More "Enlightenment" from San Francisco ...

Jolie Rouge

San Francisco activist seeks peace on the Rock
By MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer
Fri Feb 1, 3:11 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO - It would literally take an act of Congress before a city ballot proposal to turn Alcatraz into a global peace center could become reality.

The measure's purely symbolic, given that the legislative branch would have to formally switch the island prison from federal to city hands, and that the proposal faces a host of other obstacles, including a lack of funding or legal force.

That doesn't meant the measure on Tuesday's ballot hasn't gotten attention — much of it negative.

"VOTE NO ON THIS RIDICULOUS PROPOSAL," the San Francisco Republican Party thundered in a voters' pamphlet.

"Perhaps we haven't reached the proper stage of enlightenment yet, but we're more inclined to support propositions with defined sources of funding attached to them," was the San Francisco Chronicle's more tempered editorial recommending a "no" vote.

Even if Congress signed off on turning over the island, now maintained by the National Park Service, the logistics might be tricky, said Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom.

"While the mayor is in favor of global peace," Ballard said diplomatically, declining to take a formal position on the measure, "right now we're in a budget crisis, so it would be difficult to come up with the money to buy Alcatraz from the feds."

The colorful peace activist behind the proposal is undaunted.

"Inspired ideas are always resisted. It's just par for the course," said Da Vid (he legally changed his name after it came to him during meditation). "Any time you push the envelope, which is what we're doing here, there are going to be people that are going to push back."

On a recent gloomy day, Vid strode along the rain-lashed walkways of Alcatraz — dark and forbidding under a pewter sky — and expounded on his vision for the island known as the Rock.

A rough-edged chunk of land in the San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz is famous as the site of a Civil War fortress, a military prison and a maximum-security federal penitentiary. It also was the site of three American Indian occupations, the longest and best-known of which lasted from 1969 to 1971 and inspired a new era of Indian activism.

Proposition C, as Vid's dream is designated, would tear down most of the prison and replace it with a dome-shaped peace center and other buildings based on the geometry of a hexagram. The project has tie-ins to various mystical beliefs, according Vid's Web site supporting the proposition.

By converting the island, "a place of pain and suffering," into a "JEWEL OF LIGHT," the Web site says, "We will activate Powerful Forces for Cooperation, Reconciliation & Healing."

That's more than you can say for most municipal elections. "We're talking true, spiritual, mecca, artistic space because there's tremendous creative energy in this Bay area that can be unleashed and harnessed in creating this type of a project," Vid said.

Alcatraz gets about 1.4 million visitors a year, most bent on having their pictures taken in the forbidding remnants of the prison that once held the likes of Al Capone. Vid argues that the peace center would be a much bigger draw, and a more uplifting one.

He believes backers would come forward to provide money for the $1 billion conversion project if it had popular support.

Vid said there's no merit in making a brutal old prison a Bay Area hallmark and he suggests a museum could preserve the history and influence of the island's various incarnations, in particular the American Indian occupation.

Others say the prison needs to stay as a warts-and-all reminder of the way things were.

Adam Fortunate Eagle Nordwall, who helped plan the '69 occupation, noted that Alcatraz's military prison also has a place in history for having held some Indians who refused to send their children to boarding schools aimed at "Americanizing" them around the turn of the century.

"That island is a national treasure," said John Garvey, a regional historian who has written about Alcatraz, "and it needs to stay as it is."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080201/...qMbG4iFH2oc A

On the Net:

Proposal: http://www.globalpeacefoundation.org/

Park Service's Alcatraz page: http://www.nps.gov/alcatraz/

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Jolie Rouge

U.S. considers upscale hotel for infamous Alcatraz
By Amanda Beck
Sat Jun 14, 5:22 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The National Park Service is considering adding a hotel to Alcatraz Island, site of one of the world's most notorious prisons.

Unlike the cells afforded to inmates such as Al "Scarface" Capone, the facility would offer upscale accommodations like those now available at the Ahwahnee Hotel in California's Yosemite National Park.

"People are constantly saying they want to see more of the island," National Park Service Spokesman Rich Weideman said. "A hotel would be the ultimate experience in visitor access."

Alcatraz Island is run by the U.S. National Park Service and is already San Francisco's second most-popular tourist attraction, after its famed cable cars.

About 1.5 million people take ferries to visit the prison cellblock every year, and summer tickets sell out weeks ahead.

But many visitors say they also want to see parts of the 12-acre (5-hectare) island that are closed to the public, including wildlife areas, the room where prison guards bowled and the prison theater where gangsters watched "From Here to Eternity."

A hotel, likely built in a structure that once housed prison guards, would for the first time offer the general public 24-hour access to "the Rock" and capitalize on the park's popular night-time tours.

That's when evening fog shrouds San Francisco from view. But island visitors, like the prisoners before them, can still hear activity emanating from the city.

"It's a very eerie experience," Weideman said.

Many development ideas, including adding a casino or a new prison, have been floated since the federal penitentiary closed on Alcatraz in 1963, according to newspaper USA Today. But the island's status as a national historic landmark set within a national park has made development difficult.

The hotel is one of several proposals the park service is now weighing as part of its new general management plan, which will guide park development and renovation for the next 20 years.

Others include serving food to visitors in the prison cafeteria and adding boat tours to the island's perimeter.

The park service is taking comment on the proposals and will use public remarks to create a new draft of the general plan next year, Weideman said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080614/...CxSdRfAXIr0 F

__________________
Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?