Thursday's Observations On The 2025 Government Shutdown

A Shuttered Fort Point, part of the NPS

I am a concierge working for a private residence, but no longer in the hotel business. Nevertheless, I feel a little PTSD with this current government shutdown from all of the previous government shutdowns I lived through as a hotel concierge.

First and foremost: Government shutdowns are bad - for everyone.

But if you work in the hospitality community, it can be equally devastating. Recently a group of Republican state lawmakers in Utah pleaded with their leadership to avoid the shutdown. It was not out of altruism; it was out of desperation.

According to the National Park Service, 15.8 million  people visited national parks in Utah last year and added $3.1 billion to the state’s economy. Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon, Golden Spike National Historical Park, and Dinosaur National Monument are just a few of the many national parks and monuments which pepper the state and are all closed for the foreseeable future.

Of course, there are national parks and monuments all over the United States, so the economic impact of their closing is far and wide. Here in San Francisco, we are feeling it as well. It's not just Alcatraz, the Muir Woods, and even Yosemite. This week, the first week of October, was supposed to be Fleet Week. Hundreds of thousands of people come into the city, especially on the final Sunday when the Blue Angels perform. But not this year.

In my forthcoming book, Service Is The Business, I have a chapter where I share a few personal experiences I had with guests who visited during the Government Shutdown of 2013. Please enjoy this timely and prescient excerpt.

It was around this time that the second government shutdown during my years in the hotel business happened. For those not familiar with these, the federal government can literally shut down, usually briefly, when Congress is in disagreement with the President over the federal budget, resulting in federal employees not getting paid and partial closure of public offices and services. This includes national parks and monuments, many of which happened to be popular with tourists.

The first one in my hotel career occurred at the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1996, during the presidency of Bill Clinton. But it was the second one in 2013, albeit shorter, which was much more palpable for the average American who suddenly found themselves unable to use many government services.

Simply put, it was a protest against President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which later became law and extended health benefits to millions of Americans. The Republican opposition, which had a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, shut down the government until a compromise was reached and the impasse was resolved. For international visitors, who were not following the day-to-day business of Congress, this meant that all of the destinations on their travel itineraries and bucket lists were suddenly closed to them for reasons they could not understand.

While the government was shut down, for example, you couldn’t get a passport, since the issuing federal agency was closed. Even more difficult for the concierge community was that all national parks and monuments were padlocked. This included Muir Woods, Yosemite, and Alcatraz. Three nearby destinations that were the main reasons many visitors came to San Francisco were closed.

I started feeling the weight of the shutdown on the very first day. I hadn’t been at the desk for more than ten minutes when a young couple from Spain approached. They were on their honeymoon and on a four-week tour of US national parks, including Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and and Yellowstone. They were devastated when I delivered the news about the shutdown. They felt their honeymoon had been ruined.

The next day, a young Australian kid, maybe 13 or 14 years old, approached me about going to Alcatraz because his family had already bought tickets. The first thing I noticed was that the kid wore an old worn T-shirt from the1996 Michael Bay film The Rock. This movie came out years before he was born, so he had clearly gone out of his way to find the T-shirt. He also held a threadbare used book about Alcatraz which looked as if he had read it several times.

He was quite disappointed when I told him about the closure. As millions were before him, this kid had been taken by the mystique of Alcatraz. Each day, he would come to the desk, sheepishly asking the same thing, “Do you think it will be open today?” Each day, I’d have to dash his hopes and dreams of seeing Alcatraz. I had to tell him, “Not today.” This frustrated me to no end.

For weeks, I had to tell one visitor after another that their dream vacation of visiting Alcatraz and Yosemite was not possible. With no end in sight, it seemed like the only way to see them was to come back when the affected tourist attractions reopened, but nobody knew when that would happen. Professionally, I had to remain apolitical and couldn’t take sides as to who should be blamed in our nation’s capital for the closures. So I asked Guy to craft a generic response as to why their favorite places, which they traveled thousands of miles to see, were now off limits. This is what he came up with, word for word:

October first is the beginning of the fiscal year and Congress must pass a budget in order to fund the government. Because they have not passed a budget yet, non-essential federal services (such as the EPA and unfortunately national parks like Alcatraz and Yosemite) are closed until a budget can be reached.

I couldn’t just recite the mantra of Guy’s explanation. I thought it was too generic, and not believable given how many people were extremely upset. So, rather than just accepting it with the philosophy of too bad, sh*t happens, I created a list of attractions which were adjacent to their desired but shuttered destinations. Although I had been the Caravaggio’s chief concierge for 11 years by the autumn of 2013, the shutdown compelled me to think further outside the box for my guests.

National parks and monuments like Muir Woods, Yosemite, and Alcatraz were closed, but not the numerous state parks of California. Half an hour away from Muir Woods was Samuel P. Taylor State Park, which also had trails through centuries-old groves of redwood trees. Better still was Big Basin State Park, California’s oldest state park, which opened in 1902 and is about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. Many times larger than Muir Woods, it offered a canopy of old-growth redwood trees covering hundreds of square miles of hillsides, waterfalls, and canyons.

Angel Island is right next to Alcatraz, a state park, and therefore it was open. It may not have had the mystique of Alcatraz, but it had a history all its own going back to the American Civil War. It was the Ellis Island of the west coast where, like New York, many different nationalities (but mostly Chinese) had been processed and subsequently interned until they were allowed to enter the mainland.

Anti-Chinese sentiment had been brewing since the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, when many Chinese workers lost their jobs and found themselves competing for work with Anglo-Americans. This all culminated with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As a result, many draconian restrictions were enacted to limit immigration and many Chinese immigrants had been stuck on the island for years. Visitors there would find an excellent museum dedicated to the immigrant’s experience, along with tours, camping, and a little village by the ferry landing where you would be able to hear live music during the summer.

Likewise for Yosemite: Calaveras Big Trees State Park was open and only about 90 minutes away. It didn’t have the picturesque Yosemite Valley, with the huge vertical formations of Half Dome and El Capitan towering hundreds of feet above, but Calaveras did have ancient groves of giant sequoia trees as high as a skyscraper. For my guests who wanted to feel the awesome experience of Yosemite, many could often find an equally satisfying experience in a state park.

When the shutdown finally ended, it was a great relief. It had taken an emotional toll on me to have had to tell visitors bad news over and over again, day after day. One frustrated guest had even said he was just going to drive to Yosemite anyway and hop the fence. This had been testimony to the popularity and legacy of our national parks and monuments.

While the government shutdown had felt like a glass of cold water had been thrown in the face of visitors and American citizens alike, internally we were also getting our own shocking news – news that would forever change the zeitgeist of the Caravaggio.

For my disappointed Spanish honeymooners, I found alternatives they were happy with. They couldn’t go to the Grand Canyon, or to Bryce, Zion, and Yellowstone parks. But I found some Indian reservations and state parks near by. They were not the national parks they had planned to see, but they were grateful for the information nevertheless. The Havasupai Indian Reservation, for example, is adjacent to the Grand Canyon, but belongs to the Havasupai Tribe so it was open. It isn’t as spectacular as the Grand Canyon, but it offers similar topography and gives the visitor a sense of the grandeur of the adjacent shuttered national park.

When the shutdown finally ended, it was a great relief. It had taken an emotional toll on me to have had to tell visitors bad news over and over again, day after day. One frustrated guest had even said he was just going to drive to Yosemite anyway and hop the fence. This had been testimony to the popularity and legacy of our national parks and monuments.