Today, we’re going on a special tour of San Francisco. We’ll visit four unique spots that have a lot of history — and staying power. Each of these legacy institutions were featured in Alec Scott’s 2023 book, “Oldest San Francisco.” They were reported on by KALW’s current Audio Academy Fellows.
Click the play button above to listen!
Story Transcript:
HANA (host): From Model T's to electric vehicles, Alioto’s Garage has seen and worked on it all. For more than 80 years, members of the Alioto family have perfected the craft of auto repair. With several shops dotted around the Bay Area, their Mission location is where it all began. Let’s roll into the oldest auto shop in San Francisco.
As you enter the shop on Folsom Street, you can see cars in various states of disrepair lining the walls. There are a handful of technicians, some doing custom paint jobs and others are replacing tires.
CHRIS ALIOTO: You always hear a little hammering, a little tinkering, a little tapping. It's a craft. It's artistic.
HANA: That’s Chris Alioto. He and his brother Matthew are the third generation of Alioto’s fixing cars in the Bay Area.
ALIOTO: We started in 1939 in San Francisco.
HANA: On Folsom street, in the Mission.
ALIOTO: It was started by my grandfather, Frank Babe Alioto, because he had a baby face. And then passed to my father, Frank Alioto. And then passed to my brother and I.
HANA: Growing up, Chris remembers tagging along as his Dad worked Saturdays.
ALIOTO: My dad did everything. He took in the vehicles from the customers. He helped negotiate the claims. He washed the cars. He swept the floor.
I saw him leaving the house at six in the morning, coming home at seven, eight o'clock at night,
He lived and breathed this collision repair industry.
HANA: And he started at an early age.
ALIOTO: My dad had to give up a lot of the stuff that most of us take for granted. He did not get to play sports because every day after high school, he had to go work in the shop. He worked on weekends, was not allowed to take vacations.
HANA: And when Babe died unexpectedly, Frank had to step up to take the reins in order to support the family. But it wasn’t all work. Christmas time was especially festive at the garage. Chris Alioto remembers the extravagant parties his parents would throw.
ALIOTO: They were so much fun. For a week before, my father would close down the entire shop and he would decorate. Balloons all the way up to the ceiling with a dance floor. We had a tiki themed bar that we kept upstairs that we would bring out. And the frame racks that usually, you know, had cars on them would have nice tablecloths with shrimp and everyone would be eating off.
He wasn't a very communicative person with his words. But a little nod from him was him trying to express his feelings of love of them.
HANA: It was a time to celebrate and schmooze.
ALIOTO: Everyone was invited. You know, insurance companies, insurance adjusters, of course. Anyone whose car we fixed was invited. As much as my dad was constantly focused on the business he could stop the entire business for a week for a good time.
HANA: But the brothers didn’t always get Christmastime Frank.
ALIOTO: He was so tough that when I started working in the business, I wouldn't call him dad at work. I called him Frank. And even though we carpooled together, he was Frank Alioto until we got in the car to go home. And then he was Dad again.
HANA: Eventually Chris and Matthew went from watching their dad work to working with him.
ALIOTO: He wasn’t a very communicative person with his words. But a little nod from him was him trying to express his feelings of love. He did an amazing job giving my brother and I an opportunity to build on what he and my grandfather started.
HANA: So When Chris and Matthew were ready, they ran the business their way.
ALIOTO: One of the great things about working with my brother is that we’re completely different people.
HANA: Like two sides of the same coin. Matthew is the mechanic. Chris is the people person.
ALIOTO: We used to joke that he would go and fix a problem for a customer on their car, and they may not be happy. Where I could talk to the customer, not fix the problem on their car, and they would give me a hug.
HANA: They opened up seven more locations — in other San Francisco spots, Daly City, and Marin county. The brothers have seen a lot of shifts in the city and in the industry.
ALIOTO: These cars are giant computers these days.
HANA: So, is there a fourth generation of Aliotos ready to take over the business? Well…
ALIOTO: My brother has two boys. I have a boy and two daughters. And we'd like to see if they have an interest in the industry, but in no means would we want to force it on them.
HANA: For now, Chris is just enjoying running the shop with his brother.
Reported by Anthony Ivy, Erin Lim, and Yosmay del Mazo.
HANA: Next up, The California Academy of Sciences or Cal Academy, looks like it was plucked from the pages of a science fiction novel. It’s both a 170 year old museum and a working research institution that’s on the cutting edge of science discovery. Let’s jump into the heart of it with this story.
REBEKAH KIM: I'm really nosy. Um, I would read my sister's diaries all the time. And honestly, as an archivist, you're allowed to read the most personal letters or journals or diaries. And it's okay, right? No one's going to give you a hard time or be mad about it.
HANA: Rebekah Kim is dynamic, passionate, absorbing and inquisitive. She’s the current Head Librarian at Cal Academy. That’s where she organizes the archives, digitizes collections, and contextualizes the history behind the museum’s artifacts.
HANA: An important part of her work is about addressing truths about the museum that have long gone unacknowledged.
KIM: The history of science and the Academy. Um, bundled together is rooted in like racism and colonialism and imperialism, and I wanted to be very, like, honest about those early and current trends
[Sound of KIM in elevator saying “so we're gonna swing by Monarch, which is right in this corner”]
HANA: Monarch was one of California’s last Grizzly Bears. He was kept in a cage in Golden Gate Park.
KIM: So he here is like, um, shown as a symbol of California, but also he, California grizzlies are extinct and they know, you know, and, um, he's a story of also conservation. How do we live with animal wildlife
HANA: Monarch’s story speaks to conservation.
KIM: European settlers drove California Grizzlies to extinction like 70 years after they arrived so very, very quickly.
HANA: And his story also speaks to colonization and the way the settlers treated Native People, whose populations were also decimated.
KIM: Like bears. Indigenous people were seen as threats to the livelihood of European settlers.
HANA: When Rebekah joined the museum seven years ago, she was shocked to learn that, despite the great diversity in the museum’s archives, the museum staff was historically not that diverse.
KIM: I was shocked at how few women had worked here. You know, the very first curator of color was from the 1970s.
HANA: Rebekeh believes that facing the legacy of colonialism and racism at the Academy, is a way to learn from the past to create a more equitable future in science.
That’s why she’s so interested in the untold stories of the people who have kept the museum alive since 1853, in its multiple locations – first in the Financial District, then Fifth and Market.
KIM: And that is where they are until 1906, which there's an earthquake and fire which destroys the building and the collections.
HANA: The whole collection might have been lost, if not for Alice Eastwood. An intrepid, self-taught botanist and museum curator. On the day of that earthquake...
KIM: She makes her lunch. She goes down to Market Street and tries to salvage as much material as she can.
HANA: From the botany collection on the fifth floor
KIM: And the staircase had fallen apart. So I don't know exactly how she got up to the very top, but she bundles the specimens and like lowers them down on a string, down to the ground floor where somebody else packs them into a wagon.
HANA: Alice does this to a great personal sacrifice. As she is saving the museum’s specimens, her home burns in the fire that follows the earthquake. Today, the museum has a huge number of scientific specimens, around 48 million. They date all the way back to 1853.
Another key person in the history of the museum is Toshio Asaeda. The scientist and artist made watercolor paintings that enhance the museum’s extensive Galapagos collection, which is the largest in the world.
Toshio Asaeda worked as an illustrator for the Stienhardt aquarium. During the 1930s he was hired on numerous private expeditions to the Galapagos to make photographic prints and watercolors of collected specimens, while also collecting fish specimens for the academy.
KIM: It was before color photography was a thing and so you can see what the color of that fish would be and then in the jar there you could see what a preserved specimen looks like. It loses all its color. So the watercolor would have been the only way to see what it would look alive.
HANA: Like more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans, Toshio Asaeda was incarcerated in a so-called “internment” camp.
KIM: It's a part of his life that he segregated from his, like, work life.
HANA: He never spoke about it at work, never wrote down his feelings.
KIM: It's something that like, you know, resonates as a Californian, as a person of color, um, thinking about those kinds of experiences, also wanting to know what he thought.
HANA: To Rebekah, documenting these stories is an important part of moving the work of the museum forward. It’s also a way to encourage the next generation of scientists and curators to do this work.
That story was reported by Clara Kamunde and Leon Morimoto.
HANA: For our next story, we head to an undisclosed location in downtown San Francisco, to a nondescript building, where people are saving lives through compassionate listening.
[Sounds of the city]
This place is home to the oldest suicide hotline in the city, and the country.
[Sound of elevator saying “13th Floor!”]
We take an elevator a few floors up to a room filled with light.
ANDREW JAYAWICKREME: There's lots of light coming in. We've got, we have plants scattered throughout the office to make it feel more like, more, more like home.
HANA: Andrew Jayawickreme explains "in this space, people share the darkest moments of their lives." This is the office of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. Andrew’s the Hotline Manager.
JAYAWICKREME: We do a lot of laughing here. And it can be like, a little odd, like, why are all these people laughing here at a suicide hotline? We need to have that lightness within ourselves so we can share it with others. That it's going to be okay.
HANA: It’s a far cry from the organization’s first office, which opened in 1962.
VAN HEDWELL: Picture a red telephone in a basement of a Polk Street tattoo parlor in San Francisco.
HANA: That’s Van Hedwall, Director of Programs.
HEDWELL: It became the lifeline for those contemplating suicide all in the Bay Area
HANA: Nothing like this had existed before. A man named Bernard Mays Answered the distressed callers.
HEDWELL: A gay British Episcopalian priest and correspondent reporter for the BBC.
HANA: In the 1960s San Francisco had some of the highest rates of suicide in the country, and Bernard Mays was alarmed. He established SFSP as a way to counteract the trend. He put the hotline’s number on matchbooks and distributed them to bars in the Tenderloin. Soon, he was training the first cohort of volunteers and moving the hotline from the basement of a tattoo parlor into an actual office space.
Like a lot of the staff, hotline manager Andrew Jayawickreme started out as a volunteer in 2018. The hotline never records its calls, and they wanted us to respect caller privacy, too. But Andrew was able to describe a call that stuck out to him in those early days.
JAYAWICKREME: I pick up a call, and the person's on the phone. Their voice is really quiet, they're very serious, they're very somber, they're pausing a lot, there's a lot, you can tell there's a lot of thought going on.
And he had just told me that he wants to end his life. And he's telling me these hurtful things that have happened to him in his life. And he's describing how alone he is.
And I remember telling him, you know, well you sound like a really nice person. And I'm sorry to hear you're going through that much pain. And I'd like to get you some help. I didn't say anything special. It was just what I genuinely felt in that moment.
And he goes, yeah, I guess, I guess I should probably go to the hospital. And I go, I'd like, I would like that.
HANA: Andrew was struck by how powerful it was to be present for someone in a moment of crisis.
JAYAWICKREME: There's this magical moment where you can feel they're, they're taking it in. Almost for the first time. Oh, I'm valuable. I'm not a bad person. We have the opportunity to give people a message that they've never had before.
HANA: Like Andrew 5 years ago, most of the people staffing the phones here are volunteers. There are hundreds of them. Four cohorts of volunteers who get trained every year. Within the training a lot of hypothetical situations come up, too.
VOLUNTEER: Earlier you mentioned that if you're on like a high risk call, you're allowed to exceed the time limit. But you're still feeling like it's a, it's a high risk. Um, are you supposed to continue speaking with them? Do you get off and encourage them to call back in a couple hours, or you said in 15 minutes to just confirm they're okay?
JAYAWICKREME: We would arrange for a call back. Okay. And, how would you say that? That's a great question, see? I'm gonna keep doing this. I love, you shared with me a feeling. How, how would you say that to them?
VOLUNTEER: Do you think that in a few hours you could give us a call back? I'm going to call back so we can make sure that you're safe.
JAYAWICKREME: Yes!
HANA: Supervisor Kuiky Sammy works with volunteers to triage calls and prevent compassion fatigue. She says that one of the main focuses of the hotline is being culturally responsive to the diverse population of clients who call in from San Francisco and beyond.
KUIKY SAMMY: We do get international calls and a lot of calls from the south. So when we do outreach, we desperately want and need people of color to volunteer.
HANA: Because speaking to someone who has had similar experiences to you or speaks your language can be huge for someone who is feeling misunderstood. But Kuiky says the most important thing a volunteer can do is just be there.
SAMMY: It takes courage to call, and it takes courage to pick up the phone, to answer the call.
HANA: The San Francisco Suicide Prevention hotline is 415-781-0500.
That story was reported by Kristal Raheem and Demetrius Johnson.
HANA: From Downtown, you can jump on a bike to ride “The Wiggle.” It’s a popular cycling route from Market Street to Golden Gate Park, where we are headed to for our next stop.
The SFMTA counted nearly 5 million bikes in San Francisco in 2022. The city is a haven for cyclists and there is one place in town that has been keeping them rolling for nearly a century. Next, we’re putting on our helmets and riding over to American Cyclery to learn more about the oldest bike shop in the city.
[Sound of door opening; bells jingle.]
HANA: There’s a kind of soundtrack at American Cyclery: a steady thrum of tools, bike bells and chains.
[Sound of air compressor.]
BRADLEY WOEHL: Right now you can hear the air compressor going off, which We fill up a lot of tires and give a lot of free air away in the community, so our pumps are always going. then there's the sound of, of the shifting of gears.
[Sound of tool.]
WOEHL: If it's adjusted correctly, it goes click, click, click, click.
[Sound of gears shifting.]
HANA: That’s Bradley Woehl, he’s the third owner of American Cyclery. It’s a job he never expected to have. Originally, he was an avid biker and patron of the shop. He ran a magazine called The Bicycle Trader, which helped connect bike sellers with bike buyers. One day he got a call from a well-known bike retailer that he was hesitant to name…
WOEHL: They asked me, hey, can you come down here and help us liquidate this store? And I said, hey, you can't get rid of American Cyclery. This place is famous, this place is legendary.
HANA: American Cyclery was established in 1941 by Oscar Juner. Juner was a popular cyclist in the early 1900s. He competed in events like the Six Day Race, where teams of two would take turns biking and resting over the course of the week-long event. Juner won the Los Angeles race in 1937, just four years before he opened up the bike shop.
WOEHL: Oscar was able to repair things in ways in today's world where you don't repair things, you replace things, you don't fix things, you sell people new things. Oscar really knew how to make something last a lifetime.
HANA: Before Bradley bought the shop, there were plans to turn it into a museum. If you walk in today, you get a sense for that history. Memorabilia adorns every inch of every wall, bikes hang everywhere.
WOEHL: If you look up here. These are like some of the holy grail bikes of earliest mountain biking days, right here.
HANA: Imagine a time capsule that allows you to walk through cycling’s storied history, from the 1920s (Bradley’s oldest bikes) to modern high-tech mountain bikes, and everything from the hundred years in between.
WOEHL: But the most special bikes that I have here were raced by the original owner back in the 1920s and 1930s.
HANA: Each bike tells a different story. To Bradley, that’s one of the most exciting parts of doing this work. Getting a sense for each cyclist and what they need.
WOEHL: I get lots of joy from being able to help a kid get his first bike or help a dad get his, you know, bike that's gonna help him do the Iron Man.
HANA: Even past employees come by for visits.
RANA HONG: Needed a part. It's nice to visit Brad and Ray
HANA: That’s Rana Hong.
HONG: I worked here from 2000 to 2003, um, here at American Cyclery. And my time here was really great. Um, I learned a lot from working for Brad around these amazing vintage and modern bicycles there are these amazing people that would come through.
HANA: Like celebrities…
WOEHL: I sold a number of bikes to Robin Williams. I got very friendly with him and knew what his tastes were.
HANA: And cycling royalty…
WOEHL: One of our good customers is the announcer for the Tour de France. Uh, and we get his bike ready every year so he can go ride each stage of the tour ahead of the race.
HANA: However, it’s not all bells and whistles.
WOEHL: If you look at the trending in America of how few children learn how to ride a bike, there, it's on the decline. Our goal is to help get as many butts on bikes as we possibly can, starting at a young age.
HANA: In its 80 plus years, American Cyclery has seen other bike shops close or get bought out by corporations. Even Bradley got an offer.
WOEHL: They were interested in buying the store, but they weren't interested in buying American Cyclery. They just wanted my location, my cash flow, and my customer base. They weren't concerned about the history that's here, about the vibe of what this shop is. They just wanted another location to do what they do.
HANA: But it’s more than just a business to Bradley. Biking and especially fixing bikes, is about giving people the ability to go further with what they have.
WOEHL: There's great joy from repairing things, and it's a very, uh, calming thing to be able to take something that was broken or not working correctly and make it do what it was intended to do.
HANA: American Cyclery is undoubtedly a piece of San Francisco history that’s still standing.
WOEHL: It’s certainly not an apple store experience.
That story was reported by Eliza Peppel and Jann Ramirez.
All the places we went to today are featured in Alec Scott’s book, “Oldest San Francisco.”
The stories were reported by our current Audio Academy cohort and this show was produced by KALW’s Lisa Morehouse and Hanisha Harjani.
