Police found a missing cat named Number Five this week, five days after he was reportedly taken from the San Francisco Flower Market in Potrero Hill.
For the past three years, Number Five — a round-faced gray cat — has lived inside Grace Nursery, a vendor in the wholesale flower mall. He’s the fifth pet of florist Grace Su, his name nodding to the Chinese tradition of birth order nicknames.
“He’s a really cute guy,” Su said. “Everybody knows him. Some days he walks down to other vendors, sitting on people’s counters, looking at them. He thinks he’s in charge of the whole market, supervising to see that people work.”
But on the morning of May 9, in the midst of the market’s pre-Mother’s Day rush, Number Five vanished. Security footage reviewed by the Chronicle showed three shoppers scooping up the beloved shop cat, carrying him through the parking lot and loading him into a black Honda.
Number Five usually wore a tracking collar, but his captors appeared to remove it, Su said. When a patron found the discarded collar and returned it, she “realized he was stolen right away.”
Su filed a police report, and officers came to the market to review security footage, running the Honda’s license plate. Meanwhile, Number Five’s admirers were searching for any trace of the beloved cat online.
On Thursday, a photo of Number Five perched atop a forklift in Emeryville — 10 miles from home across the Bay Bridge — led police to him.
Read more via the link in our bio.
📸: Courtesy of Grace Su
A little-known candidate for California governor was campaigning on a street corner in Alameda this spring when a middle-aged man spotted the candidate’s name on a sign, climbed out of his pickup truck and snatched the candidate’s microphone.
“You’re not Barack Obama,” he yelled. “You’re a fraud!”
The man was right about one thing: Barack D. Obama Shaw is not the former president, nor is he related to the more famous Obama in any way. But that is his real name — he legally changed it in 2013 — and he really is on the ballot for California governor, running as a Democrat.
A tall, smooth-talking music teacher with a slight Texas twang and a salt-and-pepper mustache, Obama Shaw is one of 61 candidates in a wide-open field.
While strolling down that same street Tuesday where he was once accosted, the 56-year-old Alameda resident remained bullish — not only about advancing past the June 2 primary to November’s general election, but of winning the entire thing.
Read more via the link in our bio.
📸: @lsuzuki
Step 1 of the offseason for the Golden State Warriors wrapped this week: extend head coach Steve Kerr’s esteemed tenure by way of a lucrative two-year contract. Step 2 started when he reassumed his office inside Chase Center: re-establish the foundation he built over the past 12 years. And improve it, too.
Kerr and general manager Mike Dunleavy acknowledged the need for reinvention Friday inside Chase Center during their annual — but delayed — end-of-season news conferences. Dunleavy said the Warriors’ 37-45 campaign was “underwhelming,” a sentiment essentially echoed by Kerr throughout his 35-minute call and response.
“Injuries played a factor into it for sure,” Dunleavy continued. “For me the disappointment was probably in the sense of — I mean, we didn’t control things we could control. Injuries happen. Schedule can be difficult. We have some teams on nights that just made a bunch of threes, and things happen, but there’s things that we can control, starting with turnovers, that we didn’t do.”
In support of Dunleavy, Kerr added, “We know we need to make some changes. I know I have to be better. I didn’t have a great coaching year this year. I know there are a lot of things I can do better.”
Read more via the link in our bio.
Kim Buck watched as test ballots zipped through a high-powered scanner to tabulate dummy results at Contra Costa County’s voting headquarters in Martinez. The mandatory equipment test was Buck’s latest lesson as a student of the democratic process. Buck, a self-described lifelong learner who retired from a career in finance, likes to know how stuff works. But she’s also been increasingly struck by odd — and, often, paranoid — questions she receives as a poll worker. That’s what brought her to a recent election office tour, which focused on how votes are counted or adjudicated when marked in a way machines can’t process.
Buck started volunteering at the Contra Costa County polls in 2021 — a time when voter skepticism intensified because President Trump refused to accept his loss to President Biden and election result deniers stormed the Capitol.
Since Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, county clerks and registrars across California have created, expanded and better advertised programs aimed at voting transparency — like the tours and classes Buck attends. That work has ramped up as election officials prepare for the state’s June 2 primary.
Read more about these programs via the link in our bio.
📸: @funbenjoy /For the S.F. Chronicle
In anticipation of the 113th annual Bay to Breakers race this weekend, we dug into the archive to answer the question: How did the race get so weird?
The answer, at least in part, involves two friends in tuxedos. In 1976, Greg Brown and John Park were crossed the finish line in formalwear, helping transform a 7.5 mile footrace into something far stranger and far more fun.
In the years that followed, costumes became the norm and finish times an afterthought. Cows, M&M’s, pumpkins, celebrities of the moment and elaborate group costumes began crowding the course alongside serious runners.
Archive photos show runners costumed in a space shuttle, a BART train, tacos and billiard balls. The Hayes Street Hill and Golden Gate Park quickly became favorite spots for photographers documenting the race’s increasingly whimsical runners.
📸: Fred Larson, Sam Deaner, Dave Randolph, Brant Ward, Gary Fong and Steve Ringman/S.F. Chronicle
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The hottest, most whimsical place to be today was the Cafe Jacqueline estate sale in North Beach following the recent closure of the beloved soufflé restaurant that’s been operated by 90-year-old Chef Jacqueline Margulis for the past 50 years. Longtime North Beach residents and vintage lovers lined up as early as 6:45 to score a piece of San Francisco culinary history. Items ranged from a mosaic lobster table to iconic soufflé whisks, vintage cook books and menus signed by Chef Margulis. A rare byline for me on this one alongside @lenak21 🐌 @sfchronicle
The race to replace term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom has drawn a crowded field.
Chronicle political reporter Sophia Bollag sat down with leading gubernatorial candidates to discuss the issues shaping California’s future.
From affordability, to climate policy and healthcare, this interview series highlights where candidates stand ahead of the 2026 election.
To read more of the Chronicle's coverage, follow the link in our bio.
🎬: @joytakesphotos
Known for its babka, cakes, and other treats, this popular San Francisco bakery — inspired by Jewish diaspora traditions and founded by Tal Mor, Jodi Geren, and Kristina Costa — is opening a second location in the Inner Richmond.
Since opening on Gough Street in 2022, Loquat became known largely for its sweet items: laminated babka, pistachio cream puffs and decadent layer cakes and pies made by James Beard-nominated pastry chef Kristina Costa. But Mor, whose Iraqi-Jewish family moved from Israel to the Bay Area when he was 5 years old, sees bread as a vessel for historical and cultural connection. He’s been “thinking about how Jews have lived everywhere in the world and have been influenced by all the places that they inhabited and built,” he said. “It’s enriched Jewish culture. Bread is such a big part of that.”
The new Loquat will revolve around a new deck oven — whose convection heat is essential for many bread bakeries and pizzerias — that will turn out a rotating selection of breads from the Jewish diaspora: garwag, an Iraqi laffa cracker accompanied by black tea and salted cheese; ka’ak al quds, a ring-shaped, sesame-covered bread paired with labne, Palestinian za’atar and olive oil; and Morrocan harcha, a pan-fried semolina flatbread served warm with honey. Mor said they will likely move the tandoor oven to the new bakery and host the popular Loquat at Night laffa dinners more regularly there.
Read more via the link in our bio.
📸: Justin Katigbak/Special to The Chronicle; Scott Strazzante
Santa Clara University and Sutter Health plan to open the first new medical school in the Bay Area in more than 100 years, leaders at the university and the health care provider announced Friday.
The school, funded in part by a $175 million gift to the university from venture capitalist Mark Stevens and wife Mary, a 1984 alum, will be named the Mark and Mary Stevens School of Medicine. Pending approval from accrediting bodies, the 82,000-square-foot school will be built in Santa Clara about five miles from the university’s main campus and adjacent to Sutter’s East Santa Clara medical center at 2441 Mission College Blvd.
It’s not clear when the school would open, as the accreditation process can take several years. But Sutter CEO Warner Thomas said he hopes it will be around 2030.
Read more via the link in our bio.
📸: Rendering courtesy of Sutter Health
This weekend's Bay to Breakers race marks the annual opportunity for San Francisco residents to don their spandex shorts and chug up Hayes Hill, maneuvering around people dressed as bananas or fluffy birds, or those braving the elements in no clothes at all.
But it’s also a massive, bright and famously obnoxious street party for revelers swarming in from the suburbs. This creates a quandary for transportation officials and planners of the 12-kilometer race: How to get everyone to the city smoothly, avoiding a traffic jam that would snarl neighborhoods from Embarcadero to Ocean Beach.
See the complete list of closure times and weekend transit impacts via the link in our bio.
📸: Manuel Orbegozo/For the S.F. Chronicle ; Maps courtesy of SFMTA
Parking rules bend for no one in San Francisco: Not a delivery driver; not a person with hazard lights blinking; certainly not a vendor loading an unmarked van.
Aruna Lee learned this the hard way. She had just packed up from last Saturday’s Taiwanese American Cultural Festival in Union Square when she saw the slip of paper on her windshield.
“Unattended/no activity,” said the ticket, which carried a $108 fine for blocking the flow of traffic. Lee had parked perpendicular to the curb on Powell Street as she broke down her food booth and hauled equipment to the vehicle on a dolly. She assumed any parking enforcement officer who rolled by would understand the arrangement was temporary. After all, the festival grounds were still buzzing, and other cars were parked the same way.
“When I saw the ticket that said ‘unattended,’ it made me so upset,” Lee recalled in an interview. “I had to take down all of my stuff and carry it. How is that process not obvious to the city government?”
Read more via the link in our bio.
📸: @brontewittpenn
Efforts to enroll more Black students at San Francisco’s premier public high school have yet to pay off, with no more than seven African American students joining the nearly 700 freshmen expected in the fall.
Lowell High School has faced criticism for its lack of diversity for decades, with its academically competitive admissions process leading to a disproportionately Asian American and white enrollment. Students have long complained of racially charged incidents as well as a lack of Black teachers.
How to address the issue and whether to change the admissions process from a merit system to a traditional lottery is perhaps one of the school district’s most contentious debates.
Read more via the link in our bio.
📸: @brontewittpenn /S.F. Chronicle
