Portal:San Francisco Bay Area/Did you know/75

Archetype, Napa restaurant designed and owned by Howard Backen

Hulk of USS Independence (CVL-22) in San Francisco Bay in 1947

SMART train

John Adams

• ... that David A. Shirley was the first chemist to become the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory?
  
• ... that architect Howard Backen is credited with being a large influence on the architectural aesthetic of Napa? (Backen designed restaurant pictured)
  
• ... that the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard unsuccessfully tried to decontaminate the aircraft carrier USS Independence, (pictured) then packed the ship full of nuclear waste and scuttled it near the Farallon Islands in 1951?
• ... that Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeffrey F. Rosen stated that "the punishment does not fit the crime" in the sentencing of Brock Turner by judge Aaron Persky to six months of jail and three years of probation?
  
• ... that the unfinished Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit fleet will consist of nine two-car Nippon Sharyo DMU trainsets? (set pictured)
  
• ... that Girls of the Golden West, an opera based on the letters of California Gold Rush writer Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, with music by John Adams (pictured) and a libretto by Peter Sellars, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, jointly with Dallas Opera, the Dutch National Opera (De Nationale Opera) and Teatro La Fenice, Venice?
• ... that on the 1999 passing of University of California, Berkeley historian Woodrow Borah, it was said “[There] disappears the last great figure in the generation that presided over the vast expansion of the Latin American scholarly field in the United States during the years following World War II.”

June 2016