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Celebrated San Francisco historic landmark, the Huntington Hotel officially reopens

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Celebrated San Francisco historic landmark, the Huntington Hotel officially reopens


SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — First opened as apartments in 1922 and converted into a hotel two years later, the Huntington was once a playground for socialites and Hollywood stars.

It shut its doors in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and remained shuttered until this week, following new owners and a million-dollar, top-to-bottom renovation.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held for The Huntington Hotel in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood Monday.

The hotel officially reopened on Sunday.

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Mayor Daniel Lurie attended the celebration for the hotel on California Street.

“This is another sign that San Francisco is on the rise, when you have major institutions and major hotels reopening,” Lurie said. “We’re seeing it in Union Square. We’re seeing it now up here on Nob Hill. This is an exciting moment for San Francisco.”

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The hotel, known for its iconic sign, will be restoring the landmark sign to its former glory.

Many say it’s a symbol of what’s going on in San Francisco.

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“It came to symbolize San Francisco’s decline during COVID when it shut and it now, I think, symbolizes San Francisco’s rebirth,” said Greg Flynn, Flynn Group Founder, Chairman, and CEO. “It’s sort of the perfect symbol of it because it’s coming back better than it ever was.”

Alex Bastian, President and CEO of the Hotel Council of San Francisco, said hotel occupancy rates are up in 2024.

“Our data team crunched the numbers, and the four-week rolling hotel occupancy rate for San Francisco Bay Area hotels is 55.1 percent as of January 17 of this year. Compare that to January 17 of 2021, during the pandemi,c when it was 13.1 percent.”

Of course, the Super Bowl helped.

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“There’s no marketing campaign better than what we achieved as San Franciscans,” Bastian said. “The mayor and his team really elevated the game. They did an incredible job. We are so fortunate, as a city, because so many came here and they left their hearts here in San Francisco.”

Eyewitness News wasn’t allowed to gather video of the hotel’s features, but the hotel provided renderings of a sample room.

Matthew de Quillien, The Huntington Hotel General Manager, said the hotel has 143 rooms, many of them suites. Also, the Nob Hill Spa, Arabella’s Cocktail Salo,n and a reopening of The Big Four Restaurant, featuring its famous chicken pot pie.

“Our owner was able to find the original recipe from the 70’s and we remastered it and we’re … serving it to our guests,” de Quillien said.

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He said rates range from $600 a night to $7,000 a night for its Presidential suite.

The restaurant opens to the public on March 17.


If you’re on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live

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San Francisco, CA

Missing man, 85, last seen in South San Francisco

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Missing man, 85, last seen in South San Francisco


SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A Silver Alert was activated Thursday by the California Highway Patrol after an 85-year-old man was reported missing from South San Francisco.

Zosimo Carmen is described by authorities as 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighing 155 pounds. He has gray hair and brown eyes.

Missing person Zosimo Carmen (Photo: CHP)

Carmen was last seen around 2 a.m. on Thursday in the area of James Court and Livingston Place in South San Francisco. He was wearing a brown flannel shirt and blue sweatpants.

The Silver Alert was activated for San Mateo and San Francisco counties.

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Anyone who sees Carmen is asked to call 911.



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San Francisco, CA

San Francisco Giants honor Willie Mays with highway designation on what would have been his 95th birthday

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San Francisco Giants honor Willie Mays with highway designation on what would have been his 95th birthday


The San Francisco Giants announced a fitting tribute to one of the best players in the history of Major League Baseball on Wednesday afternoon. 

Willie Mays, the legendary center fielder and Hall of Famer, would have turned 95 on Wednesday. And the Giants, in conjunction with Mays’ Say Hey Foundation, along with several other sponsoring parties, will be designating a portion of a local freeway as the Willie Mays Highway. 

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Hall of Famer Willie Mays tips his cap during introductions for Game 1 of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Detroit Tigers in San Francisco on Oct. 24, 2012. (Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee/AP)

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This designation will cover a portion of Interstate 80 where the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge reaches the city near Oracle Park, the Giants’ home stadium. Signs on I-80 have already been installed with the new designation, a way for Mays to become a permanent part of the San Francisco Bay Area and his home franchise. 

Giants personnel spoke about the honor and what it meant to have a “reminder” of his infectious spirit and personality next to the stadium.

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“What an incredibly special way to honor Willie’s legacy,” said Larry Baer, Giants president and CEO according to MLB.com “For generations, this portion of I-80 on the Bay Bridge has carried Giants fans into San Francisco, and now it will forever carry Willie’s name—a lasting reminder of the joy and inspiration he brought to this city. It is also fitting that this same span of the bridge is named after former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown Jr., two great San Franciscans.”

San Francisco Giants players Orlando Cepeda and Willie Mays stand at the Polo Grounds in New York on Sept. 11, 1963, during a game against the New York Mets. (Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images)

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Mays came to the Bay with the Giants in 1958, and has a list of accomplishments to rival any other player in MLB history. A 24-time All-Star, two-time MVP, 12-time Gold Glove winner and 660 home runs, the sixth-highest number by an individual player.

Jeff Idelson, the executive director of the Say Hey Foundation, also issued a statement celebrating the announcement.

“Wille was more than a baseball great, he was a part of the fabric that helped define San Francisco culture for more than a half century,” said Idelson. “Not only is this a fitting way to recognize his lasting contribution to the community, but it furthers Willie’s legacy as a national icon.”

Willie Mays visits PS 46 in Harlem, next to the site of the former Polo Grounds where the New York Giants played before moving to San Francisco in 1958, on Jan. 21, 2011, in New York City. (Michael Nagle/Getty Images)

One of the state senators who introduced the bill paving the way for this designation was Bill Dodd from nearby Napa, who also added, “I cannot think of anyone better to welcome people traveling across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco than Willie Mays. He was an inspiration to so many of us growing up. I was so pleased to have had a part in making this happen.”

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The combination of speed, power, defense and joy Mays played the game with is incredibly rare, which is why his legacy is still viewed with such importance today, nearly 53 years after he retired. Hopefully, the next generation of baseball fans will stay familiar with his career thanks to this reminder.



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DoJ closes San Francisco immigration court in move critics say worsens case backlog

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DoJ closes San Francisco immigration court in move critics say worsens case backlog


The Department of Justice shuttered a major San Francisco immigration court last week, a decision attorneys say could exacerbate the Bay Area’s immigration case backlog.

Early in the year, news reports emerged of the closure of the courthouse on 100 Montgomery Street slated for January 2027. Over the last year, the Department of Justice had fired 20 of the court’s 22 judges (the Trump administration has been accused of culling certain immigration judges, in favor of those more amenable to its ongoing mass deportation agenda).

The justice department’s executive office for immigration review (EOIR) described the court’s closure as “cost effective” in a statement last week. A smaller court in San Francisco remains open, but the majority of court operations will move to an immigration court 35 miles (56km) away in the East Bay city of Concord.

The Concord court opened in 2024 amid a Biden-era push to trim the ballooning immigration case backlog. As of September 2025, nationwide there are 3.75m pending immigration cases, according to data from the EOIR. In San Francisco, there are 120,000, per the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Trac), a research center at Syracuse University.

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Some legal experts doubt the Concord court, where six judges were recently removed, has the capacity to inherit the closed San Francisco court’s caseload. A justice department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

“With so few judges at the Concord court, we’re going to see a lot of people waiting years and years and years to have their cases heard,” said Milli Atkinson, director of the San Francisco Bar Association’s immigrant legal defense program.

“These delays deeply affect people. They affect people’s ability to have resolution … to have an answer and closure, whether a positive one that they’d hoped for or a negative one,” said Shira Levine, a former judge at the San Francisco immigration court, who is now legal director for the Immigrant Institute of the Bay Area.

The passage of time could also weaken the presentation of a case.

At asylum hearings, people are “presenting a lot of oral testimony from themselves and from witnesses. Over years, testimonial memories can fade,” Levine said. “Even if you submit the written evidence, years later, someone may not be available to testify in support of that evidence.”

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The San Francisco court’s closure coupled with the exodus of judges has sown “a lot of chaos”, Atkinson said. There are court dates being pushed back and others being pushed up as a result of recent changes.

Atkinson expects that there several individuals will fall through the cracks of the court system.

“A lot of migrants have unstable addresses or don’t receive their mail,” she said, also adding that notices in English may not be heeded by those who don’t speak or read it.

People could then be placed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s radar if they miss their hearings, Atkinson said.

“If someone gets the wrong date, gets the wrong time, gets the wrong place, doesn’t file something exactly correct … the consequences are in some cases – where they really do have a serious fear of return – life-threatening.”

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