Treasure Island

All of us are under a shelter-in-place order, but we aren’t living the same experience. Access to resources makes it easier. Scarcity brings hardship. On Treasure Island, one resident is scrambling to make sure her community’s basic needs are met. 

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Treasure Island is an artificial island built on a natural reef between Oakland and San Francisco. Landon Neill discovered old film footage that sent him on a mission to understand the forces that shaped the island’s history.

This week on Open Air, KALW’s weekly radio magazine for the Bay Area performing arts, host David Latulippe talks with actor Michael Patrick Gaffney (pictured) about his original one-man show, The Oldest Living Cater Waiter, which runs through July 9 at the Gateway Theatre (215 Jackson St.) in San Francisco.

On this edition of  Your Call’s One Planet Series, we’ll have a conversation with UC Berkeley geophysicist Roland Bürgmann about his recent report, which explores the impacts of sea level rise on the San Francisco Bay area.

If you drive east on the Bay Bridge out of San Francisco and look down at Treasure Island, it’s hard to miss what look like enormous piles of dirt. These mounds are actually the remains of old Navy barracks, ground into pieces.

Most people who visit Calistoga -- a town in the Napa Valley -- come for the wine and the spa treatments; few come for the literary history. But they could: one of the most romantic honeymoon getaways ever written about happened one hundred and thirty five years ago.

There’s a lot of talk in education circles these days about changing to the common core curriculum or changing from books to computers. But at Life Learning Academy High School, or LLA, Principal Teri Delane is focused on making some more significant changes.

“We have a wonderful school that is a small school on Treasure Island that is actually changing kids lives,” she says. “When you have 90% of the kids who are killed in San Francisco, killed because they dropped out of school, it is my job to make sure they stay in school.”

Our Hear Here community storytelling project has been asking Oakland and San Francisco residents to tell them a story about a meaningful place in their neighborhood. Meanwhile, the KALW news team has set out on a similar mission, and visited iconic places all over the Bay Area to talk to the people who visit them. KALW’s Lisa Ratner brought back this story from Treasure Island.