The Tenderloin

The Tenderloin is a place most tourists pass by. It's a rough and tumble neighborhood, named for a time when police were paid extra to work a beat there and so could afford "tenderloin", the better cuts of meat.

The Tenderloin district is wrapped between Van Ness Avenue to the west, Gough to the north, and Mason Street and Golden Gate Avenue to the east and south, respectively. The Tenderloin is dotted with transient hotels that typically feature a single room with a bed, desk, and sink. They are the last resort of many poor people who can afford the cheap rent and often live for years in such places. Many of the old hotels are substandard tinderboxes, but the residents fight closing them down because for many it's the best they can afford. Fires are fairly common and usually deadly for the aged and crippled who cannot escape in time.

The fringes of society live there -- the elderly, the sick, the alcohol and drug addicted, the transsexual prostitutes who scrape up a meager living on the dark street corners at night.

People do raise children there and find their meager finances challenged by paying top dollar for low quality at one of the many corner liquor stores that tend to proliferate in poor neighborhoods like this one. I bought a candy bar at G&B Liquors. I saved it until I got home, and when I opened the wrapper, the chocolate was grayed with age.

Even so, you'll find Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Italian, Indian, and "American" restaurants almost anywhere you care to walk. The ethnic mix makes it seem as though the entire world converged on this small village west of Market Street.

The Tenderloin is also a vibrant neighborhood with community organizations like the Cross Cultural Family Center, and the Tenderloin Community Center showing that there is pride and support in what on the surface looks so dingy and run down. Other highlights include the infamous Mitchell Bros. O'Farrell Theatre with its live strip shows and the "Green Door" made famous by porn star Marilyn Chambers. On the flip side is Glide Memorial United Methodist Church on Ellis at Taylor, which has people standing in line around the block to hear the Reverend Cecil Williams preach his message of love and healing. Glide Memorial is a tremendous community resource that provides over a million free meals each year along with counseling and support services for alcohol and drug addiction, AIDS counseling, and domestic abuse; every kind of social ill.

And while the O'Farrel Theatre charges $40.00 just to get in, across the street is the Bread and Butter where you can get a fully-loaded roast beef sandwich for about 3 bucks. You can sit at the window counter and people-watch or read the daily news in their clean, well-lit store. The BackFlip on Eddy and Larkin is a bar in the Phoenix Hotel where rock stars stay while they're in town. It features an outdoor pool and patio where you can sit under the stars sipping an umbrella drink and forget you're in a city for a while.

Father Alfred Boedecker Park on Eddy Street at Jones is the favorite hangout of drunks, street people, people watchers, and drug dealers. The park is crowded day and night and seems to be the social center of the Tenderloin. I wouldn't suggest going there looking like a tourist. It's a pretty rough place.

At 9:15pm a police cruiser pulls up to the park announcing over their bullhorn that the park is closed. It's a female officer, which probably has no relation to the fact that the bums, drunks, and loiterers are slow to break up their heated conversations and move on.

The Tenderloin has some of the best cheap restaurants, dingy dive bars, gorgeous strippers and homely hookers, sly drug dealers, youthful hustlers, and at least one polite bum who apologized to me profusely for urinating against the wall of a building as I passed.

Tourists rarely visit this part of San Francisco. It's dirty, gritty and dangerous. But if someone asks me where to go to see the "real" San Francisco, I'd have to tell him to park the car on Jones near Taylor in front of the Campus All-Male Theatre and point his feet away from Market Street. Walk around. Get lost. There are surprises around every corner. Wear black. You'll fit right in.