San Francisco Chronicle Bay Area - Spoken Edition

The last letter of new sign awaits installation in front the current understated version at the entrance to Children's Fairyland at Lakeside Park in Oakland, Calif. on Friday, Aug. 10, 2018. The new sign is the finishing touch on an extensive renovation of Lakeside Park which includes the 68-year-old children's theme park. less The last letter of new sign awaits installation in front the current understated version at the entrance to Children's Fairyland at Lakeside Park in Oakland, Calif.

BART Board President Robert Raburn got a stunning dress-down from an Oakland station agent Thursday after he and other directors took a mixed vote on the general manager’s call for more security on the crime-troubled transit system. Raburn and other BART directors voted “yes” on installing emergency call boxes and upgrading security cameras, but “not yet” on banning panhandling or increasing the number of ticket checkers to curb gate jumping.

Gump’s was a wonder of another age, a time not so long ago when it was the most exclusive store in the city, and maybe the West. The 157-year-old retailer Gump’s is facing closure of its San Francisco store near Union Square after filing for bankruptcy protection. When all the best people shopped at Gump’s This is one of the strangest weekends you can imagine in San Francisco.

This July 3, 2017, photo provided by Ebony Monroe shows her cousin Nia Wilson in a selfie, who was killed in an unprovoked stabbing attack at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Oakland, Calif., Sunday, July 22, 2018. John Cowell, 27, a recently paroled robber with a violent history, was peacefully arrested on an Antioch-bound train Monday night about 12 miles (19 kilometers) from the Oakland station where investigators believe he killed Wilson and wounded her sister Sunday night.

Inside the Fresnel lens of the historic Point Reyes Lighthouse that will be repaired during the two-month renovations. There are 308 stairs that lead to the exit of the historic Point Reyes Lighthouse that will close for two months for major renovation. The historic Point Reyes Lighthouse will close this weekend for two months for major renovations and to fix up the old and very complicated lighthouse lens.

President Trump’s arena tour is the “Mission: Impossible” of American politics — how is he ever going to overcome all his many enemies and prevail? But unlike Tom Cruise’s character, he doesn’t have to deliver any results at the end of the show. There are other showbiz analogies to be drawn from Trump’s appearances in places such as Tampa, Fla., Kansas City, Mo., and Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Although he spent most of the time talking about wildfires and climate change, Gov. Jerry Brown strayed into the world of economics while talking to reporters the other day at the state emergency center and warned of another recession lurking on the horizon. “At some point, the tariffs and the natural cycle will kick in,” Brown said, then flipped back to his time at San Francisco’s St.

Tourists sit bundled up on a bench at a scenic overlook of the Golden Gate Bridge at Ridge Battery in Sausalito. Tourists bundle up as they walk up Battery Spencer on a foggy day to get a look at the Golden Gate Bridge in Sausalito. Lubima Petrova (second from left) photographs her daughter, Rumi, with the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop. Friday was the 24th foggy morning in a row in San Francisco, a gray reminder of what a terrible summer this has been.

I went to the dark side the other day, a dangerous place that’s helping to ruin our city. The type of place that could soon be banned. I had lunch at an employee cafeteria. A friend who works at a big tech company in Mid-Market and I had been saying we should get lunch for ages. But in the daily whirl of our busy lives, we never actually scheduled it.

One of the highlights of political icon Ron Dellums’ lengthy congressional career was in 1990 when Nelson Mandela thanked the crowd at the Oakland Coliseum for the work that they and Dellums had done to end apartheid in South Africa. Dellums died Monday at age 82.

Gus Konstin, a San Francisco restauranteur who owned historic John’s Grill for many years, died Monday at UCSF Medical Center after a long illness. He was 87. Konstin was an American success story. He arrived from his native Greece in 1951 with $20, a limited command of English and a determination to succeed. Over the years he became wealthy through hard work and shrewd investing.

BART’s new East Bay extension to Antioch is already rocketing off the charts. Opened in late May at a cost of $525 million, the 10-mile link from Pittsburg to Antioch is averaging 3,800 weekday riders — well above the 2,800 BART initially estimated. “And there likely would be even more riders, but there’s no room in the parking lot,” said BART Board Director Joel Keller, whose east Contra Costa County district includes the new station.

I just spent a couple of days in another world, right in the heart of California. This is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which is as close — and as far away — from the state’s big cities as you can imagine. You can see the edge of the delta from a BART train heading toward Pittsburg. Mount Diablo, at the center of East Bay suburbia, is visible everywhere in the delta. But the delta is far, far away from the booming Bay Area.

There was no better proof of how we have failed as voters than the scene at last week’s NAACP convention, where former President Bill Clinton presented me with the group’s award for outstanding achievement. As I told 2,000 attendees in San Antonio, if we had all done our job and voted in 2016, it would have been President Hillary Clinton making the presentation. It got a laugh, but it is the bitter truth.

Boykin, in his room at the Henry Robinson Center, says: “I want to work my way back into society. I have power — I just have to figure out how to use it.” Rufus Boykin, who has lived on the street for more than 20 years, is staying at the Henry Robinson Center, a transitional housing facility in downtown Oakland. Rufus Boykin balled up a brown napkin in his hand and swiped at the tears on his face.