Due to Caltrans closing the Bay Bridge in both directions over the upcoming Labor Day weekend for earthquake retrofitting, BART will be running hourly overnight service to 14 stations during the wee hours of Friday, September 4 through the early morning hours of Labor Day on Monday, September 7. Participating San Francisco stations will be the 24th Street Mission, Embarcadero, and Powell Street stations, as well as the San Francisco International Airport station. We've never experienced a late-night holiday BART ride but can imagine they'd be pretty rowdy, not to mention the tragic Oscar Grant shooting that occurred this past New Year's Eve. Stay safe and keep your wits about you, BART passengers. [Via Eyes on Blogs, SFBART] more ›

Chenery House owner, colorful San Francisco ad man, and entrepreneur Bob Pritikin bought Hitler's globe this week for a cool $100,000. The globe, snatched fom Hitler's desk in the ruins of his Eagle's Nest retreat, was found by WWII U.S. soldier John Barsamian and put up for auction this week in San Francisco. Now, before you go labeling Pritiklin an anti-Semite, this man is character -- a true collector and unique hoarder. His home... more ›

Aw. This kind of sucks. School teacher Margaret Pavese got slapped with a misdemeanor charge for causing the 47+-acre Lick fire that erupted on Labor Day Weekend. more ›

Labor Day may mark the end of summer for most, but for TV fans, it's the beginning of the Fall TV season that really signals the end of summer and its often crappy TV offerings. Instead, we've got the return of OLD crappy shows and new (possibly) crappy shows to look forward to. Like tonight, when Fox jumps the gun on all the other networks with its Fall season premieres of "Prison Break" and "K-Ville." more ›

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and several smiles as well as lots of cash were raised by some plucky urban ironing. London is apparently full of lies and whales: one of these things is true. We leave that up to you to figure out. more ›

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...And that's not even the curviest part! A car chase that started in Marin County around 3:00 a.m. Monday morning ended abruptly when the driver, speeding at around 75 mph over the Golden Gate Bridge, overshot the turn from Doyle Drive onto Lombard Street and flipped over. A open fifth of Hennessey was found in the car, and the passengers are in SF General with non-fatal injuries. more ›

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. more ›

Since our trimethyldioxypurist is on the road for Labor Day, we're stepping in on the caffeine beat to pass along some sad news: Peet's Coffee founder Alfred Peet died earlier this week (Wednesday) in Oregon. more ›

We had a good time going through the recipes and eating stories in Street Food, the new book by wunderkind Tom Kine - that is, when we got over the insane jealousy. He got a book contract to travel for three months and eat all he could! How do we get something like that? We're excited to try his takes on bolani (Afghan flat bread) and Kadu (roast pumpkin paste), which he got from Bilal, who runs a stall at the Kaiser Farmer's Market in Oakland. Kine even includes party ideas at the end...fun! more ›

You know how the Bay Bridge is going to be closed on this Labor Day weekend? And how that means there'll be fewer car-trips into San Francisco? A reasonable person might assume that that'll mean an increased demand for public transit -- but Muni's response to that is, "reasonable people? What on Earth are those?" more ›

A warm spell is rolling into the Bay Area -- so it's time for our perennial post complaining about how much we haaaaaaate it when it's hot. Bring back the fog! Bring back the fog! more ›

-- Paranoia, feeding faux stories, and NYT's Laura Albert (AKA Miss Leroy) article. Depressing is right, Rita. [CultureBlog] more ›

-- Michelangelo Antonioni dies; Mick LaSalle suspects Eric Rohmer will fade to black next. [Chron blogs] more ›

Remember way back to this spring when there was a Democratic primary? And that one guy who looked like Phil Rizzuto beat the Really Boring Guy to take on the Governator? Whatever happened to him? Yes, it's only been a few weeks into the main part of the campaign for Governor, that being after Labor Day, but questions are already being asked about whether Phil's campaign is either doomed or just F-----.. more ›

Isn't everyone glad the Bay Bridge is reopened? Well, maybe not BART -- they're reporting a 13% increase in ridership over Labor Day weekend, including 10,200 riders who used the overnight service. Despite that promising-sounding 10,200, BART continues to say that it makes no financial sense to run BART 24 hours all the time; they say that it costs $300,000 to run the trains overnight, and they only made $30,000 on overnight fares this weekend. (They're making up the $270,000 from Caltrans.) Hey BART, we have a thought -- maybe if you had 24 hour service all the time, more people would use it and it wouldn't just be this weird one-off thing for one solitary weekend? more ›

--The Bay Bridge lower deck is open again. more ›

As if the Cal Greeks didn't have enough to worry about with the undercover cops swarming in -- the ladies of Alpha Omicron Pi got an unpleasant surprise as they answered their door yesterday morning at 2:30 a.m. to a young man, who then died from a gunshot wound. The Berkeley police had received a tip that there might have been a shooting earlier that night at the site of the former Tower Records on Durant, and the sorority released a statement that contrary to previous reports, the sorority was not having a party that night. more ›

In honor of Labor Day, we'd like to point out that every employee, freelancer and consultant in Silicon Valley has to bargain their health benefit terms on their own or take what the company offers, and many end up one of the 46 million Americans without. So this techie is rooting for Tom Ammiano to legislate health security, at least for San Franciscans. While individual entrepreneurial successes like the Mercury News' Matt "Silicon Beat" Marshall going solo are inspiring ('Web 2.0' bubble prophecies aside), we hope he doesn't have dependents or any pre-existing conditions that need insuring. more ›

Look how cute these penguins are! more ›

You know how everyone says San Francisco is a little bubble utopia isolated from the realities of the rest of the world? Well, you might as well embrace it this Labor Day, because the eastbound Bay Bridge is closed all weekend. more ›

Hello on your puzzling adventures, Perplex puzzlers! We're hoping they lured you to our site out of your competitive spirit of gamesmanship, and we'll keep you with our obsessive coverage of most things Bay Area. more ›

When not performing Skinnerian experiments on us with the ever-increasing supply, yet less-than-expected demand for FasTrak lanes that makes weekend drives over the Bay Bridge look worse than rush hour, CalTrans is engaging in further operant conditioning by closing the Bay Bridge eastbound lanes over Labor Day Weekend. more ›

Four unrelated shootings in San Francisco over the long Labor Day weekend -- one at 24th and Alabama, one at Turk and Laguna, one at Harrison and 1st, and one in Visitacion Valley near the Cow Palace. Two victims are dead, two are in the hospital. PG&E announced that it figured out why that generator blew the other week underneath the Ralph Lauren store -- water leaked into the transformer, which caused an electrical short, which then blew up oil in the chamber used for insulation. Who uses oil for insulation? (Okay, engineers, enlighten us.) In other news, another transformer blew up on Market Street due to a failed cable splice, there was a power outage near UCSF when a tree blew into some power lines, and another outage in the Outer Mission when a car drove into a pole. And celebrating Labor Day the old-school way, 61 union members were arrested outside the Grand Hyatt at a sit-in over the year-long hotel strike. The union organizers have agreed to end the boycott against the Westin St. Francis because the WSF management has agreed to support several of the union's key demands. more ›

There's a story -- a funny accident of history, actually -- that explains why there is always a copy of the latest (one of the most earnest content engines in the country). The text reads: "Published 20 times a year, biweekly except in January, July, August, and September, when monthly." more ›

That's right, SFist is getting on a plane early tomorrow and will be flying deep into the heart of Texas in order to bring you wall-to-wall reporting of the internerd/hipster fest that is South by Southwest. We really, really hope all those stories of Austin being "cool" and "hip" and, mostly, "liberal" are true -- we get scared of potential conflicts with Red Staters once we pass Pinole on 80. Can they see it in our eyes that we support same-sex marriage, universal healthcare and public transportation funding? more ›

So apparently the San Francisco school board held some public meetings to decide on the start of the new school year. Before Labor Day? After Labor Day? Decisions, decisions, decisions. Everyone was pretty much in agreeance agreement agreeance over starting school the week before Labor Day until several parents raised their objections. Turns out it would interfere with the start of Burning Man and well, the parents didn’t want readin’, ritin’ and rithmetic to get in the way of little Timmy and little Susie missing out on mud baths, raves, and art installations. While not official, the School Board is probably going to go with the pre-Labor Day opening. more ›

After six weeks of fruitless negotiations, the San Francisco hotel workers union, UNITE 2, has called for a two-week strike, until October 13. The boycott is against the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group, which includes the Argent Hotel, the Hilton San Francisco, the Crowne Plaza Union Square and the Mark Hopkins Inter-Continental (SFist will be moving its staff meeting from the Top of the Mark). more ›

SFist is obsessed with traffic (even though we no longer drive to work). It comes from the 18 months we worked in the middle of a salt marsh in a big cubicle box overlooking 101 North in Menlo Park. (SFist knew it was time to quit that job when we started hoping for accidents on the way down so we could get to work that much later.) Like real estate and the NASDAQ, South Bay traffic is monitored closely as a proxy for the economic boom and bust cycle -- although oddly enough, traffic patterns appear to have no actual correlation with anything other than that one guy driving 40 in the fast lane. more ›