3rd & Mission, San Francisco

Looking south on 3rd Street from Mission Street in San Francisco, 1961 (top) and 2011 (bottom)

These two photos are taken from near the same spot 50 years apart -- looking south down 3rd Street from Mission Street in San Francisco. A close look at the blonde brick building on the left allows you to make the connection.

I get a kick from these 'then and now' comparisons. When your pictures and stories about a neighborhood's past fill your head, walking down a street is like walking down ten streets at the same time and any one of them can present itself at anytime.

Thanks to OldSF.org for developing a fantastic tool to explore a large portion of the San Francisco Public Library's photo archive. The story of how their project came to be is an example of the volunteer spirit that makes the internet awesome.

So what the story behind 3rd Street's transformation? How was this neighborhood south of San Francisco's financial district, one filled with rooming houses, pawnshops, bars, cafes, and parking lots redeveloped into an area of museums, fine hotels, large-scale retail, a convention center, a public garden, and a few pockets of affordable housing?

The SF Redevelopment Agency's summary of the 87-acre project seems rather flimsy. An historically rich account can be found in Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (see Map 12 and accompanying text, pp. 85-90).

Photographs from Ira Nowinski's No Vacancy and Ben Pease's map are folded together with Solnit's beautiful prose, including perspectives from Jack London, who was born near 3rd & Brannan in 1876, and Jack Kerouac, who lived near 3rd and Howard and worked at the trainyard at 4th and Towsend for spell during the 1950s.

To the left: a slice of Pease's map detailing the neighborhood's buildings and uses in 1960. Clicking the audio/media tab of the UC Press page leads to an audio interview with Solnit and UC Press Art Director Lia Tjandra about Infinite City.

Ice Cube & The Eames

I may be one of the few residents of San Francisco that maintains a deep fondness for Los Angeles. That's why I'm glad to see L.A. (and a small slice of its design history) shown some love from Ice Cube in this PST video. Hat tip to the LA Times on Tumblr.

Pacific Standard Time "Ice Cube - Eames" 2:15 from MassMarket on Vimeo.


Ice Cube should be the next Huell Howser. I'd love to see this turned into a series.

Fukú Americanus

When Sean San José told Junot Diaz that he wanted to adapt Diaz's novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for the stage, Diaz replied, "Good fucking luck, bro." Given the two had collaborated before, his comment seems more like a blessing than skeptism. Perhaps Diaz, who spent 11 years writing the novel, was hinting at the challenge ahead.

Fukú Americanus, directed by San José and Marc Bamuthi Joséph at Intersection for the Arts, centers on the lives of Dominican immigrants growing up in Northern New Jersy during the 1980s. The play retains the novel's mix of sci-fi, hip-hop, and historical references, but the book's violence is toned down on stage. The cast is strong, equally skilled with comic and poignant moments. The play's short scenes look more choreographed than blocked, often flowing together with transitions provided by a narrator, Fukú, a character who doesn't appear in the novel. Think: a younger, funkier, vagabond-version of Our Town's Stage Manager.

The concept of Fukú is defined in Wao as "the Curse and the Doom of the New World." The character on stage is more inviting / less menacing than that. Early in the play he delivers what might have been my favorite line of the evening: "There may be some of this you don't understand, but that's part of it."

Someone's story doesn't need to be 100% comprehensible for it to be worth knowing. I doubt any audience member walked in with perfect knowledge of the Diaz lexicon--it's that diverse. As someone roughly the same age as Diaz, I felt clued into the pop culture references but the dialogue in Spanish simply washed over me. Still, the play's physical and emotional momentum carried me along, and that feeling (being forced to look for meaning in context, tone, body language, facial expressions...) may have brought me closer to Oscar's experience--being a stranger in a strange land. That's what I think Fukú meant by "that's part of it."

For locals: the show has been selling out, and the run has been extended until July 12.

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The Cast: Carlos Aguire (Yunior), Maria Candelaria (Moms), Vanessa Cota (Lola), Biko Eise-Martin (Fukú), Anna Maria Luera (La Inca), and Brian Rivera (Oscar).

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For more: read SF Chronicle's preview, which included Diaz's "good luck" line.

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From the SF Guardian review.

Act one of Fukú Americanus, Campo Santo's adaptation of Pulitzer prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, explodes across the stage like a Caribbean hurricane.... The second act...is less cohesive...and unlike the book, does not resolve itself in Oscar's ultimate tragedy, which is a little like ending Hamlet before the duel. Denied both his tragic end, and his triumphal devirginization, Oscar's role in this adaptation is less that of anti-hero, than one of hapless foil in the larger sweep of fukú's pitiless influence. (N. Gluckstern)

* * * From the NYT's review of Wao.

Junot Díaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. M. Kakutani's full review.

* * * Diaz discusses the character of Oscar at the Sydney Writer’s Festival

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Junot Diaz
http://www.colbertnation.com/
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

p.s. to the Colbert clip: The Day of the Triffids is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1951 by the English science fiction author John Wyndham. Tiffids are a highly venomous (fictional) plant species and the titular antagonists of Wyndham's novel.

It's Harvey time

The brink of Pride weekend is a good time to share The Times of Harvey Milk (1982), a documentary about San Francisco’s first openly gay man elected to public office.

After several attempts, Milk was elected to the city's Board of Supervisors in 1977. He and SF mayor, George Mascone, were assassinated a little more than a year later.





This Oscar-winning documentary preceded the Gus Van Sant drama, Milk, by 26 years. For those not familiar with California politics of the late 1970s (like me), these two films can act as a primer on Proposition 6, the 1978 initiative that intended to ban gays, lesbians, and their supporters from working in California's public schools. Watching Life and Milk, I couldn't help but compare the defeat of Proposition 6 in 1978 to the passage Proposition 8 in 2008. (Prop. 8 narrowed the definition of marriage to different-sex couples.)

The public debate on Prop 6 included long-form, televised debates; the Prop 8 race lacked such discussions and was dominated by political TV ads. Further, there wasn't a readily identifiable spokesperson, such as Milk, representing the cause of same-sex couples during the Prop 8 campaign. How much these factors influenced the respective outcomes, it's hard to say, but the differences stood out to me.



From Gallop, June 18, 2008

Gallup polling chronicles important changes in public attitudes about homosexuality and gay rights over the past quarter century. Americans have shifted from frowning on homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle and being divided over whether it should be legal, to now supporting gay rights on both fronts. At the same time, the country remains highly ambivalent about the morality of homosexual relations, and as a result, support for legalizing gay marriage lags far behind the less culturally sensitive matter of gays having equal job rights.

Kathy Kozachenko's election to the Ann Arbor city council made her the first openly gay or lesbian candidate to run successfully for political office in the United States (January 1974).

Sound off, 1, 2, Sound off, 3, 4

Highlights from the Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Boot Camp 2009

All for Good. Google has provided this new org with a nifty gadget/widget for distributing volunteer opportunities around the web. It aggregates listings from many well-established sites. This effort seems inspired by, but not officially part of, the Obama administration's serve.gov. I'm not sure non-profits have had trouble recruiting volunteers in recent years, but these folks have their heart in the right place.

YouTube will try to connect video-makers with non-profits via the newly launched Video Volunteers service, another off-shoot of All for Good. Other YouTube benefits for non-profits can be found here.

Mozilla, the outfit behind the Firefox browser, is organizing a service week (September 14-21, 2009) and asking tech-savvy individuals to sign up to teach senior citizens how to use the web, install a wireless network at a school, refurbish hardware for a local computer center, etc. Non-profits and the like can register on the same site to receive such support. (No group has a better rep for friendly customer service than IT pros, am I right? Here's hoping the most smug and surly geeks sit this one out.)

NTen is a membership organization of nonprofit technology professionals that shares information, provides professional development opportunities, and conducts research. NTen partners with The Port, offering "social media solutions."

Computer Recycling Center. Teachers, community non-profits, plus Bay Area groups that serve foster youth and home-bound elderly can apply for refurbished hardware, available for the price of a reasonable service contract. For those looking to put their old gear to good use, CRC either places with it at a worthy site or recycles it responsibly.

The Boot Camp wasn't focused exclusively on technology, but much of what I took in was. After a full day of rah-rah for the geeks, I thought it was important that Ari Dar, the founder and executive director of Action Without Borders/Idealist.org, reminded attendees during the closing session that Rome was built before facebook and that technology is merely a tool, not the end-all.

The issue many of the non-techy, non-profiters were wrestling with seemed to be how much time, money, etc. should be invested in new tools as they continue to provide their core, often in-person services. Each org will have a unique answer to that question, if they have time to adequately address it. This year's Boot Camp was a star-studded infomercial for some of the shiniest tools currently available, but I found little guidance on how to evaluate the various opportunities.

Beyond camp
Groundswell, a book and blog, is a great resource for groups struggling with their 2.0 strategy. A number of talks by the book's co-author, Charlene Li, can be found online, if you prefer to watch rather than read.

And as you may know, there's more to volunteer management than getting people to turn out. Not all activities are as simple as stuffing envelopes. If expectations on both sides aren't met, the two parties who just wanted to do some good leave unsatisfied, if not disgruntled. Idealist's Volunteer Management Resource Center could prove useful on this front.

* * *If you're looking for a volunteer opportunity, you might peruse Volunteer Match or Idealist for gigs all over, including the Bay Area. SF residents might have luck with The Volunteer Center, One Brick, or Hands On Bay Area. And ReServe, based in NYC, is doing some interesting work with highly skilled retirees.

Thao at The Rumpus

Last week I attended the first of what's promised to be monthly events for The Rumpus, a website focused on culture and based in San Francisco. The entertainment included readings of prose and poetry, animated film, and musical performances. Thao Nguyen's 3-song set was the highpoint for me. Her guitar playing is dexteritous and percussive, and its upbeat feel provides a compelling balance to her sometimes somber lyrics.



"beat my brow, beat my chest, beat the ones who love me the best"

Check out the beatbox intro...

"as sharp as I sting, as sharp as I sing, it still sooths you, doesn't it, like a lick of ice cream"

Thao often plays with The Get Down Stay Down; visit them on MySpace, if so inclined.

Studio 360 conducted this interview with Thao and her mom in Arlington, VA.

You should be able to learn of future Rumpus events here.

Yield To Total Elation

Achilles G. Rizzoli (1896-1981) was a San Francisco Bay Area native, a professional draftsman, and visionary artist.

By all accounts, Achilles Rizzoli was a devoted son and a competent employee. A work colleague described him as friendly but not sociable. He appears to have had no close friends and was a lifelong celibate who may have suffered from mental illness. The earliest article I found about him was written in 1992 by John MacGregor, who seems to have had access to his journals.

[Rizzoli] speaks again and again of his "confusion, inability to mobilize the mechanics of recording impressions automatically, for the most part dwelling in a sphere of shifting sand-like maze of colour, paste, light and sound". Such elaborate documentation of hallucinatory experience, in both written and graphic form, all carefully dated, is uniquie in the phenomenology of schizophrenia. ("A.G. Rizzoli: The Architecture of Hallucination", Raw Vision #6)

Every other source I came across points to A. G. Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions by Hernandez, Beardsley and Cardinal (1997). Many of the biographical details referenced below were gleaned from this book.

Only a few neighbors and colleagues took notice of his art during his lifetime. Nine years after his death, a sample of his work made its way to Bonnie Grossman, founder of The Ames Gallery. Investigating further, she uncovered over 40-years-worth of Rizzoli creations in his great-nephew's attic. In 1997 the San Diego Museum of Art launched a two-year traveling exhibition of his drawings that was accompanied by Architect of Magnificent Visions, the definitive study of the artist and his work. A documentary film, Yield to Total Elation: The Life and Art of Achilles Rizzoli, was released in 2000.

Symbolic representations, or "transfigurations" as he called them, made up the bulk of his visual work between 1935 and 1944. His depictions of people and events as mansions, towers, and cathedrals mix a variety of architectural styles including Beaux-Arts, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Renaissance, and Romanesque. The drawings are embellished with religious iconography and affectionate sentiments about the subjects, sometimes written in verse. On the first Sunday of each August between 1935 and 1940, Rizzoli hosted the A.T.E. (Achilles Tectonic Exhibit) at his home in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Several of the pictures below commemorate the visits of attendees. Also featured below is the one of the plot plans for Y.T.T.E. (Yield To Total Elation), an invented world's fair-like expo.



Mother Symbolicly Represented (1935)



Mrs. Geo. Powleson Symbolically Portrayed (1935)




"In appreciation of the kindly interest they have shown in their visit to the A.T.E. during its first anniversary day, August 2, 1936."



The Primal Glimpse at Forty (1936)
"That you too may see something you've not seen before"



Alfredo Capobianco and Family Symbolically Sketched (1937)


The YTTE Plot Plan (1938)




Shirley was a 6-year old kid from the neighborhood. (1939)




"A Scholar and a Gentleman" (1939)




"The Palace God is Building for Abraham N. Zachariah" (1939)

Assorted Images
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Rizzoli focused his creative creative energy on writing prior to 1935. His self-published book, The Colonnade (1933) was billed as "Versified Fiction Romancing Total Love in Vivid Terms of Highly Entertaining Monumental Mediums." The effort generated little or no interest; 3,000 seal copies of book were found in his home after his death. His final creative undertaking was AMTE’s Celestial Extravaganza (AMTE = Architecture Made To Entertain), a journal of his visions, recorded in prose, poetry, and illustrations (1958-1977).

I found other good accounts of his life in this blog this blog, and The Ames Gallery site. Newspapers that critiqued the '97/'98 exhibition included the SF Chronicle, SF Examiner, and the NY Times. Note to locals: the San Francisco Public Library offers archives of Raw Vision magazine, along with Magnificent Visions, and the documentary film Yield to Total Elation.

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Related Images


Tower of Jewels, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915


Grace Cathedral, Nob Hill, San Francisco, built between 1928 and 1964

Coit Tower, Telegraph Hill, San Francsico, built 1933

Golden Gate International Exhibition, Treasure Island, San Francisco Bay, 1939

Rizzoli's former home, Alabama Street in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, 2009

SF Builder

The current issue of Stop Smiling Magazine features an article about a self-taught architect from the Mission District, Timothy Ludwig Pflueger (1892-1946).

Like Chicago after the great fire of 1871, San Francisco was rebuilt from the ground up in the months and years following the devastating earthquake of 1906.... Influenced by Mayan and Asian art, as well as the early modern architects of his generation, Pflueger came to define excellence in San Franciscan Art Deco. His first job was at a picture-framing shop, but just as the construction boom was getting underway, he got a lucky start as a draftsman right out of high school.

Eventually he led many significant projects in the Bay Area, including Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Tower, the I. Magnin store (now Macy’s), the Castro Theatre, the Paramount (in Oakland), plus a variety of homes, schools, and cocktail lounges.

Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Tower

115 Sansome Street

Cirque Lounge (formerly part of the Fairmount Hotel)

Paramount Theatre

Paramount Theatre

Pflueger's work has been compiled in Art Deco San Francisco.

California pop

Sometimes I forget how many people live in California.

The California Budget Project's recent paper Planning for California's Future: The State's Population Is Growing, Aging, and Becoming More Diverse included this chart that highlights the size of CA's general ethnic groups.



Obviously, all states aren't listed above, nor does this list include every state with a population larger than New Mexico's. For a complete list the of populations in all states and territories consult this wikipedia page.

Looking at these figures I wonder how much attention, say, the people of Ohio will get from Presidential canidates this fall versus the time that will be spent courting Latinos in California. I guess that's why, despite what we saw in 2000, neither Dems or the GOP are really interested in direct national elections; it's easier for both sides to focus on slivers of fractions of counties in a handful of states, rather building a platform that appeals to the true majority.

The Chutes

Between 1895 and 1902 a San Francisco amusement park called The Chutes occupied the area bordered by Haight, Cole and Clayton Streets, a spot just a few blocks from Golden Gate Park -- an escape from SF's crowded northeast quadrant and accessible by a handful of independently run cable car lines.

c. 1895. Top of The Chutes, looking northeast onto Haight Street.

The surrounding middle-class neighborhood was just taking shape. The attraction was billed as a family-friendly locale and the sale of alcohol was prohibited.

The ride was 70 feet high and 300 feet long. The flat-bottom boats would hit the artificial lake going over 50 miles-an-hour.

The site eventually included an elevated railroad, a merry-go-round, an alligator house, a live theater and an exhibition hall. Within seven years, The Chutes outgrew its Haight Street location and moved to the Richmond (1902-1909) and then the Fillmore (1909-1911).

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Friends of 1800 provides an architecturally focused history of the neighborhood. For more on The Chutes' amusements, visit Historysmith.