The Diggler Scooters are all the rage on Angel Island. Bring a friend and cruise the island in style.

Check out the video made by William A Warrior as a tribute to the women held at Angel Island from 1910-1940.

The Upwardly Global 10th Anniversary “Passport to Possibilities” Gala took place on Angel Island October 2nd, 2010.
To learn more about Upwardly Global, click here.

And don’t forget to follow Upwardly Global and Angel Island on Facebook.

Our dockside retail store is open! On the ferry dock between Sam’s and Servinos, we carry apparel, kids toys and variety of commemorative items representing the history of Angel Island and the United States Immigration Station. Open 10-4 on Saturday and Sundays. Extended hours in the summer.
Come say hi:}

Everyone always asks how do you get all this stuff over here…and honestly it’s a good question and we do it a number of ways mostly by schlepping it from one spot to another. However we also bring a whole bunch of stuff over to the island once a year in what is affectionately called the Sysco Big Order. On that day our friends at Sysco food distributors load up 3 delivery trucks and load them one at a time onto a barge that transports them to the island. Once on the island the truck is driven up a very narrow road to a storage room we call the dungeon. It’s actually the basement of one of the historic houses on the island and does sort of resemble a dungeon. The best thing about it is it’s really big because we have ALOT of stuff. The key to Sysco Big Order is to get at much of the heavy stuff on the truck as possible so that later in the season we aren’t having to schlep really heavy things, example: 150 cases of water, 200 cases of juice, 150 cases of cokes etc… We also bring over charcoal, paper products, cleaning supplies and basically anything that will successfully store for the year. We take most of the stuff off the truck with a forklift but then we do it the old fashioned way one case at time, hand to hand to hand to hand… It makes for a very long day and often a mishap or two (last year we drove the forklift into a ditch about five minutes after it arrived. It then had to be  be towed out with a tractor—a forklift is a VERY HEAVY THING) This year gale force winds delayed our delivery day and forced the rescheduling of the barge, the trucks and all the staff but at the end of the day when the dungeon is stacked to the ceiling it’s a very good feeling…

Angel Island is a place of so much history and beauty and one of the things that’s always intrigued me is the garden plots on Angel Island that were used by Alcatraz prison as a source of fresh produce, since there was insufficient soils on Alcatraz for any sort of agriculture.   The first “Alcatraz Garden” was located at the present site of Camp Reynolds. In later years Alcatraz Gardens moved to the south side of Angel Island, where military prisoners from Alcatraz were brought over by steamer to work in the gardens. In 1876 the cultivated area was described as being twelve acres in size and “roughly fenced”. It was worked by a detail of four men. In the dry season water was furnished by a damned pond in one of the ravines above the garden site. These gardens not only furnished fresh produced for Alcatraz but vegetables were also sold to other military installations around the bay and on occasion to markets in San Francisco. The gardens remained in production until Alcatraz became a federal penitentiary in 1934. Potatoes, Green Beans, Tomatoes, Onions, Lettuc, Carrots, Beets and wild flowers are some of the crops known to have been grown on the island. This year the cafe began working an abandoned garden plot at Camp Reynolds, planting and cultivating the original Alcatraz Garden crops. The garden is 100 percent organic andwith a little help from Teddy Giacommini’s awesome organic cow poop our garden is thriving. We hope to be able to harvest our first salad crop in a month or so. Look for it on the special board in the cafe.