Читать книгу Hollow City - Rebecca Solnit - Страница 8

San Francisco, Capital of theTwenty-First Century

The St. John Coltrane congregation’s ceremonial march to a temporary site after their eviction.

Saturday night a new bar called Fly opens on Divisadero Street and immediately becomes a mecca for white kids. Sunday evening the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church a few blocks down the boulevard holds a benefit to help it relocate from its home of twenty-nine years. And this bar and this church aren’t even in the San Francisco neighborhoods that are being most rapidly changed. What’s happening on Divisadero Street in the Western Addition is just the spillover from the wild mutation of the Mission District, once a bastion of Latino culture and cheap housing, and of the formerly industrial South of Market, districts that are becoming the global capital of the Internet economy.

San Francisco has been for most of its 150-year existence both a refuge and an anomaly. Soon it will be neither. Gentrification is transforming the city by driving out the poor and working class, including those who have chosen to give their lives over to unlucrative pursuits such as art, activism, social experimentation, social service. But gentrification is just the fin above water. Below is the rest of the shark: a new American economy in which most of us will be poorer, a few will be far richer, and everything will be faster, more homogenous and more controlled or controllable. The technology boom and the accompanying housing crisis have fast-forwarded San Francisco into the newest version of the American future, a version that also is being realized in Boston, Seattle, and other cities from New York and Atlanta to Denver and Portland.

A decade ago Los Angeles looked like the future—urban decay, open warfare, segregation, despair, injustice and corruption—but the new future looks like San Francisco: a frenzy of financial speculation, covert coercions, overt erasures, a barrage of novelty-item restaurants, websites, technologies and trends, the despair of unemployment replaced by the numbness of incessant work hours and the anxiety of destabilized jobs, homes and neighborhoods. Thirty-five percent of the venture capital in this country is in the Bay Area, along with 30 percent of the multimedia/Internet businesses, and the boom that started in Silicon Valley has produced a ripple effect throughout the region from south of San Jose to Napa and Sonoma in the north.¹

San Francisco has had the most expensive housing of any major American city in the nation for two decades, but in the past few years housing prices—both sales and rents—have been skyrocketing, along with commercial rents. New businesses are coming in at a hectic pace, and they in turn generate new boutiques, restaurants and bars that displace earlier businesses, particularly nonprofits, and the new industry’s workers have been outbidding for rentals and buying houses out from under tenants at a breakneck pace. Regionally, home sale and rental prices have gone up by 30 percent over the past three years, but the rate of increase is far more dramatic in San Francisco (where rents rose 37 percent from 1996 to 1997, before the boom really hit, and nowadays can go up 20 percent in less than six months in some neighborhoods, vacancy rates are below 1 percent, and houses routinely sell for a hundred thousand dollars over offering price).²

Part of the cause is the 70,000 or so jobs created in the Bay Area annually, nearly half a million since 1995.³ Evictions have skyrocketed to make way for the new workers and profiteers of the new industries; at last estimate there were seven official evictions a day in San Francisco, and 70 percent of those evicted leave the city.⁴ For decades San Francisco has been retooling itself to make tourism its primary industry, but in late 1998 a city survey found nearly as many people were employed in the brand-new Internet/multimedia industry as in the old hotel industry, 17,600 compared to 19,200, and that doesn’t count the huge number of freelancers working in multimedia who bring the numbers to more than 50,000 (in a city whose population is about 800,000).⁵ Construction and business services to accommodate this boom have also expanded rapidly, though the construction workers are not building housing they themselves are likely to be able to inhabit. All over the city, buildings are being torn down and replaced with bigger ones, long-vacant lots are being filled in, condos built and sold, old industrial buildings and former nonprofit offices turned into dot-com offices and upscale lofts. As San Francisco’s Urban Habitat Program puts it, “The growing gap between low wage and high wage workers and the scarcity of housing, especially affordable housing for low income households, is resulting in the displacement of low income people by middle and high income households in historically urban communities of color.”⁶ San Francisco and many Silicon Valley cities are exacerbating this housing crisis by encouraging the influx of new enterprises and new jobs without addressing the housing needs such jobs create, thereby ensuring a brutal free-market struggle for places to live and an aggravation of traffic problems that are already among the worst in the nation.

Brian Goggin, Defenestration Building, Sixth and Howard Streets (public artwork of furniture leaping from the windows of a condemned building on Skid Row, with murals on ground level).

Silicon Valley was the sprawling suburban capital of the first wave of new technology—computers, electronics and software design. In recent years San Francisco has become both a bedroom community for the Valley’s highly paid workers and the capital of the next technological wave—the Internet, aka multimedia, with biotechnology about to become a huge presence in Mission Bay. The newness of this new technology is celebrated everywhere, but in some ways it’s just continuing by other means an old history in San Francisco: an assault on the poor that began with urban renewal programs in the 1950s and has taken many forms since. And in some ways, the new technology is returning us to an old era, perhaps to the peak years of the Industrial Revolution, with huge gaps between rich and poor, endless work hours and a spartan work ethic, a devout faith in progress and technology. The manic greed at work here also recalls the Gold Rush, another nineteenth-century phenomenon often referenced in the Bay Area; but the differences matter, too. In 1849, California was a remote outpost and prices on everything soared when the world rushed in: laundresses and farmers could charge prices in proportion to the wealth being dug out of the Motherlode and join the boom, a prospect impossible in globalized contemporary California.

St. John Coltrane Church procession on Turk Street.

The influx of high-tech money is producing a sort of “resort economy” in the Bay Area, with real estate prices so inflated that the people whose work holds the place together can’t afford to live in it. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the latte-makers and janitors live on the other side of a mountain pass that becomes treacherous in winter; in the Bay Area, the help just faces an increasingly long and hard commute, and air pollution has increased with the sprawl accommodating those who can’t live in the most expensive real estate in the country. What Jeff Goodell wrote about the economy of Silicon Valley is coming true here: “The brutality of the Silicon Valley economy is apparent not just to newcomers who arrive here to seek their fortunes but also to anyone who is so unwise as to choose a field of work for love, not money. Schoolteachers, cops, construction workers, nurses, even doctors and lawyers—as the tide of wealth rises around them, many are finding it harder to stay afloat. Despite the utopian rhetoric of Silicon Valley boosters … it’s clear that Silicon Valley is developing into a two-tier society: those who have caught the technological wave and those who are being left behind. This is not simply a phenomenon of class or race or age or the distribution of wealth—although those are all important factors. It’s really about the Darwinian nature of unfettered capitalism when it’s operating at warp speed. And while the divide between the haves and have-nots may be more extreme in Silicon Valley than in other parts of the country right now, that won’t last long. ‘Silicon Valley-style economies are what we can look forward to everywhere,’ says Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell University who has long studied the increasing gap between the rich and poor. ‘In this new economy, either you have a lottery ticket or you don’t. And the people who don’t are not happy about it.’”⁷

When the new economy arrived in San Francisco, it began to lay waste the city’s existing culture—culture both in the sense of cultural diversity, as in ethnic cultures, and of creative activity, artistic and political. Both are under siege, and while the racial aspects of gentrification and urban renewal have often been addressed, this book focuses particularly on creative activity (and, of course, the two are extensively overlapping sets—hip-hop and mural movements being two hallowed examples). Cities are both the administrative hub from which order, control and hierarchy emanate and, traditionally, the place where that order is subverted. This subversion comes from the free space of the city in which people and ideas circulate, and bohemia is most significant as the freest part of the free city, a place where the poor, the radical, the marginal and the creative overlap. Bohemia is not so much a population as a condition, a condition of urbanism where the young go to invent themselves and from which cultural innovation and insurrection arise. As that cultural space contracts, the poor and individual artists will go elsewhere, but bohemia may well go away altogether, here and in cities across the country.

Eviction Defense Network poster, Mission District, 1999, with graphic by Eric Drooker.

Artmaking has been, at least since bohemia and modernism appeared in nineteenth-century Paris, largely an urban enterprise: the closer to museums, publishers, audiences, patrons, politicians, other enemies and each other, the better for artists and for art. For if cities have been essential to artists, artists have been essential to cities. This complex gave rise to the definitive modernisms of the Left Bank, Montmartre and Greenwich Village. Being an artist was one way of being a participant in the debate about meaning and value, and the closer to the center of things one is the more one can participate. This is part of what makes an urbanity worth celebrating, this braiding together of disparate lives, but the new gentrification threatens to yank out some of the strands altogether, diminishing urbanism itself. Perhaps the new urbanism will result in old cities that function like suburbs as those who were suburbia’s blandly privileged take them over. In the postwar years, the white middle class fled cities, which created the crises of abandonment, scarce city revenue, and depression that defined urban trouble through the 1970s, but the poor and the bohemian who stuck to cities often made something lively there anyway; now those who once fled have come back and created an unanticipated crisis of wealth for those raised on the urban crisis of poverty. Wealth has proven able to ravage cities as well as or better than poverty.

In discussions about gentrification here, artists are a controversial subject—sometimes because the focus on the displacement of artists eclipses the displacement of the less privileged in general, sometimes because artists have played roles in promoting gentrification as well as resisting it, sometimes because artists and their ilk are conceived of as middle-class people slumming and playing poor. After all, modern bohemians are often people who were born among the middle class but who chose to live among the poor, while some artists socialize with and service the rich. For the time being, remember that painter means both those who have covered the Mission District with murals celebrating radical history and those who sell in downtown galleries (and that some of those in the downtown galleries, like Enrique Chagoya, are making paintings too incendiary to be publicly sponsored murals). And for this book, bohemian refers to all the participants in the undivided spectrum of radical politics and artistic culture here, a spectrum that includes Marxists who look down on culture and artists who don’t notice politics until it evicts them, as well as a lively community of innovative activists and political cultures, or rather dozens of such communities. Whether it was Allen Ginsberg decrying “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!” in the first reading of Howl in 1955 or the Sierra Club in the early 1960s lobbying for wilderness preservation with lavish photographic books, art and politics have been all tangled up together here for a long time.

Artists, however, are just bit-players in a major transformation of cities. Those who really orchestrate urban development have another agenda altogether. Neil Smith and Peter Williams summed it up in 1986: “The direction of change is toward a new central city dominated by middle-class residential areas, a concentration of professional, administrative, and managerial employment, the upmarket recreation and entertainment facilities that cater to this population (as well as to tourists)…. The moment of the present restructuring is toward a more peripheralized working class, in geographical terms.”⁸ This is the context behind multimedia replacing meatpacking in the South of Market, Fly arriving as the Coltrane church departs in my own Western Addition neighborhood, and valet parking suddenly appearing where lowriders once cruised Mission Street. As for the effects of this gentrification, what is happening in San Francisco is happening everywhere, which is precisely the problem (and because the term gentrification traditionally describes the transformation of a neighborhood rather than a whole city or region, it may be an inadequate term altogether for this awful upgrading). What Bill Saunders, editor of Harvard Design Magazine, writes of the changes in Harvard Square could describe this city and many others: “The new Square reflects the worldwide increase in the imperialism of a small, delocalized number of rich and powerful organizations…. The Square is now: more impersonal (e.g., the sales and service people are rarely familiar or interested in the buyer), more expensive (after inflation), more exclusionary (less welcoming and less affordable to eccentrics, the middle and working classes, and the marginally employed), more predictable, more uniform, and more like other places (a Gap is a Gap is a Gap)…. Along with the Square’s greater polish, luxury and upscale taste come new subtle pressures to be rich and beautiful, constrained and role-bound. The new red brick architecture—often replacing low, tippy, wood-frame buildings—is decorous and solid but boring. One longs for more bad taste, for more surprise, dirt, and looseness, more anarchic, unself-conscious play…. I think of appealing college towns as at least somewhat Bohemian. That word now applies to nothing in the square.”⁹

One Friday night a few weeks after Fly opened, I go there with a friend and look at the crowd mingling with the utter absorbedness of the very young. Clean-cut but aspiring to be cool, the women in very tight and the men in very loose clothes drink big glasses of beer and saki cocktails. The front half of the bar has expensive chairs and frosted red glass light sconces, but in the back, along with a purple pool table and thrift-store couches and chairs, is a mural on shiny purple paint featuring elongated females of various skin colors in skimpy seventies clothes waving their tubular limbs. It’s clearly meant to evoke a fantasy of the area and of an era, a sort of bell-bottomed floating world without strife or tension. The name Fly, written in seventies-style fat round red letters on the illuminated plastic sign outside, evidently refers to the 1970s blaxsploitation Superfly films that director Quentin Tarantino appropriated, a funny reference for a predominantly white kid’s bar in a formerly African-American neighborhood. (A scruffy musician in the neighborhood tells me that Fly claimed “last call” had been called when he went to Fly for a midnight beer, only to find that the well-dressed couple who came in after him was being served.) Fly is across the street from a neighborhood fixture, Eddie’s Café, a decades-old soul-food restaurant, with a more recently arrived Asian-owned liquor-grocery store and an Arab-owned café on the other corners. It’s far posher than the other businesses at this intersection, and its mural is a fantasy substituted for history—a fantasy because it proposes a fictional history based on entertainment, while it participates in erasing the real history of a neighborhood wracked first by urban renewal, then by crack and gentrification. The jarring thing about these privileged young newcomers is that they accept as unquestioned fact what those who were there before them know as deterioration, outrage, erasure, distortion of what came before. The new San Francisco is run for the dot-com workers, multimedia executives and financiers of the new boom, and memory is one of the things that is being lost in the rapid turnover and all-out exile of tenants, organizations, nonchain businesses and even communities.

The storefront Church of St. John Coltrane exemplifies culture in every sense: it’s religious, artistic, ethnic, political and social at the same time. It feeds the poor three times a week and serves as one of the last remaining links to the golden age of the Fillmore District before it was gutted by urban renewal. And as an eccentric, individualist cultural hybrid—making free jazz a sacrament—it represents what has always made San Francisco distinctive, while Fly is a commercial enterprise that could be anywhere people old enough to drink and affluent enough to appreciate hip light fixtures congregate. You could say it’s not fair to compare a bar and a church, but the neighborhood’s African-American bars all vanished long ago—though the former jazz club midway between Fly and St. John’s has become the Justice League, a hip-hop club, and nearby Storyville caters to a mixed crowd of young jazz aficionados. Both bar and church postulate a relationship to African-American cultural history—to jazz and spirituality at the one, to fashion and movies in the other. It may be unkind to single Fly out, but it signifies the new order as neatly as the church signifies the old. Last year a new owner bought the building whose ground-floor storefront the church has inhabited for so long and doubled the church’s rent, a de facto eviction. Probably, like a lot of new landlords who’ve paid enormous prices for San Francisco real estate, he needs a better return on his investment than St. John Coltrane can provide.

The Sunday after my excursion to Fly, I take my bike the few blocks from my home of nearly two decades to the Coltrane church. It’s the first sunny spring morning after a lot of rain, and people seem rejuvenated. There are some others out there waiting with me for the 10 o’clock service, and I read the program for an older man in a tweedy suit who’s getting his glasses out and we begin to talk. He’s lived here half a century and first got into politics here working for Helen Gahagan Douglas, the woman who ran for the Senate against Richard Nixon in 1950. He’s one of the more progressive forces on the Democratic Central Committee, judging by what he says about gentrification and Mayor Willie Brown, and he’s come here to see what can be done to keep the church in its present location. A couple of shaggy young men sit on the curb. A couple shows up, then another man. At 10:15 Bishop Franzo King drives by and his daughters and Sister Deborah, a sturdy, radiant woman with a kerchief over her dreadlocks, get out. As Sister Deborah puts a key in the storefront door, a young white guy in black hipster sunglasses and a stocking cap shaped vaguely like a fez opens up from inside, and we all shuffle in. There’s a good stereo system on which Coltrane plays while the white guy in the glasses sings softly and one of the daughters hums along. The church’s right wall is lined with glossy paintings on some kind of board, like giant playing cards, portraying figures in the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine sensibility of flattened, large-eyed, stiff and highly stylized figures. They’re beautifully painted, and in them all the angels, saints and the Madonna and child have dark skin. The left wall features clippings and the text of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Off by itself is a smaller painting of Coltrane himself in Byzantine-icon style, with delicate flames lined up like a graduating class inside the mouth of his saxophone. A row of fluorescent lights illuminate these and the altar that’s off-center in the back of this unremodeled storefront. Front and center on the altar is a portrait of Jesus with neat dreadlocks.

Bishop King has put on what looks like a red yarmulke, the six battered wooden pews have become half-full, and the service begins with the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and other prayers in a formal style. But after the prayers, he begins to preach like the African-American Baptists and Methodists in the neighborhood, fervently, rhythmically, with antiphony supplied by Sister Deborah’s rich voice in the back and the two young women up front clapping hands. The pale hipster in the dark glasses takes up a tambourine and beats it above his head. Some of the people in the pews are swaying to the sounds. Bishop King’s prayers ask God to soften the hearts of those up high and to care for the needy below, and he says that Heaven is the true home of this church that is becoming homeless. Sister Deborah comes forward to sing with a cordless mike, and Bishop King gets behind the red drum set next to her and drums away with the same stateliness he preaches with. Turning sideways, I see that a young Asian couple has come in and we’ve got all the races represented, if the guy with the soul patch is as Hispanic as he looks. “The strongest argument for San Francisco over, say, Dallas (other than weather and natural elements like hills and oceans),” my friend Catherine e-mails me from the Mission District that day, “is that here people still mix.”

I skip out on bible class to bicycle through Golden Gate Park, which begins a few blocks west of the church, and I pass groups of martial artists training, elderly Chinese doing tai chi, slack-faced men in cars waiting to be solicited for adventures in the shrubbery, scrambling small children and bounding dogs on the lawns, rollerbladers dancing to a boombox, homeless people sunning themselves and what looks to be a matador class with three students and an instructor (but no bull) waving hot pink capes. On my way back from a view of the Pacific, I stop at the park’s M. H. de Young Memorial Museum and admire the way the Portuguese émigré artist Rigo has turned his space in a group show of Bay Area artists into a mini-museum of American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier. Rigo’s installation includes a display of Peltier’s laboriously realistic paintings of indigenous people, a facsimile of his jail cell, and a series of footsteps, one for each year of Peltier’s long incarceration on dubious charges. In other galleries of the museum paintings, prints and photographs dating back to the nineteenth century depict the city’s history.

I come home from the park to a phone message from the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. When I call him back, he tells me of several incidents in which Latinos were attacked or thrown out of bars in a Mission District that no longer feels like their home. “It is horrible, horrible, horrible,” he says with emotion, and he repeats what several others have told me, that the San Francisco police are busting the neighborhood’s Latino bars for every possible code infraction, thereby accelerating their turnover into enterprises catering to wealthier and whiter new arrivals. The Mission is named after Mission Dolores, the church built by Franciscan missionaries in the eighteenth century, and it has had a Latino presence ever since, notably since the 1930s, but that population is under siege—mostly by money. Guillermo tells me that twenty of his friends in the Mission have already left, and the community he came to be part of five years ago may not exist much longer.

A triple wave of real estate rapaciousness is evicting people from their homes, putting nonprofits and small enterprises out of business or out of town, and bringing in hordes of chain stores that are erasing the distinctness and the memory of San Francisco, but for days after my conversation with Guillermo the news seems to come in pairs. In the New Mission News, on the left side: “Mission Armory Developer Says He Wants to Do the Right Thing”—a fortress vacant for decades in one of the bleaker parts of the North Mission, once proposed as a homeless shelter, is now slated to become a dot-com worksite. On the right side, “Proposed Resource Center for the Homeless Is Now Homeless.” And in the San Francisco Independent there’s a double pairing: on the front page of the Neighborhood Section, “Street Tree Planting Programs in Budget Peril” and “Planners OK Pottery Barn for Market and Castro” with the subhead “Neighborhood Divided over Chain Store.” These stories jump to the back page, where the left side has a new story, “Popular Richmond [District] Dance Studio Faces Eviction,” with an aside that dance studios all over the city are losing their spaces. A week later, the Chronicle runs a gossip item on “startup billionaire Marc Greenberg,” his twenty-million-dollar house, his half-million-dollar bachelor party and the million he paid Elton John to play at the wedding, followed a few pages later by passionate letters about what untaxed Internet commerce will do to independent bookstores and to the community such places encourage. San Francisco institutions such as Finocchio’s—probably the nation’s longest running drag-queen revue—have lost their leases. Fear and eviction come up every day. My favorite example is a letter to “Ask Isadora,” the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s sex-advice column, by a masochist who wanted to know whether he really had to obey his dominatrix by sexually servicing their ancient landlord. Though the issue for him was about the extent to which submissiveness must go, the issue for her was preserving the lease by any means necessary. San Francisco’s housing crisis makes even dominatrixes cower.

“Where will you go?” is the question tenants ask each other, and the answer is always another city, another state. A woman who works at a domestic violence shelter tells me that the entire premise of domestic violence counseling—that the spouse should leave the batterer—is being undermined by the lack of places for such victims to go beyond the temporary shelters. For landlords, housing is an investment, but for tenants it’s the terms on which the most intimate aspects of their lives are played out: home. This is a private psychological crisis as well as a public economic one, and just as homelessness can make people outright crazy so the threat of it can strain character.

I drop by Global Exchange, the human rights and environmental organization that did much at the end of 1999 to rally opposition to the World Trade Organization in Seattle, and meet its director, Medea Benjamin. She tells me that a dot-com has just rented the space below them on this scruffy stretch of Mission Street, and they’re probably facing an unaffordable rent increase. A little further down Mission Street, the Bay View Bank Building, an office building housing clinics, Spanish-language media, and nonprofits, was leased to a dot-com, which is evicting them all. In the old days of gentrification, getting bounced from a neighborhood meant you just landed somewhere else, but in this game of musical chairs, the only available chairs are over the horizon. The day I read that the Pacific Stock Exchange is going to close, I run into Cliff Hengst and find out that he’s going to lose his Mission Street home of nine years. The Stock Exchange is closing because the new economy is virtual: it doesn’t require locations. Cliff is losing his home because the people who work in the new economy aren’t virtual, and they make more money than he does. The apartment he shares with his boyfriend Scott and the auto body shop below it will be torn down to make way for condos. Cliff knows four artists who’ve moved to L.A. in the last month, he tells me, and he figures he’ll move there, too, since no one like him can afford to relocate within the city. I figure San Francisco without Cliff will be just a subtle bit bleaker. Your basic half-Indonesian gay San Francisco artist, Cliff has contributed to the city in countless ways, like a lot of the others who are heading into exile.

In times of tyranny, the citizens talk of democracy and justice; in our time we talk of public space, architecture, housing, urban design, cultural geography, community and landscape—which suggests that the current crises are located in location itself. Geography may be the central discipline of our time, as visual art, literature, film, history all take up questions of place. Car-based suburbia has been a particularly nowheresville version of utopia since the Second World War, but the spread of chains, the gentrification of cities, the ability of administrators to control increasingly subtle details of public space and public life all threaten to make urban places as bland and inert as suburbia, to erase place. Much has been said about the New Urbanism, whereby suburbs are designed to resemble small towns, but what is happening in San Francisco and cities across the country is a new New Urbanism in which cities function like suburbs.

This is a story about love and money. Or a story about love, money and location. The new economy is as different from the old economy as a tourist economy is to the remote village it suddenly lands in; the campesinos can’t afford those hotel rooms and drinks, and San Franciscans can’t afford the transformed San Francisco. As things we took for granted vanish day by day, San Franciscans’ love for their city becomes more and more evident. People speak constantly, obsessively, of what is happening and mourn what is being lost. Several photographers devote themselves to documenting the vanishing places—the same kind of salvage photography once used to document vanishing fourth world cultures and crafts or that Eugene Atget and Charles Marville used to capture a vanishing Paris. The artist Chip Lord makes a video documentary on what the new technology is doing to San Francisco’s public spaces and civic life. A few people calling themselves the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project put up posters calling for class war. The Mission Artists Gentrification Insurrection organizes a March of the Evicted, and its posters with a brilliant graphic by Lower East Side artist Eric Drooker linger on the streets long afterwards. People hold meetings, work on eviction defenses, write letters to the editor. Everyone talks about the transformation of the city, and almost every tenant talks about fear of losing his or her perch here. It’s in the news every day. It is the main news here and has been for the last few years. It’s a crisis, a boom, and an obsession.

Love of place should not be confused with nationalism, which is a ferocious identification with an abstract idea or an ethnicity. To love one’s place is to love particulars, details, routines, memories, minutia, strangers, encounters, surprises. It’s common now for lovers of rural places to fight to preserve them, and what they love is usually the appearance of a place, the activities possible in that place, sometimes the fauna as well as the flora and form, but also what that place means. Love of a city is a more complicated thing, in that it’s a love of one’s fellow humans in quantity, for their eccentricities and frailties, as well as a love of buildings, institutions such as Halloween in the Castro or the Chinese New Year Parade, particular places, ethnic mixes; but also a love of one’s own liberation by and in connection to these phenomena. What is happening here eats out the heart of the city from the inside: the infrastructure is for the most part being added to rather than torn down, but the life within it is being drained away, a siphoning off of diversity, cultural life, memory, complexity. What remains will look like the city that was—or like a brighter, shinier, tidier version of it—but what it contained will be gone. It will be a hollow city.

Every day somebody’s apartment or house is turned from a home into a commodity and put on the market, and they join the ranks of the displaced. A steady stream of the displaced is trouping to the East Bay, where they are accelerating the gentrification of Oakland and Berkeley, whose poor are in turn moving further from the center themselves. As Paul Rauber put it in an East Bay Express article about this ripple effect, “That means Arun boots Deidre, who boots Miguel, who crosses the bay to boot Shawana.”¹⁰ But many—the poor as well as artists—are leaving the Bay Area altogether. Susan Miller, executive director of New Langton Arts, estimates that 30 to 40 percent of the artists here a few years ago have left: Film Arts Foundation, for example, is not only losing its lease but its constituency of independent filmmakers. American Indian Contemporary Arts, a downtown nonprofit gallery, was evicted last fall in favor of a dot-com, and probably won’t be able to find a replacement location.¹¹ San Francisco’s rich cultural life arises out of a European-style density (it has the densest population in the US outside New York) and out of the combination of many ethnicities, classes, media, resources, seekers after the adventure of making culture, revolution, identity. These things are not portable; you can move the species but not the habitat.

Of course, this is happening because San Francisco is such a desirable place. The story goes that the first wave of technology workers were just electronics and software geeks who were content to live in the suburban sprawl of Silicon Valley, but along with the Internet came a more hip technocracy that demanded nightlife, grit and sensibility. Just as tourists can love a place into unrecognizability and homogeneity, so these young workers and their older bosses and backers may eviscerate the city. Some of them are buying art, and sales are booming for a few artists—but that doesn’t counterbalance the impact on the arts community as a whole. Even the Wall Street Journal notes that the dot-com newcomers like cover bands more than innovative ones, and so San Francisco’s famously creative music scene is withering as well.¹² Whatever the Internet may be bringing the masses stranded far from civilization, the Internet economy in its capital is producing a massive cultural die-off, not a flowering.

San Francisco used to be the great anomaly. What happened here was interesting precisely because it was different from what was happening anywhere else. We were a sanctuary for the queer, the eccentric, the creative, the radical, the political and economic refugees, and so they came and reinforced the city’s difference. In some ways the city’s difference goes all the way back to the Gold Rush, when the absence of traditional social structures, the overwhelmingly young and male population, and wild fluctuations of wealth produced independent women, orgiastic behavior, epidemics of violence and an atmosphere of liberation. “They had their faults,” the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth once remarked of San Francisco’s original inhabitants, “but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather.”¹³ For many decades afterwards, the city was celebrated as a cosmopolitan version of the Wild West town, with malleable social mores, eccentrics and adventurers a big part of the social mix. By the twentieth century, it was becoming a center for immigrant Italian anarchists, Wobblies and union organizers—“not only the most tightly organized city in America but … the stronghold of trade unionism in the United States,” asserted Carey McWilliams.¹⁴ Conscientious objectors flocked here after World War II, and the poets who would later be celebrated as beats and as the San Francisco Renaissance started coming in the 1940s and 1950s; African-American emigration to the wartime jobs of San Francisco produced another postwar cultural flourishing of jazz and nightlife. With bars like the Black Cat, it was also a haven for gays and lesbians early on, and remains one today for those who can afford it. It was the place where the counterculture of what gets called “the sixties” flourished most, as well as a major center for punk culture and related subversions after 1977.

Labor Day parade on Market Street, 1935 (damaged photo). Courtesy San Francisco Public Library.

Throughout the 1980s, it was a sanctuary city for refugees from the Central American wars, and the movements sometimes called multiculturalism flourished here, from the environmental justice movement to the 1980s explosion of visual arts dealing with questions of ethnicity and identity. And of course since the Sierra Club was founded here in 1892, the San Francisco Bay Area has been a major center for environmental activism and the evolution of environmental ideas. Feminism, human rights activism, pacifism, Buddhism, paganism, alternative medicine, dance, rock and roll, jazz are some of the other phenomena infusing the local culture. The city has also changed radically many times. In 1960, it was 78 percent white, but by 1980 whites were less than 50 percent of the population and it was the nation’s most ethnically diverse large city (with a diversity similar in many ways to what it had during the Gold Rush).¹⁵ But San Francisco’s is a history of pruning as well as blooming: since the 1950s it has been mutating from a blue-collar port city of manual labor and material goods to a white-collar center of finance, administration, tourism and, now, the “knowledge industries.” Since 1997 this change has accelerated spectacularly. As Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, put it, we have had fifteen years of change compressed into a couple of dozen months, and nobody saw it coming.

This is a story about love, but there is also a lot of anger. Some people have focused on “newcomers,” and a sardonic discussion of what constitutes a San Franciscan—how many years, what kind of habits—filled the letters page of the SF Weekly for a while. Some people have focused on yuppies, and there is definitely tension on both sides of that divide—those who know they are considered yuppies, and those who hate whoever qualifies as a yuppie in their eyes. Some people have said that it’s not the fault of those who came here looking for a job that there’s a housing crisis, and it’s the local politicos, real estate speculators, greedy landlords and developers who should be targeted. Some fault a system in which a basic human need—housing—exists largely as a free-market commodity, so that need takes a back seat to profit.

My own writing has been about culture and politics in other senses. I have written about senses of place, and the geography of culture, about specific issues and sites, as well as about particular artists and movements. Lately it seems to me that even to be able to recognize and resist the forces that threaten the environments and communities that sustain us requires time and space that are rapidly eroding: time eroding as an ever-more-expensive world presses us to produce and consume ever more rapidly, catapults information and distraction at us, eliminates the unstructured time for musing and meeting; space eroding as public space, access to the sites of power, culture and protest—and also the unexploited space where one can hear one’s own thoughts—is undermined. My last book was a history of walking, and it is in part an exploration of the circumstances in which culture, contemplation and community are possible and of the embodied and geographically grounded basis of thinking and imagining. This book is about a more gritty version of the same subject: San Francisco has been not only the great refuge for the nation’s pariahs and nonconformists; it has been the breeding ground of new ideas, mores and movements social, political and artistic. To see the space in which those things were incubated be homogenized into just another place for over-paid-but-overworked producer-consumers is to witness a great loss, not only for the experimentalists, but for the world that has benefited from the better experiments (and been entertained by the sillier ones). Think of San Francisco as both a laboratory of the new and a preserve for the old subversive functionality of cities. Think about what happens if both these aspects get bulldozed by the technology economy. The Internet too may be a laboratory for the new, but even if it is a great organizing tool it is not presently of much value for social critique or the expression of cultural genius.

A 1971 documentary about San Francisco titled “The City That Waits to Die” presumed that San Francisco would be destroyed by its unstable geology, but the earthquake that has come at the millennium has been a temblor of capital and its unstable distribution, altering San Francisco more than could almost any natural disaster. This book is not about the new technology economy, nor is it an economic history of cities or gentrification. It is a portrait of what a sudden economic boom is doing to a single city and a reflection on what is being lost and what its value—its nonmonetary value—is. It focuses almost entirely on San Francisco, not because what is happening here is unique, but because it so resembles what is happening elsewhere that I believe it can stand alone as an example of a crisis in American cities. Hollow City focuses on artists, particularly visual artists, because artists are the indicator species of this ecosystem: from their situation can be gauged the overall breadth or shrinkage of the margin for noncommercial activity, whether that activity is artistic, political, spiritual or social.

A few days after my excursion to the Coltrane church and the park, I go to see Chris Carlsson in his office on Market Street, a big room that with its posters, clippings, abandoned coffee cups, bicycles and beat-up furniture looks more like the living room of an activist household than anyplace else I visit now—and it is an activist household of sorts, both the site for Chris’s typesetting business and a gathering place for myriad political activities. In 1981 Chris cofounded Processed World, a situationist magazine analyzing and promoting subversion of the white-collar workplace. Along with Re/Search publications and the punk-and-populist-politics magazine Maximum Rock’n’Roll, P.W. represents a little-recognized punk-culture golden age for alternative publishing (Processed World folded in 1993, but the other two grind on). In the mid-1990s Chris cofounded Critical Mass, the collective bicycle ride that has since become a global phenomenon to protest the lack of safe space for bicycle transit and to help create that space. For a few days in 1997, San Francisco’s Critical Mass became a national news story about bicyclists’ confrontation with the law and with Mayor Willie Brown. Chris’s concerns with public space, technology and social life continued with the City Lights anthology Reclaiming San Francisco he co-edited, and with his CD-ROM Shaping San Francisco expanding on that history installed in two independent bookstores and the main library to prove that the new technologies need not be privatizing. A guy whose hectic conversational pace seems younger than his forty-something years and whose nearly white, sea-captainish beard seems older, he settled down on one of the thrashed couches in front of a bookcase full of San Francisco’s history to give me his version.

“I’ve lived here since 1978. I came here as a twenty-one-year-old guy and got a job with an environmental group doing canvassing and thought, This is it, I want to live in San Francisco. At that point Haight Street was fifty percent boarded up and overrun with alcohol and heroin and there was no sense of gentrification being around the corner at all. When I got here it felt kind of bleak and slumlike. I didn’t know what to expect and didn’t have a sense of the previous cultures. The punk scene was unfolding around me, and the city’s been reshaping itself around me ever since. I have a sense of connectedness to San Francisco as this site of change. There’s something very exciting about the endless influx of new energy looking for something inexplicably magical. Everybody keeps coming here to renew that quest or had until now. And that’s exactly what I think we’re losing at this moment, this endless arrival of the young, the radical, the political and the marginal and the edgy. They’re not coming here anymore. If they do come here, they can’t stay or they’ve gotta find themselves a six-day-a-week job, which is what people here think is an acceptable mode.

“It’s ironic that, in a city that was the founding place of the eight-hour day in the 1860s, there’s no eight-hour day anymore 140 years later. This is the first city in North America where the eight-hour day was really established. The first technological coup against organized labor was the transcontinental railroad, which broke the back of the eight-hour day in San Francisco. The railroad builders brought all the unemployed laborers back from the east, but before the railroad was finished there was a tight labor market. The workers who were here at the end of the Civil War realized, ‘Hey, we can control this,’ and so they published decrees in the local newspapers announcing the eight-hour day. Group after group did that, and in 1867 they had a march of a thousand workers up Market Street marching in the order by which their trade had established the eight-hour day—but by ’72 it was gone.

The St. John Coltrane congregation arrives at its temporary home.

“Now we live in a world in which the eight-hour day is not only a wistful memory for a lot of people, but they don’t even conceptualize it as an issue. You individually have to deal with remaining competitive in the market, and the number of hours you work is just not a relevant issue to band together with other people about, because there’s no sense of class, no sense of shared commitment. You are an independent entrepreneur in the world. Your job is to work as much and as long as you can in the labor market. It’s a laughable predicament, and there’s not much time to find your way out of it, it’s a bit of a rat’s maze. And that’s speedup. That’s my experience of San Francisco: we are living through the greatest speedup in human history, and nobody’s even saying it out loud.”

“Is there a dot-com culture?”

“No, there’s no culture, we’re all greedy … no,

that’s a joke. A few months ago in Fortune magazine

there was an article called ‘Doing Business

the Dot-Com Way.’ The priority is definitely making

money—fast. It’s a multicultural business—or

maybe forced to be. It’s hard to find skilled people,

so you’re drawing from everywhere in the world:

Asia, Africa, India, Europe—anywhere skills have

been acquired.

“It’s a fast-paced industry, with long hours and

constant learning—though sometimes it’s not the

money, it’s the adrenaline.”

Tools for Managing Loyalty

“The company is in e-marketing. We provide

loyalty solutions. We build the technology that

makes people come back to a website.

We think of it as a tool that manages loyalty

between customer and company.

“Most of the people in this business

are very young, and they don’t all have

experience in communication.

So you have to reconcile that with

this space we work in. There are lots

of places to sit and meet: couches,

outdoor tables, the pool table.

It’s a casual environment.”

“This company was founded in the late

’90s. When I came on board there were 80

people. We now have over 400 employees,

including all the acquisitions we’ve made.

“Now that the company is so large, it’s

hard to know what’s going on. We talk a lot

about how to make people happy. How do

we make displaced people happy in a new

company?”

“I feel bad that the dot-com movement is the first trend in this city that’s pushing people out. It’s all about economics. I’m in this industry and I think it should be more socially responsible. We’re becoming this technological, scientific center. I think science can hurt social life.” –Financial systems analyst

Vacant lot, Western Addition, 1950s. Photograph by David Johnson.