One truth of San Francisco is that it's a city-tumor built upon itself. It was stolen, and stolen, and stolen again, land taken first from the Ramaytush and Muwekma Ohlone tribes by the Catholics of the eponymous mission, and then again and again built to shine and squatted in and left to rot and squatted in again, in wave after wave of gold rushes and life-seeking immigration bringing and building and burning and living in what remains from the last few waves.
It felt very vivid, yesterday, after an impromptu urgent dentist visit, to walk into a city I've walked in for ten years and see it again after it's started to be somewhat inhabited again after the COVID shutdowns.
All images in here have been taken in the Castro and west-of-Mission neighborhoods where I ended up walking on Thursday.
A heavily tattered bisexual pride flag flies from above a shuttered store on Market Street, in the Castro district of San Francisco.
More photos after the break. ⬇
The Pride flag flies over the Castro neighborhood. First Scandinavian enclave, then working-class Irish and Italian neighborhood, it was one of the locations where discharged gay servicement gathered during and after World War II, building up again to an upscale destination to become one of the first gay neighborhoods of the US, and finally becoming one of the epicenters in the rising cost-of-living bubble that expelled much of the lower-income — predominantly non-cis, non-white, non-male — queer population from the city just prior to COVID. Layers and remains of each of these modes persist in the neighborhood.
An old storefront shows modern, statement furniture pieces and a large black-and-white photo that has been decorated so that the model in it appears to have a face mask made of colored gemstones, from a store window in the Castro neighborhood.
It always feels, in some way, that this is land where we live in the ruins of previous attempts: joyous attempts, effective ones, still washed out by the ultraliberal and reactionary forces that drive the economy of the region.
Content and platform holders that drive the online conversation, and push for the erasure of marginalized experiences while allowing the hard-right to flourish, are mostly stationed here. Many low-income queer people who live in the region have been priced out by a city that's been consistently in the last few years in the top 5 for cost-of-living indices in the United States. Years of consolidation of a local dynasty of mayoral and county power — springboard to both state and national Democrat politics: Feinstein, Pelosi, Newsom, Harris — and the presence of big Republican-leaning money have all but cemented a carceral attitude toward the vast segment of the population who lives in poverty and is unhoused or needs help with addiction.
A long while ago, thinking of the average state of the turn-of-the-century architecture that characterizes most of the northern part of the city, I would've said we're squatting in ruins. Nowadays, I realize that perhaps the ruins we are squatting in are less about buildings and more about communities, and that we are creating new ruins of this kind every day.
Against a gray sky, a brewery sign is affixed to the tower-like corner of a typical San Francisco home in a state of some disrepair, at the edge where the Castro neighborhood gives way to Mission Dolores.
From a bench in Dolores Park, we see a view of the upper area of the park and the eastern portion of the city — largely toward the Mission and Bernal Heights — made less substantial by haze against a gray sky. The bench has an anti-homeless armrest attachment in the middle.
Amongst the façades — themselves in apparent need of repair — local people struggle to produce a coherent response to the local and national forces that produce community chokeholds here.
On the Guerrero Street side of Dolores Park, cars — some expensive — are parked near a crossing with a red light. Small and inconsequential on the corner building, a “Spread Love, Stop Hate” sign is a tiny splash of color against the gray sky and the muted green of the Guerrero palm strip.
At a crossing on the Guerrero Street side of Dolores Park, on a pole, a taped black-and-white printer-paper sign for the SaveTheCastroTheater.org campaign explains that the legacy of the LGBTQ+-friendly Castro Theater is in potential jeopardy due to an ongoing renovation.
Street art of mummies, with one in the foreground with very stereotypical Mexican signifiers — a sombrero, a tied handkerchief — with a scroll that says ‘La tierra es de quien la trabaja’ (land is of those who cultivate it), an Emiliano Zapata quote here attributed to ‘Emiliano Muskpata’. The street art is on the high wall of a staircase leading to one of two Victorian-style houses, the one with the art on it in a state of some disrepair, against a gray sky.
There is still life here, and the continued push of counterculture. As is usual, capital has absorbed it — enshrining places and people who could do so much better into picturesque snapshots of themselves without doing much about what they represent. The birthplace of the idea of computer icons has turned need into more iconography, tiny dioramas it only thinks about as frozen in time.
Carts of books outside renowned used bookstore Dog Eared Books, in its location in the post Valencia St. neighborhood.
⚠️ content warning: mention of rape, death in the next photo.
An entrance alcove with a door, covered in graffiti, to the former location of the Borderlands bookstore. A sticker over the cracked window pane insert shows an ourobouros image with ‘Kill Your Local Rapist’ in its center.
The ‘pirate store’ at 826 Valencia, a charity that encourages art and creative writing for children, shows ‘Misunderstood Monster Ads’ and cardboard inserts of pirates playing guitar and sea creatures inside a classic window-shopping setup adopted by many other for-profit merchants at Valencia St.
An art installation peeks out from a storefront window with a large For Lease sign on Valencia St. (The installation is ‘Squirt Pug and Junk Food’, by Andrea Bergen, a papier-mâché piece.)
The social justice messages of the murals at Clarion Alley peek from the side of Community Thrift Store on Valencia St. Many tours of the city will gesture at or show the murals as an oddity and an attraction, as they do with much street art in the city, without engaging with the messages of the people — largely people of color — who have painted them.
The ‘little Roxie’, a movie theater built into what was a traditional San Francisco storefront. A handpainted wooden sign hangs in the entryway and the windows are almost entirely covered with movie posters, upon which printed synopses and staff recommendations have been pasted.
