City Lights Bookshop, an icon of Beat Era rebellion.. and a Mecca for tourists

"San Francisco is the capital of Real America, and it's in terrible danger"

© Jen Burke Anderson, October 2000

We're all dressed in black, staring at the coffin on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. Thereâs a good couple hundred of us; most are young. Some of us huddle under black umbrellas, though the October sky is at its brightest, most coquettish blue.

The cops look bored. God knows how many times they've seen this kind of spectacle, heard these kind of speeches, eyeballed the tatty, painted, unhinged likes of us. The coffin represents San Francisco Arts and Culture. Dancers, club-goers, writers and activists march up and lovingly place flowers and trinkets upon it.

But presently a tanklike woman with flowing grey hair approaches the microphone at the top of the steps next to the coffin, and the real protest begins.

"San Francisco has deep roots in radical culture. We didn't back down during Vietnam, we didn't back down during the AIDS crisis, we didn't back down when the U.S. was terrorizing El Salvador, and weâre sure as hell not backing down now!"

She's Old Guard, and as she shouts the dated leftese of someone who's been in San Francisco too long, nonetheless we begin to feel the power and presence of our ancestors: the Beats, the punks, the ravers, and that subculture to end all subcultures, the Hippies. She now barks out the various "-isms" that comprise bigotry, without really explaining what exactly these things have to do with hot-shot developers evicting us to make a fast buck. But nevermind, we're with her, it's a powerful speech and our sense of importance is swelling. I've got tears in my eyes and, for the first time in recent memory, I'm proud to be American.

TWO AMERICAS

There are two Americas, I was telling my Irish friend. There's False America--fast food, Microsoft, Nike, action films, ugly architecture, aseptic suburbs where everyone buys lots of stuff by way of convincing themselves the world revolves around them.

Then there is Real America: Emerson, Thoreau, Thomas Paine, Walt Whitman. Real America is about escaping oppression, creating something new. Thereâs an emphasis on simplicity, on being "real.". Great American art isn't known for its cleverness and intellectual vigour; rather for its honesty and directness, its connection to nature (be it human nature or otherwise). To paraphrase socialist writer Michael Harrington, "America has a good heart, not necessarily a good mind".

The same Frenchmen who firebomb McDonaldâs come here to gape at Yellowstone National Park. The same hip English kids who sneer at our crap TV shows also worship at the altar of Lou Reed, Robert Johnson, Scott Walker, James Brown, and Johnny Cash. Cynical Euro-intellectuals save all year to come to the Burning Man festival, where they gaze at the flaming freak show around them and smile, "It's very...different here."

San Francisco is the capital of Real America, and it's in terrible danger.

A BRIEF HISTORY

Baghdad By the Bay has been waving its freak flag high long before Hendrix was even born. The Gold Rush brought a grand influx of wealth into the City in a time when established order and law enforcement were shaky at best. But the combination of money and an overwhelmingly single male populace fuelled a prolific and progressive entertainment scene. Bizarre, androgynous and overtly sexual performers such as Adah Menken and Lola Montez were embraced in San Francisco as in no other city on earth.

By 1900 it was said that San Francisco had more theatres than any other U.S. city (Source: San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum). By 1906 things were so raunchy in the "Paris of the West", apparently, that when the quake hit many considered it to be a localized spanking from God.

Fiction writer MFK Fisher reports that Prohibition basically never happened here. But we didn't just lead the nation in good-natured fun; in 1934 our maritime strike, culminating in "Bloody Thursday," shut down the city for four days and inspired unionists around the country to stand up to police and bosses.

So San Franciscans haven't been backing down for a very long time. But after decades of bucking the social and political status quo, we are now coming up against the nemesis that may destroy us completely: cash.

The corner of Haight St and Ashbury in July 2000 -where have all the flowers gone?

CAPITAL IN THE CAPITAL

To really understand the gravity of our funereal protest, it would be best to start with a tour of San Francisco's most famous spiritual battleground as it stands today.

The corners of Haight and Ashbury are, in a sense, like any other in a former working-class Irish neighbourhood that's survived the 20th century to become a major thoroughfare. But these corners are a symbol.

Here is where, during 1967's Summer of Love, forces from around the country suddenly converged to overturn a war and a culture that was hypocritical, paranoid, false and suicidal. Looking back over the Summer of Love Council's rota of free performances, happenings, and arts events, it seems in one sense like a modern update of Gold Rush era bacchanalia. But, in a country divided by Vietnam, the civil right movement, and a rejection of materialism, it was as though the rest of the country suddenly saw the point. Haight and Ashbury melded into an icon that still lives in the American psyche. Ask any farmer in Iowa what he knows about San Francisco and he'll say: hippies.

To the Midwestern tourists who clog the sidewalks, Haight and Ashbury means a funny place to make the "peace" sign and get your picture taken. To young people who canât remember the 60s, it symbolizes one big party: drugs, sex without AIDS, rebellion that actually had some greater significance than a fashion statement. But to the likes of our greying protest speaker, Haight and Ashbury still symbolizes the fragile idea that is Real America. Perhaps more significantly, to the neighbours it symbolizes the increasingly fragile ideal of a neighbourhood--a place to feel at home, shop, work, meet each other, send your kids to school, support one another.

Understandably, the businesses that occupy these four corners are looked on as a barometer of how we're doing as far as living up to the Summer of Love's ideal of a genuine, old-fashioned community.

On the Northwest corner is Haight Ashbury T-Shirts, selling tie-dyed trinkets that have about as much to do with the 60s as a fruitcake has to do with Jesus Christ. Still, it's a mom-and-pop (or rather, a mama and a papa). Humble and charming.

On the Southwest corner, we're still doing OK. It's Aardvark Clothing, the zany retro-punk vintage boutique, where carousel racks are crammed with musty smoking jackets and your purchases are bagged for you in used plastic Safeway carrier bags. Cool.

On the Northeast corner, it starts to get sketchy. Ben and Jerry's ice cream is a national chain and empire started by two old hippies who melded softcore activism with business smarts and created something the finance magazines fawningly called "compassionate capitalism." The ice cream is undeniably delicious and they do funnel proceeds to environmental and educational causes. But it is a chain, and not a local one. Its presence there seems less like organic happenstance and more like the ultimate extension of their brand.

And finally, on the Southeast corner, there "it" is. Floor to ceiling windows, retina-scorching halogen lights, and firing lines of headless mannequins draped in staid collegiate clothing marketed as cutting-edge fashion. For many of us, The Gap is a figurehead of the worst aspects of globalization: corporate omnipresence, sweatshop labor, and the promotion of a gaunt, Nordic ideal of beauty that makes everyone everywhere feel like crap. In a kinder world, the trouble with the Gap would only be global. But it's local. VERY local.

A timeline compiled by the Bay Guardian in its special issue, The Battle For San Francisco, chronicles this corporate giant's rise to real estate thugdom in the City. In 1993, The Gap announced that it was building corporate headquarters on the San Francisco waterfront. In 1996, Gap CEO Don Fisher formed the San Francisco Partnership, a pro-business group that would, among others, retain a firm grip on Mayor Willie Brown for the remainder of the 90s. They would use City Hall to ensure their right to aggressively buy and develop San Francisco land, racing the clock to beat the inevitable death of the high-tech venture capital boom.

Proposed office redevelopment in the Mission District close to residences

IF YOU'RE GOING TO SAN FRANCISCO, BE SURE TO BRING A LANDLORD-TENANT LAWYER

When the so-called Online Revolution began in the mid-1990s, San Francisco experienced an explosion of job growth and an abundance of venture capital like never before. By late 1999, venture capital was flowing into Bay Area firms at a rate of US$20 million per day. (Source: Bay Guardian, The Battle For San Francisco, October 2000.)

In the past five years, we have watched our city go from insanely expensive to surreally expensive. In the mid-1990's the Chronicle reported that we'd nudged Manhattan out of its throne in terms of high rent and low vacancy rates.

Can Real America survive in a place where a one-room studio is US $1200 per month? In a skyrocketing real estate market, landlords will stop at nothing to get rid of tenants and begin a new lease at market value. The San Francisco Tenant's Union, of which I am a member, can't return my phone calls for days; the outgoing message tells me to be patient while they wade through swamps of evictions. According to the Bay Guardian, from June 1999 through June 2000, there were 2,761 evictions filed with the Rent Board - nearly triple the evictions in 1993.

Obviously, this isn't the best of times for the poor and working classes in the City. But our arts and nonprofits are also suffering incredible losses. The dance studio and gallery where I took classes and discovered Tony Ryan's photography, 848 Space, has been evicted. Brilliant DJ Charlotte the Baroness will be taking her talents to England after her eviction. Downtown Rehearsal Studios, an affordable rehearsal space serving about 500 local bands, shut down in October 2000 when the owner evicted them in search of higher rent. Numerous friends have informed me in the past few months that theyâre moving to Portland or Sacramento, where "the scene is better".

Real estate madness has dealt a near-death blow to the City's nightlife as well. Wealthy residents of new live-work units in the South of Market district have complained of the noise produced by nightclubs. In the past two years, nightlife institutions like the End-Up and 1015 Folsom have suddenly found themselves the subject of police scrutiny and suspended licenses. Clubs are being shut down on trumped-up charges, and new cabaret licenses are suddenly scarce.

False America is no longer content that we buy its products and worship its gods, that we sacrifice ourselves to its carefully choreographed visions of Individuality. It needs our physical homes too, the last geographical stakeouts, the last real places in America, where people can arrive from Illinois and Georgia and Marseilles and Liverpool, and live a simple, rich, fun, liberated life, in touch with history, community, and creativity.

WORLD PARTY

The San Franciscan struggle against developers and big business is being paralleled in communities all over the world. Artists, minorities and the working class are getting edged out of their neighborhoods in the Lower East Side of New York and Londonâs Notting Hill. An evicted dancer tells me her Parisian friends are also being displaced by armies of chic restaurants and boutiques offering fashionably bland wares. Around the world, fiscal success is eclipsing quality of life, American-style. But San Francisco, like Haight-Ashbury itself, is symbolic. If we can't fight back and win, who can?

WHO WANTS TO LIVE IN AMERICA?

Watching The Gapâs TV commercials, itâs hard not to be taken in. The camera sweeps gorgeously, cinematically back to reveal legions of Gwyneth Paltrow clones in capri pants and sleeveless sweaters, kicking and gyrating in a whitewashed mockup of the rooftop scene from West Side Story. It's cheeky, campy, and fresh. Everyone looks like they dropped straight out of heaven. Surely our youth, our vitality as a culture, lives inside these 30 seconds of televised glory

. But I think it's fair to say that The Gap's Don Fisher and his kind have been responsible, directly or indirectly, for snuffing out much of San Franciscoâs genuine youth culture and nightlife. At the end of the 20th century, creative young people can't afford his capri pants, let alone to live in his city.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

Make no mistake: the reaction of the arts, nonprofits, and neighbourhoods has been swift and unrelenting, if ill-funded. Which protest are you going to tonight? The rock-a-thon or the Late Night Coalition benefit? The City Hall hearing regarding the latest club to get its license suspended, or the rally in front of the latest evicted dance studio, with music and party to follow? The multi-stage variety show to support your candidate for district supervisor? Or the all-singing, all-dancing stakeout in front of that obnoxious new office development that steamrollered your friend's affordable housing?

There have been clever newspaper editorials charging that this colorful and vibrant new wave of activism is more therapy than serious political manoeuvring. But perhaps therapy is exactly the point. There's a very real sense at these protests that we are taking our lives back, standing up for the few things left on earth that can't be bought and sold. In a culture where our needs are dictated to us by an economy that works us near to death, where we're so overwhelmed by the psychological warfare of advertising that we no longer know our own thoughts, art is so peculiar, so curiously human, so Wholly Other that we worship it as God on Earth, not really knowing what else to do. If we dance to the evicted Brazilian drummers outside of City Hall, will we finally cleanse our minds of The Gap's slick, mock-ethnic TV advert revue?

REVOLUTION NUMBER TWO

In order for there to be another 60s, my friend said, there'd have to be another war.

There IS another war. It's a spiritual war and, in our city, a territorial one. It will not be televised because television is owned by the enemy. But one day soon, the rest of the country will start to wonder what strange, hollow, waxy invader has gotten inside their brains, their clothes, the food they eat, their neighbourhoods, their souls. They will take up ideological arms and, if we're still here for them, come to San Francisco.

An excellent link for the history of the City by the Bay is Shaping San Francisco

Comments and Suggestions

Continue on the unauthorised San Francisco tour:

(1) Home - (2)Sanfrancisco.com - (3) Luver and Me - (4)Visit the Tenderloin
(5) Peoples' Park - (6) Land's End Beach - (7) People's Park Today - (8) The Innocent Arrives
(9) The Mural Culture - (10) My exhibitions in SF - (11) The Battle for San Francisco
(12) Victorian Architecture - (13) Return to Travel Page