A BAY AREA NEWS GROUP PREMIUM EDITION
Iridescence everywhere
Light-based art works illuminate the Bay
BY ETHAN BARON
Two dozen people lie on the floor of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral gazing into a cone of light shining down from a hundred feet above. They look up into radiance: shifting beams and curtains of blue and green, red, purple, yellow and pink, patterned with swirls and billows from manufactured fog. Deep, slow music evoking monasteries and whale song resounds among the church’s towering concrete pillars.
Experiencing the “Grace Light” art installation could be compared to gazing into the eye of God — or something like it.
“At the end, you almost felt like you were taken into the dome of heaven,” said San Francisco artist Pat Lee, 73, freshly upright after about 15 minutes on the cathedral floor. “I didn’t expect it to be so emotional.”
Appreciation of light unites humanity: sunsets gleaming through clouds, the face of a loved one in a candle’s glow, lasers glittering in a concert hall and the burst of fireworks in the night sky. In recent years, advances in technology and the influence of artists who ignite the night desert at Burning Man have brought artistic illumination into everyday life — sparking not just interest, but engagement and joy.
Grace Light, by Berkeley artist George Zisiadis and San Francisco composer Gabriel Gold, is just one of many light-based installations brightening cities and communities across the Bay Area. There are iconic, illuminated letter and word sculptures at San Jose’s airport and a winery in Santa Rosa. A giant woman made of steel and stars towers in San Leandro. To the south, a new geometric night-time wonderland has expanded Paso Robles’ spectacular Sensorio Field of Lights. And
Lying on the floor, guests are bathed in light while viewing the Grace Light art installation at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral.
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the biggest light installation of all, the Bay Lights project that lit up the Bay Bridge for 10 years until going dark in March 2023, is set to return in even more magnificence in 2025.
“Every origin story starts with light. It’s sort of at the genesis of every culture. It’s speaking a universal language that touches us at the core,” says Ben Davis, founder of Illuminate, the nonprofit behind Bay Lights, Grace Light and other largescale works that fall into an artistic genre closely linked to the Burning Man festival of art, music and experience held each summer in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
Among the most prominent artists and artworks to emerge from Burning Man are Marin County’s Laura Kimpton and her Monumental Words sculptures, which have traveled from the desert to sites around the world. At San Jose Mineta International Airport, her “XO” helps turn arrivals into celebrations. At Santa Rosa’s Paradise Ridge Winery, her “LOVE” stands tall after barely escaping the devastating Tubbs Fire in 2017.
Kimpton launched the project, a collaboration with artist Jeff Schomberg, at Burning Man in 2010 with “MOM.” The next year came “OINK,” because Kimpton was farming pigs, and humans may need reminding that we’re animals, she says. The sculpture, installed far out near the Burning Man boundary fence, had external lights that flashed on and off.
“You could see OINK from five miles away, and it would go, ‘OINK, OINK, OINK,’” says Kimpton, 60.
Kimpton, of San Anselmo, started putting light inside her sculptures in 2016, when she found spotlights couldn’t prop-
erly illuminate the @ symbol in her “@EARTH#HOME” installation at Burning Man. “It drove me nuts,” she says. “I’m kind of a spastic artist who can kind of be messy and everything, but I’m a trained photographer: I like balance.”
For her “XOXO” the following year, the crew put light-emitting diodes (LEDs) inside the sculpture, “so that Laura doesn’t have a little fit,” she says.
Now, a version of that sculpture welcomes travelers and the friends and loved ones who come to meet them at the San Jose airport’s Terminal B. Twice the height of a person, “XO” represents the hugs and kisses ubiquitous at airports and changes color every few seconds, from red to green to blue and on through the spectrum, light shining through hundreds of bird-shaped cutouts in the sculpture’s aluminum sheeting.
“When you can change the colors of the piece, it makes a party, it makes an event,” Kimpton says.
Light, when built into art, also attracts. “It makes people look,” says Charles Gadeken, whose otherworldly “Entwined” sculpture garden illuminates San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza. “I get tired of seeing people ignore art. They walk past it. They don’t see it at all.”
At the plaza, eight of Gadeken’s chest-high techno-shrubs, plus one a bit taller, sprout from a sand-covered rectangle recalling the Black Rock “playa,” with the seedy chaos of nearby Market Street substituting for the kaleidoscopic madness of Burning Man. Each shrub features dozens of stalks topped with 3½-inch plastic cubes that glow, pulsate and switch colors: pink, chartreuse, orange, blue, white and purple. Every so often, some flash.
“There are ways to use light art that really engage people,” says Gadeken, 60, whose path to artistic prominence also started at Burning Man. “The world could use some light. The cities have many dark places that could be illuminated and made more beautiful and made more fun.”
The Bay Area’s most-viewed work of light art, the Bay Lights that sparkled and shone from cables holding up the western span of the Bay Bridge, blinked to black in 2023, shut down after the lighting systems dete-
Above: Onlookers take in the iconic Bay Lights installation one last time before the lights were extinguished on March 5, 2023. The installation will flicker back to life in even grander form next year.
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Laura Kimpton’s XO sculpture greets arrivals with love at Terminal B at the San Jose Mineta International Airport.
NHAT V. MEYER/ STAFF
riorated in the elements and sea air. Illuminate’s Davis is working with local, state and federal authorities to bring it back in 2025 — and make it visible from the East Bay and Peninsula, instead of just San Francisco and Marin County, to deliver what Davis calls “aesthetic equity.”
This project, too, arose from Burning Man, albeit indirectly. In 2010, Davis returned to the Bay after a week’s immersion in the festival’s culture of contribution, amid phantasmagoric structures ablaze with light. He had a hard landing back home in San Francisco. As he looked up at the Bay Bridge from The Embarcadero, inspiration struck: The generosity and beauty of the playa didn’t have to stay there.
“I just wanted to bring it to where we live and make it last longer and reach more people,” says Davis, 63.
Someone sent him a video of an installation by artist Leo Villareal at the San Jose Museum of Art. Davis called Villareal and asked him, “If the Bay Bridge
was your canvas, what would you do?”
Villareal turned the span into a 1.8-mile long harp of light, the blinking white LEDs appearing to flow up and down in glimmering drops, with patterns sweeping sporadically across the lines of steel cables. He and Davis are again collaborating, aiming to set the span alight again in early 2025 with — they hope — an expansion from the original 25,000 lights to 50,000. If Davis can satisfy officials’ concerns around driver distraction, each of 300 cables will have white LEDs on both sides reaching as high as 240 feet above the bridge deck to create “The Bay Lights 360.”
“It won’t really be clear who gets the view and
Above: Marco Cochrane’s Truth Is Beauty sculpture on San Leandro’s Tech Campus brightens the night for evening commuters on the nearby BART tracks.
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Right: Artist Charles Gadeken’s Entwined installation illuminates an enchanted forest in the heart of San Francisco.
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who doesn’t until we turn it on,” Davis says. “We’re doing our best to keep that view open to the entire Bay Area.”
A new brand of LED should dramatically increase the installation’s lifespan, Davis says.
Over the past decade, low-power, relatively cheap LED light has driven a world-wide expansion of light art, says Nancy Sweeney, an art consultant who curated the collection at The Ameswell hotel in Mountain View, where a mesmerizing work of LEDs, mirrors and fiberglass by artist Chul Hyun Ahn greets guests at reception.
But while art with built-in illumination grows in popularity and visibility, the need for maintenance and the potential for glitches or the deterioration that undid the Bay Lights give pause to many owners and operators of locations that host art, Sweeney says. Still, with advances in technology, “people are more willing to go there,” she says.
Increasingly reliable LEDs, along with evolving systems for controlling how they light up, are also creating a new wave of interest among artists, says Jia-Ming Day, a light artist and professor of New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts. He is studying light art in the Bay Area as a visiting scholar at UC Davis and began his U.S. studies at San Jose State University in 1992. Day, 59, believes this region’s residents will be seeing more light-based public art, often installed as a remedy to dark urban spaces.
Public appetite for captivating light art can be measured by the Sensorio “Field of Light” in Paso Robles. After flickering to life in 2019, the 15-acre, ground-level array of 100,000 color-changing spheres by artist Bruce Munro was to last about eight months. But it has drawn so many vis-
If You Go
Grace Light at Grace Cathedral at 1100 California St. in San Francisco is free (donations encouraged), and takes place on select evenings from January through April and September through November. Tickets are released at noon on the Tuesday before. Find details at http:// gracecathedral.org/grace-light.
itors to wander in awe among the orbs that it’s been expanded and made permanent. Now, a new light-art exhibit has popped up at Sensorio: “Dimensions,” a music-aided ramble among glowing metal geometric sculptures, the work of long-time Burning Man artists Serge Beaulieu and UC Berkeley graduate Yelena Filipchuk.
Back by the Bay, a stone’s throw from the San Leandro BART station, a 55-foot-tall sculpture of a nude woman rises from the city’s Tech Campus. Her toes are pointed, her back is arched, her head is tipped back, and her arms stretch toward the dome of heaven. An intricate labyrinth of steel tubing forms her skeleton. Beneath her steel mesh skin, she is lit from within by 2,500 LED lights that up close appear as pinpoints. From the BART platform, they look like stars, and from further away, they make her glow like a distant galaxy.
Built by Petaluma artist Marco Cochrane, Truth Is Beauty debuted in 2013 at Burning Man. Today, the sculpture brightens the darkness for many a tired commuter. “I like how it lights up,” says Shanea Espinoza, 31, a hostess at a nearby restaurant who takes BART home to Hayward after work. “It just adds a nice sparkle in the night.”
Burning Man light
tunnel sculpture dazzles downtown San Jose
BY CAMERON DURAN
The huge metal rings vertically embedded in the sidewalk just outside San Jose’s City Hall go almost unnoticed in daylight, blending into the building’s sleek architecture. But when the sun sets, the concentric arches come to vivid, pulsing life.
Waves of colorful lights race down the runway’s curves to the beat of ambient electronic music, an immersive spectacle that evokes the installation’s birthplace far from the downtown buzz — at Burning Man, the annual weeklong, counterculture spectacle in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
Designed by a pair of former Pixar colleagues, Rob Jensen and Warren Trezevant, Sonic Runway made its festival debut in 2016 — where first-time attendee Kerry Adams Hapner, San Jose’s director of cultural affairs, was “blown away” by the sculpture. What if, she wondered, all of San Jose could experience the piece, too?
The answer was the Playa to Paseo project, which eventually brought seven Burning Man artworks from the desert to downtown. In 2017, Sonic Runway became the first installation to take up residency in San Jose, spanning more than 400 feet of sidewalk between Third and Fourth Streets and lighting up from sunset to midnight. A playlist of mellow instrumental tracks plays from one end of the tunnel, with each ring lighting up as the beat of the music reaches it.
The light art installation quickly charmed the city and became a go-to downtown photo spot, with more than 4,000 Instagram posts tagged at the site. Families, cosplayers, bikers and dancers have all shared their love for the colorful LED experience online.
“Sonic Runway has been so wildly popular,” Adams Hapner said. “It’s what you hope. You hope that the community loves it and has that sense of joy that you experience when you walk down the runway.”
The runway is audio reactive, with LEDs synced to its electronic music, but for special events, live music can provide sonic inspiration instead. A cellist, a youth choir and an opera singer have all plugged in.
The runway creators first met in the late 1990s while working at Pixar in Emeryville. Jensen had
been a Burner for years. In 2002, he convinced Trezevant to come along, and it was there that they dreamed up the first version of the sculpture — made with pyramids, rather than rings.
The first iteration was “basically just a series of strobe lights that was a sort of nerdy scientific visualization of the speed of sound,” Jensen said. “The whole point of that was to be able to see the beat of the music, and in particular, to be able to see it coming at you before it got there.”
They funded the project themselves and built it with a team of friends, aligning with Burning Man’s collaborative spirit. It debuted at the 2003 event.
Over the next decade, audio processing and LED technology advanced significantly. Trezevant and Jensen set up a crowdfunding campaign to create an updated version of their installation. The 2016 runway used a sequence of steel arches, which allows lights to move in another dimension, around each curve, and creates a “shared space” for viewers, Trezevant said, while still being open to the surrounding world.
“You can easily move in and out of it, and it doesn’t feel claustrophobic,” he said. “I think it has this really elegant feeling to it.”
Built for a short stay at Burning Man, the work wasn’t intended to withstand the wear and tear of urban life. The desert festival is a celebration of the artistic and the ephemeral, after all. So the city of San Jose eventually partnered with Jensen and Trezevant to create a more permanent version designed for downtown. Sonic Runway made its return in 2021 and is set to remain there until at least 2027.
“There’s a certain magic that comes from the temporariness, but it’s fleeting, and very few people actually get to experience it,” Jensen said. “It’s been very rewarding for both of us to know that this piece has had a life beyond that one sort of bizarre environment, and many more people are able to enjoy it on a daily basis.”
Trezevant hopes passersby of all ages will feel a sense of wonder as they interact with the light installation.
“Every time I walk through the runway, and I see other people, they’re always smiling,” Trezevant said. “It just seems like this tunnel of smiles, everyone having a good time.”
Created by a team led by artists Rob Jensen and Warren Trezevant and designer Stockhausen, Sonic Runway and its 25 arches stretch 432 feet down a sidewalk in downtown San Jose.
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Before there was light
Edison’s little bulb changed everything — and humans have never been the same
BY MARTHA ROSS
Think back to the last time your home and neighborhood were plunged into darkness.
That was Breck Parkman’s experience for 10 nights when the 2017 Nuns and Tubbs fires cut power to his Sonoma County home, and he and his teenage son suddenly had to live without a bright and steady source of light.
“We just did candles, and we had an old oil lamp,” says Parkman, a retired archaeologist with the California State Parks.
The experience reminded Parkman of how local Native American tribes and other preindustrial aboriginal groups he’d studied for four decades lived half their lives in darkness.
His friend Gregg Castro, the cultural director for the Peninsula-based Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, noted that California’s original inhabitants followed nature’s “clock.” They rose before dawn, completed daily tasks by dusk and went to bed early — or gathered at night in their roundhouse, sharing ancient stories and daily gossip around a campfire, their community’s only source of light.
“For thousands of years, they did quite well,” Castro says. “They developed a lifestyle that coincided with nature for the most part.”
These days, the only places to get away from city lights are remote Sierra campsites, like this one in the John Muir Wilderness, or near Point Reyes and other DarkSky-designated areas.
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It’s only during a wilderness camping trip or a power outage caused by extreme weather that 21st century Bay Area residents are reminded, too, that this is how humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years — until the arrival of the lightbulb.
It was nearly 150 years ago that Thomas Edison and others commercialized incandescent lightbulbs and made electric power possible in homes, in factories and on city streets. “Put an undeveloped human being into an environment where there is artificial light,” Edison once said, “and he will improve.”
Indeed, the widespread availability of artificial light has changed human life in profound ways. The illumination of homes, workplaces and public spaces at the flip of a switch has influenced how we sleep, work, socialize, move around our communities and interact with nature and the night sky.
“Never before, in our everyday lives, have we been more dependent upon artificial illumination, arguably the greatest symbol of modern progress,” writes Virginia Tech history professor A. Roger Ekirch, in his 2005 book “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past.”
But there’s been a price to pay for this progress. Scientists have documented how people’s sleep, circadian rhythms and physical and mental health have been affected by hours of exposure to artificial light, according to Stanford-educated materials scientist and author Ainissa Ramirez.
One notable finding by scientists and historians is that people in preindustrial societies in Western Europe, Africa, Asia and South America didn’t sleep straight through the night. Ekirch says the “consolidated”
Extreme weather and wildfire conditions have made PG&E power outages increasingly common across the Bay Area.
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eight-hour model of sleep is a vestige of the Industrial Revolution. Preindustrial people instead slept in shifts — retiring soon after sunset, sleeping for about four hours, waking for an hour or two in the middle of the night to ruminate, work or chat with family and neighbors, before going back to sleep until sunrise.
Meanwhile, all the bright, 24/7 lighting that surrounds our communities, along with the thousands of privately owned satellites being launched into space since 2019, has contributed to a permanent glow in the night sky, which some scientists believe is as serious a global environmental threat as climate change, says Aparna Venkatesan, a University of San Francisco cosmologist whose work focuses on cultural astronomy and space policy.
Light pollution has caused “tremendous” ecological damage to plant and animal species, which rely on Earth’s seasons and daily cycles to nourish themselves, migrate, reproduce and protect themselves from predators, she says. And it has erased people’s ability to see stars
in the night sky.
Preindustrial humans could look up and see a dazzling array of stars. Now, scientists say, 80 percent of Americans can’t see the Milky Way. People around the world are losing a vital connection to millennia of their own history and culture, Venkatesan says, which includes celestial influences in mythology and literature and early breakthroughs in navigation and science.
“This relationship with the night sky is timeless,” Venkatesan said. “And that awe — capital A.W.E. — and curiosity is deeply human, so when we lose that, we are losing something precious that makes us human.”
Before the ubiquity of artificial light, people could experience such awe on a nightly basis. In 1863, Henry David Thoreau marveled at the varieties of moonlight while taking a midnight walk, noticing that his eyes adjusted to the darkness, while his hearing, smell and touch took “the lead” in navigating the forest. Lying back in a pasture, he could
An Oakland police car cruises Oakland’s Montclair district during a PG&E power outage in October 2019.
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gaze up at the canopy of stars — “jewels of the night” — which would “surpass anything which day has to show.”
The night and its mysteries have long evoked terror, too, of course. Every culture conjures stories of ghosts and spirits emerging in the dark. People learned to expect nocturnal attacks by enemies. They fear criminals on dark city streets even now. And in 1840s California, the agony of the Donner party was intensified by the lack of light in snowbound cabins, accounts show. At night in the black forest, a dying Tamsen Donner tried to buoy the spirits of her three freezing, starving daughters by telling them stories about Daniel in the lion’s den.
Control of fire gave humans a means to beat back darkness even a million years ago. For millennia, they used torches to illuminate the darkness and later, rushlights, candles and lamps filled with oil extracted from plants, fish or whales. These early lighting technologies gave people enough light to do chores at night or to host religious ceremonies, while royals and the rich could stay up to enjoy solitary activities or host extravagant parties.
But those flickering flames were both expensive and fire hazards. “Preindustrial families were constrained in their use of candles and lamps by concerns for both safety and frugality,” Ekirch says.
Hearth fires and lamplight provided a primary source of nighttime illumination in many American homes into the 19th century. The long list of daily chores for the girls in San Jose’s Kettman family in the 1860s included churning butter and
putting wicks and oil in the lamps. Boyle Workman, an early Los Angeles city councilman, recounted the large fireplace at the end of the kitchen in his family’s “pioneer” farmhouse. Workers gathered there each night, “their white teeth gleaming in their dark faces as they laughed and chatted.”
Gas lighting allowed cities on both sides of the Atlantic to change their nighttime cultures by glowing up their streets starting in the early 1800s. San Jose’s downtown streets and some homes finally got gas lamps in the 1860s, but these lights required constant tending, and the gas and open flames remained a potential hazard.
As Edison predicted, the invention of the much safer, easy-to-switch-on lightbulb transformed the “undeveloped” human. It transformed everything — and not necessarily for the better.
On this particular autumn day, Parkman is reflecting on how Edison’s invention has affected even his family interactions. Once power was restored to his Sonoma County home after the long outage, he and his son returned to their usual evening activities — doing household chores or working on their laptops in their separate, well-lit parts of the house.
We may think of electric lights as the norm, but that wasn’t true even a few decades ago. As a child in the 1950s, Parkman would visit his grandparents, whose rural home in Georgia didn’t have electric lights. Evenings were spent on the front porch, everyone talking and watching fireflies dance in the nighttime shadows.
“My grandfather would tell
Kris Bel, of Concord, checks his smart phone as smoke lingers above the San Francisco Bay in October 2019, when power outages made the setting sun the only reliable source of light. JOSE
CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF ARCHIVES
stories, and it was just a different way of being, he remembers. “I think family had a different definition in semi-light than it does in full light.”
Meanwhile, scientists theorize that the constant use of artificial light has set people on a course to develop a range of modern illnesses, as Ramirez said, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.
Changes to how we sleep — or don’t sleep enough — is one issue, as Ramirez explained in an interview and in her 2020 book, “The Alchemy of Us.” So, too, is the fact that human physiology has become disconnected from Earth’s seasons and its daily cycles. A photoreceptor in the human eye responds to light, whether from the rising sun or from lights in our homes and on our devices. This light tells our brains to release chemicals that wake up the body — the opposite of what happens when the sun goes down, and the brain signals the release of melatonin.
With so much artificial light in our lives, “we are experiencing too much of the wrong kind of light at the wrong part of the day, and these lights affect our health,” Ramirez says. We spend too much time in “daytime mode,” flooding our systems with growth hormones that, studies show, increase the risk of cancer.
Beyond human health, the proliferation of artificial light has disrupted the lives of species around the world, according to Venkatesan. Sea turtles along U.S. beaches are having trouble finding dark beaches where they can nest, because lights blaze from hotels and vacation condos. Meanwhile, birds can’t see the moon or stars well enough to migrate at night, or they become attracted to lights in buildings and crash into them.
Devastation to biodiversity is one impetus for the DarkSky International movement, which advocates for protecting night skies from light pollution. A DarkSky initiative began in West Marin County in 2020, when residents in Point Reyes Station began hearing neighbors complain about lights around town that were keeping people up at night.
DarkSky West Marin joined forces with Point Reyes National Seashore to have a portion of Marin County designated as Northern California’s first DarkSky community, a regional officially recognized for good night sky quality by DarkSky International. DarkSky West Marin regularly invites the public to stargazing events near Tomales Bay — on the first clear night in the week before a new moon — to hear stories about the celestial bodies above and to feel that sense of awe as they gaze at the Milky Way. And, says West Marin co-founder Peggy Day, guests are asked to look south and see “the dome” of light all the way from San Francisco. “We want people to see the effect of human lighting on the sky.”
The Tactile Dome exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco immerses guests in complete darkness as they make their way through the exhibit.
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LETTHEREBEDARKNESS!
Let your sense of touch guide you inside
BY BRITTANY DELAY
the Tactile Dome
Light shows, LEDs and screen projections are all the rage these days. Everywhere you go, there seems to be some hoozit or whatzit aglow. It’s often for good reason — these visuals can be stunning — but whatever happened to less is more?
If that sentiment resonates, head for the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Tactile Dome. For more than four decades, this 33-foot-wide geodesic structure has plunged participants into complete darkness, challenging them to navigate a labyrinth of textures solely through touch.
Enter the dome, and you’ll spend the next five to 10 minutes walking, crawling, climbing, bouncing, twisting, turning and sliding your way through a sequence of 13 pitch-black chambers. All the surfaces, walls, floors and ceilings of the chambers are covered in materials that blend, change and contrast, confronting explorers with a most tactile experience. Bounce? Twist? Turn? The dome almost sounds like the
immersive version of a bop-it. It isn’t just child’s play, says Rachel Hyden, the Exploratorium’s senior director of visitor engagement. Visitors of all ages are drawn to the darkness, and what they take away from it is as individual as they are.
“The experience is not particular to children or adults,” Hyden says. “We have adults for whom going through the dome is conquering a fear. For others, you can just hear the laughter and hilarity they’re experiencing as they go through. There’s no universal experience.”
So, whose funny idea was it anyway to have people get on all fours and crawl their way through total darkness? The dome is actually the brainchild of Carl Day and August Coppola. (Yes, that Coppola, brother of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and father of actor Nicolas Cage.)
Coppola fostered a keen interest in perception bias. He argued that people rely too heavily on visual information
The Tactile Dome is open from 10:15 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. daily and from 6:15 to 9:15 p.m. for “After Dark” hours on Thursday nights at the Exploratorium on Pier 15. Dome tickets are $16 (reservation only), plus museum admission ($30-$40), and a portion of the exhibit is wheelchair accessible. Find more details on the Tactile Dome, ticket information and admission restrictions at exploratorium.edu.
to understand the world, often overlooking the sense of touch and developing a reluctance to physically engage with others and the environment.
Perhaps Coppola saw, early on, the ways in which modern society was trending towards isolation. However, even he may not have predicted the relevance of the dome in our digital age. In a world increasingly dominated by screens and technological distractions, the dome offers a rare experience, forcing visitors to disconnect from the visual and embrace the tactile.
Of course, a lot of attractions promise “immersive” activities, but the dome is the real immersive deal. When the dome first opened in 1971, a press release from the Exploratorium reported visitors “compared the experience to being born again, turning yourself inside out head first, being swallowed by a whale and inevitably, being enfolded in a giant womb.”
So what exactly lies inside?
“I don’t want to give away all the secrets,” Hyden teases. “One of the things that we really try to maintain is the sense of mystery about the dome. We don’t tell you all the things, because we want it to be something you experience for yourself.”
Expect surprises. Darkness. And then, light.
Illuminated sculptures radiate calming vibes for patients at John Muir
BY MARTHA ROSS
No one ever really wants to go to the hospital, and hospitals know it.
That’s one reason that a growing number of medical centers have filled their walls, lobbies and waiting areas with art, hoping to make what can be a worrying or painful experience for patients into something more welcoming. Being able to look at a beautiful mural or sit in a garden next to a stunning piece of sculpture is thought to be healing for patients, as they undergo tests, surgery or treatment for serious health conditions.
The art world also has taken notice that hospitals, especially those displaying high-quality works in newer, state-of-the-art buildings, have become art-filled public spaces, just as libraries, parks and shopping centers have done.
Both patients and art lovers can find aesthetic relief in two striking, large-scale illuminated sculptures on display at John Muir’s Walnut Creek Medical Center. The sculptures, by two internationally recognized Tucson-based artists, were commissioned for the hospital’s new Jean and Ken Hofmann Cancer Center, which opened in February in the gleaming, 155,000-square-foot Behring Pavilion.
Both sculptures are equipped with lights that allow them to glow at night, making them
visible at all hours of the day in remarkably changing ways. The illumination means “they can reach out beyond the bounds of the sculpture itself,” says Joe O’Connell, creator of the sculpture, “Uplifting Together.” He and Barbara Grygutis, who created the second sculpture, “Regeneration,” specialize in art that uses light. For this installation, their pieces embody themes from nature that are meant to inspire hope and healing.
Visitors arriving at the pavilion’s main entrance from the parking lot will encounter Grygutis’ “Regeneration” first. Standing 20 feet tall, the sculpture consists of two, curved, elongated pieces — halves of a whole — standing on end. Their aluminum panels feature an intricate, lacy network of cutouts, through which daylight and other light sources can shine.
Grygutis, whose sculptures also grace public spaces in Santa
Clara and Palo Alto, said she envisioned a seed pod, bursting open to start a cycle of new growth and life. The nature theme is especially apparent after dark, when the green lights embedded within make the sculpture glow in hues reminiscent of leaves or blades of grass, radiating out into the night sky through the lacy panels.
“Hopefully, people find it beautiful and calming,” Grygutis says. “Hospitals more and more are commissioning art as a point of interest and to create a calming environment.”
On the other side of the pavilion, visitors will find O’Connell’s “Uplifting Together,” a 19-foottall installation mounted against the pavilion’s outdoor facade. Tucked away at the far end of the center’s meditation garden, it’s shielded from traffic noise — and both the garden and art can be seen by patients visiting the center’s first-floor radiation and oncology department.
Like Grygutis, O’Connell used aluminum to create forms that seem alive with movement and growth. He shaped the metal into a vinelike “twining branch,” he says, with tendrils and softly colored orbs that rise across the wall and reach up towards sun and sky. LED lights follow the course of the tendrils and are programmed to switch on when the sun goes down, creating a gentle nighttime glow that rises
up out of the garden.
O’Connell saw the “twining branch” as connected to life “in all its various forms.” It might remind some people of the human circulatory or nervous systems, he says, but you see those forms in nature as well.
O’Connell says his love of tinkering and illumination comes from growing up in New Jersey — his father was a math teacher, his mother an artist — near the West Caldwell laboratory of Thomas Edison, who helped invent and commercialize the incandescent light bulb. O’Connell says his grandfather and Edison were friends.
When O’Connell was commissioned to create the sculpture for John Muir hospital, he said his work was informed by his father and his health problems, with his father going “from one hospital to another” and spending time in a recovery facility before he could return home.
“It gave me a chance to think about what type of art people need in hospitals,” he says, especially when “they are spending long periods of time in one place or returning again and again.”
The experience also made him appreciate the unique challenges and rewards of creating art for a healthcare setting, knowing that people will come to his work with the widest range of emotions and reasons they might be there.
Above: Joe O’Connell’s illuminated Uplifting Together graces a wall in the meditation garden at the John Muir cancer center.
Right: Barbara Grygutis’ Regeneration installation greets patients and staff in Walnut Creek.
JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF
FLAME GUARDIANS of the
BY JOHN METCALFE
Ever since she can remember, Desiree Heveroh wanted to be a lighthouse keeper on the East Brother Light Station, a three quarter-acre speck of an island in the San Francisco Bay. After applying three times, the Richmond resident finally got her wish in 2020, when Covid shut down the island’s public bed-and-breakfast, and she was called in for maintenance and warding off marine squatters.
Heveroh took a boat out to meet her fellow keeper, a sea captain, and settled into a small Victorian abode with unbeatable 360-degree views. That’s when the power went out.
“The submarine cable failed, and we were literally stranded on the island. There was a boat on a hoist,
Ever vigilant lighthouse keepers led isolated lives of duty
but that only works when you have power,” she recalls. The sea captain eventually had to leave for work elsewhere. “He strapped his dog to his chest, pushed a kayak off the island and paddled himself to the mainland. And then it was just me.”
For the next two months, Heveroh lived her own version of Tom Hanks’ “Cast Away” — although replace Wilson the Volleyball with a helpful raven she named Edgar Allen. She couldn’t shower more than once a week, due to no water pressure, and she canned her own food because freezers weren’t operational. It was rough living like it was the 1800s, but she made the best of it.
“I grew a garden. I trained a raven. I had a baby duckling. I learned a language. All the things you say you’re going to do, I did,” Heveroh says. “I didn’t look at clocks or calendars,
and it was as glorious as it sounds.”
It takes many — sometimes odd — factors to become a lighthouse keeper. First, you need a lighthouse. In the Bay there are plenty. The surge of marine traffic following the 1850s Gold Rush saw them built everywhere, from deadly open-ocean waters to rocky coastal cliffs and inside the sheltered Bay, where several lighthouses continue to aid navigators.
East Brother Light Station was built in 1874, after crews blasted the top off an island north of what’s now the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. It was the home of many lighthouse keepers and their families, who averted ship collisions and groundings with a foghorn and a beaming, beehive-shaped Fresnel lens. The U.S. Coast Guard automated the station in 1969, and in 1980 — thanks to heroic efforts from pres-
Above: Built in the 1870s on an island in San Francisco Bay, the historic East Brother Light Station is now a bed-and-breakfast inn.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TOM BUTT
Opposite: Northern California’s St. George Reef Lighthouse sits six miles off the coast near Crescent City.
RICH PEDRONCELLI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
ervationists — it reopened as a charming inn where anybody can stay for a one-of-a-kind vacation. (You just can’t shower, if you’re only staying a night.)
The inn has five rooms with old-timey beds, nautical art and a grand dining table where guests eat gourmet meals cooked by the innkeepers, who generally serve in pairs for two-year shifts. Guests swap world-traveling tales in the parlor before bedtime, and the next morning, ring the station’s 1930s diaphone foghorn, which shakes the entire island with a sound between a roar and a surprised grunt. Then they return to the mainland, leaving behind what are jokingly referred to as the island’s “cellmates” — the lightkeepers.
Hundreds of keepers have served at dozens of Northern California lighthouses, all built for a variety of reasons but mainly because something awful happened there. Mile Rocks Lighthouse, southwest of the Golden Gate Bridge, was erected in 1906 after a passenger steamship, the City of Rio de Janeiro, struck a submerged reef. Roughly 130 people drowned, and bodies (including that of the captain, identified by a watch chain around his rib cage) washed up near Fort Point for years.
Point Bonita Lighthouse in the Marin Headlands went up in 1855 on a small promontory that’s claimed at least 10 wrecks — that’s among more than 300 vessels that wrecked or ran aground near the Golden Gate during the Gold Rush — including the S.S. Tennessee, whose skeletal remnants can still be seen at low tide. Pigeon Point
Lighthouse near Pescadero owes its name to the clipper Carrier Pigeon, which tore apart on the ocean’s rocky bottom in 1853. The ship that came out to save her also ran aground.
In 1898, San Francisco became the first city in America to deploy a lightship, a vessel that stayed anchored in place outside the Golden Gate and acted as a floating lighthouse. Lightships were used in California into the 1970s, sometimes with “submarine bells” dangling 30 feet below, ringing constantly and annoying
Built in 1855, the Point Bonita Lighthouse was the third lighthouse constructed on the West Coast.
JANE TYSKA/ STAFF ARCHIVES
the fish, on the theory that distant ships could sense and navigate from the sound. Lightships were constantly getting rammed by other boats, though, and the U.S. Coast Guard eventually replaced them with humongous automated buoys.
East Brother wasn’t built so much to warn of dangers in the water, but for navigation for local shipyards and up and down the Sacramento River.
“Back then, they didn’t have radios, radars, any of that stuff,” says Tom Butt, the former mayor
of Richmond who helped restore the light station into an inn.
“When ships were moving at night, the only thing they had to go by was lighthouses. They could identify each lighthouse because the rotation of the lights were all distinctive and could plot their course by going from lighthouse to lighthouse.”
Early lightkeepers were known as “wickies” due to all the work they did on the lard oil-powered (later kerosene) lamps. They refilled the oil canisters, trimmed the wicks
to keep smoke from darkening the lenses and wiped sea scum from the lighthouse windows. They painted and repainted everything, cleaned mountains of guano from the buildings and kicked dead fish that washed up back into the ocean.
At some lighthouses in deeper seas, the keepers tied ropes around themselves to keep from being swept into the abyss. (Up in Humboldt County, there has been evidence of a 150-foot-tall rogue wave striking a lighthouse.) In the open Pacific, there
are no such protections — one man trying to reach his lighthouse by boat was battered so badly by waves, he simply died a few days later.
And keepers dealt with a constant ringing in the ears, thanks to the foghorns. Dennis Powers writes in his 2007 book, “Sentinel of the Seas,” which chronicles life on the St. George Reef Light near the California/ Oregon border:
“As these horns blasted, keepers over time could permanently lose part or most of their hearing ... Wickies changed their way of talking when the horn sounded and would only talk during the intervals of silence. After the foghorn stopped, the keepers and their families often found themselves still talking in that same strange staccato language.”
Given the isolation, lightkeepers could grow into the
The lighthouse at Pescadero’s Pigeon Point Light Station, a state historic park, was named for a clipper ship, the Carrier Pigeon.
JANE TYSKA/STAFF ARCHIVES
best of buds or become mortal enemies. One keeper in Oregon tried to murder his “cellmate” by putting ground glass in his food. Another pair arguing over a wife got into a physical fight, the fatal lesson being never take a hammer to a knife fight. Food was a source of friction. In Alaska, three keepers fell out over whether they liked potatoes mashed or fried, and for the next six months, never spoke a word to each other.
In 1937, the keepers of the St. George Reef Light were trapped by a large storm for nearly two months with no new food, no mail and dwindling supplies of coffee and tobacco.
“The four men under (keeper Georges) Roux stopped speaking to one another for one month, and to say ‘good morning’ became a personal affront,” writes Powers. “The irritating tone of men’s voices added to
the screeching winds, moaning diaphone foghorns and the tower’s shuddering. Individuals ate facing away from one another, avoided the table all together or ate by themselves. Fist fights broke out, and men threatened one another; it was a miracle that no one was murdered or severely injured.”
Times of tragedy may have provided moments of bonding. A lighthouse, it turns out, is an excellent perch to watch natural disasters unfold. The crew of St. George witnessed a tsunami in 1964 strike Crescent City at midnight, killing 11 and destroying 30 city blocks. In 1906, the keepers of East Brother watched San Francisco burn after the Great Earthquake, no doubt wondering about friends and innocent others.
Many of the first keepers at East Brother hailed from European countries, including Denmark, Ireland and England. They had to read, write and be up for an immense amount of scut work. Keepers hauled coal deliveries, sometimes 40 tons at a time, up from the wharf to power the boilers. They were in charge of the foghorns, but because those take time to charge, they first rang a bell — once every 15 seconds for 45 minutes. (Nearby at Point Knox on Angel Island, one female keeper received a special commendation for banging a bell in heavy fog for an incredible 20 hours and 30 minutes. She eventually retired due to “broken health” from long and solitary fog watches.)
All that might be enough to drive a body to drinking, and there is indeed evidence
it happened. “January 2 1883: Wind S., light, hazy. (Assistant keeper) Mr. Page took the mail over to San Quentin, returned drunk,” one East Brother superintendent noted in his log. “January 11 1883: Wind N.E., cold, light, foggy. Mr. Page went for the mail, returned at 2:30 p.m. drunk, mail wet.”
There was no doctor on the island, which made pregnancies difficult. When his wife went into labor, John Stenmark, a turn-of-thecentury keeper who stayed there 20 years, rowed 2.5 miles to fetch the closest medic at Point San Quentin. When she had a second child, he did the same thing again — regardless of potentially perilous storm conditions.
All the potable water on the island comes from rain that gets funneled into an immense cistern and a redwood tank. Back in the day, there were concerns about lead-paint contamination — authorities told keepers to mix in powdered chalk and forget about it.
“Seagulls were always a problem,” one former resident recalled in Frank Perry’s 1984 book, “East Brother: History of an Island Light Station.” “All summer, they would fly over, eat, scream and defecate ... It was rain water, and if you found a crawly thing in your glass, you just didn’t drink all the way to the bottom.”
“There was a frog in the cistern, should have brought him out,” that same person noted. “He was an albino, snow white frog in the cistern
The spark plug-style Mile Rocks lighthouse rises from a windswept rock about a mile from the Golden Gate Bridge, with views that include the Farallon Islands in the distance.
GETTY IMAGES/ ISTOCKPHOTO
with no eyes. He lived there for at least five years, used to keep tabs on him. Not Calaveras caliber but a good-sized frog.”
It wasn’t all grim stuff like the loneliest frog ever. Keepers entertained company from the mainland with music and dancing. There was excellent fishing for delectable rock cod and striped bass, and to stave off boredom, a traveling library sometimes docked with novels and history books. Children enjoyed playing in the boiler room, which was warmer than the rest of the island and had fun Steampunk emanations and oil smells.
The Coast Guard automated the station in the late ’60s, the death knell for the last of the old-style keepers. Community members didn’t want to let it sink into disuse, so in 1979, they formed the nonprofit East Brother Light Station Inc. and did a complete retrofit of the Victorian property. They reconstructed paint schemes with chemical analysis, rebuilt the white-picket fence and stripped asbestos shingles to reveal original redwood siding.
Lighthouses becoming guesthouses isn’t a rare thing. There are at least 14 states that offer the chance to stay in lighthouses. In California, that includes Pigeon Point Lighthouse, Point Cabrillo Lighthouse, the restored 112-year-old Carquinez Strait Lighthouse in Vallejo and Point Arena Lighthouse, with its pet-friendly rooms with queen beds and fully stocked kitchens.
Today’s keepers have a different skill set. They know how to give tours, make beds and cook classy dishes like kataifi-wrapped goat cheese with organic mixed greens and vineyard chicken with truffle-mashed potatoes. Since East Brother reopened as a bed-and-breakfast, there have been approximately 20 pairs of keepers — serving more than 50,000 overnight guests — with backgrounds as diverse as retired Navy SEAL, wooden-boat builder, journalist, scientist, commercial fisherman and flight attendant. To recruit innkeepers, the nonprofit typically posts a listing on job boards like Craigslist that reads: “Keepers must have culinary experience or abilities, must be warm and presentable to the public, and must be enthusiastic and self-motivated. Children are incompatible with this job, as are pets.” It cites these benefits: “Incomparable views; meet a lot of interesting people; one of California’s bestknown bed and breakfast inns; hard work but pretty good pay for a young couple (or couple of any age) doing something unique; birds, marine mammals, fresh air, boats; and history.”
Desiree Heveroh’s journey to becoming a keeper began with a fascination with the remote East Brother. “From the first time I saw that island, I just felt an indescribable pull, like a magnet,” she says. “I kind of have always known I was going to live there.”
Heveroh’s stories from her year-plus there might sound a little ... spooky. “It was foggy a lot, and everything had a slight dampness to it in the morning. Everything had little green algae growing on it, unless you wiped it off.”
For a place so steeped in history, you might expect
ghosts. Heveroh didn’t have any encounters with spectral sea captains walking out of the mirror and demanding to know the current price of whale oil, but she did have a dizzy moment making up a shared closet. “I heard ‘This was my closet’ in my head when I was standing in there. So I feel maybe I was reincarnated from one of the keepers’ kids or something.”
The nature-watching on the island is fantastic. “When seal mothers were giving birth to pups, they’d do it on my island,” she says. “Osprey and ducklings and other birds — I learned all of them and their sounds. I saw a juvenile humpback whale moving across the Bay, blowing out of its blowhole.”
One day, she heard a noise and found an inquisitive raven. She trained it to come close using peanuts. He eventually brought over a bride she named Brandy Alexander. When the power went out for two months, and she could see her frigid breath in her cabin, the ravens started leaving her piles of twigs for the fireplace. “They weren’t from my island, but they’d fly them over from somewhere.”
Heveroh was worried Covid would shut the light station down permanently. But restrictions started easing in late 2021, and she left the island content things would be copacetic.
“I’m not sad I’m not living there anymore. When you really love a thing, you want what’s best for it,” Heveroh says. “She is meant to be marveled at, meant for people to be out there and pouring their love into her energy field — getting engaged, falling in love, conceiving children. She needs and deserves all that, and I’m so happy she has it again.”
Desiree Heveroh was a keeper on the East Brother Light Station in the San Francisco Bay from 2020 to 2021.
DESIREE HEVEROH
BY KATE BRADSHAW
Hidden in plain sight along the Peninsula’s popular “Stanford Dish” hiking trail is a geometrically funky tower, where scientists have been quietly collecting solar measurements for nearly 50 years.
Built in 1975, the Wilcox Solar Observatory was part of a Navy project to study the sun’s magnetic field. The sun’s corona spews out a constant stream of charged particles, a solar wind that reaches speeds of up to a million miles an hour as it spreads those particles across our solar system.
Why was the Navy interested in something so solar-related? When the direction of the magnetic field within that solar wind changes, it can reduce the Navy’s ability to communicate with submarines, says Stanford physics professor J. Todd Hoeksema, who leads the university’s Solar Observatories Group, which includes the Wilcox observatory.
For the last four decades, the solar observatory has collected low-resolution maps of the sun’s magnetic field each day, weather permitting. Rain and cloud cover can make those efforts challenging, of course. But on sunny days, a resident scientist — typically, a Stanford physics graduate student — collects solar data, taking measurements for 15 to 20 minutes at a time, three or four times a day to map the field.
It’s a gig that comes with onsite lab housing, a quiet retreat from bustling campus life that’s considered a perk, although Hoeksema recalls being startled by a tarantula on his first night there as a grad student long ago. Around 30 students have lived at the observatory over the years. (Or rather, 31 — one scien-
There’s a hidden white tower in the Palo Alto hills used to study the sun
Sadaf Kadir peers out of the Wilcox Solar Observatory in the hills west of Stanford University. KARL MONDON/STAFF ARCHIVES
tist had a baby during her residency.) Many of those scientists, Hoeksema says, have gone on to careers as solar astrophysicists.
At the moment, physics grad student and resident scientist Sadaf Kadir lives at the observatory with her cat. Several times a day, Kadir climbs the tower to set up instruments, so the sun’s rays hit the lab’s mirrors at the right angle to create a spectrograph capturing details about the solar magnetic field.
The results of her measurements are then reported out at http://wso.stanford.edu, where helioscientists can pore over the data. Laymen can, too, although it makes for a pretty abstruse read.
The non-solar astrophysicists among us can click through to the Stanford Solar Center, a nonscientist-friendly education link that includes everything from vital solar statistics and physics explainers to instructions for baking scientifically accurate planet cakes, mantle, core and all. There’s a recipe for solar cupcakes, too, that includes an advisory that despite the sunny yellow crayons we wielded as kids, the sun is actually white.
“Choose your (frosting) color accordingly,” the recipe says.
From the ground, the Wilcox Solar Observatory tower looks rather like the love child of a pyramid and an observatory. It may not be as flashy or prominent as its famous hilltop neighbor, the Dish, but the solar lab has its own historic legacy. After nearly half a century of observations, the lab has collected a consistent body of data scientists use to track the sun’s 11-year solar cycle patterns, Hoeksema says, and to learn about space weather and solar wind.
In recent years, heliophysicists have put devices into space
“People assume they know a lot about the sun. But there are a lot of open questions.”
Resident scientist Sadaf Kadir
to collect more sophisticated measurements, but the Wilcox observatory provides consistency, a long-term solar record that uses the same method as it did half a century ago. Plus, Hoeksema says, it’s more sensitive to weak magnetic fields than other observatories.
Why is all this — this observatory and these measurements — important?
“People assume they know a lot about the sun,” Kadir says. “But there are a lot of open questions.”
Solar activity shapes what’s known as space weather, and that, in turn, can impact communications and GPS systems — technology used by our smartphones and our cars, not just Navy submarines.
And for observers of night sky phenomena, space weather explains why the aurora borealis was visible in the Bay Area and beyond in May, sending otherworld waves of fuchsia and pale green light across the sky in some places. There was a major geomagnetic storm on the sun.
San Jose built a tall tower of light before Paris erected the Eiffel
BY LINDA ZAVORAL AND SAL PIZARRO
It was a brilliant idea, literally and figuratively. Awestruck residents admired it. Scientists praised it. Newspapers and magazines glorified it.
The tower would come to symbolize the city.
Paris and the Eiffel?
No, this was San Jose and its Electric Light Tower, a scientific marvel built several years earlier that put the Bay Area city on the international map, proving that innovation in this part of the world didn’t start with Silicon Valley’s chipmakers.
The 237-foot-tall landmark constructed in 1881 was the brainchild of San Jose Mercury publisher J.J. Owen, who was inspired by San Francisco’s municipal lighting. His project,
however, would be a “moonlight tower,” one structure that would illuminate all of downtown.
And it did — for 34 years.
According to a Sacramento Daily Union article, Owen estimated it would take three such towers to light the whole of San Jose, then just a fraction of its current 180 square miles. “Mr. Owen deserves great credit for the sagacity and energy he has displayed in this undertaking, and San Jose ought to be proud of him,” the paper said.
Not all were as impressed. Farmers from as far away as Los Gatos and Morgan Hill claimed the light emanating from Market and Santa Clara streets kept their chickens awake at night, adversely affecting the egg output.
In 1915, a storm toppled the structure, just as a civic effort to restore the by-then dilapidated tower was getting underway.
But the achievement still stands tall, thanks to History San Jose, the keeper of the city’s cultural heritage and history. A half-size replica of the tower, donated by the San Jose Real Estate Board, was erected in 1977 at History Park. Visitors can see the symbolic icon illuminated during special nighttime events and this upcoming holiday season.
In the century-plus since its collapse, history buffs have wondered whether San Jose’s monument to progress could have been the inspiration for Paris’ famous tower, which was built eight years later, in 1889.
Filmmaker Thomas Wohlmut
Above: San Jose’s 237-foot Electric Light Tower was built in 1881. It collapsed in 1915 during a windstorm.
COURTESY OF THE SARATOGA HISTORICAL FOUNDATION
Left: A replica of the tower at San Jose’s History Park is illuminated each year during the winter holidays.
PATRICK TEHAN/ STAFF ARCHIVES
sought to explore that notion, researching for years and making fact-finding trips to France.
His 2019 documentary, “The Light Between Two Towers,” debunked the rumor of a Gustave Eiffel visit to San Jose, but the film makes a convincing case that the French engineers who designed the Paris landmark would have been very aware of the San Jose Light Tower.
At the time, the tower was celebrated as an engineering and electrical achievement in Scientific American as well as newspapers around the country and the world.
“From the engineers that I spoke with in Europe, they clearly say that engineers start with something someone else has made and try to make it better,” he said in a 2019 inter-
view. “So it’s entirely logical that they would start with our tower — not use it, not copy it — but begin the design process with something that works and was world famous.”
In recent years, civic leaders in San Jose seriously considered erecting another light tower downtown to give Silicon Valley a new landmark. But the group that formed to explore the idea, the San Jose Light Tower Corp., found that a light tower doesn’t carry as much cachet with potential investors and the public these days as a more modern statement piece.
So an artistic competition was held, with scores of designs in the running. The favored installation, “Breeze of Innovation,” will be filled with motion. Though development is stalled, the artwork, with 500 swaying rods, has one thing in common with San Jose’s famous tower: It’s designed to generate electricity.
Details: San Jose’s History Park, 635 Phelan Ave., will illuminate the light tower during this year’s holiday drivethrough, which runs from Nov. 21 to Jan. 1. Find ticket information on the holiday events at www.christmasinthepark.com. Learn more about History Park at https:// historysanjose.org.
The Little Tramp was here
Early film history still unspools in the Niles theater that gave Charlie Chaplin work
BY JOHN METCALFE
There is perhaps only one place in America that shows weekly silent movies on antique projectors using the original film prints, the light flickering across the screen as stories unfold. And that is the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in the Fremont community of Niles, a historic Hollywood-type enclave where Charlie Chaplin made his early movies.
The museum is located inside a 1913 movie theater that’s been restored to its original glory, give or take some exposed lath and plaster. On a recent afternoon, a tour guide leads a group up to a projection room overlooking rows of wooden seats and an upright piano that’s played during screenings.
He raps on the roof of the booth, which is paneled in tin, in case the celluloid accidentally ignited and caused a fireball.
“I like doing that — it lets me know the ceiling won’t fall in,” he says. “If you look on the wall, there’s some charcoal writing from the old manager that says ‘Spit In Box.’ A hundred years ago, you couldn’t smoke up here, but you could have chewing tobacco, and the manager didn’t want to scrape sticky brown spots off the floor.”
The museum has an archive containing roughly 14,000 old
film prints, some from the Em Gee Film Library in Los Angeles, others donated by the film preservationist David Shepard and more acquired through sometimes strange means. (Valuable footage of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition’s opening ceremonies, for example, was found underneath a house in Los Altos.) There is an equipment repair-and-restoration room, a film-research library, a darkroom and hulking projectors, like a 1912 Motiograph made by Chicago’s Enterprise Optical Manufacturing Co. “Those seats right there are
Above: Artifacts from the heyday of the silent film era are displayed at the Niles Essanay museum in Fremont.
Opposite: Actor Charlie Chaplin, seen here in 1922, made 14 films for Essanay.
SHAE HAMMOND/ STAFF; ASSOCIATED PRESS
original to the 1913 theater,” says the docent, indicating a row of four chairs holding a bowler hat and bamboo cane. “We put stuff on there, so people don’t sit on them.”
The museum’s name derives from the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, a Chicago-based operation run by Gilbert Anderson and George Spoor. Anderson’s obsession with Westerns led him to Niles, where its hot, dusty weather and brown hills recalled an Old West town. In 1912, the company began building studios, actors’ cottages and prop workshops
and went on to make more than 350 silent films there. (The Niles studio shut down in 1916 and was razed by the 1930s.)
Many of the movies chronicled the exploits of Broncho Billy, played by Anderson, who was said to be the first Western movie star. A lot of the films were shorts, such as 1915’s “Versus Sledge Hammers,” which has an IMDB summary that deserves mentioning: “The Count received word through a matrimonial agency that Sophie Clutts will inherit a million dollars and goes to her father’s hotel to win her hand. Mustang
Above: The silent film museum’s annual Charlie Chaplin Days inspire Keystone Cops-style hijinks and Charlie Chaplin look-alike contests.
LANE HARTWELL/STAFF ARCHIVES
Left: This Bell & Howell 2709 camera at the Niles Essanay museum in Fremont was used to film scenes for “Sesame Street,” as well as 1920s comedies.
SHAE HAMMOND/STAFF
Pete, however, is in love with Sophie, and when he discovers the Count is making love to her, proceeds to insult him. The Count challenges Mustang to a duel. Being a blacksmith, he chooses sledge hammers as weapons.”
In 1914, the studio lured an early-career Charlie Chaplin in with a then-unheard-of signing bonus of $10,000. Chaplin made 14 films for Essanay, five of them in Niles, including one of his most famous productions, “The Tramp.” Chaplin traveled with his own special crew of cameramen, actors and even a producer — but despite all this highfalutin’ staff, still managed to create moments that were rather Chaplinesque in their ridiculousness.
“They were on location in Oakland for their first film, ‘A Night Out,’ and a crowd had gathered around the Hotel Oakland while they were filming,” says Niles Essanay museum president David Kiehn. “A policeman saw the crowd on the street, and it looked like Charlie was kind of wrestling with (co-star) Ben Turpin during the scenes. This policeman was trying to disperse the crowd and arrest Chaplin — then saw the film camera, stopped in his tracks and let the filming continue from there.”
Chaplin eventually left to work for a different company in L.A., but his memory is honored every summer in the museum-sponsored Charlie Chaplin Day festival. “We bring in guests and Chaplin experts and have costumes we sell at our store,” says Kiehn. “The Chaplin lookalike contest — we have a guy from Canada — is very popular and draws crowds.”
Also in the museum’s vaults are snapshots from the earliest days of film, such as a Miles Brothers short called “A Trip Down Market Street” shot from a cable car four days before the Great 1906 Earthquake destroyed the city. Kiehn identified the film’s portentous date himself by studying license plates and contemporary weather reports, some nice detective work that landed him on “60 Minutes” with Morley Safer. (The short is now in the Library of Congress’ national registry of historically significant films.)
Other short footage includes a gravity car chugging on Mount
Museum president David Kiehn presides over the film artifacts, including this historic Bell & Howell 2709 camera, that comprise the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum collection.
SHAE HAMMOND/STAFF
SHAE HAMMOND/STAFF
Tamalpais, a 1905 Colma boxing match between Jimmy Britt and “Battling” Nelson and the aviator Lincoln Beachey racing an airplane around a horse track.
“Beachey was killed during the Panama–Pacific Exposition,” notes Kiehn, “when his plane plunged into the San Francisco Bay, and he drowned.”
Every weekend, the museum invites the public into its 100seat 1913 nickelodeon theater for a screening of one of its prized films, typically with live piano accompaniment. It might be an Essanay production or Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 serial-killer movie “The Lodger” or a 1916 cartoon of Krazy and Ignatz, sort of the Itchy and Scratchy of their day. It doesn’t seem to matter the pick — the crowds are always there and always enthusiastic.
“Our first question that we ask the audience is, ‘Who has come the farthest?’ In any given show, there might be people from other states or countries — people have come from Asia, South America, Canada and Europe,” says Kiehn.
“We’re showing films in a silent theater that were shown 100 or more years ago in a town that made silent films and where Charlie Chaplin made films — that’s a pretty unique situation.”
Details: The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is open from noon to 4 p.m. on weekends at 37417 Niles Blvd. in Fremont; free admission. Films ($8-$10) are screened on Saturday nights in the Edison Theater, with a Laurel and Hardy talkie matinee one Sunday each month. Find the schedule and more details at nilesfilmmuseum.org.
The museum’s archives contain thousands of old film prints with everything from Westerns to footage from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
THE NO-BURNOUT BULB
Livermore’s amazing little electric sphere shines on with nary a flicker
BY KYLE MARTIN
And lo, Livermore said, “Let there be light!”
This year marks 123 years of illumination from the Livermore Centennial Light Bulb, which has been a glimmering beacon for the city’s residents since the year 1901.
To put that in perspective, that light bulb is older than the teddy bear (invented in 1902), the Wright brothers’ first flight (1903), the invention of corn flakes (1906) and the first candy apple (1908). The bulb’s light has outlasted most summer flings, many college relationships and the number of A’s seasons at the Coliseum. And the Centennial Light Bulb has been highlighted over the years by the Guinness Book of World Records, which declared it the longest burning bulb on Earth, and the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters.
“It really is one of the wonders of the world,” says Livermore mayor John Marchand. “People have come from all over the world to see the lightbulb. I think the integrity of that lightbulb matches that of the people it serves. And it shows things can be built to last.”
Consider how long your lightbulbs last before you scoff over such high praise. This bulb is extraordinary. The city celebrated the mighty Centennial Bulb’s millionth hour of illumination in 2015 and has added another 78,849 hours to the total so far.
The bulb’s 60-watt, carbon-filamented birth can be traced back to the late 1890s, when Ohio’s former Shelby Electric Company sent it to Dennis Bernal, who owned the Livermore Power and Light Company at the time.
These days, you’ll find it at the Livermore Fire Department, which opened its first firehouse in 1876. Back then, Livermore was a travel stop on the road between San Francisco and Stockton with a population of 830. Retired deputy fire chief Tom Bramell — official Keeper of the Bulb — says Bernal donated the bulb to the fire department in 1901 to illuminate a hose cart house, where firefighters once hitched their horses to a trolley before riding out to battle fires.
At the time, firefighters used a kerosene lamp for illumination in the dead of night. Bernal hoped his electric bulb would add a glow — safely — so firefighters could see in the dark without risk of burning down their own cart house.
The light has beamed ever since, though not without some struggles.
“The lightbulb isn’t burning out, but the webcams are,” Bramell says.
Livermore residents lovingly refer to the lightbulb as “world famous.” They’re not wrong. Fans from Amsterdam, Australia, Asia and elsewhere log
on daily to watch the bulb’s live stream — although the live stream has failed a couple of times, as the bulb out-sparkled the camera battery.
The bulb took some hits back in the day, when firefighters bumped or tapped the dangling light as they raced from the station on service calls — a precarious good luck tradition the bulb has survived. It also survived its 1976 move from its first home — at the former Fire Station 1 on First and McLeod streets — to the current Fire Station 6 at
4550 East Ave. with a full police and fire truck escort.
In May of 2013, its beam was interrupted for about nine and a half hours when the backup power system, which was supposed to be fail-safe, failed. But the power source was switched, and the light glimmered again.
It’s the oldest light in the world, but it didn’t get that title without some competition. It outlived a 100-year-old light bulb in Fort Worth, Texas; a 91-year-old bulb in New York; a third competing bulb in New
People from around the world have come to see the Centennial Bulb and sign the visitors register at the Livermore fire station.
JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF ARCHIVES
York City; a fourth one in a Magnum, Oklahoma, firehouse; and another notable rival in Ipswich, United Kingdom, Bramell says.
But will it ever go out?
“Who knows how long it’ll last,” Bramell says. “It could be there another 100 years. It’s just amazing.”
Details: Visit the bulb from 10 to 11:30 a.m. and 3 to 5 p.m. daily, when the fire crew is on-site at Fire Station No. 6, 4550 East Ave. in Livermore. Find more information or watch the Bulb Cam at www.centennialbulb.org.
Oakland Zoo’s annual Glowfari sets some fantastic critters aglitter
STORY BY JASON MASTRODONATO
ILLUSTRATION BY PEP BOATELLA
When the sun sets on the Oakland Zoo this month, a new set of animals will come to life.
Filled with thousands of LED lights, these illuminated lantern creatures, some as large as 25 feet tall and 65 feet long, will set the imagination on fire. It’s all part of the Oakland Zoo’s Glowfari, and its fifth year promises to be even more extravagant and interactive than before.
“With Glowfari, we tapped into something that was never before seen in the Bay Area,” says zoo president Nik Dehejia. “To see the zoo at night in a very different way, it’s a magical experience.”
It takes a year to produce each year’s illuminated menagerie, from idea generation to arrival at the Port of Oakland. If you’ve strolled the winding paths of the zoo in the last few weeks, you may have already spotted creatures getting ready for their closeups — this year’s Glowfari opens Nov. 8.
The zoo staff dreams up several themes each year, matching them with different areas of the zoo — California coastline fauna, for example, Madagascar flora, deep sea creatures, North American forest animals, alligator-filled swamps and a set of dinosaurs that proved so popular, they’re back for an encore.
Those fantastical creatures come to life, so to speak, at a warehouse in China, where 100 artisans spend about 50 days turning dreams to reality. Painters sketch creatures to fit each theme and its link to the zoo’s conservation efforts.
The glowing lanterns are pretty, to be sure, but the zoo didn’t just
JANE TYSKA/STAFF ARCHIVES
Visitors arrive for the 2023 Glowfari lantern festival at the Oakland Zoo. The event, now in its fifth year, is filled with thousands of LED lights and illuminated lantern creatures, some as large as 25 feet tall and 65 feet long.
want animal-shaped lanterns. They wanted to connect with visitors in a more profound way.
“At one level, (Glowfari’s) just about coming at night, having fun with your friends and family, having hot chocolate, enjoying what you’re seeing at the zoo,” Dehejia says. “But for those who want to dive deeper, each area has a conservation connection.”
Back in China, metal workers weld immense 3D shapes, so electricians can wire in LED bulbs,before the frames are wrapped in a fabric skin. Then the artists return to add color and details that turn a simple shape into an alligator, a woolly mammoth or exotic bird that looks real enough to come alive, Jumanji-style.
“Thankfully, it’s a revenue share agreement with the company, so we’re not purchasing everything up front,” Dehejia says.
The enormous pieces of art are placed in shipping containers, 20 or 30 at a time, for the 50-day journey across the Pacific Ocean. Shipments begin arriving at the Port of Oakland in August. Once the shipments clear customs, a specialized production company takes the hand-off for the final countdown, installing power cables and prepping the lanterns for their debut. By October, gigantic octopi and fleets of penguins begin quietly appearing on the zoo grounds.
With more than 150,000 visitors each year, Glowfari has become a marquee event for the animal park, which uses the two-month festival to generate a healthy portion of the zoo’s $31 million operating budget and support its conservation efforts.
The zoo has rescued 30 mountain lions, as well as other
JANE TYSKA/STAFF ARCHIVES
Anne Cassia, left, captures the moment as Todd Tyler falls prey to a giant shark lantern at the Oakland Zoo’s annual Glowfari festival.
JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF
Top right: A dodo bird was one of the attractions at last year’s festival.
JANE TYSKA/STAFF ARCHIVES
Left: With more than 150,000 visitors each year, Glowfari has become a marquee event for the animal park, which uses the two-month festival to help support the zoo and its conservation efforts.
JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF ARCHIVES
Top left: Pandas cavort among the bamboo trees at the Oakland Zoo’s Glowfari.
ARCHIVES
creatures, thanks to Glowfari funds. It’s not just a priority for the zoo; it’s important to its visitors, too, Dehejia says.
“We’re doing the right thing in how we operate,” he says, “how we care for our animals, how we talk about habitats and climate. Our work around rescuing and caring for species is so important. We know the younger generation and people early in their careers want to come support a zoo that reflects their values and what they believe in.”
Glowfari isn’t the Oakland Zoo’s first foray into holiday events, of course. Its ZooLights delighted visitors for more than 20 years, but over time, the decorations had become outdated, and everything seemed to be Christmas-themed.
The zoo was looking for something fresh and new — “larger than life,” says zoo marketing manager Isabella Linares — when a staffer met Tianyu Art & Culture’s Jessie Li at an Association of Zoos and
Visitors explored a jellyfish tunnel in the California Coastline exhibit during last year’s Glowfari.
JANE TYSKA/STAFF ARCHIVES
Aquariums conference in 2020. The Chicago-based company had just started working with another zoo — and Oakland was game.
Since then, the concept has spread to dozens of zoos, including Seattle’s Woodland Park, the Los Angeles Zoo, Santa Barbara Zoo, Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo and beyond. “But Oakland,” Li says, “was one of the earliest.”
Glowfari’s Oakland debut in late 2020 was an instant success, selling out so swiftly, the zoo has since moved to a rolling ticket release. This year, tickets for the first four weeks dropped on Oct. 22, with an additional 2,500 tickets released at 9 a.m. daily for dates 28 days out.
This year’s Glowfari, which runs through Jan. 26, will include all sorts of new displays — everything from pollinators to high-elevation animals, South American wildlife, exotic birds and Nile Valley creatures. A section devoted to farm animals will include a 26-foot tall,
illuminated walk-through barn. And the dinosaurs are not only back — they’ll be more interactive than ever.
In fact, expect to see more interactive everything.
“Glowfari is one of our longest festivals, and it’s one of our most important festivals,” says Li. “This year, we added a lot more movements in each lantern area. Before, the lanterns lit up, and you’d walk through and take pictures. Based on our research, people like to see more movement and motion from the lanterns.”
In a nutshell, she says, visitors like surprises — lots of them. So look out for giant alpacas and llamas that might come to life, birds that talk and special effects everywhere.
“We changed lighting techniques to make the color more vivid,” Li says. “We added more interactive lanterns (so) visitors can have fun with them. You speak to a parakeet, and it speaks to you and repeats your words. There’s a drum — hit it and it triggers movements. There’s a stepping board (that) triggers lighting. There are swings and seesaws, lantern versions of ‘whack a mole,’ rooms with hanging lights and mirrors that make you feel like you’re in a different world.”
Interactive displays, such as this giant ant walk-through, are just part of the fun at Glowfari. The zoo’s annual holiday event features hundreds of illuminated larger-thanlife animal lanterns.
JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF ARCHIVES
The goal, Dehejia says, is to delight everyone, no matter their age.
“It’s not just for little kids. It’s for grown ups as well,” he says. “What I love about it is seeing people smiling and happy. We need more fun and joy in our world. That’s what the zoo has always been providing.”
The one thing you won’t find at Glowfari are live animals. The zoo’s residents will be safely secured in their night quarters.
“We’re particularly conscious of noise for some animals,” Dehejia says. “We’ve learned how to ensure we have the sound from our music at a certain decibel level, so it doesn’t affect animals. We work closely with our animal care teams, so where we shine lights, we ensure we’re doing it with great care to the needs of the animals.”
Details: Glowfari will run from 4:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. daily from Nov. 8 to Jan. 26 at the Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Road in Oakland. Santa will be on hand on Sundays in November and daily Dec. 1-23. Glowfari tickets range from $21 to $39, with a 10 percent discount for zoo members, children and seniors. Find more information at www. oaklandzoo.org.
BY ETHAN BARON
With two simple tricks of the light, the Bay Area’s hidden animal world comes alive at night.
Holding a flashlight at eye level lets people see the reflection bouncing back from different species’ eyes. The color of the gleam can help identify the creature. And an ultraviolet-light flashlight — easy to find online and at less than $15, relatively inexpensive — causes certain animals, notably the creature famous for its pincers and stingtipped tail, to glow in the dark.
“I always think of it like a great party trick for the Bay Area,” says California Academy of Sciences curator of arachnology Lauren Esposito. “There are scorpions everywhere, with the exception of San Francisco.”
When the beam of a UV flashlight hits a scorpion, the light particles bounce back in wavelengths that make the animal fluorescent. The perceived hue can vary a bit, depending on a scorpion’s color, but they’re usually greenish, “like glowin-the-dark stars you put on a ceiling,” Esposito says.
In daytime, the Bay Area’s reclusive scorpions tend to hide under logs, in rocky crevices, under tree bark or “anywhere they can find a nice refuge,” Esposito says. The eight-legged arachnids emerge to hunt at night, favoring skies with a crescent moon, an adaptation possibly linked to avoiding predators like skunks, raccoons and bats, Esposito says.
Scorpions eat “basically anything they can come across that they can overpower, which is pretty much just insects because of their size,” she says. They also prey on spiders and other scorpions.
Night time is the right time to spy animal eyes shining in the dark
Three scorpion species are prevalent in the region’s natural areas, Esposito says. The chestnut-hued western forest scorpion and the tan-colored common California scorpion both approach three inches long as adults, while the sawfinger scorpion tops out around an inch-and-a-half. On Mount Diablo, all three may be encountered.
“It’s kind of a really unique spot as a result of that,” Esposito says.
Forest scorpions prefer stands of oaks or redwoods, while the common scorpions often live in “forest-to-grass transition zones,” and the sawfinger generally inhabits grassy areas, woodlands with sparse tree cover or even grazed land, Esposito says.
Two other species, Graemeloweus glimmei and Graemeloweus iviei, are also sometimes spotted in the Bay Area.
Finding scorpions at night can be as easy as grabbing a UV flashlight in a wavelength of 385 to 405 nanometers, taking it out into virtually “anywhere where there’s nature and open space,” and pointing the light at plants at waist level and below, Esposito suggests.
“People are really excited to see a scorpion,” she says. (Those planning scorpion safaris should ensure the location is open after dark.)
Keep your hands to yourself, though. Bay Area scorpions may sting if provoked, producing a reaction like a mild bee sting, Esposito says. “They don’t jump. They’re not going to chase you.”
Non-UV light sources can reveal other animals. Positioning a flashlight or headlamp near eye level and scanning around will often turn up glowing dots in the darkness, as light reflects off certain animals’ eyes and straight back into ours.
That’s thanks to a mirrorlike structure at the back of many nocturnal creatures’ eyes called a tapetum lucidum that helps them see when light is low, says Oakland Zoo docent Tom Bennett. The color of “eyeshine” varies not only by species but by specific animal. Even within species, the reflective structures are never identical. What kind of animal is behind the eyes shining in the darkness cannot be confirmed by the color of their shine alone, but certain critters are associated with certain colors.
Raccoons’ eyes, for example, usually reflect bright yellow or amber, while opossums’ tend to reflect white or pale yellow, Bennett says. Coyotes’ eyes typically look greenish-gold, and bobcats’ are yellowish, similar to raccoons. Mountain lion eyes, Bennett says, tend to shine a bright greenish-yellow.
And the most fantastical of all are spiders’ eyes, which reflect in whitish-blue. When the creatures are plentiful, says arachnologist Esposito, their multitudinous eyeshine looks like “twinkling stars in the grass.”
A pair of Asian black forest scorpions glow under ultraviolet light in their enclosure at the Singapore Zoo.
WONG MAYE-E/ASSOCIATED PRESS
gleamings Season’s
The holidays set the Bay Area ablaze with dazzling light displays
BY MARTHA ROSS
among the elite class of Bay Area holiday lights enthusiasts, Joseph Leake goes the extra mile — literally — to transform his family’s property into a bright and brilliant spectacle every winter season.
Leake lives in San Francisco, where he often works long weeks and double shifts in the Sheriff’s Department’s DNA and forensics unit. But somehow, he will find time to commute to his 93-year-old father’s home in Redding, more than 200 miles north, to set up an elaborate, nature-themed Christmas display that includes a blue-lighted river coursing through the front yard, berry-filled trees, otters mining gold, hot air balloons and a gnome community center.
This year, Leake’s portfolio as a holiday lights enthusiast is growing as he takes over running the famous California Christmas Lights website. The site has become the go-to place for Bay Area people who want to enjoy a festive winter night outing by exploring extraordinary holiday lights displays in their neighborhoods or nearby communities.
Leake is taking over the volunteer job of curating California Christmas Lights from Alex Dourov, another famed enthusiast from Livermore, who created the first iteration of the site in 1999. Leake and Dourov knew each other from the California Christmas Lights Facebook
Woodside’s historic Filoli estate is adorned with miles of twinkling lights for the winter holidays.
SHAE HAMMOND/STAFF ARCHIVES
page. Dourov reached out to Leake with his plans to retire, in part because he and his wife like to spend time babysitting their young grandchildren.
Leake said Dourov told him, “If you don’t want to do it, then it’s closing down, and I went, ‘Oh my God,’ you can’t let California Christmas Lights close down. That’s just wrong.”
Dourov may have passed the California Christmas Lights torch, but he will still decorate his family’s home in his usual over-the-top fashion, as he’s been doing since the early 1990s.
Like Leake and other great home illuminators, Dourov started decorating his property with a few modest strands of lights. But his decorating ambitions grew ever more expansive and detailed each year, soon incorporating a light show accompanied by music.
The site grew out of his desire
to help people who love holiday lights find his home and others in the Tri-Valley area. Early on, Dourov’s site, of course, included a page for “Deacon” Dave Rezendes’ world-famous display at his Livermore home, Casa del Pomba.
Very quickly, the website expanded to include homes in other East Bay towns and over the Altamont Pass in San Joaquin County. Pretty soon, holiday decorators in the South and North bays and on the Peninsula signed on, too, and the website eventually grew to include more than 300 homes in some 130 towns throughout Northern California.
Now Leake is running the site, with the help of his tech-savvy sister, Barbara Jaquez. And sometime before Thanksgiving, he’ll find time to drive or fly from San Francisco to Redding to help his father, John, get his
display ready to turn on the day after Thanksgiving.
As great holiday lights enthusiasts often say, Leake and his father are motivated by the happiness they bring to the hundreds of people who stop by the house each year.
“The biggest funny thing about it is people come up and say, ‘Oh, it’s a tradition now with our family. We come here every year,’” Leake says. “Dad looks at me, he starts laughing and goes, ‘How much more of this can we
do?’ I said, “I’m game as long as you’re game.’”
In that spirit, here are more amazing light displays to visit in the Bay Area this holiday season. Some, like Dourov and Leake’s, are hosted by individual homeowners, while others are mounted by local parks, civic and business organizations and churches. For the displays listed, expect admission to be free, unless otherwise specified. Details of some displays were not available as of press time.
For many Livermore residents,
holiday display is part of their family traditions.
visiting Deacon Dave Rezendes’
DOUG DURAN/ STAFF ARCHIVES
Alexander Hourel Flores checks out the snow action at Alex Dourov’s Knottingham Circle extravaganza in Livermore.
RAY CHAVEZ/STAFF ARCHIVES
ALEX DOUROV’S EXTRAVAGANZA
Livermore
Dourov’s display offers a mix of old-school decorations that he has accumulated over the past 30 years and high-tech light and sound effects as well as a snow machine, penguins on skis, a star-topped “mega” Christmas tree and a new, light-up Santa’s workshop. Kids are invited to make calls to Santa, and guests can listen to music from the
sidewalk or on 107.9 FM from their car.
Details: Nightly from Nov. 29 through Dec. 29 at 467 Knottingham Circle in Livermore; http:// californiachristmaslights.com/.
TRAN FAMILY’S WINTER WONDERLAND
San Jose
A large glowing archway leads visitors into this magical display
created by Tony Tran, his wife, Stacey, and their two daughters. A 2023 finalist for ABC’s “The Great Christmas Light Fight,” the display has in the past featured 12 brightly lit Christmas trees, illuminated angels and a giant stack of Christmas presents, on top of which stands an 8-foot Santa Claus, who will sing songs and tell stories.
Details: Nightly, starting at 6 p.m., Dec. 1 through 24 at 578 Flagler St., San Jose.
DEACON DAVE’S WORLDFAMOUS DISPLAY
Livermore
You could consider Dave Rezendes, a deacon at Livermore’s St. Michael Church in Livermore, one of the O.Gs of Bay Area holiday lights enthusiasts. Like other great illuminators, he began the display at his
Pleasanton’s Bob and Susan Widmer created their Widmer World holiday light display, seen here in all its 2022 glory, with their daughters, Kristine and Kimberly, and son-in-law Craig Eicher.
JANE TYSKA/ STAFF ARCHIVES
home, Casa del Pomba, rather modestly with about 2,000 lights in the early 1980s. For his display last year — his 40th — more than 785,000 lights twinkled and glowed around his property. As in years past, expect opening night, which falls on Nov. 30 this year, to be a grand event, with excited crowds joining in a procession down Hillcrest Avenue.
Details: Nightly, starting at 6 p.m., Nov. 30 to Jan. 1, with an opening night procession at 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 30. 352 Hillcrest Ave. in Livermore; http:// casadelpomba.com.
HISTORIC LIGHTS IN WOODSIDE
Experience classic holiday elegance at Woodside’s centuryold Filoli estate. Inside the stately mansion, elaborately
decorated trees radiate celebration in the grand ballroom and other graciously appointed spaces. But especially enchanting about Filoli during the holidays are the miles of twinkling lights arrayed around the extensive garden, including a 210-foot-long light tunnel. On weekends in December, Santa will be available for selfies, and visitors can pause their tour to sip sparkling wine in the ballroom or enjoy a traditional tea, with finger sandwiches, scones and pastries, in the garden house.
Details: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, Nov. 16 through Jan. 12 at 86 Cañada Road, Woodside. Filoli will be closed on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Admission is $23-$43; https://filoli.org.
TEMPLE HILL
Oakland
The spectacular gardens of the Mormon Temple, visible from many parts of the Bay Area, make an ideal location to create a holiday display. Against the white
For nearly 60 years, residents of a north Fremont neighborhood have festooned their yards with holiday lights and larger-thanlife cartoon cutouts, using the spectacle to raise money for worthy causes.
granite of the temple, thousands of lights are arrayed around the garden, which features fountains and lush flora. There’s also a pool, surrounded by 42 towering palm trees and leading to a glowing manger scene. The lights also illuminate the five golden spires atop the temple.
Details: Nightly, starting at dusk through the month of December, at 4770 Lincoln Ave., Oakland; https://templehill.org/ christmas-lights-at-the-oakland-temple
CRIPPSMAS PLACE Fremont
For more than six decades, residents of the 70 homes in this north Fremont neighborhood have illuminated their front yards and raised larger-than-life plywood cutouts of favorite cartoon characters in a representation of community solidarity and goodwill. They’ve also used their displays to raise money for worthy causes.
Details: Nightly, 6-10 p.m., Dec. 7 to 28. Cripps Place and surrounding streets in Fremont; www.crippsmasplace.org.
During “Garden of d’Lights,” visitors can meander along the paths of the 3.5-acre Ruth Bancroft Garden, where its world-famous collection of gorgeous cactuses, other succulents and drought-tolerant plants are presented with fantastical and specially programmed lasers and thousands of LED lights.
Details: Selected evenings, Nov. 22 through Jan. 11. 1552 Bancroft Road, Walnut Creek. Admission, $16-$29, must be purchased ahead; https://www. ruthbancroftgarden.org/garden-of-dlights
The beloved San Jose tradition offers two ways to see lights and other festive displays. The popular walk-through takes place in the heart of downtown in Plaza de Cesar Chavez with a 65-foot illuminated tree and a forest of pines decorated by San José schools, community groups and businesses. A separate drivethrough light show takes place at San Jose’s History Park.
Details: The free walk-through opens Nov. 29 in Plaza de Cesar Chavez and is open from noon to 11 p.m. daily at 1 Paseo de San Antonio. The History Park drive-through runs from Nov. 21 to
LIGHTS IN THE CACTI IN WALNUT CREEK
CHRISTMAS IN THE PARK San Jose
ANDA CHU/ STAFF ARCHIVES
Jan 1, starting at 5 p.m. at 635 Phelan Ave. Tickets are $25 to $30 per car, and reservations are required; www. christmasinthepark.com
CHRISTMAS ON A HILL
Morgan Hill
Climb the hill at West Hills Community Church to walk through a dazzling light display with illuminated tunnels, decorated trees and hand-painted, life-sized displays. You can also sit and watch a synchronized musical light display or take in a view of Morgan Hill below while enjoying free popcorn and hot chocolate.
Details: 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Dec. 14-15 and Dec. 21-22. West Hills Community Church, 16695 DeWitt Ave., Morgan Hill; https://www.westhills.org
CHRISTMAS TREE LANE
Alameda
This cooperative effort, put on by more than 50 households, is in its 86th year. Local groups will perform, and kids can drop off letters to Santa in a specially designated mailbox that routes them to the North Pole. Santa also will stop by on certain nights to visit with kids.
Details: 5:30 to 10 p.m. nightly, Dec. 1 to 31, 3200 block of Thomson Avenue, between High Street and Fernside Boulevard, Alameda; www.facebook. com/christmastreelane.
WIDMER WORLD Pleasanton
Julie Perrucci, of Los Gatos, stops to capture the scene during the Garden of D’Lights at the Ruth Bancroft Garden and Nursery in Walnut Creek.
JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF ARCHIVES
For more than 30 years, the Widmer family of Pleasanton has presented a popular home display that includes a Big Tree of red and green lights, a giant “Peace on Earth” sign and a tunnel of decorated trees, displays of popular cartoon characters and elaborate arrangements of life-sized Santas, reindeer and snowpeople.
Details: Nightly Dec. 1 to Dec. 31, weather permitting, 3671 Chelsea Court, Pleasanton; http://widmer-world.com
OAKLAND ZOO’S GLOWFARI
The Oakland Zoo hosts one of the Bay Area’s most unusual holiday displays, with gorgeous, detailed, larger-than-life animal lanterns arrayed around the zoo’s 525 acres. Visitors can stroll around the zoo and meet magnificent, glowing elephants
and giraffes from Africa, pass through a tropical rainforest, time travel back to the age of the dinosaurs and visit with mountain lions, wolves, polar bears and other iconic North American wildlife.
Details: Open from 5 to 9 p.m. most nights from Nov. 8 through Jan. 26 at the Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Road in Oakland. Santa will be on hand on Sundays in November and daily Dec. 1-23. Glowfari tickets range from $21 to $39; www.oaklandzoo.org.
MERRY MERRY-GO-ROUND Berkeley
The famous Tilden Park carousel in Berkeley becomes even more of a magical place during the holidays, as it is festooned with bright, colorful lights and graced by visits from Santa and his elves and Olaf the Snowman.
Details: Pending, including information about specific days, times and ticket costs. Tilden Regional Park, at the intersection of Central Park Drive and Lake Anza Road, Berkeley. Find the latest information at https://tildenmerrygoround.org.
LIGHTS OF LIVERMORE
Taste some great Livermore wine and enjoy a one-hour trolley ride around Livermore to see the town’s biggest and brightest holiday displays. This includes a stop at Riesling Circle, where more than two dozen homes are elaborately decked out with lights. The trolley rides start at historic Concannon Vineyard, where you can taste a flight of wines before boarding the trolley. There also are trolley rides nightly for families, during which no alcohol is served.
Details: Nightly, Dec. 6 through Dec. 23. Details on how to purchase
tickets and costs are pending. 4590 Tesla Road, Livermore; https://www.livermorewinetrolley.com.
LOS GATOS’ FANTASY OF LIGHTS
The annual show at Vasona Lake County Park offers one of the Bay Area’s most popular drivethrough holiday displays, with a 1.5-mile route taking families through a fantasyland of lights, animated figures and a 90-foot twinkling tree, courtesy of the Santa Clara County Parks Department.
Details: In past years, the route started at 333 Blossom Hill Road in Los Gatos. Look for dates, times and tickets — which must be purchased ahead — at https://parks.sccgov.org/.
WILLOW GLEN San Jose
Year after year, residents in a five-block area of this central San Jose neighborhood decorate their homes in their own unique ways, but visitors can expect to find plenty of brightly lit archways, light poles, candy canes, giant snow people and multiple Santas and reindeer. You can go on your own, of course, but San Jose Brew Bike will be taking groups on one-hour tours of the neighborhood’s holiday lights in December via 15-passenger “bicycles.”
Details: Most homes in Willow Glen get their decorations up by the first weekend of December. Streets to visit include Glen Echo, Glen Eyrie, Glen Brook and Cherry avenues, as well as Camino Ramon, Camino Pablo and Camino Ricardo. San Jose Brew Bike tours run from 5:15 to 8:45 p.m. Dec. 3 to 23, with tours running from 5:15 p.m. to 8:45pm. Group tickets are $450 per 15-person group; https://sanjosebrewbike.com.
The glow keeps growing
The
sensational Sensorio
light display in Paso Robles adds new exhibits
BY LINDA ZAVORAL
The sun sets on the gently rolling hills as the audience members take their positions, strolling along the pathways or seated on the terrace.
The performance is about to begin.
As the light in the sky diminishes, the lights on the stage — a 15-acre meadow — come alive. One hundred thousand of them carpet the landscape, in shimmering colors that change as the evening progresses.
This is “Field of Light,” a solar-powered sensation from visionary Bruce Munro.
The renowned British artist has famously illuminated the vast Australian outback near Uluru. Placed a sea of shimmering CDs in an English village. And dreamt up eye-catching and inspiring art for the grounds of Saratoga’s Villa Montalvo — his first major installation on the West Coast.
For the past five years, his creations on California’s Central Coast have dazzled hundreds of thousands of visitors at what’s called Sensorio, a 386-acre canvas. The installations are located along Highway 46 in Paso Robles — or what Sensorio calls “the intersection of art, technology and nature.”
A better description might be the intersection of art, technology, nature — and wine, this being Paso wine country. And the gallery is growing, experience
score plays. “Gone Fishing” is a whimsical take on that contemplative pastime that features hundreds of lighted fishing rods. And with “Fireflies” — 10,000 floating, swaying points of light — Munro said he hopes to instill “a sense of wonder and surprise” in those who view the exhibit.
The newest artwork made its debut earlier this year. “Dimensions,” created by Serge Beaulieu and Yelena Filipchuk’s Los Angeles art consortium called HybyCozo, is an immersive, geometric exhibit that invites visitors to interact with the large metal sculptures through touch or shadow play. A 33-minute soundtrack by musician Allen Hulsey accompanies the installation.
by experience, to the delight of tourists, residents and the hospitality industry.
The majority of guests have traveled here to visit wineries and other sights during the day.
“Sensorio offers a great nightcap,” general manager Ryan Hopple says. “It’s awe-inspiring to meet people from around the world and around the U.S. and to walk around at night and hear all the different languages.”
Founders Ken and Bobbi Hunter are locals who saw Munro’s Uluru project years ago and were inspired to create “a play-
ground for the mind” that would take advantage of the Paso topography, Hopple said. They have plans to build a fine-dining restaurant onsite and later, hotels and a conference center.
Meantime, the collection here has grown by three more Munro exhibits and the site’s first non-Munro installation.
Munro’s “Light Towers” artwork gives new meaning to the term “site specific” — he fashioned this installation from 17,000 wine bottles. The glowing fibers within these towers change colors as the musical
Coming soon is a fifth Munro installation. He is currently at work on FOSO, which stands for Fiber Optic Symphony Orchestra, a synchronized concert of music and light. Visitors will be encouraged to walk through the exhibit, even view the scene from a viewing platform or “conductor’s box” overhead.
FOSO is tentatively expected to join the Sensorio landscape in February.
Details: Sensorio is open ThursdaySunday evenings. Tickets range from $30 for a “Dimensions” exhibit pass to $140 for an all-access Terrace Exhibit pass. Visitors are advised to book well in advance, though tickets are sometimes available at the gate. Sensorio is located at 4380 Highway 46 East, Paso Robles; https://sensoriopaso.com/.
Above: Fiber-optic lights glow inside artist Bruce Munro’s immersive Light Towers installation at Paso Robles’ Sensorio. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Right: “Dimensions” made its debut earlier this year. The immersive, geometric exhibit by the Los Angeles art consortium HybyCozo, invites visitors to interact with the large metal sculptures through touch or shadow play. A 33-minute soundtrack accompanies the installation. PHOTO COURTESY OF SENSORIO
NEON LIVES ON
The illuminating interplay of glass, noble gas and electricity takes form as both art and advertising all around the Bay
STORY BY JOHN METCALFE
BY KARL MONDON
Enter the nondescript Neon Works warehouse in North Oakland, and you’ll find yourself suddenly immersed in rainbow light. It’s as if a time-warping tornado from the 1950s Bay Area wrapped all the neon signs up and dumped them in one place — gleaming banners for Carl’s Pastry, Kane’s Coats and Furs and Kilpatrick’s Bakeries, which baked bread for the World War II effort.
The collector behind these glowing artifacts is Jim Rizzo, who runs the company with his wife, Kate, and two other artisans. Neon Works has fabricated and repaired neon signs for more than three decades. Over his career, Rizzo guesses he’s touched every neon sign in San Francisco at least once.
PHOTOS
Jim Rizzo stands proudly by some of the vintage signs he has restored at his Neon Works facility in Oakland.
“All these places were momand-pop businesses that raised their families off of that business, which is what I’m doing,” he says. “I just feel the hard work and love of having their names in neon, like, ‘Here’s my store; here’s my pride.’”
There was a time when the Bay was basked in the soft glow of this noble gas, an oasis of light in the nocturnal murk beaming atomic number 10 into space. It’s thought the very first neon sign in America was erected in San Francisco in 1923 for a car dealership on Van Ness Avenue. Market Street in the 1950s was a blazing anaconda of neon, bathing moviegoers at the Orpheum Theatre and shoppers at the Crystal Palace Market, and Chinatown enjoyed its own mysterious hodgepodge of cocktail and chop-suey signs.
That special glow is now greatly diminished, thanks to government policies that dismantled neon signs and the invasion of cheaper alternatives like LEDs. (Don’t get a neon worker started on LEDs.) But if you know where to look — in the niches of industry, preservation and high art — you’ll find the Bay Area’s neon culture bravely flickering on today.
There used to be tons of neon-fabrication shops around the Bay, with a Yellow Pages from the 1950s showing two full pages of company listings. Now, Rizzo’s operation is perhaps the only one of its size still in existence that’s 100 percent devoted to neon. But the pandemic did a
number on the economy, which affects signs, too.
“If businesses aren’t opening, they’re not buying signs, and even the ones that are opening aren’t spending as much money as they used to,” he says. “I think the love of neon is still there, but because budgets are tight, people are going to LED fake neon. Have you seen that stuff? It’s trying to look like neon, but it’s plastic with little diodes embedded in it. ... Nobody makes it in America.”
Neon Works handles about 100 jobs a year for restaurants, bars and hotels that want the comforting, nostalgic glow of neon. Recent customers include the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, which restored its iconic blade sign and marquee, John’s Grill off Market Street and the
Glass tubes are neatly stored, above, while a glass bender’s fire glows, below, at Neon Works studio in Oakland.
Freight & Salvage music hall in Berkeley.
Rizzo handles the installations, which means he often finds himself hanging 16 stories up in a bosun chair tinkering with hotel signs. He can handle the dizzying elevation: “I love heights.” What he can’t stand are the pigeons.
“I will kill a pigeon in a heartbeat, I hate them,” he jokes. “The Avenue Theatre sign (in San Francisco) was so dilapidated and filled with pigeons that every day we pulled up to it, we were just like, ‘Uhhhhhgh.’”
The tube bender at Neon Works is Adam Taylor, who moved out to the Bay specifically to work with neon after getting his bachelor’s of fine arts on the East Coast. “Tube bending” is the term for heating and shaping neon tubes with almost medieval-like flame torches — the trade is full of such wonderful terms, including “slumping” (when a tube sinks down from gravity), “blockout paint” (black pigment used to create the illusion of letter breaks) and “bombarding” (electrifying a tube to clean out impurities).
The trade also has its own unique challenges. “Funny story: My first day here, I lit myself on fire,” says Taylor, who’s had to seek medical attention at least twice for bending-related injuries. “One was a bad slice on the forearm — I still have a scar — and the other was a bad cut on my thumb, which I got glued up at urgent care. Burns and cuts are normal — comes
Top: Adam Taylor, a glass bender at Neon Works, creates a new sign in the Oakland studio.
Bottom: A higher vantage point helps Meryl Pataky check her work at the She Bends studio she runs with Kelsey Issel in the old Hamm’s Brewery building in San Francisco.
Glass bender
Adam Taylor turns up the heat at Oakland’s Neon Works.
with the job.”
Taylor guesses there are fewer than a dozen people in the Bay doing commercial tube bending. It’s a highly specialized job — and one he loves despite the pain.
“I think it’s very rewarding to work with your hands every day and actually have something physical in front of you,” he says. “And in a roundabout way, it gives back to the city and environments by giving certain neighborhoods feelings or a vibe. Just driving around randomly through San Francisco or Oakland, I can be like, ‘Oh, I did that! I did that!’”
Two people dedicated to preserving those vibes are Al Barna and Randall Ann Homan, whose nonprofit San Francisco Neon is devoted to advocating for the artistic legacy of neon. They have helped the
city’s government draft best practices when it comes to preserving historically significant signs and have saved many from decrepitude or the junkyard, including Portola’s Avenue Theater, the Abigail Hotel in the Tenderloin and Li Po Cocktail Lounge in Chinatown.
“Neon got a really bad reputation during the (post-war) flight from the downtowns, which left all those signs in disrepair and associated with blight,” says Homan. “One of the biggest reasons in removing them was Lady Bird Johnson, whose scrap-old-signs campaign (aka the 1965 Highway Beautification Act) actually paid people to take down neon signs. It was an effort to modernize America’s main streets and was so prevalent and successful, it’s a miracle we have any neon signs left in our cities.”
When Homan and Barna assist in restoring a sign, they and the
sign’s owner typically hold a “lighting ceremony” at the end, flipping the switch as gathered crowds cheer — such is the compulsion of neon.
“Different signs in different neighborhoods work like sponges, they soak up local history and become landmarks, even after the theaters and shops disappear,” explains Homan.
“And the fact it’s glass, gas and electricity all in one finished product and also that it’s all handmade — the technology hasn’t changed much in over 100
years,” adds Barna. “Electronics have become more sophisticated, but that doesn’t mean they’re better. The quality of the noble gasses is hard to match. There’s no other light source like it.”
Neon isn’t just a vehicle for advertisement or placemaking, though. A small but vibrant arts movement has sprung up around the medium, which in the Bay Area is arguably led by She Bends, a creative project run by Meryl Pataky and Kelsey Issel. She Bends puts on shows — check out its curated exhib-
Kelsey Issel’s She Bends studio has curated a “Neon as Soulcraft” exhibit at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design.
it “Neon as Soulcraft” at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design, through Nov. 24 — and pushes for more exposure for female and underrepresented artists in the male-dominated field of neon.
“Neon is not seen so much as a fine art form. That’s one of things She Bends tries to shift perspective on — we’re showing audiences it can be more than just a sign,” says Pataky, who does things like balance stone blocks atop deceptively strong neon tubes and weave
an immense hanging quilt from shattered scrap glass.
What attracts Pataky to neon? It’s certainly not the collectors, a relative rarity in the Bay Area.
“It’s a technology, a craft and an art form, and a relatively new one compared to most,” she says. “The science behind getting it to light up looks very complicated, but in fact is simple — it’s ionized glasses inside a low-pressure evacuated tube. So it’s essentially the same thing we see in the cosmos, in nebulae, and that is very primordial. You can literally create light, which feels like a magical thing to do.”
Pataky can count on one hand the number of neon artists operating around the Bay. That might change in the near future, though, as there appears to be a growing curiosity.
“I think the interest is going away from people sitting at a computer all the time toward wanting to do things with their hands — nurturing those crafts that went away and are now making a resurgence, like making handmade jeans and manufacturing parts for machinery,” says Shawna Peterson, a neon artist and sign maker in the Sierra foothills. (She recently redid the sign at Albany’s beloved dive bar, the Hotsy Totsy Club.)
Peterson is part of a nationwide group trying to create a nonprofit that will offer course training for new artisans, so they can go from dipping a toe into neon to becoming fullblown wizards of glowing glass.
“One of the things that concerns me is neon has a high learning curve, so there are people who get into it but then lose faith and get frustrated,” she says. “I’m just hoping they stay dedicated and continue so there are more generations that pick up the torch. Literally.”
Imaginarium light show inspired by Chinese lantern festivals, creates eye-popping magic
BY JIM HARRINGTON
On a recent fall evening, Lulu Huang stands before a sea of glowing roses, tens of thousands radiating multiple colors. Nearby are dragons, fairies and other fantastical characters demanding attention as part of a nearly unfathomable tapestry of LED lights.
“A lot of people take pictures here. It’s like a selfie wonderland,” the San Jose resident says.
Some 5 million lights were used to create the latest Bay Area installation of Imaginarium 360, a Chinese lantern festival that set up shop in August for a two-month run at Pleasanton’s Stoneridge Shopping Center. It’s one of nine productions that Huang’s company — the Fremont-based International Culture Exchange Group — has on deck in California and Arizona in 2024. Imaginarium will return to Sacramento’s Cal Expo later this month for its annual winter holiday stand. And a dozen more venues will be set aglow in 2025 — including a springtime return to Milpitas’ Great Mall.
Huang beams as she passes the light displays in Pleasanton, pausing for a second here and there to take in the sounds of excited
Elena Harrington revels in a sea of glowing flowers during an Imaginarium installation at Pleasanton’s Stoneridge Mall this fall.
RAY CHAVEZ/STAFF
children. It reminds her of her own happy times as a child in China, where lantern festivals are a tradition.
Huang moved to San Jose in 1994, where she pursued a common Silicon Valley path. She ended up running a computer networking company, Global PC Direct, in Fremont. Yet, the memories of the Chinese lantern festivals stayed with her. She remembered how they inspired her and wanted to do something similar to inspire others. The goal, in part, was to create “something that doesn’t exist in real life.”
So she took a gamble and went to work creating her first Chinese lantern festival.
“I had no clue what I was doing,” she admits. “That (first) one was just out of my passion. I did not think I was doing it for my career.”
She also had concerns that people wouldn’t like what she came up with.
“What if I had bad taste?” she says with a teasing grin. “People would throw tomatoes at me.”
But, she decided, “You have to trust your vision.”
Right: Imaginarium took over mall space in Pleasanton this fall and will pop up again at Sacramento’s Cal Expo for the holidays and Milpitas’ Great Mall next spring.
JANE TYSKA/STAFF
Top right: The lantern festival’s displays draw visitors of all ages.
RAY CHAVEZ/STAFF
Top left: San Jose friends Davina Reed, left, and Dulce Ceballos explore an Imaginarium light installation in Pleasanton.
RAY CHAVEZ/STAFF
And what is her vision?
“I want to see the world through children’s eyes.”
That first festival in 2011 — dubbed Global Winter Wonderland — was a massive produc-
tion. Held in the parking lot at California’s Great America in Santa Clara, it was a big success, drawing rave reviews from attendees. Huang believes it was the first ever held in this country.
“Now, the Chinese lantern festival is very popular in the U.S.” she says.
As she began hosting lantern festivals throughout the year, she changed the name from Global Winter Wonderland to Imaginarium.
The glowing objects that inhabit Imaginarium’s many exhibits are created using steel wire frames. Lights are placed inside and then the whole thing is covered with colorful silk.
The creations are handmade at Imaginarium’s factory in China.
“They have a history of over a thousand years,” Huang says of the decision to have these creations built in China. “That’s why they are good at it.”
An Imaginarium event holds more than giant lanterns, though. Huang and her staff design fun attractions and interactive settings, too, including an elaborate lighted maze — although that’s not one that fans are likely to see Huang wandering through.
“I’m afraid of going inside, even though it’s my own production,” she says. “I am very bad at directions.”
As beautiful as it is now, Imaginarium is an ever-changing work in progress, with Huang tinkering with the formula and adding and refining attractions to create a playground where people of all ages can let their imaginations run wild.
“We try to build a place where people can forget about reality,” Huang says.
Details: Imaginarium360 will open at Sacramento’s Cal Expo at 1600 Exposition Blvd. this holiday season and Milpitas’ Great Mall, 447 Great Mall Drive, this spring. Ticket prices typically start at $19. Find schedules and more information at imaginarium360.com.
RAY CHAVEZ/STAFF
Top left: Founder Lulu Huang calls her Imaginarium displays “a selfie wonderland.”
JANE TYSKA/STAFF
Bottom left: Erin Aura and her grandson, Kaiden, 1, of Pleasanton, are dazzled by the lights at the Imaginarium festival this fall at Stoneridge Mall.
Strange magic
BY JASON MASTRODONATO
The Chutes and roller coasters are long gone from Playlandat-the-Beach, an extravagant seaside carnival held near San Francisco’s Ocean Beach from the 1920s until it closed in 1972.
Other artifacts are scattered across the city. The carousel, for example, still whirls — at Yerba Buena Gardens. But stroll behind the famous Cliff House, and you’ll spot the Camera Obscura — built for Playland visitors — still in its original location.
Based on ancient technology, this unique attraction is still available to those who pay their $3 cash-only admission — the price has gone unchanged for decades — and enjoy an unusual view of the beach, Seal Rocks, Sutro Heights and the vast area at Lands End.
Walk into this dim 20-by-20foot room, and you’ll be hard pressed to see anything at first. The room is mostly dark, aside from rays of light projecting down from a small skylight. There are holographic images and historic photographs on the wall, but the main attraction is what that small window in the ceiling provides. Only narrow
Magnified images mesmerize visitors at San Francisco’s Camera Obscura
rays of light squeak through, providing inverted images with rotating views that can be quite stunning.
“These pinhole cameras work because of the ray nature of light,” says Dan Congreve, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford. “When you see an object, what you are seeing is light reflected or scattered off it. You need light to be traveling in a straight line and to reflect. You see light coming from different angles, and your eye can make it into an image.
“The way these pinhole cameras work, it forces faraway things to only allow certain rays of light in. It’s a cool project.”
The curated rays of light entering the Camera Obscura provide images of the outside scenery magnified seven times, inverted and projected on a disc below eye level. The colors seem more vivid because of the darkness of the room.
The Camera Obscura was a big attraction when it opened in 1946. Floyd Jennings, a San Francisco businessman, was enamored with the technology and had it built just next to the Cliff House, where it could tempt visitors after a meal.
Soon after it opened, the Camera Obscura was featured in Life Magazine with flashy photos of sea lions sunbathing on Seal Rock.
“These ideas of how to manipulate light rays go back hundreds of years, even thousands of years,” Cosgreve said. “The idea of light traveling in a straight line goes back to the ancient Greeks.”
Leonardo da Vinci is often credited with inventing the camera obscura concept, which was used by artists who traced perfect lines of projected images in the 1500s.
The Camera Obscura is
strange and wonderful, but the views and activities just outside are worth a visit themselves. Up the hill at the Lands End Lookout Visitors Center, manager Roberta Walker is always looking out the window, scanning for whales.
“I’ve seen more here in my life than anywhere else,” Walker said. “But I haven’t seen them this year. They’ve been over (by) the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Walker recommends starting your visit to Lands End with a trip to the visitors center, where she can point you in the direction of two main attractions: the ruins of the Sutro Baths, once the world’s largest saltwater swimming pool open to the public, and the Coastal Trail, a 3-mile out-and-back trail that offers spectacular views of the ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge.
On a sunny day, she says, be sure to pack a picnic and find a spot to enjoy the views from Sutro Heights — “and spectacular sunsets in the fall.”
You’ll have to wait a while longer for the reopening of the once-popular Cliff House restaurant, which has been closed since 2020. A local business was recently awarded a 20-year lease to revive the historic space as well as the cafe inside the visitors center, but the opening date has been pushed back to 2025. For now, though, you can pick up hot drinks and snacks at the center, then hit the trails and take a peek at the magnificent landscape outside — or get a different perspective inside the Camera Obscura.
Details: The Lands End visitor center is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The Camera Obscura is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, although weather conditions may close it without warning, so call — 415-750-0415 — before you go.
San Francisco’s Camera Obscura, which sits atop a rocky platform near Ocean Beach, opened in 1946.
ARIC CRABB/STAFF ARCHIVES
Bright idea for sleep and mood control: Manipulate your light exposure
STORY BY JASON MASTRODONATO
ILLUSTRATION BY JUI ISHIDA
Now that we’re nearly 20 years into the iPhone era, most of us have heard this basic tip for getting better sleep: Set your phone down well before going to bed.
The theory is that the blue light radiating off your phone will signal to your brain that it’s time to be active, not to shut down.
Over at the Stanford Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences, Jamie Zeitzer had a feeling something about that advice didn’t add up.
“There is a bit of misperception out there about how important screen light is,” says Zeitzer, who is best known for hacking jet lag with a 2016 sleep science study (more on that in a minute). His team found that the blue light emanating from your smartphone makes almost no difference in the quality or duration of sleep for most people. Something else does — in a major way.
But first, Zeitzer says, it’s important to understand the systems that let our brains receive light. One of those systems enables you to see objects. The other is a set of cells in the retina that project many different things that are around the
image but unrelated to it, including light. These cells aren’t asking how bright the light is, but rather, how bright it is compared to light we’ve been getting, Zeitzer says. And that lux measurement of the amount of light hitting a surface is all relative.
For a person who has been outside much of the day, taking in sunlight between 10,000 lux on a cloudy day and 100,000 lux on a bright day, getting 30 lux off a phone screen “does nothing to your brain,” he says.
Studies that correlate sleep issues with bedtime phone use are often testing people who have been indoors all day, where lighting ranges from 50 to 500 lux. If you’ve spent the day at home, looking at a phone before bed can indeed make a difference.
If you’ve spent the day outdoors, the brightness of the phone makes no impact. It’s what you’re doing on that phone that matters.
“At that point, it’s not the blue light keeping you up. It’s that you’re on your phone using apps or social media or entertainment that has been gamified to make sure you don’t go to sleep,” Zeitzer says. “You’re doing things that psychologists have devel-
oped to make sure you’re on it as long as possible.”
And the longer you stay awake, the greater your fatigue and its impact on mental health. There’s an element of “social isolation and loneliness people feel if you’re up late at night,” Zeitzer says. “It’s 3 a.m., there’s nobody else around. Is that an environment that is conducive to being anxious and depressed?”
Getting outdoors not only helps you sleep, it makes you feel better in the moment. So much so, Zeitzer is experimenting with a 20-foot-long virtual window in the lab.
“We’re trying to figure out, what is it about being outside, from a visual perspective, that makes us feel better,” Zeitzer said.
WAKE UP WITH LIGHT
San Jose State sleep scientist Cassie Hilditch has spent 20 years studying how to help emergency workers and other late-night shift workers cope with fatigue. Short naps during night shifts can help improve performance, she says, but it’s really
important to expose yourself to bright light as soon as you wake up. (If you’re waking after dark, find a therapy lamp that can emit as much as 10,000 lux.)
“Light has the ability to make you feel more alert the moment you’re exposed to it,” Hilditch said.
And whether you’re resetting your body clock for a night shift or bracing for jet lag, “changing” time zones and increasing light exposure can help.
“You can use light to manipulate the timing of your sleep,” Hilditch said. “If you want to delay your sleep — if you’re on the East Coast and traveling to the West Coast — you can start preparing by exposing yourself to light later into the evening and avoiding light in your usual wakeup hours. The opposite is true, if you’re on the West Coast. What I do in preparation is try to avoid any light in the evenings and then expose myself to really bright light in the morning.”
Most people’s circadian rhythms can only shift about an hour each day. So shifting your bedtime — and light exposure — a half-hour each night before a coast-to-coast flight can help.
In the Stanford sleep lab, Zeitzer discovered another light-related tip for curing jet lag. There’s the advice you’ve probably heard before: “Get bright light exposure when your flight lands and stay awake all day, even if you didn’t get a good night of sleep,” he says.
This part, though, may be new to you: Set a flashing light to go off three hours before your alarm clock rings, Zeitzer says, if you’re going from the West Coast to the East. Even though your eyelids are closed, the cells in the retina can transmit the light information to the circadian system, and the gaps of darkness between light flashes allow the eyes to regenerate, so you can continue sleeping while your brain is recalibrating.
His testing results? A flashing light while sleeping elicited a nearly two-hour delay in the
onset of sleepiness.
A Stanford student-led company, LumosTech, has licensed a patent for such technology and now sells eye masks with flashing lights ($250) that are timed to help reduce sleepiness upon waking up.
LIGHT AND HAPPINESS
Each fall, Californians turn their clocks back one hour, a change that signals the beginning of winter, longer nights and shorter days.
For many, it can trigger seasonal affective disorder (SAD), an illness that shares many symptoms of depression, including sadness, listlessness and sluggishness, according to a Harvard University study.
Around 5 percent of Americans report experiencing SAD during 40 percent of the year.
There’s no cure-all, but light therapy — essentially using a therapy light for 20 to 30 minutes to amp up your light exposure in the morning — has proven remarkably effective, says Harvard Medical School’s
Richard S. Schwartz, who found light therapy improved SAD symptoms for 40 to 60 percent of the people in his study.
Of course, good sleep habits — exercise, sunshine, diet, a bedtime routine — play an important role for everyone. Whether you’re trying to fall asleep or dealing with 3 a.m. wakefulness, swapping out a book for your phone is an excellent idea.
Lesther Papa, a San Jose State assistant psychology professor, uses a Casper glow light with a 45-minute timer. He likes to read during those 45 minutes as the gradually dimming light signals to his body that it’s time for sleep. The light works in reverse in the mornings, gradually turning on 45 minutes before his alarm.
“It feels like sunlight is already coming in,” he says. “When you wake up, the first thing you shouldn’t be doing is going to your phone again. Let yourself get acclimated to your natural light surroundings.”
So what about artificial light? We’re surrounded by lightbulbs of every sort, from LEDs to CFLs
and smart bulbs that glow in every color from blues and greens to five shades of white.
Interior and architectural designer Megan Afifi began studying the effects of colored light on mood as an undergrad at Pepperdine University. What she found was that lighting in warm shades (yellows, for example) and cool hues (blues) can have a dramatic impact on mood, and the effects on cognitive performance are task dependent. Reaction times are faster in warm lighting, but creative intelligence is higher in cool lighting, she says. And extremes — “an all super warm or all super cool environment” — make people feel uncomfortable.
Afifi favors smart light bulbs, whose color and warmth can be set from your phone, bulb by bulb, and can mimic, say, morning light or a sunset glow or coordinate with home decor.
“Dusk and dawn are very warm, golden sunlight,” she says. “That’s why sunlight is so helpful to get you going in the morning.”
Left: Dr. Jamie Zeitzer, right, and postdoctoral fellow Maira Karan demonstrate equipment used at the Stanford Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences, including a virtual window that brings the beach to Palo Alto.
KARL MONDON/ STAFF
Opposite: Liney Madera performs during the Imaginarium light installation in Pleasanton this fall.
RAY CHAVEZ/STAFF
