trump's apparent plans, "It remains to be seen how the Administration could possibly afford to spend billions to convert and maintain Alcatraz as a prison when they are already adding trillions of dollars to the national debt with their sinful law." And, the former Speaker added, "Should reason not prevail and Republicans bring this absurdity before Congress, Democrats will use every parliamentary and budgetary tactic available to stop this lunacy."

Longtime local newspaper columnist and now ABC 7 politics "Insider" Phil Matier calls Bondi's visit "a photo op" and "a publicity stunt."

"This is a tour in order to capture the image of them in San Francisco on Alcatraz, declaring that Donald Trump is tough on crime, so tough that he's going to reopen The Rock," Matier says. He adds that while the expense of returning this "ancient castle" to a working prison is likely unworkable, "planning for it and showing drawings and making a statement about it, that's a lot cheaper."

The photo op is reminiscent of one the administration orchestrated last week, in which a group of federal officials on horseback rode through a Los Angeles park, making a threatening show of hunting for undocumented immigrants that was basically staged for Fox News's cameras.

Meanwhile, Bondi has spent the last week dodging questions about the Epstein files, as a host of formerly Trump-supporting voices on the internet are growing increasingly incensed about the administration trying to brush Trump's well established links to Epstein under the rug.

Previously: Trump Still Barreling Forward With Certifiably Insane Plan to Reopen Alcatraz as a Prison

Top image: U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a news conference at the DEA headquarters on July 15, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. The Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration held a news conference to announce that 71 kilograms of fentanyl and 20 kilograms of methamphetamine were seized in South Carolina as part of the “Operation Take Back America” initiative. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

• Two members of the Trump administration are reportedly coming to the Bay Area to visit Alcatraz on Thursday, following through, at least for show, on Trump's absurd plan to reopen it. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, in a comment today, called it "the Trump Administration's stupidest initiative yet." [ABC 7]
• As part of a California Highway Patrol investigation report, an eerie photo has been released, taken by one of the built-in cameras on the Tesla Cybertruck that crashed last November in Piedmont killing three teens. The photo shows three of the crash victims just prior to getting into the car, and one of them is carrying what appears to be a 1.75L bottle of vodka. [KRON4]
• Activists seeking to have the city oust a prison operator from the site of the historic Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in the Tenderloin had a hearing today at the Board of Appeals, appealing a decision by the Planning Department to allow the transitional housing facility to remain at the address. [Mission Local]
• A seven-member musical collective, Oakland Rising, was invited to perform at the Kennedy Center, but only three of them have decided to make the trip, with the other expressing moral and political reservations since Trump's takeover of the institution. [Chronicle]

National:

• A very significant, 7.3M earthquake struck near the southern coast of Alaska this afternoon, triggering a tsunami warning for much of that coastal area, but not for California. [KTVU]
• Likely from the toilet this morning, Trump went off on Truth Social about the "Jeffrey Epstein Hoax," saying that "Scams and Hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at," and complaining, "my PAST supporters have bought into this 'bullshit,' hook, line, and sinker." [CBS News]
• It hasn't yet formed into a tropical storm — it will be named Dexter if it does — but a disorganized mass of rain and thunderstorms is moving onto the Gulf Coast and could cause flooding in Louisiana, Florida, and elsewhere. [CNN]

Video:

• Below is the trailer for 1979's Escape From Alcatraz, the Clint Eastwood movie that Trump was likely watching on TV the weekend that he decided the decomissioned federal prison ought to be reopened.

Photo: Mauro Lima

In this week's Field Notes: a Golden State Valkyries momcast, Audium’s 50th anniversary 176-speaker revival, Bandaloop in Oakland, Tamera Avery’s surreal art, the best swimming holes, Victorian towns, zany dioramas, and more.

Courtside vibes and Bay Area pride

Two former high school ballers turned San Francisco moms, educators, and entrepreneurs have created a podcast that’s as much about community as it is about basketball.

Valkyries, Say Less dives into the stories behind the players and coaches of the Golden State Valkyries, offering insider perspectives, bite-sized game updates, and the best Chase Center eats. Listen on Apple and Spotify.  — KPIX

Bay Area swimming holes worth the drive

Looking to beat the heat and escape the city grind? Bay Area swimming holes like the Inkwells in Marin, Russian River's Sunset Beach River Park, China Hole near Morgan Hill, and Garden of Eden in the Santa Cruz Mountains offer cool, refreshing dips in scenic spots.

Float beneath the redwoods, hike to hidden beaches, or spend a lazy afternoon tubing in the sun. Just check the water conditions, pack out what you pack in—and be sure to park legally. — Axios

A Victorian road trip through Northern California

From Ferndale’s dairy-fueled “Butterfat Palaces” to the gold-built facades of Grass Valley and Murphys, these Northern California towns flaunt 19th-century charm.

Nevada City saved nearly 70 Gold Rush buildings, including California’s oldest theater. Eureka’s Carson Mansion is a Queen Anne masterpiece. Together, they offer a road trip through California’s ornate architectural past. — Secret San Francisco

Audium at 50

A former donut shop turned sound sanctuary, Audium is celebrating 50 years in San Francisco with a revival of its first-ever tape piece, Audium VI. Created by founder Stan Shaff in 1975, the piece returns as an immersive, in-the-dark experience running now through August 23 — its 176-speaker choreography pulling sound across walls, ceilings, and floors like an aural dance.

Director Dave Shaff, Stan’s son, describes the composition as funky and raw — full of foghorns, field recordings, and subconscious stirrings. The lobby features archival gems: reel-to-reels, taped conversations, and the analog gear that shaped SF’s weirdest legacy venue. — KQED

Dancing on the walls of Oakland’s City Hall

Vertical dance pioneers Bandaloop return to their roots this July with Somewhere to Oakland — a free public series of gravity-defying performances on the walls of City Hall, the Rotunda Building, and more. Catch them through July 26. — Visit Oakland

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Call for zany local historic news dioramas

The Oakland Library is inviting the public to create miniature dioramas based on weird and notable local news stories throughout the ages for a new exhibit, All the News That’s Fit to Build, opening August 9 and running through November 29 in the Oakland History Center.

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KQED’s suggested diorama topics include a raccoon jailed for disorderly conduct, a Lake Merritt mud mishap, and a 1940s tomato spill in Hayward. Dioramas (max 6 inches tall) must be submitted July 21–August 2, along with a copy of the original news story. Outstanding entries will be honored at a special October 4 reception. — KQED

A local’s guide to Alcatraz

Alcatraz is more than just a prison tour—just ask longtime guide Brian Stannard. In summer, skip the crowded cellhouse and head for the quiet West Road, where birdlife abounds and the views of the Golden Gate are unbeatable. Winter is ideal for locals, with fewer crowds and access to the rarely open Agave Trail, marked by towering, Seussian trees.

Time your visit around the Red Power exhibit, which honors the 1969 Native American Occupation. Day tours offer more time to explore, but night tours deliver moody magic. — Broke-Ass Stuart

San Jose time capsule

Nostalgic social media account, Era Envy, featured the interiors of an immaculately preserved 1960–70s era San Jose home. That shag carpeting is just begging to be caressed. — Era Envy

Grappling with absurdity and decay

San Francisco painter Tamera Avery took an unexpected path to art. After earning a business degree at UC Berkeley, she rose through the ranks at Levi Strauss, eventually leading the Youth Wear Division. In 2002, she left to paint full time.

Largely self-taught, Avery creates large-scale oil works based on collages, costumes, and staged photos of friends and family. Her masked, isolated figures appear in surreal landscapes shaped by social and climate anxieties. Her work is currently featured in Force of Nature at Oakland’s Gearbox Gallery through August 9, with an opening reception this Saturday, July 12 and an artist’s talk on Saturday July 26. — 48 Hills

More days, more trips for the free water shuttle

The Oakland-Alameda Water Shuttle is now running six days a week with 63 free daily trips between Jack London Square and Alameda’s Bohol Circle Park. Friday through Sunday hours stretch from 7:20 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. — Port of Oakland

Top Image: tamaraavery.com

President Trump’s Federal Bureau of Prisons officials insist they are moving forward with their out-to-lunch scheme to reopen the tourist site Alcatraz as a maximum-security prison, despite that this is all galactically unrealistic.

We’re not sure where President Trump developed his fever-swamp fantasy that Alcatraz could be reopened as a maximum-security prison. It may be because he watched Clint Eastwood’s Escape From Alcatraz and it gave him the tough-guy jollies. Or maybe it’s because of his strange preoccupation with sharks, though Trump probably does not realize that the San Francisco Bay pretty much only has leopard sharks, which do not attack people. There have been literally zero reports of shark attacks in the San Francisco Bay in more than 150 years.

Yet still, the Chronicle reports that the Trump administration has been scaling up its plans to make Alcatraz a prison again. That paper notes that Federal Bureau of Prisons officials visited the converted tourist attraction last week, and are planning more visits.

This news actually comes from Golden Gate National Recreation Area superintendent David Smith, speaking at a Thursday meeting at the Presidio’s Golden Gate Club.

“I have been in discussion with folks from the Bureau of Prisons,” Smith said at the meeting. “They have been out here. They’ll be coming out again to do assessments of the structure.”

Smith also added a dash of reason in his remarks. “I don’t think this is likely in our future,” he said, because of the “amount of money that would be necessary” it would take to modernize the dilapidated facility.

The Chronicle report notes that “Few people knowledgeable about Alcatraz think reopening it is realistic.” But this is the Trump administration, there are no “knowledgeable” people involved here!

Federal Bureau of Prisons director William Marshall was on Lara Trump’s Fox News show Monday to explain the state of the plan. And yes, Fox News has given President Trump’s daughter-in-law a show, because that is how deep the corruption, stupidity, and nepotism run in the modern conservative movement.

"When you think of Alcatraz, you think of Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Lambeau Field, those types of facilities, you just get that kind of feeling about Alcatraz when you think of those historical venues," Marshall said on the show. "And so yeah, we absolutely think we can get it done. We’ve got engineering teams out there now that are doing some assessments, and so I’m just really excited about the opportunity and possibilities."

OK, where to begin unpacking this delusional nonsense? For starters, absolutely fucking no one thinks of Fenway Park and Wrigley Field when they think of Alcatraz.

Moreover, KTVU explains that renovations would require at least a billion dollars, and annual maintenance fees would run about $100 million each year, because everything needs to be shipped in by boat. The whole reason Attorney General Bobby Kennedy shut the prison down in 1963 was because its operation was such an inefficient waste of money.

And as a reminder, three prisoners did escape.

We will leave the final argument against the idea to San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, who took his first real public swipe at Trump, albeit in nebbishly Daniel Lurie fashion. When told of Trump's plans, Lurie told KTVU, “This is not a serious proposal."

Related: Wiener: Trump's Alcatraz Idea 'Absurd,' Would Be 'Domestic Gulag In the Middle of San Francisco Bay' [SFist]

Image: Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, USA. (Getty Images)

And just like that, we have confirmation of the likely source of President Trump's Sunday whim to reopen Alcatraz — which will never happen — and it's the Clint Eastwood classic Escape From Alcatraz from 1979.

The movie was reportedly showing on the local PBS affiliate WLRN in Palm Beach on Sunday morning, about two hours before Trump shot off his Truth Social post from Mar a Lago suggesting that he'll expand and reopen Alcatraz in order to house the country's most hardened criminals. The Hollywood Reporter put this together on Monday, and it's all the more ironic given the Trump administration's vendetta against public television.

"When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm," Trump wrote, in part. That's why, he said, he was directing "the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders."

Based on a true story of a 1962 escape from the prison, the 1979 film Escape From Alcatraz stars Eastwood as real-life hardened criminal Frank Morris, who orchestrated the escape attempt by four men, three of whom disappeared and were never seen again and one of whom stayed behind. Authorities believed they may have drowned, after trying to use an improvised raft to cross the Bay, but their bodies were never found.

Trump almost acknowledged the Hollywood inspiration for his idea, as the Chronicle notes, when he answered a reporter's question about the asinine tweet on Monday, saying, "Well, I guess I was supposed to be a moviemaker. [Alcatraz] represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order... Alcatraz is, I would say, the ultimate. Sing Sing and Alcatraz, right? The movies."

Trump then incorrectly said that no one had ever escaped the prison. And he made a reference that might have its roots in a shot from the Eastwood film, saying, "One person almost got there, but they — as you know the story — they found his clothing rather badly ripped up. It was a lot of shark bites, a lot of problems."

We don't generally see great white sharks in the Bay, and Trump was clearly just talking out of his ass, per usual. Also, as the Chronicle notes from accounts of his first term, Trump tends to watch four to eight hours of television every day, so of course this is where his mind went while channel surfing.

As we discussed Monday, Trump himself signed a bill into law in 2018 that was meant to shrink the prison population, but Trump knows that his base likes to hear him say things like "throw 'em all in jail" as much as possible, so this was just him riffing on that idea. Historians note that Alcatraz was shut down over 60 years ago because it was too expensive to maintain and was already in a state of decay, and rebuilding the facility would be prohibitively, absurdly expensive.

As a National Park, which it has been since the 1980s, Alcatraz sees around 1.2 million visitors per year, and is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the Bay Area.

Previously: Wiener: Trump's Alcatraz Idea 'Absurd,' Would Be 'Domestic Gulag In the Middle of San Francisco Bay'

Yet again, after all these years, the media is compelled to jump and respond to Trump's every mis-capitalized tweet from the toilet, and this time it was a ridiculous idea floated on Sunday to turn Alcatraz back into a federal prison.

Trump clearly gets his rocks off by taunting liberals and denigrating San Francisco in particular, and that was probably all he was doing with a Sunday post on Truth Social in which he suggested returning Alcatraz to its original purpose, as a prison for "the most dangerous criminals."

Why Alcatraz? Because he and other people know it from the movies, and he's apparently decided it's symbolic of how we don't lock up enough people anymore. This is curious both because the federal prison population has been growing since 2022, after a pandemic dip, and because Trump himself signed a bill into law in 2018 aimed at shrinking the prison population, the First Step Act.

"For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering," Trump wrote in his Truth Social post on Sunday. "When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. No longer will we tolerate these Serial Offenders who spread filth, bloodshed, and mayhem on our streets."

He continued, saying he was directing "the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders."

When we were "a more serious nation," we didn't elect clownish despots like him, but I digress.

A spokesperson for Governor Gavin Newsom's office on Sunday responded saying, "Looks like it's distraction day again in Washington, D.C."

House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said in her own statement, "Alcatraz closed as a federal penitentiary more than sixty years ago. It is now a very popular national park and major tourist attraction. The President’s proposal is not a serious one."

And state Senator Scott Wiener offered a lengthier response, calling the idea of reopening Alcatraz "absurd on its face."

"This major tourist attraction generates significant revenue for the federal government and supports many jobs," Wiener said in a statement. "But apart from Trump’s continuing unhinged behavior, this action is part of Trump’s ongoing crusade to sabotage the rule of law… If Trump is serious about doing this, it’s just one more step in his dismantling of democracy — a domestic gulag right in the middle of San Francisco Bay."

This is another example of a Trump whim that becomes a tweet that becomes a national story in a matter of minutes, and will likely amount to nothing. And, obviously, the cost of transforming what is now a virtual ruin and a museum into a working prison again would be massive.

Not to mention the reason that Alcatraz closed as a prison in 1963 was that it was three times more expensive to operate than other federal prisons, because everything needed to be brought in by boat — as CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins noted on Sunday.

The Chronicle ran out and grabbed some photos of tourists returning from trips to Alcatraz on Sunday, asking them their opinions of Trump's proposal, and so did KTVU. Unsurprisingly, no one thought it was a good idea, and they want it to continue to be a tourist attraction.

Alcatraz historian John Martini tells the Chronicle that the entire cellblock would likely need to be demolished and rebuilt to house prisoners again, and that it is currently "totally inoperable" with no water or sewage, and electricity only in some parts. "It was always an extremely expensive place to run," Martini adds.

Will we need to hear about this much more beyond this week? Hopefully not.

Photo by Marcus Lauff