PreservationNation

By Anthony Veerkamp

San Francisco’s natural environment is one of soft, feminine contours. The transition from bay to marsh to dunes to hills happens almost imperceptibly, with the ebb and flow of coastal fog lending the whole landscape a gauzy quality. Alas, it didn’t take long for the men who built this town to assert masculine rigidity and order to what is, after all, the tip of a frankly phallic peninsula.

The clearest manifestation of this urge to conquer nature and make her submit to man’s will is the orthogonal street grid that cinches San Francisco like a Victorian corset, leaving only her twin peaks untamed. Ironically, in the name of order and expediency, San Francisco’s developers unwittingly gave the city the distinctive romantic quality that makes it like no other city in the world – a place that practically demands to be sung about. Cue the band: “San Francisco, open your Golden Gates!”

As most visitors quickly realize, San Francisco isn’t built on a single grid, but rather an assortment of grids, each marching to its own master. The primary east-west grid that grew from the Spanish pueblo Yerba Buena’s central plaza (today’s Portsmouth Square in Chinatown) was followed by the diagonal grid of super blocks and alleyways that was developed south of Markey Street by Yerba Buena’s American usurpers. (By the way, as far as I’m concerned, go ahead and say “Frisco,” but please don’t call South of Market “SoMa” – ick!) South of South of Market is the Mission District, whose own grid is roughly in line with the main Yerba Buena grid, but is oriented north-south instead of east-west. Got it?

Within these grids, Euclidian order reigns, but eventually they bump up against each other like tectonic plates, forming an urban planner’s no man’s land just south of the intersection of Market and Gough. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way – there’s an 1852 plan of San Francisco that shows the grids neatly coming together around a boomerang-shaped plaza.

However, as is so often the case with grand urban schemes, greed won out over grace, and the plaza never came to pass. Instead, and in an ironic twist of fate, the block that was to be the plaza contains a spec office building that houses the City of San Francisco Planning Department. Today, the messy clot of streets doesn’t even have an agreed upon name. It is, nonetheless, an area of keen interest to me, as it’s the neighborhood that I call home.

I know, I know – you were expecting a brilliant paean to that gayest of gayborhoods, the Castro, whose totemic Castro Theater blade sign is right up there with the Golden Gate Bridge and the Transamerica Pyramid as icons of San Francisco. (The Castro sign, by the way, is looking pretty spiffy after getting a makeover for its starring role in the film “Milk.”)

The fact is, I have decidedly mixed feelings about the Castro. When I’m in a good mood (yes, it happens) and I look up Market Street and see the outsized rainbow flag at Market and Castro blowing in the wind (flags in San Francisco never merely flutter), I sometimes get a bit of a lump in my throat. But I’m just as likely to go on a rant over how the Castro and other big city gay neighborhoods may be approaching functional obsolescence; or how my own life is quite gay enough as it is, thank you, without being surrounded by more of my tribe; or how the best way to “Celebrate Diversity!” (as the bumper stickers implore) is to live in a truly diverse neighborhood.

But the simple fact is that even if I wanted to live in the Castro, the Castro doesn’t want me. Or, more precisely, the Castro has little room for me or anyone who fails to make the pay grade required to buy a home where median prices (even today) run north of $700 a square foot.

So instead, I live down the hill from the Castro in a neighborhood whose most notable feature is an elevated freeway. Even real estate agents struggle to give my neighborhood appeal. They have no problem calling half of the Tenderloin “Lower Nob Hill,” but the best they can come up with for my ‘hood is “easy freeway access.” Not exactly flattering, but at least it’s honest, as the misbegotten Central Freeway belches out its traffic practically on my doorstep.

When folks ask me where in San Francisco I live, I usually say the Mission, which is almost true. I could just say I live on Valencia Street, which actually is true, but here in San Francisco, “Valencia Street” carries a lot of baggage. You see, during the go-go days of the dot-com boom, twenty-somethings with more money than sense decided that Valencia Street was the place to be. Almost overnight, it went from being a Latino and lesbian backwater most noted for its taquerias to San Francisco’s “it” neighborhood – the place where Bill took Chelsea out for lunch at the Slanted Door.

Before long, Valencia Street was the front line in a decidedly uncivil war over gentrification. Uphill and to the west were the already-gentrified neighborhoods of the Castro and Noe Valley. To the east was the “real” Mission, and community activists were hell-bent to keep it that way. I’m not exactly sure when the Mission hit the tipping point, but the secret was definitely out.

This all left me feeling at war with myself. I was at once an agent and victim of gentrification. I had been able to settle in the area through a City of San Francisco affordable housing program that supported first-time homebuyers – a program for which I was eligible courtesy of my career choice. For a while, I could play devil’s advocate on both sides of the battle, but once the valet parkers started popping up, I knew which side I was on. I never actually keyed a BMW, but I thought about it…a lot.

And then, just like that, the dot-com boom went bust. Some smart kids saw the writing on the wall and cashed out; many of the others found themselves moving back in with mom and dad. Remarkably, the Mission survived the Barbarian invasion pretty much intact, and it remains the heart of Latino San Francisco. In fact, my stretch of Valencia Street has proven remarkably resistant to change.

After all the ups and downs, my block is anchored by the same stalwart businesses that were here back before there was an e-anything: at the north end by an old-school gay piano bar called Martuni’s, and at the south end by a bar called Zeitgeist, which is undoubtedly the best place in San Francisco to drink outdoors provided that 1) it’s one of the twelve days a year that the weather is warm enough for that sort of thing, and 2) you can get a table away from the somewhat stinky port-o-potties.

In between the two bars, there’s a motley crew of businesses that includes a tattoo parlor, a laundromat, a Baha’i Church, an “oriental massage” parlor, a grocery/liquor store, and not one but two medical marijuana dispensaries. Glamorous, huh? I’d be lying if I pretended there weren’t days when I want nothing more than a bit of good ole’ fashioned gentrification, especially now that the risk of a socioeconomic coup seems to have waned. I have no issue with pot clubs, but do we need two in one block? What is this, Macy’s and Gimbals?

But there is also something both thrilling and reassuring about living in the midst of over-the-top diversity. In my condo complex alone, I know that Mandarin, Thai, Russian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Farsi, Tagalog, Hindi and Vietnamese are spoken. Of course, gay and lesbian (and all their rich dialects) are spoken too, but they don’t dominate.

In my neighborhood, gays and lesbians are just part of a modern-day Babel. There’s no doubt that together we form a community, but I use the term “community” in its most neutral – and perhaps most meaningful – sense. We are not a group of people who have come together because of shared belief, ethnic heritage or “lifestyle.” Instead, the main thing we have in common is that we can’t afford to live in Pacific Heights. There’s certainly very little that’s “intentional” about my neighborhood. I’m not even sure if it’s accurate to say that we’re a particularly tolerant community. As in ancient Babel, we misunderstand one another frequently, and get on each other’s nerves a lot.

Really, what I believe we’re all about is coexistence. Fate has thrown us together, and we’re determined to make the best of it. Despite our startling diversity, here at the corner of Valencia and McCoppin, we’ve managed to get near-full compliance with some really complicated recycling rules. We may not hold the key to world peace, but sometimes, the seemingly simple act of communal composting is reason enough to celebrate.

Anthony Veerkamp is the senior program officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Western Office. He can think of few greater pleasures than a warm evening in San Francisco spent with friends and strangers drinking in the Zeitgeist beer garden (away from the port-o-potties, of course).

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 1:12 pm and is filed under lgbt heritage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.