They say it’s harder to get into than Harvard: Y Combinator, YC for short, is “startup school” for tech founders. It takes applications twice a year. Being among the 230 startups accepted out of 24,000 means getting a half-million-dollar investment and access to mentors who’ve already made it.

Airbnb, Reddit and DoorDash are on the alumni list. For most of its 18-year history, Y Combinator has been based in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. Recently, though, its center of gravity has moved about 40 miles north to San Francisco.

YC opened a new office in June and now considers the city its headquarters. Garry Tan took over last year in a role once held by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Tan wants founders to be nearby, at least during the first three months they’re in the program. He told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali why during a walk through the city. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Garry Tan: If you leave the center of all of the action, a lot of those companies end up dying. And you need to be around lots and lots of people in order to be successful. And that’s extra true right now, because AI is such a brand-new field, like literally, the large language models and the biggest and the best companies that are creating the platforms right now, like OpenAI, Anthropic, they’re right here. And so San Francisco is mecca.

Lily Jamali: So you call this “Cerebral Valley,” is that right?

Tan: Yeah, a lot of startup founders just coined it; actually, I think a YC company coined it. They threw a conference called Cerebral Valley and it stuck. I think they’re doing their second annual this year.

Jamali: Got it. What does that mean, that term?

Tan: Well, I think it’s a play on really the brain, at the end of the day, and what’s happening now with AI: literally computer silicon, we sort of infused it with electricity and now these things can reason, they can talk. We have talking rocks. And that’s sort of the play, that literally we have electronic brains that can reason in a way that really has never happened before. Like, you can speak to it. It can search large datasets as if it were a human being. That’s wild.

Jamali: Well, what is it about AI and the development of that technology that makes it matter for you to be around people?

Tan: Well, I think just as Seattle had Boeing, and it basically attracted all of the smart people who cared about airplanes, or even Silicon Valley, they call it a Silicon Valley back when semiconductors were relatively new technology. And literally, they invented the idea of Moore’s law there. So I think the same thing is happening here. There are brand-new techniques on how to get the most out of this new technology that literally was not really something that people had access to until the middle of last year even. I think ChatGPT really broke it open. And now what’s happening is that people can create, frankly, thousands of startups, of which maybe a few dozen of them will go on to be worth billions of dollars, because they will create sort of the next Microsoft, the next Google, the next Meta, like the next great startup. There isn’t just going to be one, there might be dozens of them here. I think this is the great frontier. And it’s crazy enough, I think, something that will touch billions of people on the planet, like, the software people build in the city will radiate out to every part of the world, as well.

Jamali: What does it feel like to live in San Francisco right now and work here?

Tan: Personally, I think I’m really torn. I mean, I think that we create, and tech people, and the opportunity that we see, we’re creating incredible amounts of wealth. And then, at the same time, we need to find ways to make our city as vibrant as possible. And that means government. Like, I’m the last person to say, “Hey, like, we want less taxes.” I’m the first person to say, “Actually, let’s take that money, take that wealth, spread it around, but then have effective governance, effective government that actually makes this a truly awesome place to live, not just for tech people, not just for the wealthy, but for everyone.

Jamali: Well, this is like the perennial issue in San Francisco. So first time I lived here was right after the dot-com bubble burst. Then I was here in 2015, when there were the shuttle bus protests, people were very upset. I mean, there’s always this concern about gentrification being driven by the tech industry here.

Tan: Yeah. And I think tech sort of stood back and sort of took it and said, “You know what? Like, we have no response.” And I think we have a response now, which is tech people need to get politically active and demand that we get great government, that we want services that work, that policies have to work. And so that’s the matched pair. And I think it’s happening as we refill the office towers, as we bring vibrancy back to the city, we also want the government to help everyone.

Jamali: So what do you think when you read all these stories in the national press about San Francisco being a mess and being very dangerous? There’s a very clear narrative coming out of certain national outlets about this city right now.

Tan: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s all correct. And it’s the result of government that doesn’t work for the people. And I think it’s not just tech, like it’s the Asian American community, like my elders are being stabbed in the streets. Our children can’t get good educations. And we’ve just allowed it. And I think that ultimately, it’s about people being educated on what’s happening and how we got here, but I think we can turn it back. And it’s more important than ever that San Francisco do that because we want this to be a place that’s welcoming to immigrants, to the smartest people in the world, to all come in one place and create these things that are of incredible value.

Jamali: So you say that those headlines, there’s truth to them, that that negative narrative. That’s how it feels to you living here?

Tan: But we are not doomed to just sit here and take it. I mean, the laws are not being actually enforced here. And when you trace it back, there are real policy issues in San Francisco where, for instance, the police are run by a commission that drown police officers in paperwork. And so that’s one of sort of hundreds of different things that I’ve discovered as I’ve sort of gotten involved in politics. And the thing is, we want this place to be a great place to live. And basic things like traffic enforcement matter a lot.

Jamali: It’s kind of interesting — so that narrative is there, but are you saying at the same time that there is this comeback happening, that maybe a lot of people outside of San Francisco haven’t appreciated? A comeback that’s being driven by the tech industry?

Tan: Yeah, at the end of the day, what we want is prosperity. And the coolest thing in the world is that at Y Combinator, we get to see two or three people come together from any background, from any country in the world, and they have a fair shot here. They get half a million dollars, and they can go and try to create something that touches a billion people. And that’s really what we try to do every day. And if they succeed, they’ll have thousands of employees, and these are good, high-paying jobs in tech. And that will actually create so much prosperity for the whole community, that that’s actually why San Francisco is so awesome.

Jamali: Well, let me ask you this: If your goal seems to be to try to drive tech back to this area, doesn’t that kind of end up with a lot of the same issues that drove a wedge between locals and the tech community 10 years ago, before that, 25 years ago? How do we make sure we don’t repeat the same mistakes?

Tan: I think ultimately, honestly, when you talk about that, we’re talking about housing. And this is the most expensive housing market possibly in the world. And you know what, our policies are absolutely derelict. We’ve abdicated our responsibility to the people as a government in both California and in San Francisco.

More on this

Garry’s concerns about housing are widely shared and grumbled about throughout the Bay Area. In July, David Brancaccio spoke with San Francisco Mayor London Breed for “Marketplace Morning Report.” David noted, at the time, that the median listing price for a home there was $1.3 million. Average rent: $3,600 a month.

On building new housing, Breed told him with process, policy and procedure, “we need to get out of our own way.” Last month, she signed legislation she said will streamline housing construction there. It comes as California mandates the city to build more than 80,000 homes, half of them affordable, over the next eight years.

And here’s an article on Cerebral Valley, which the online outlet The San Francisco Standard calls the city’s “Nerdiest New Neighborhood.” Hacker houses are apparently all the rage again. The Standard likens one of them to a “glorified babysitting service for techies.”

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The San Francisco Water Emergency Transportation Authority’s (WETA) rapid electric emissions-free ferries (REEF) programme has set target dates to begin construction of its first zero-emissions ferry as well as the start of commercial operations as part of a phased plan to overhaul its fleet with five new ferries.

WETA relayed the news as part of a strategic partnership deal with Finish maritime technology group Wärtsilä, which will lend its expertise on fleet electrification and systems integration to the REEF project.

In early 2021, WETA launched a study intended to create a foundation for its plan to replace San Francisco Bay’s ferry fleet with new zero-emissions vessels. The municipal study finalised its ’Blueprint for Zero Emission Vessel Transition’ in early 2023, determining a new fleet would need electric propulsion systems and electric charging infrastructure. 

With the REEF project’s conceptual phase nearing completion, WETA said it will soon begin the project’s vessel construction phase.

The REEF project foresees building three 150-passenger ferries and two larger ferries capable of carrying 300 or more passengers. The project is also planning to build floating battery charging units.

“The construction of the first electric-powered vessel is slated to commence before the conclusion of 2023, with commercial operations expected to launch in 2025,” a statement from new REEF strategic partner Wärtsilä said.

“We’re proud to operate the cleanest high-speed ferry fleet in the nation, but a zero-emissions future for our system is within reach,” WETA executive director Seamus Murphy said. “Wärtsilä’s expertise and experience will be incredibly valuable given the complexity our ferry decarbonisation programme entails.”

Wärtsilä said the strategic partnership project around the REEF project was one of “several” the company would carry out work on under the umbrella agreement with WETA.

On its LinkedIn social media page, WETA confirmed it is working with Wärtsilä “and additional partners”, with “more news on this front soon”.

WETA’s website says its long-range development plan calls for new terminals in the Treasure Island, Mission Bay, Berkeley, Redwood City and South Bay areas of San Francisco, as well as in the Carquinez Strait, with an initial plan to shift 50% of its municipal vessel fleet to zero emissions by 2035.

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Before Lou knew of the Victor Heights plot, another developer evicted the residents living in the Craftsman and the single-story Victorian under the Ellis Act as part of a plan to bulldoze them and build 26 luxury apartments on top. When that proposal wasn’t approved, Lou bought the property along with two partners (he owns 20% of the development). One of his partners, Brian Falls, formerly worked for Palisades, the development firm that’s behind 1111 Sunset Blvd.; now, he has his own development company called the Urban House.

“Preservation is not just about the buildings, but also the settings, and the culture,” says architect Jingbo Lou, in front of one of the converted Craftsman bungalows at Alpine Courtyard.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

“Preservation is not just about the buildings, but also the settings, and the culture,” Lou says.

For him, preserving the settings and culture of Victor Heights means reinstituting the commercial fabric of the neighborhood by providing affordable rents for first-time small-business owners.

As part of his research into the neighborhood, Lou found a 1932 picture from USC’s digital library that shows how residential homes were once sandwiched between small retail shops in Victor Heights. All of his tenants at Alpine Courtyard, he says, “are in their mid-30s, have accumulated a lot of experience in their field and were looking for a starting point to have their own business.”

Lou finalized the deal to develop the plot in 2019, which was already zoned for commercial business as part of a 1970 master plan amendment — on account of the area’s proximity to water management district buildings, Elysian Park and major freeway intersections.

Early on, he learned that there was an oil well in the middle of what’s now the courtyard, which would have been a risk factor for the previous developers who planned to build residential units on top. Back in the late 1800s, Victor Heights — named for Victor Beaudry — was a popular area for oil production.

Lou’s plan maintains the existing layout instead of building anew and includes commercial tenants who don’t sleep there overnight.

Banchan shop and cafe Perilla has garnered good reviews and national attention. Owner Jihee Kim serves rolled egg and seaweed, dosirak with blistered cod, kimbap and more.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

Yee was the first of the group courted by Lou. He came by her Chinatown kiosk soon after it opened in the spring of 2021 and was impressed by her vegan croissants and fruit danishes. Eventually, he persuaded her to collaborate with him on a second location in Victor Heights.

Once she was brought in, Yee asked her good friend Riley to open a coffee shop, plus Kim, whom she knew from the restaurant world (Kim previously worked at Rustic Canyon and other fine dining restaurants in San Francisco), and also Thompson, whom she had worked with at the now-closed Konbi, to come on board.

Lou jokes that she’s his co-developer on the project. At the new bakery, she’ll continue to serve all of her Baker’s Bench staples, and she hopes to eventually offer hot breakfasts too. “We’ll just slowly grow as we’ve always slowly grown,” she says.

Chef Miles Thompson, left, and business partner Andy Schwartz expect to open a restaurant at the Alpine Street complex that’s an evolution of their pop-up Baby Bistro.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

Already, Riley is selling Yee’s croissants, chocolate chip cookies and cinnamon knots at Heavy Water Coffee. He’s also serving a collaborative drink with Perilla, an espresso tonic that utilizes Kim’s fermented umeboshi plum syrup.

“There’s nothing like this in Los Angeles,” says Thompson, who has worked as a chef in L.A. for over 15 years, including at the now-closed Allumette, Michael’s in Santa Monica and Konbi.

The development’s communal dynamic was a big part of its appeal for Schwartz. “In a pretty destination-driven, isolated city, there’s going to be a collective energy here, and I don’t think that’s something that happens so much in Los Angeles,” he says.

“In a pretty destination-driven, isolated city, there’s going to be a collective energy here, and I don’t think that’s something that happens so much in Los Angeles,” says Andy Schwartz.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

At this point in time, the old building that will house the forthcoming restaurant from Schwartz and Thompson is still in the beginning stages of being converted into a new restaurant (rough plumbing, flooring, etc.).

Jumie Ra, a ceramicist who has lived in Victor Heights for 11 years, welcomes the new businesses in Alpine Courtyard. “I’m also a small-business owner, so I think any small business is good, it just doesn’t get a lot of attention here,” she said.

Devin, a newer resident to Victor Heights who preferred to be called by his first name only, said of Heavy Water and Perilla: “They’re a little bougie, but it’s nice to have something, because it’s sparse.”

To Chen, who worries that the culinary hub is “trying to emulate a Silver Lake type of crowd,” a neighbor cup of coffee from Heavy Water that costs $2 is “a nice gesture, and probably well-intentioned,” he says. “But sometimes it’s not about the individual business practices, it’s about the developers and the bigger picture of what’s happening to a neighborhood.”

Alpine Courtyard returns small businesses to a stretch of Victor Heights where shops were once sandwiched between residential homes.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

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About a year after Eversheds Sutherland announced plans to incorporate in San Francisco, the global firm has opened an office that will serve as a hub for local and international attorneys. It is also Eversheds’ first office to experiment with hospitality operations.

The company signed a four-year lease for 5,806 square meters for the space, located at 101 California in San Francisco’s financial district, which opened provisionally in late December.

“We wanted the office to be an incentive for people to come here,” said Baird Fogel, executive partner for the San Francisco office. “The Bay Area and much of the country is struggling to get people back into the office. I have made it my task to make the office attractive. When it’s dark and dingy, people don’t come in very often.”

The room is newly renovated and has been individually designed and expanded. In addition to around a dozen individual offices, it has a central communal area and several conference rooms.

Baird Fogel, Partner at Eversheds Sutherland. Free photo

Eversheds currently has six attorneys and three partners in San Francisco. Although interest and recruiting activity has been “constant” over the past year, Fogel said the new office is another opportunity to attract talent to the company.

Fogel, a transactions attorney specializing in sports and energy matters, joined Eversheds from Morgan, Lewis & Bockius last March. He is one of the founding partners of the office, along with Evershed’s technology and data partner, Brandi Taylor, who relocated from San Diego. In August, the company hired Dan Brown, an insurance partner of McDermott Will & Emery.

The company plans to continue to grow aggressively and strategically, Fogel said, citing key practice areas including privacy, technology, litigation, corporate, antitrust and esports.

Eversheds, formed from a 2017 merger of UK law firm Eversheds and US Am Law 100 law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, is not alone in its ambitions in Northern California.

Since 2020, several companies with UK roots have set up offices in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, including Simmons & Simmons, Allen & Overy and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.

Freshfields, like Eversheds, are dedicated to creating enticing office spaces with an indoor-outdoor vibe. Meanwhile, other companies in Northern California are trying out hotel, open floor and other unique space concepts.

As for Eversheds, the new spaces will not only benefit potential recruits, but also international Eversheds lawyers, many of whom represent large tech companies like Zoom and Intel in the region.

“The idea is that it will become an international hub for Eversheds’ lawyers,” Fogel said. “As such, the office is a guinea pig for a new initiative that is underway at Eversheds: the hospitality industry.”

Fogel said attorneys could reserve an office for that day, but no one would have a permanent office. It’s a concept that Eversheds is considering in other areas in the future.

“Those of us in San Francisco will probably set up an office or two that we sit in quite often, but even those offices will be up for grabs when we’re not there,” Baird said.

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Egg dishes are a flavor of home. We want them the way our fathers or mothers or grandparents made them. An egg conjures memories of learning to cook for many of us, since making eggs is perfect for teaching a kid. Even if one disdains a straight scramble, the egg is a key ingredient in many comfort foods, including pancakes and birthday cake.

For all these reasons, eggs carry a certain nostalgia. They remind us of paradise lost—​the childhood that is done, the beloved elder chef who is buried, the metabolism that once tolerated syrupy breakfast carbs. And nostalgia has power. Would you kill to return to a yolk-​kissed moment when a caregiver served up love on a plate? Some men would. And, indirectly at least, some men did during the Egg War of the Farallon Islands.

The Egg War began unofficially in 1848 with the Gold Rush. San Francisco started the year with a mere thousand souls, but over the next twelve months the population rose to twenty-​five thousand. The city experienced scarcities of women and of food, particularly protein. Scaling up farms to provide for the local population proved harder than it seemed. Nobody could get large groups of chickens to survive there, and the technical solutions to this problem were decades off. Without chickens, of course, there could be no eggs. And without eggs, there could be no cakes, morning scrambles, pancakes, puddings, or muffins. As Napoleon once put it, “An army marches on its stomach,” and a rootin’-​tootin’ army of miners in the Wild West doubly so.

As gold poured into the city, the prices for fresh eggs skyrocketed. Out in the field, a single chicken egg might sell for $3, while in the city that same egg fetched the still exorbitant price of $1. Even without accounting for inflation, $12 to $36 per dozen eggs is ridiculously expensive. If we account for inflation, the miners paid something astounding—​more like $427 to $1,282 per dozen. This explains the origins of Hangtown Fry rather well. According to legend, a guy who had struck gold wandered into the El Dorado Hotel in the mining supply camp of Hangtown (so nicknamed for its penchant for stringing up criminals). He threw down a bag of gold and demanded the most expensive meal the chef could make—​which turned out to be oysters and eggs. If someone could bring good fresh eggs to San Francisco Bay, he would more than make his fortune.

If we account for inflation, the miners paid something astounding—​more like $427 to $1,282 per dozen.

By most accounts, the first people to strike it rich were “Doc” Robinson and his brother-​in-​law Orrin Dorman. Doc, a pharmacist from Maine, had figured out that the Farallon Islands, home to hundreds of thousands of screaming seabirds, might provide enough eggs to finance a new pharmacy. So Doc and Orrin hopped in a boat and set sail for the Farallones, about thirty miles outside of San Francisco Bay.

As a location, the Farallones are pretty cursed; they are the sort of place a third-​grade boy would make up to impress and gross out his classmates. Although to call them “islands” is a bit grand—​they are jagged rocks of various sizes that stick up above the water. Those rocks are a legendary site of shipwrecks. Since Sir Francis Drake set foot on the islands in 1579, mariners have referred to the group as the Devil’s Teeth, for their appearance, the rough seas that surround them, and their tendency to chomp on ships.

One of the smaller islands is known simply as “the pimple,” a rock six meters tall and sixty-​five meters wide, with a whitehead of bird droppings on it. The sea salt blasts the rocks, and white crystals crunch underfoot on some of them. Before the Europeans arrived, the Ohlone people called the Farallones part of the land of the dead, specifically the part meant for the bad, dead people.

If these weren’t enough of a deterrent, great white sharks infest the seas surrounding the islands, which is unusual since great whites tend to only travel solo or in pairs. But around the Farallon Islands, they gather in numbers up to 150 sharks. It probably has to do with the large population of pinnipeds that also populates the Farallones.

Once home to fur seals and sea otters until Russian and Boston fur merchants decimated local populations in the early 1800s, the islands also played home to elephant and harbor seals, as well as several species of sea lions—​a veritable buffet for the great whites. The kelp flies, of course, also came to lunch on the pinnipeds. And kelp flies number among nature’s vilest creatures. I will let journalist Susan Casey explain. For unfathomable reasons, she spent weeks on a rickety yacht moored offshore of the largest island in the 2000s while reporting for her shark book titled after the archipelago:

They were at their peak now, a carpeting plague, crawling up pants legs and down shirt fronts, overwhelming a person’s every moment outside. And these flies were not the cleanest insects—​their preferred habitat is the inside of a seal’s anus. The anus flies spent their time in one of three ways: tormenting us, tormenting the poor seals who had to house them in such an inhospitable place, and copulating with abandon in giant fly gang-​bangs. This morning I’d counted a vertical stack of thirteen flies.

I personally draw the line at anus flies.

Into the tumultuous, shark-​infested, kelp fly-​ridden water, Doc and Orrin sailed. They landed on the largest rocky outcropping, which is less than a fifth of a mile square. There, they came face to face with the overwhelming fact of life on the island—​its birds. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds—​gulls, cormorants, auklets, puffins, petrels, and most important, the common murre. These shrieking, squawking birds, packed shoulder to shoulder among the cliffs, laid great volumes of eggs onto masses of weeds and likely comprised more than half a million nesting pairs. Importantly, the common murre outnumbered the other seabirds. A type of guillemot, the common murre dresses all in black, save for its white belly.

Each year, female murres lay a single pear-​shaped egg with a tough shell. The eggs have background colors in the greenish blue range, with darker brown-​black pencil squiggles and dots atop. Roughly twice as large as a chicken egg, with a bright red yolk and a white that stays translucent when cooked, murre eggs made a fine substitute in baked goods. When not eaten absolutely fresh, though, they leave an aftertaste of old fish. Eat a thoroughly bad murre’s egg, and rumor had it that you’d spend three months getting the flavor out of your mouth.

Doc and Orrin scrambled up those slippery, excrement-​covered cliffs and filled their boat with eggs. On the harrowing journey home through rough seas, they lost almost half their booty. But when they arrived in San Francisco, their half boatful of eggs fetched a small fortune of $3,000 (something like $100K in 2020 money). Doc Robinson used his share of the profits to build a pharmacy and the Drama Museum, a theater where he delighted locals with his impressions of New Englanders. He went on to become a pillar of the nascent theater community. But the trip had so terrified him and Orrin that nothing could persuade them to return. Word of their profits, though, spread quickly. The egg rush had begun.

Within a week, eggers swarmed the Farallones seeking their fortune. One enterprising collection of six men promptly formed the Pacific Egg Company (also known as the Farallon Egg Company, or simply the Egg Company) and, in keeping with the land-​grab ethos of the time and place, staked their claim on the largest island. They fought off their foes, erected some outbuildings, and soon established brutal methods for gathering eggs. First, they’d rampage through one section of the egg fields, breaking every egg in sight, which ensured the freshness of the next day’s harvest.

Their crews had specialized gear—​rope-​soled shoes, often with spikes driven into them, to help them gain purchase on slippery cliffs. The egg man’s uniform also included climbing ropes and special vests made of flour sacks with a drawstring waist and holes cut for the head and arms. Eggers deposited their cargo into a deep slit in the vest’s neck, which allowed them to carry up to eighteen dozen eggs without a basket. On the cliffs, keeping hands free was key. When fully laden, the eggers resembled lumpy Santas and would return to a collection point at the base of the cliffs. They would kneel deeply over a basket, almost as if praying, and let the thick-​shelled eggs pour from their chests.

The work required desperation or nerves of steel, probably both. The company employed up to twenty-​five men at a time, often new immigrants with little to lose. The treacherous egging season ran from May to mid-​July. A simple slip on the cliffs could send a worker into the shark-​infested brine. And then there were the gulls.

ccording to an 1874 Harper’s article on the eggers, “These rapacious birds follow the egg-​gatherers, hover over their heads…. ​The egger must be extremely quick or the gull will snatch the prize [the egg] from under his nose. So greedy and eager are the gulls that they sometimes even wound the eggers, striking them with their beaks.” To avoid frequent scalp injuries, many of the eggers carried clubs, which they swung around their heads.

With the Pacific Egg Company in control of the largest island, local fishermen and other fortune-​seekers ventured out to the smaller boulders. A local newspaper ran a story on one such pair that ended up stranded on a rock for six weeks in 1899. Stormy seas foiled at least three rescue attempts, leaving the men to survive on raw eggs and the meager supplies rescuers could land. Returned to safety, one of the emaciated castaways told the local newspaper, “I will never again be able to look at a murre egg without disgust. We have had several fights with the sea lions.” A dramatic drawing of a man with a bat fending off a ferocious pinniped accompanies the story.

Throughout the 1850s, the Farallones’ yearly egg season brought armed struggles as the Pacific Egg Company vied for control of its veritable gold mine. It fought off gangs “armed to the teeth,” according to an 1859 Alta California article. Battles raged on land and sea, as hijackers attacked boats ferrying eggs to the mainland.

One group of rival eggers spent several days hiding in their boat inside Great Murre Cave beneath the largest island, where guano continuously rained down on them and the ammonia buildup killed several men. A government force sent into the fray in 1860 found themselves so outnumbered and outgunned that they “thought it prudent” to return home without engaging.

Battles raged on land and sea, as hijackers attacked boats ferrying eggs to the mainland.

If it wasn’t rival gangs of eggers testing the egg company, it was the government. In 1855 the US government seized the land and built a lighthouse there. It refused to recognize the egg company’s claim to the land but allowed it to keep up its rapacious methods so long as it didn’t interfere with lighthouse business.

The federal government fixed pay for all lighthouse keepers at a paltry $450 to $600 per year. Not bad if you lived in the East, but in the inflation-​happy epicenter of the Gold Rush, domestic servants could earn nearly that in a month, plus room and board, and all without having to live in a nightmare hellscape of guano and bird shrieks. Nerva N. Wines, the first lightkeeper, who served from 1855 to 1859, became a stockholder for the egg company and let them run amok so long as he received his dividend.

His successor, Amos Clift, had a better scheme. Clift had taken the job for the express purpose of commandeering the eggs. As he wrote in a letter to his brother, “If I could have the privilege of this egg business for one season, it is all I would ask [and] the government might then kiss my foot.” Clift boldly leased egg-​gathering rights to various parties and remained the keeper through the season of 1860, when the Lighthouse Board fired him for corruption. Without Clift managing the many competing parties, the conflict heated up.

It started off with the egg company posting signs barring the lightkeepers from certain parts of the island. Next, eggers busted up government roads, and an armed group captured four lightkeepers and tried to eject them from the island. Later that same year, someone assaulted an assistant lightkeeper. The situation had gotten more out of hand than usual, and the government struck back.

The regional superintendent of lighthouses, Ira Rankin, had a pragmatic streak and realized that so long as the egg rights to the land were up for grabs, the assaults, stabbings, intra-​egger battles, and graft would continue. So he decided to crown the original egg company ovary overlords of the Farallones and to hell with whether it was technically legal. (On paper, at least, the land belonged to the US government.) And Rankin would support the egg company using government power.

A freelance egger named David Batchelder took powerful exception to this move and made repeated, armed attempts to take the island with increasingly large numbers of men, Italians, a detail the papers loved to include. During the start of the 1863 season, he and his men built a house and a stone fortification on the island. Rankin responded with an armed customs ship that laid siege to Batchelder’s operation. The government removed four men, five shotguns, a rifle, and assorted other weapons. But Batchelder was not easily deterred.

Two weeks later, he returned with at least thirty men, who captured several Pacific Egg Company employees. Again, the same customs ship arrived and landed three boats of men to round up the egg rebels, plus their arsenal of twenty-​one firearms. At some point, Rankin realized that a few lightkeepers must be in league with Batchelder, so he sent a sternly worded letter threatening to fire anyone assisting the upstarts. Rankin also ordered the customs ship to patrol nearby waters, questioning any boat headed to the Farallones and boarding it if necessary.

Batchelder was rumored to be gathering forces for another try. On June 3, 1863, three sloops dropped anchor off the coast of the main island. They contained Batchelder, twenty-​seven armed men, and a four-​pound cannon. Isaac Harrington, the egg company foreman, met the boats at the landing, a wooden derrick built over the inhospitable shoreline. He howled across the waves that the rebels would land “at their peril,” and Batchelder yelled that they would come ashore “in spite of hell.”

Everyone spent a tense night, the egg company men camped on the landing and Batchelder’s men carousing in their boats. At daybreak, the rebels sent one boat in for a landing, and everyone opened fire. When the gunshots and feathers settled twenty minutes later, one of the company men was dead with a hole blasted through his stomach, and Batchelder’s men beat a hasty retreat, leaving a sloop behind. Five of Batchelder’s men had injuries, including one shot through the throat, who died at a hospital a few days later.

After Batchelder’s grand defeat, the rivalries among egg gangs died down, though tensions between the Pacific Egg Company and lightkeepers remained high for several more decades until an 1881 executive order barred commercial collection on the islands. Twenty-​one soldiers arrived to evict the egg company from the land permanently. Informal egging and selling by the lightkeepers continued till the end of the century but eventually ceased as the rising supply of chicken eggs made it far less profitable.

The Farallon egg trade lasted for a half century, with tragic ecological consequences for the birds. Estimates vary from source to source, but at the beginning of the egg rush, the company likely shipped around 900,000 eggs per year. Fifty years later, that number was closer to 150,000 eggs shipped, a sixth as many. The unchecked smashing and stealing of murre eggs had a predictable effect, decreasing the murre population by about 95 percent, from a high of 400,000 to 600,000 before egg gathering to a lean 20,000 birds at the trade’s conclusion.

Later environmental degradation—​multiple oil spills, shipping lanes, falling numbers of tasty sardines, to say nothing of an underwater nuclear waste dump—​further diminished the number of murres to a mere 6,000 by the 1950s. Since then, thanks to conservation efforts, numbers have greatly recovered, hitting 100,000 in 2000 and 250,000 to 300,000 in 2020.

*

Humans have done far worse in pursuit of eggs. Before Doc Robinson retrieved the first boatload in the Farallones, before the Gold Rush entirely, the great auk flourished. A large, docile, penguin-​looking bird, the auk was a member of the common murre’s biological family. Like murres, great auks congregated in large groups—​a move that would turn out to be foolish—​to lay their eggs on the bare rock of sea islands. Black with white bellies like the murre, this oversized, flightless cousin bred on rocks off the coast of Greenland, Newfoundland, Iceland, Massachusetts, and Scotland.

They had the minor misfortune of moving and breeding slowly—​females laid only one egg a year—​and the greater misfortune of soft feathers, tasty flesh, and fat that made a fine fuel oil. Laws going back to the 1550s tried to protect the birds, but they proved too easy to catch and too useful. One of the sadder passages I’ve read is the 1794 description of an auk hunt by Aaron Thomas of the HMS Boston:

If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leasure. This is not a very humane method but it is the common practize. While you abide on this island you are in the constant practice of horrid cruelties for you not only skin them Alive, but you burn them Alive also to cook their Bodies with. You take a kettle with you into which you put a Penguin or two, you kindle a fire under it, and this fire is absolutely made of the unfortunate Penguins themselves. Their bodies being oily soon produce a Flame; there is no wood on the island.

The human cruelty blows me over—​to skin animals alive or boil them alive on a fire made of their fellow birds. It’s a vision of hell.

By 1800, many of the great auk habitats had been destroyed. The scarcity of great auks made their eggs more valuable to oologists, who sent collectors out to snatch eggs and skins, which further decimated their populations. In 1844, three Icelandic hunters visited Geirfuglasker, a coastal island, to secure some specimens for a merchant. On June 3, they found the last known nesting pair of great auks, strangled them, and deliberately smashed the last egg with a boot. One of the hunters later described the scene to a researcher: “I took him by the neck and he flapped his wings. He made no cry. I strangled him.”

As I remember the large, old great auk shells in the cabinet, I think perhaps the birds are not the foolish ones after all.

Early in 2020 I visited a collection of great auk eggs at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Collection manager Jeremiah Trimble, red-​headed and with a hint of stubble on his cheeks, had an obvious love of the natural world; he lit up when I asked him about birding. He ushered me into the large windowless room that hosts the museum’s enormous collection of nearly 500,000 specimens of eggs and skins. Taxidermied birds perched atop the grayish cabinets that packed the room.

I had a list of eggs I wanted to see—​the glossy iridescent green-​blue of the South American tinamou inside a clear plastic box within its drawer; the Tic Tac–​sized hummingbird eggs, displayed inside nests that were, as Trimble explained, held together with cobwebs, like some fairy house. I saw globed white owl eggs, and the beautifully pointy and speckled egg of the common murre, including one collected in the Farallones. The egg of the elephant bird of Madagascar had recently been on display and lived in a cabinet. Such birds once laid the world’s largest eggs—​the size of watermelons. Though historians now debate the cause of their extinction, which occurred sometime between 1000 and 1200 CE, one theory suggests that humans simply ate them to death.

After fitting the enormous beige-​brown balloon into its box, Trimble showed me a very special cabinet on the other side of the room: a drawer of extinct species. He showed me the oblong golf ball of what was the United States’ only native parrot species, the Carolina parakeet. Down the row from it lay a small, glossy white egg from the passenger pigeon, a species too tasty for its own good. Perhaps the world’s largest collection of great auk eggs lay nearby, more than a dozen of them, the supersized version of the common murre eggs.

Though I try to be open-​eyed about the depravity of the era of exploration, I confess I do feel nostalgic for it sometimes. Not for the bad medicine or the narrow range of roles women and people of color were allowed to play in public life, but for the global sense of adventure and for the natural world that has been lost. How wild that the United States once had an exotic parrot species, with its orange head and teal body. I wonder about the people back then: did they count themselves lucky to walk the Earth at the same time as the Carolina parakeet or the great auk? Or did they simply see birds as commodities for exploitation or as mere scenery?

Peeking inside the drawer sparked a mix of emotions: illicit delight in seeing something rare mixed with solemnity since all that survives of these species are these remains locked in basement drawers. Of course the Victorians did not know how lucky they were to walk the Earth with the Carolina parakeet any more than I knew, when my father-​in-​law came over to play with my baby one morning, laid him on the carpet floor, and said, “Coochie coochie coo—​you’re not going to see any white rhinos, are you? No, you’re not” to my child on the day the last male white rhino died. The white rhinos are lost. There are no more elephant birds. There are no more night herons or dodoes or Reunion ibises.

I thought of that sepulchral drawer again nearly a year after my pilgrimage, when the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced the extinction of twenty-​three more plants and animals, including Bachman’s warbler, a symphony in yellow, black, and moss-​green. We have made the same mistakes over again, and as I remember the large, old great auk shells in the cabinet, I think perhaps the birds are not the foolish ones after all.

__________________________________

Reprinted from Egg: A Dozen Ovatures by Lizzie Stark. Copyright © 2023. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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As the 1950s wound down, the proliferation of mass-produced, heavily marketed light lagers took an increasing toll on America’s—and San Francisco’s—small brewers. But a number of local establishments still proudly featured Anchor’s signature product, in particular the Crystal Palace Market between Market and Mission at 8th Street. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it was a “sprawling, pungent, cheap and exotic carnival of delicatessen and delicacy.”

During the 1940s and 50s, Austrian Joseph Erdelatz served Anchor Steam and hot dogs at his bar in the southeast corner of this vast, colorful marketplace. Locals called it the “Steam Beer Parlor,” scarcely imagining its pivotal role in Anchor’s or its beer’s survival. For had it not been for the Crystal Palace, there might never have been an Old Spaghetti Factory, and without the Old Spaghetti Factory and its charismatic owner, Fred Kuh, there might be no Anchor Steam Beer today. Fritz Maytag, who tells the story better than anyone, shared it with me a few years ago:

Ah, Fred. A man of good taste. He had lived in Chicago and been to the Sieben’s Brewery, where I later bought our bottling line. They were the last brewery in America to have a restaurant in the brewery, a little Bier stube. And when he came to San Francisco for a visit, on the way into town from the airport, the very first thing his friend did was take him for a visit to the crystal Palace Market, sort of the equivalent of today’s farmers’ market. He recognized it immediately as similar to the great traditions of good food in Europe. Then his friend took him to the taproom at the crystal Palace Market, where they served Anchor steam on draught. Fred told me that he vowed that day, in the bar, drinking Anchor steam, that he would move to San Francisco, open a restaurant, and serve only Anchor steam Beer on draught.

And Fred Kuh served, on draught, Anchor Steam Beer only, all the years he was open. He had bottled beers, but no other beer on draught ever. And it was a booming place with young people. It was a target for the brewers. Imagine all the salespeople from Budweiser, Coors, and Miller, who would call on Fred at the Old Spaghetti Factory and tell him that he couldn’t possibly survive as a business if he didn’t have their beer on draught. And he told them all to go jump in the lake.

Fred Kuh had made good on his vow.

__________________________________

Reprinted with permission from The Anchor Brewing Story: America’s First Craft Brewery & San Francisco’s Original Anchor Steam Beer by David Burkhart, foreword by Fritz Maytag, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

The post The Mannequin for America’s Trendy Craft Beer Growth? Contained in the Small-Brewer Scene in Nineteen Fifties San Francisco ‹ Literary Hub appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

As the 1950s wound down, the proliferation of mass-produced, heavily marketed light lagers took an increasing toll on America’s—and San Francisco’s—small brewers. But a number of local establishments still proudly featured Anchor’s signature product, in particular the Crystal Palace Market between Market and Mission at 8th Street. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it was a “sprawling, pungent, cheap and exotic carnival of delicatessen and delicacy.”

During the 1940s and 50s, Austrian Joseph Erdelatz served Anchor Steam and hot dogs at his bar in the southeast corner of this vast, colorful marketplace. Locals called it the “Steam Beer Parlor,” scarcely imagining its pivotal role in Anchor’s or its beer’s survival. For had it not been for the Crystal Palace, there might never have been an Old Spaghetti Factory, and without the Old Spaghetti Factory and its charismatic owner, Fred Kuh, there might be no Anchor Steam Beer today. Fritz Maytag, who tells the story better than anyone, shared it with me a few years ago:

Ah, Fred. A man of good taste. He had lived in Chicago and been to the Sieben’s Brewery, where I later bought our bottling line. They were the last brewery in America to have a restaurant in the brewery, a little Bier stube. And when he came to San Francisco for a visit, on the way into town from the airport, the very first thing his friend did was take him for a visit to the crystal Palace Market, sort of the equivalent of today’s farmers’ market. He recognized it immediately as similar to the great traditions of good food in Europe. Then his friend took him to the taproom at the crystal Palace Market, where they served Anchor steam on draught. Fred told me that he vowed that day, in the bar, drinking Anchor steam, that he would move to San Francisco, open a restaurant, and serve only Anchor steam Beer on draught.

And Fred Kuh served, on draught, Anchor Steam Beer only, all the years he was open. He had bottled beers, but no other beer on draught ever. And it was a booming place with young people. It was a target for the brewers. Imagine all the salespeople from Budweiser, Coors, and Miller, who would call on Fred at the Old Spaghetti Factory and tell him that he couldn’t possibly survive as a business if he didn’t have their beer on draught. And he told them all to go jump in the lake.

Fred Kuh had made good on his vow.

__________________________________

Reprinted with permission from The Anchor Brewing Story: America’s First Craft Brewery & San Francisco’s Original Anchor Steam Beer by David Burkhart, foreword by Fritz Maytag, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

The post The Mannequin for America’s Trendy Craft Beer Growth? Contained in the Small-Brewer Scene in Nineteen Fifties San Francisco ‹ Literary Hub appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

GILROY (KPIX 5) — California’s high-speed rail project is moving ahead with the approval of the San Jose-to-Merced section by way of Gilroy.

The approval by the state High-Speed ​​Rail Authority board of directors was cheered by Gilroy officials who envisioned building a transit hub around the rail stop.

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“I believe this will be transformative for the Gilroy community,” said Mayor Marie Blankley.

The approved alignment for the San Jose-to-Merced segment which will take tracks through the Gilroy station, before heading across Pacheco Pass into the Central Valley.

“This will be a connector for bus and rail to Monterey, to the east, to San Jose and it’s going to really help people who are going to be needing transportation to get to jobs as we increase the housing supply in California,” Blankley said .

Gilroy resident James Suner says it all looks good on paper.

“It would be like having an airport terminal in town, it acts as a hub, brings in transit-oriented development and would be a catalyst for the next century for Gilroy,” he said.

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But given the high-speed rail project’s history, Suner is skeptical it will actually happen.

Although construction of rail infrastructure is ongoing in the Central Valley, there are no firm plans for when the San Jose-Gilroy-Pacheco Pass segments would be built.

“High-speed rail is the biggest boondoggle in the history of the state,” Suner said.

Others like bike shop owner Ro Gaeta are hopeful that it will help make Gilroy more of a destination.

“We’re just a little bit of a secret town that people know as for the Garlic Festival, but I think that would be a plus for this town if it actually happens, and it sounds like it eventually will,” Gaeta said.

Mayor Blankley said she’s been told to expect pre-construction activity to begin sometime within the next two years.

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San Francisco-based real estate technology company HomeLight has opened a regional center in Tampa, a critical step in its expansion plans for the state.

HomeLight, which provides a platform that provides real estate agents and their clients with expertise in the property buying and selling process, announced Monday that the location in the Westshore Concourse Center will serve as the company’s operational hub for Florida. It will be dedicated to providing exclusive, tech-assisted title and escrow services to the best real estate agents.

The new office will create at least 100 jobs in Tampa and more than 500 across the state, according to the company’s news release.

“With HomeLight planning to hire at least 500 people across the state of Florida, Tampa is an ideal city to serve as our first Florida office and regional hub because of its vibrant culture, booming business scene and diverse talent pool,” said Ankur Bansal , President of HomeLight Closing Services, told the St. Pete Catalyst in a prepared statement. “Our Tampa office will currently serve the St. Petersburg area – and as we continue to expand our products and services across Florida, we are considering opening additional offices both locally and across the state.”

HomeLight has been drawn to Florida as its closure service line has grown more than 500% in the state since June 2020, as well as Florida’s rapidly growing population.

The new location is an important step for HomeLight as the company continues to expand its presence in Florida and the United States

The HomeLight Listing Management Tool (photo courtesy of HomeLight).

“Thanks to HomeLight’s technology platform and the incredible attention to detail from their trustees, we can manage the closing process for our clients with ease – and shorten our closing date for clients compared to other traditional competitors in the neighborhood.” / The broker from Max Capital Realty , Clyde Murphy said.

HomeLight was founded in 2012 and is a privately held company with offices in Scottsdale, San Francisco, New York and Seattle, backed by well-known investors such as Zeev Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Group 11, Crosslink Capital, Bullpen Capital, Montage Ventures, Citi Ventures becomes. Google Ventures and others, according to the company’s press release.

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After more than 10 years as a research center in San Francisco, Bayer is leaving the city to concentrate its research activities in Boston.

“In order to optimally use our resources and carefully leverage internal and external innovation potential worldwide, we have decided to consolidate our research innovation activities in the USA in the Boston, MA area, where we are working on the Kendall Square project in. invest Cambridge, “said a Bayer spokesman on Tuesday evening in an email.

“As a result of this decision, we will close our Open Innovation Center-North America West in Mission Bay, San Francisco in accordance with the end of the lease for this facility,” added the spokesman.

The San Francisco Business Times first reported the site’s impending closure on Monday, noting that the company’s lease for the space expires in October.

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Germany-based Bayer settled in San Francisco in May 2010 and relocated 65 researchers to a space vacated by Pfizer near the University of San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus. In 2012, the company opened its Mission Bay CoLaborator, a 6,000-square-foot incubator in the same building. The incubator has now been expanded to 30,000 square meters.

When Bayer’s lease on the space expires, the companies that have settled in the incubator will be without homes. Bayer is working “with the CoLaborator companies to ensure a smooth transition to future locations of their choice,” said the spokesman.

The company’s own workforce at the site has shrunk to just 20 as a result of the relocation of research projects between different locations, the spokesman said, adding: “The work of this team will be integrated into the work of other Bayer teams around the world.”

In April, Bayer announced the impending closure to its employees and encouraged those affected to apply for other positions within the company, including nearly 100 biotech positions at the Berkeley site across the bay.

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The Berkeley site is home to Bayer’s global production center for hemophilia A products, but could contain a lot more at some point. The company is seeking approval from Berkeley executives for a 30-year plan to add 1 million square feet of manufacturing, research, and office space to the site, the San Francisco Business Times reported in April. It is planned to use the site for the production of drugs such as protein therapeutics as well as cell and gene therapies.

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