This week: The SF Columbarium, tulip season, Silicon Valley repair cafes, Marin dad punk band, and an Iranian-American fashion line. Plus: finding unique SF trees, connecting with deceased loved ones, and author Kate Schatz’s new novel focusing on the fight for women’s rights in 1960s SF.

Where the city keeps its ghosts

When you step inside the San Francisco Columbarium, the noise of Geary Boulevard fades into a kind of quiet museum of lives once lived. The 1898 structure is one of the last surviving pieces of San Francisco’s old cemetery system, after most burial grounds were cleared and moved to Colma in the early 1900s.

Inside the copper-domed building, thousands of niches hold urns alongside personal mementos — photographs, letters, trinkets — turning the walls into a patchwork of family memory. The Richmond District landmark is open to visitors daily from sunrise to sunset. — GhoulHost/City Days

Trees near you

San Francisco tree fans have a handy way to spot notable specimens around the city. This map of landmark trees, which works on mobile, displays nearby rare or historic trees wherever you are.

The map inspires users to discover unusual trees hidden in spots they might otherwise walk past. — SF Tree Guy/Instagram

Calls into the wind

Near Ocean Beach, a small booth known as the Heaven Phone invites people to speak to loved ones who’ve passed on. Visitors drop a stone into a tube, lift the receiver, and look through a butterfly-shaped window toward the sea while the wind carries their words.

The installation sits at the ocean’s edge near Ortega Street, offering a brief, personal pause along the beach. — Whimsy Soul/Instagram

Dadpunk in the minivan lane

A group of Marin fathers has turned the daily chaos of parenting into a scrappy punk project called Le Minivans. Frontman Matt Swanson — who once played in Oakland dream-pop band Minipop — writes many of the songs while waiting in school pickup lines, turning routine domestic moments into fast, cathartic riffs.

The band formed in 2018 with four other local dads, leaning into what they call “dad punk,” where the stakes are low and the material comes straight from everyday life. Le Minivans will be performing Saturday evening, March 7 at Smiley's Schooner Saloon in Bolinas. — Marin Independent Journal

Second life for small things

Instead of throwing away broken appliances or torn clothing, some Bay Area residents are heading to pop-up repair events where volunteers take a crack at fixing them on the spot. Repair Café Silicon Valley sets up at libraries and community centers, pairing visitors with experienced “fixers” who troubleshoot everything from hair dryers to ripped seams.

Each person can bring two items, and most repairs wrap up in about half an hour once a station opens. Upcoming gatherings include March 14 at Willow Glen Community Center in San Jose, March 29 at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, and April 26 at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto. — Bay Area Toddler Explorer/Instagram

Tulips by the windmill

Spring color is spreading across the lawn at Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden, beside the park’s historic Dutch windmill, where thousands of tulips are reaching their peak this month. The small garden sits near the western edge of Golden Gate Park and fills with bright rows of blooms each March, many planted from bulbs sent by Dutch growers.

Just steps away, the towering Dutch Windmill — built in 1902 to pump water for the park — still anchors the landscape after its restoration decades ago. — Secret San Francisco

Threads of freedom

Bay Area siblings Kristin Vartan and filmmaker Sean Ansari Vartan carry a family story shaped by exile. Their mother fled Iran as a teenager after the Iranian Revolution, when strict dress codes and public expression tightened under the new regime. One keepsake remains — a prom dress sewn by their grandmother that Kristin still wears today.

The pair channel that history into their creative project, Style Speaks, exploring how clothing and movement tell personal stories. Their work reflects both grief for those still living under repression and gratitude for the freedom to create here. — KPIX

Letters never sent

In her new novel, author Kate Schatz of Rad Women fame visits 1968 San Francisco, where a high school senior’s brief brush with the Fillmore’s counterculture leads to an unplanned pregnancy and a quiet exile to a private maternity home. Where the Girls Were, from The Dial Press, draws on Schatz’s own family history and the thousands of young women who were sent away under a veil of secrecy before Roe and reliable birth control were widely accessible.

Through clipped letters and institutional rules, the novel traces the tension between the tumultuous time period — assassinations, anti-war protests, the Summer of Love — and the rigid expectations still governing “good girls” at home. — KQED

Top image: Kate Schatz/Instagram

Previously: Field Notes: ‘Run’ Club Comedy, Too Short’s ‘Blow the Whistle,’ and Black History on the Pacific

Workers worked all night on the San Mateo Bridge to fix a crack found in a steel beam, a repair job that affected westbound traffic. "One of three westbound lanes was closed and was expected to remain coned-off for 24-to-48 hours." [KTVU]