Crosscurrents

Children's Fairyland is a storybook-themed amusement park on the shores of Lake Merritt. Have you ever been inside? Reporter Dalia Cuenca pulls back the curtain.

In the Bay Area, summer weather usually begins in the fall. Why is that? In this short-answer segment, San Francisco State meteorology professor Oswaldo Garcia explains our "peculiar" climate.

This is Audiograph — the Bay Area’s sonic signature. Each week, we’ll play you a sound recorded somewhere in the Bay Area. Your job? Listen to the sound in the player above, figure out where it was recorded and what it is, then call to let us know.

Today on Crosscurrents:

• How the iconic, original Kasper’s may dish out dogs again.
• The editors of a new anthology introduce us to Oakland Noir.
• The miniature wonderland of your earliest childhood memories—if you're an East Bay native.

Tune into 91.7 FM 5:00 P.M Audio will be uploaded after the show.

This music is the "Quartet" from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, “Rigoletto,” as performed by pianist Steven Bailey. Steven Bailey has a free performance scheduled on Sunday at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland. He'll play music by Scarlatti, Beethoven, and Debussy.

This auditory guessing game is part of Audiograph, a crowd-sourced collaborative radio project mapping the Bay Area’s sonic signature.

Earlier this year, Anne Kirkpatrick became Oakland's newest police chief. Kirkpatrick’s got a Southern twang and change maker cred, having just left her job leading reform efforts at the Chicago police department. But some are skeptical that any one chief can change a department rocked by scandal for so long.

I’m with emergency responders Nicolas Kinney and Chris Channell in a green and white Paramedics Plus ambulance racing to a 911 call in Fremont. We bump over train tracks and swerve through mid-afternoon traffic.

• Why Alameda County wants its emergency response team to reflect the people it serves.
• Oakland’s new police chief shares her leadership strategy
• What it sounds like to be a Warriors fan.

• A proposed San Francisco ordinance could make a big difference for breastfeeding mothers at work.
• Political consciousness about Asian American identity informed Francis Wong's music.
• A peek inside the "Tomb Treasures" exhibit currently at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.

Egyptian pharaohs must never have heard the saying “you can’t take it with you.” They had massive tombs built, preserved their bodies, and included every possible thing they might need in the next world.

It was 1854 when the first patent for a breast pump was issued to an inventor in New York State. Since then, the device Lea Hardy is about to use to pump breast milk hasn’t changed much.

Saxophonist Francis Wong grew up in South San Francisco, but he’s made his mark in music far beyond his small hometown. The late jazz critic Phil Elwood called him one of "the greatest saxophonists of his generation."

Have you heard of vetiver? In horticulture, oil from the vetiver plant can be extracted for aromatherapy. In music the San Francisco band named Vetiver can be heard singing.

Why do so many Bay Area highways have similar names? We've got Interstate 280, 580, 680 and 880 — what gives? That's the question that listener Jennifer Paulus submitted to Hey Area, KALW's collaborative reporting project. Click the player above for the answer. 

Forty-plus seniors both in and out of wheelchairs socialize in groups of twos and fours in the lobby of AgeSong University. Friday afternoons are happy hour time at the Portola eldercare facility, and the scene is complete with a caterer, and a singer performing lite rock hits. 

If you walk down San Bruno Avenue in the Portola neighborhood, you’ll notice an orange building sitting in the shadow of the Avenue Theater. Right now it’s a Round Table Pizza. However, more than 60 years ago, this building was the Melita Furniture Store. 

A lot of San Francisco neighborhoods have iconic visual identities-- like the Mission district with its colorful murals, or the Fillmore with sidewalk plaques commemorating the “Harlem of the West”. So then what do we see when we  walk down San Bruno Avenue in the Portola district – just down the hill from KALW on the Southeast side of the city?

• The Portola neighborhood's history through a mural. 
• How the neighborhood became an enclave for Maltese immigrants.
• A Portola nursing home has persisted through the power of protest for 130 years.

San Quentin, the historic prison on the edge of San Francisco Bay, confines about 3,800 inmates.

The Bay Area is a music-lover’s paradise.

Cat Spediacci takes me on a neighborhood tour of crumbling roads. We’re in Richmond, where she’s lived most of her life. Her Volkswagen rumbles over washboard pavement.

“The road is just completely rotten the way it looks,” says Spediacci. “If I had a tire that looked like this, I would replace it. If I had a fruit that looked like this, I wouldn't eat it.”

Sofia Deleuse and Pamela Fakui on running a head-lice removal salon and the tips, tricks, and myths they've picked up along the way, including facts you probably never knew about Raid and mayonnaise.

• How the Bay Area won the title for the worst roads in the country.
• A concert series connects local musicians across genres.
• Why volunteers at San Quentin State Prison do what they do.
• A salon that deals specifically with lice.
• The drought is over — why is San Francisco's Vaillancourt Fountain dry?

When you think about immigration and deportation in the US, one population that may not immediately come to mind is Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.

You’ve probably seen them: groups of men looking for work, standing in front of Home Depot or waiting on corners of busy thoroughfares. These men are day laborers, looking for short-term work ranging from gardening to painting. On any given day there are almost 120,000 of them looking for work in the United States; about 40 percent are here in California.