Plus: Sanders and Oscario-Cortez draw thousands in Denver to stand up against America’s newest Guilded Age.
San Francisco’s Tulip Day, also dubbed Union Square in Bloom, filled downtown San Francisco with deep pastels and flowering aromas Saturday when 80,000 tulips were plucked by tens of thousands of people. San Francisco’s annual Tulip Day brought long lines that snaked around Union Square as droves of bipes waited for their chance to pick a free (small) bouquet of tulips … while supplies lasted.
Some waited over an hour for their opportunity; others anticipated the event’s popularity based on prior experiences and arrived at Union Square well before the gates opened; by 4 p.m., it was hard pressed to find a single tulip, regardless of the color, after thousands of people each plucked eight of the flower’s they desired.
San Francisco’s Tulip Day isn’t novel; rather, it was inspired by Amsterdam’s National Tulip Day. The day-long happening started in 2018 and has since grown into a beloved Bay Area tradition … that’s also, unfortunately, all too on-brand for influencers who take it upon themselves to congest lines while filming content. (Like the adage “give us nothing, girl” has never been more accurate.)
The Union Square Alliance and the Consulate General of the Netherlands partnered up for this event as part of an effort to bring back life and activity to downtown, which, by all accounts, is working — a pedal amongst many coloring new life into San Francisco, if you will.
Organizers, too, hope the event will serve as evidence that people should try and keep tulips in their homes long after the ones picked from Tulip Day wilt. And with everything the way it is these days, cultivating indefensible amounts of beauty inside one’s home should be celebrated.
What else transpired over the weekend? Let’s take a look.
- A proposed budget package could help save Muni from falling off a fiscal cliff. In a last-minute effort to stop Muni and BART trains from cutting even more service lines and times, State Senator Scott Wiener introduced a funding package to help skirt the worst outcomes; if the measure passes the State Senate, it will find its way on the ballot in November of 2026. More info.
- Anti-oligarchy rally in Denver draws record-breaking crowds. Over 34,000 people attended the joint Bernie Sanders and Alexandrai Cortez rally aimed at calling out the current state of federal politics and the wealth-gap-widening, oligarchical direction it’s been going in; among abysmal party approval form the public, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are shining as anchors (and possible party north stars) for Democrats. More info.
- Of course, Mosser Living wants to remodel its namesake SRO building into a full-time vacation hotel. SROs are a relic of affordable housing and remain a touchstone for some of SF’s most vulnerable populations, including the elderly and not-able-bodied, but Mosser Living, which owns and operates the property, hopes to gut it and turn their namesake building into a hotel, efficiently gutting rent-controlled units and replacing them with more profitable hotel units; San Francisoc, however, has just denied its request to do just those things. More info.
Feature image: Courtesy of Instagram via [at]adcristal
