BERLIN SOVIET WAR MEMORIAL: GRIEF, GUILT AND GOOD GRIEF

An aerial view of the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park lays out a procession of mourning and remembrance across a landscape and culture.   With the Soviet occupiers beginning construction 10 months after the end of the war, the memorial spreads the granite ruins of the Third Reich Chancellory over territory the length of three football fields.

Since our summer trip to Berlin our posts have focused on comparisons between East Berlin and San Francisco’s Western Addition as a sort of Learning from Berlin.  We have included thoughts on gentrification , on graffiti and now, lastly,  on memorials.  Before we tackle what a memorial in our home town might look like (and we welcome suggestions) we would like to provide online photo-documentation of East Berlin’s most colossal, yet less advertised, memorial.  The Soviet War Memorial(Sowjetisches Ehrenmal) serves as a mass grave for more than 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers, fallen in the Battle of Berlin, creating a  superscale landscape of heroic death and monstrous bombast providing an apt synopsis of the physical horrors of WWII and the psychic horrors of Stalinist domination.  More than DDR kitsch the monument marks the origins of the modern post-war memorial in Berlin establishing a pattern combining solemn remembrance, didactic reflections on horror and an historical critique presented through a  landscape choreographed to achieve maximum emotional effect.  While its monstrosity is tasteless and blatantly manipulative, one’s emotional response becomes thoughtful and complex, powerful and disturbed.

Along the sidewalk a memorial arch announces to the recently crushed Berlin population “Eternal rest for the heroes who have fallen for the freedom and sovereignty of the Soviet Homeland.”  From the arch (1) a tall and deeply shaded tunnel of rustling leaves (2) leads to the distant silhouette of Mother Russia (3).  Dwarfed by the distance, on approach  her gigantism and weeping become evident.

Turning toward the light at a processional dogleg, the sequence makes an emotional dogleg too, as the direction of her anquish becomes apparent.  Two kneeling Soviet soldiers leaning heavily on their PPSH41 sub-machine guns (4) frame a gateway to a field of 16 raised tombs (5) holding 5000 Russian dead forming a parade ground of death and mourning.  Each tomb is decorated with quotes from Stalin in Russian with German translation and with carved images depicting the liberation and total annihilation of Berlin by Soviet troops on the ground and  the Allied bombs from the sky. (See the movie Woman of Berlin for a dramatic depiction of Berlin’s fall into vengeful Soviet hands.)

The long perspective of tombs climaxes on an apparent mass grave topped with a 75 foot high monument of a toddler hoisted by a mammoth Soviet soldier who in a damning act of liberation crushes a Swastika under his sword and boots (6).  Surrounded by depictions of war’s atrocities, the proximity of fearful baby and blade are disquieting.

The Soviet memorial combines heroism, grief, justice and revenge, using emotional content as a didactic tool of propaganda to inflict psychic damage upon the defeated Berlin citizenry, heroizing their oppressors as liberators and rationalizing Berlin’s  oppression as the weight of guilt.


Lacking subtlety the memorial confirms architecture as a tool to manipulate human emotion, the well-spring of memory.  While vengeance and despair are negatives, reflections on loss and recognizing history’s toll can be liberating as emotional relief and can lead to a positive social re-commitment.  In this way the crushing gigantism of the Soviet War Memorial can be compared to the unsettling dizziness created by the sloping walls and ground planes of architect Daniel Libeskind’s  Jewish Museum in Berlin or the deep grief brought on by the dark descent of Maya Lin’s elegant Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, where architectural devices manipulate one’s sense of well being in the interest of national catharsis and historical revelation.

The memorial to the Red Army in Treptower Park provides the blueprint for Berliners’ modern mania for memorials as a means for an expiation of history’s guilt, providing an effective avenue from national shame and denial towards self-awareness, truth and reconciliation.

The Jewish Museum‘s Holocaust Tower and the Soviet Hero, both shown below, are similar in  size.

thanks to koobcat for video

STREET ART / STREET CRIME

At San Francisco’s Vinyl Coffee and Wine Bar at Fell and Divisidero big bucks are paid for the Banksy-like work of Eddie Colla top and X’s “Thank you, Andy” at right.  The art successfully gives Vinyl some insider street cred in a traffic-challenged location.

At the Berkeley Art Museum the Barry McGee exhibit lionizes his undeniable and unbridled talents as graffiti and street artist.  (See our last post.)  The show questions  graffiti’s place as outsider art inside a museum setting. Selling out to a gallery is hardly a crime if you’re an inner-city youth with few opportunities (see 1983′s video classic Style Wars).  But if you fancy yourself a professional outsider like Barry McGee (BFA San Francisco Art Institute 1991) your professional work is privileged and surcharged with artistic irony.

Along with the graffiti art superstars and inner-city taggers, let us also salute those unsung heroes who have spent hours on Sunday mornings,  face down, scraping and scrubbing away one tagger’s night of fun from our grubby sidewalks, or who with paint brush raised repeatedly obliterate a black marker tag on their trash door with a paint that doesn’t quite match up, prepping the blank canvas for the night’s inevitable re-tagging.   Together, taggers and tag-removers form a perverse self-sustaining eco-system that provides us with an uncertain urban backdrop challenging property and community values with thoughtless and costly acts of big kid fun.

Four blocks down Divisidero Street, frustrated Mojo Bicycle Cafe owner and parklet maintenance man, Remy, expresses the frustrations of many:   ”If I get a hold of ‘em, I’m gonna u-lock their head to a parking meter!”

Last summer’s trip to Berlin alerted us to the liveliness of graffiti when experienced  without the personal burden of property ownership.     Tags, posters and street art provide a sidewalk wainscot as high as arms’ reach that’s by turns stunning, destructive, decorative,  enlightening , accusing and amusing.

At a corner cafe in the Kreuzberg tagging has reached such a frenzied level that cleanup has been abandoned, and public outrage transformed to a whatever, you-win acceptance.  The consistent density of graffiti forms a lively decorative pattern.

Below, street art brightens the grim party scene warehouses under the tracks in Berlin’s Friedrichshain.

In Berlin graffiti and street art is impossible to ignore and offers us an alternative outlook to the outlawed tags and the sanctioned street art of San Francisco.

A shout in the darkness “CAPITALISM DESTROYS. CAPITALISM KILLS!”–this provocation effectively protects free squat housing in the otherwise gentrified Prenzlauerberg district labeled “the Noe Valley of Berlin” by San Francisco ex-pats.  In Berlin the challenges to conventional thinking and complacency are unavoidable.   The street walls and building faces that form the background of our daily life are not silent.

Faced with Berlin’s blight,  San Francisco Director Mohammed Nuru and his Department of Public Works would be in an apoplexy of enforcement, posting violation notices atop graffiti, impartially criminalizing both vandal and vandalized.  Check out their you tube video for your favorite tags and corresponding outrage.

Recalling the Wild West and Depression Dustbowl, DPW slaps public notices across the vast city landscape like WANTED and REWARD posters, authorizing property owners as vigilantes charged with protecting their own property.    This scenario paints taggers as modern day Billy the Kid’s and Pretty Boy Floyd’s and corporations as greedy robber barons seeking total mind control through monopoly of our visual world.    McGee’s rationalization of street crime as the art of an unfair world is not totally crazy if the caliber is high and the populace forgiving.

DPW’s war on graffiti has created a  limited success.  Compared to Berlin, fines to tagged property owners have proved successful in controlling graffiti pushing tagging crews to less guarded and unfined locations.  Notably, back alleys, Muni and trucks, sidewalks, shops with  recently terminated leases, and even trees are bombed.  Below the fantastic 2006 ORFN, has survived a remarkable 6 years as a moving target in the outer NOPA.

Pay attention,  street art admired one day will be gone the next.  This moving street art memorial on the wall of the vacant UC Extension on Haight at Laguna encouraged the community to tag on the serious losses the Lower Haight community has faced.

Lately, the memorial has been obliterated by a by a less nobly motivated artist with a mural as relevant to the community as the sadly permanent 12-foot tall pink bunny around the corner at Laguna and Haight.

Who decides what stays and what goes?  And who decides what is insult and what is art? Below DPW Director Mohammed Nuru and BKF (Big Kid Fun) crew member Cameron.

    
“But is it Art?”  According to Nuru’s DPW if its commissioned it is not graffiti.  Into this provocative loophole leap semi-professional graffiti artists whose street art includes contact information such as E Clair Acuda Bandersnatch with her ubiquitous mix of adorable and sinister including the Save-More Market at Eddy and Divisidero below.

As described by Cameron, tagging crews form a secret, insider club for social outsiders, where Kings mentor crew initiates in style, materials and rules of the game.  Each crew parties and then hits the streets to maximize exposure and longevity in a shifting landscape of  impermanence, paint-outs and going overs.  Gang-tags, independent tags and the general public are incidental and outside the game.  With the various crews numbering between 12 to 100 members, they operate along the edge of criminal behavior,  sometimes falling into more  serious socially destructive behavior and sometimes stepping back as elders of a new generation.  Check out King Barry McGee‘s own description of the sport.

Whose neighborhood is it?  On Birch Street between Laguna and Gough, an embattled block has taken a creative approach to protecting 150′ of concrete block and fencing, riffing tags into an organic pattern that spins off the obliterated typography into one of the longest pieces of street art in the city.

Below images of the collective consciousness posted on Linden Alley and concealed behind the closed restroom doors of Taqueria Cancun.

    

Outside The Page corner bar where the smokers hang, sidewalk graffiti offers these simple words of  peace to the neighborhood:

“NO YELLING.”

Graffiti intersects the public realm where it forms the background for our daily  behavior, competing in volume with corporate advertising for visual and mental attention.  It effectively discourages gentrification with its uncertainty and insult.  As it crosses the line from outsider to art and commercial success, its role is reversed, and the artist is first in line as the unwilling vanguard of the neighborhood’s change.

Thanks to Carol Ciappa for spotting “The Problem with Vandalism” and Vinyl for bringing it to our attention, and thanks to Woody Guthrie and Barry McGee for insight into the criminal mind.

Woody Guthrie sings Pretty Boy Floyd     Woody Guthrie sings Vigilante Man

 

 

BARRY McGEE: ARTIST AND VANDAL

Last summer’s trip to Berlin, City of Graffiti, has us thinking about the lively yet criminal place of graffiti in the community.   The Berkeley Arts Museum visits the subject  in Barry McGee’s exhibit of constructions, sketches and graffiti art closing December 9th, 2012.  The museum building itself  is not to be missed, as it too is subject to closure as an art museum in 2015 as a result of ever-stiffening seismic requirements anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Big One.  Meanwhile, the building’s impending loss as a dramatic and now-unrepeatable gallery space is a tragic and crushing blow.

Designed by Northern Californian Mario Ciampi, who also gave us the elegant  overpass of I-280, the museum’s massive cantilevered concrete ramps captures all the visual noise and rough character of  the underside of a freeway on-ramp where McGee first made his mark in San Francisco.  The museums unabashed concrete drama   imparts a vitality and weightiness to the work that is lost in the prim presentation of the McGee collage construction on Floor 2 of that big white box SFMOMA.  Not surprisingly, McGee’s experience as urban tagger shares Ciampi’s keen understanding of the thrilling tension of urban spaces capitalizing on  juxtapositions of perspective/planar, light/dark, big/small, and discovery/risk in the arrangement of the art for maximum effect.

Typical, of the work formerly visible for free on the concrete supports upholding  San Francisco’s Central Freeway, are the caricatures of McGee’s world of the down and out, beaten-down, submissive, angry and plain drunk.  The incredible talent and dark humor behind the line work and rendering recalls centuries of admirable caricaturists including Daumier, George Grosz, and the war and post-war Sad Sack Cartoons of George Baker.

 

The exhibit extends to include bricolage installations of miniature drawings and street detritus,  to more recent color and type patterning, and on further to the artist’s street life with  graffiti paraphernalia and memorabilia including a fantastic spray-can laden overcoat.    Repeating a theme are wooden robots and artist robots whose arms jerk up and down in simulation of the vandal’s spray-painted artistic violations.  The artist as jerking robot metaphor is made blatant in a seedy “bodega” sited at the back of the exhibit whose greasy interior piled with old record albums, beatnik novels and dirty ashtrays resembles a reconstruction of the interior of the artist’s grabbag brain.

The general response of “that’s cool” sums up one’s overall response.  The exhibit is  a lot of fun, circus-like in scope, intimate in detail and tactility and graphically stunning.  As weird as it is cool is its linking of art and the creative act to an asocial bad-boy impulse–a  crime in most jurisdictions–in which the museum and art-goer get to play act at complicity.  The awkward place of graffiti on the streets and in the museums is discussed  by McGee himself in this linked SFMOMA video.

Out on the streets, the edgy confusion of graffiti crime, street art, community building and blight awaits further study.

 

EAST BERLIN/WESTERN ADDITION: CHANGE COMES TO PRENZLAUER BERG…AGAIN

“Berlin-prettier than ever!” beckons the 1947 prop art poster for Soviet  East Berlin’s 5-year plan for the rebuilding of social housing and infrastructure following the devastation of the Allies’ bombardment and the Soviet invasion.

Distance provides perspective.  Unpacking our mental suitcase from a recent summer holiday in graffitti-bedighted East Berlin, we edit snapshots, positioning them for inevitable comparisons to our own living situation, in our own neighborhood in the Western Addition considering topics of street art, gentrification, bicycles, social housing, memorials and population relocation.

The changes in Berlin have been cataclysmic.  A city of 4.5 million in 1939, the population now stands at 3.5 million, 25% un-occupied, uncrowded and affordable.  For those with connections to Eastern European immigrants, the absence of a vibrant Jewish culture in Berlin is a palpable loss.  The World War and Cold War past is still present in the empty lots, the bullet-pocked plaster, the missing windows, and graffitied squats standing side by side with chic window displays, hot clubs, cool condos and high art.

Berlin is not an elegant city, but it is emotionally exciting and easy to live in with  a historical investment in the public realm of trains, subways and buses, parks and benches, street trees and street life, bike paths, museums and memorials.  Curiously and unlike San Francisco, Berlin–at least in parts–appears indifferent to sidewalk maintenance, graffiti removal and sidewalk obstructions–elements of the public realm whose vigilant maintenance is a San Francisco obsession with repeated inspections,  personal warning notices, and offers of rewards for informants.

The twice graffitied “YUPPIES GET OUT” adds an edgy touch to a sidewalk cafe in the leafy Prenzlauer Berg district in Berlin.  Nearby, an eery display of children’s garments graces a kiddie clothing store appealing to the new hipster parents and a younger fashionable clientele.

For centuries a rebellious enclave of breweries and politics, Prenzlauer Berg, a less bombed, more neglected, tree-lined district was home to Weimar political riots, pre-deportation Jews, 30′s Communist supporters, 70′s  artists, musicians and dropouts, 80′s Communist dissidents, 90′s squatters and punks, each group pushed along by the next, all enjoying a neighborhood providing a diverse if changing street life, a diversity of housing types and a fractious diversity of opinions.  Famous denizens include Marxist martyrs Rosa Luxemborg and Karl Liebknecht, and Kathe Kollwitz, artist of the proletariat, and punk eccentric Nina Hagen.  The neighborhood continues to change, recently becoming a well-priced option for an influx of West Berlin families.

Kollwitz’s death portrait, Memorial for Karl Liebknecht, is shown below.

We stayed in Prenzlauer Berg in a young ex-pat’s Airbnb vacation rental, a charming, bright, high-ceilinged late-19th Century apartment.  Through tall, uncurtained windows,  one looks across the street to the broken  windows of a largely abandoned brewery housing an art center, repair shop and rockabilly bar.   On Sunday mornings church bell chimes mixed with bass thumps from an all-night club.  In this heady atmosphere it is difficult not to fantasize about the promise in the half-occupied fixer-uppers.  With the fall of the Wall and the equalizing advantages of socialism  dismantled, East Berlin became a land of opportunity for Western squatters,  opportunists and now families who possess all the unequal advantages of a free system.

Metzer Eck has served Schnitzel and the Berlin favorite Hackepeter (raw ground pork) to locals for 99 years.  Sharing a table and thoughts with Gert(promoter/producer) and Manfred(avant-garde electronic musician), both long-time residents of Prenzlauer Berg,  talk turned from Hackepeter to the history of the pub, the long-standing bohemian community it fed, and the sweet-sour results of gentrification and, more broadly, of the collapse of the Berlin Wall.  The Capitalism they have now promotes inequality.  Communist control was flawed.  ”What is needed is a Third Way.”

Like Western Addition in much of Berlin there is  an attractive  tension of a place not fixed and postcard perfect–not like Munich, not like San Francisco’s Marina or Marin, not like Alamo Square for that matter–but complicated, still struggling with the process of  becoming something else while recognizing its difficult past.  If there are lapses of conscience and historical recollection in Deutschland, it is certainly not evident in East Berlin.   If anything, the Soviet Occupation built monuments, walls and governance on historical foundations of guilt, fear and suspicion.   Since the 80′s resurgence of prosecuting war criminals and the 90′s outing of Stasi informers, there is a clear recognition that the process of remembrance and healing is ongoing and open-ended and healthier than forgetting.

Don’t refuse, re-use.  A re-purposed  statue of Lenin decorates the entrance to a cardboard distribution warehouse.

In the coming blog posts, we take a summertime holiday in East Berlin, looking at the politics of street art, and how and why to memorialize a painful past.

 

 

 Nina Hagen: Smack Jack 1982 

LAST OUTPOSTS: LAST DAYS AT GETHSEMANE

“The last days are here.”  80-something,  Ray takes his morning constitutional down to the corner store, at Broderick and Fulton around 8 am, hangs out to catch his breath, smoke a cigarette, socialize and sometimes prophesize.  We talk about the recent foreclosure and sale of the Gethsemane Missionary Baptist a block away.  ”I’d been sayin’ it all along, it’s the last days, I do believe that.  The last days are here!”

The Gethsemane Missionary Baptist at Grove and Broderick is the latest of Western Addition’s church closures.  Neighbor Bill reports the church had been failing for  a while and was not shocked to hear the loan had been foreclosed and the property sold.  The realtor for sale reports the interior was in shambles.

I bump into Dharma, drinking lattes, a block east at Mojo.  He recalls, “I think maybe it was 2004.  I ‘member walkin’ by and those walls were like pumpin’.”  Here he makes a squeeze-box oompah gesture.  ”Yeah, it was this cool, loud gospel music.  We stuck our heads in, but it didn’t exactly feel right. So ….”

Friday the 13th, April 2012, was the day the music died at  Gethsemane Missionary Baptist–the day the foreclosed property was listed for sale.

As described on the realtor’s website redfin.com: “601 Broderick is a charming old church … in the heart of NOPA.  Not for the faint of heart or faithless, this property needs a revival. … make them believers. Heaven only knows what the possibilities could be!”  Receiving multiple offers on first showing, the sale closed before the For Sale sign was hammered in the ground.  Highland Ferndale Partners,  a luxury home developer purchased the church for restoration and resale.  David Papale, partner and realtor,  prefers not to disclose the sale price, but  redfin.com notes the price clearly at $1,401,000, 40% over asking, a sizeable investment in the future of the community. One might speculate, since this is real estate, that the sale price is more than adequate to cover the losses the bank faced in foreclosure on their faulty loan, a profit unrealized by the church.   Mr. Papale claims, while the possibilities for the property include six  units, it will be restored as a single family  home and to its original Victorian appearance without “that horrible addition.”  

Emphatically squat and unadorned, aluminum windowed and with in-your-face exterior spots, the addition could easily be seen as the Anti-Victorian to an ardent preservationist.  The photo from the Planning Department’s  1976 Architectural Field Form  shows the original entry porch, intact up to 1976.

“DESTROYED EN FACADE BY ABOMINABLE ENTRY ADDITION.”  Overcome with emotion the Planning Department’s  Field Notes for 601 Broderick rave with a zealot’s outrage about the 1977 entry addition for the Gethsemane Missionary Baptist.  The Field Notes represent the personal indignation and righteousness that mark the beginnings of historical preservation enforcement in San Francisco’s Planning Department.

In 1962 the women’s Junior League of San Francisco, the self-proclaimed incubator for “many of San Francisco’s most successful fundraisers and philanthropists (Opera, Ballet, Symphony, etc.),” initiated a drive-by survey of important historical structures and recorded them in the book Here Today (c 1968).    Responding to Western Addition’s decay, Urban Renewal‘s demolition (including 2,500 Victorians) and the post-war craze for asbestos shingle and stucco facade upgrades, the survey focused heavily on homes with Victorian ornamentation.  With the advent of Redevelopment Phase 2, their record serves in memoriam the further Victorian disappearances and relocations of the coming decades.  Pictured here are Here Today’s authors: Junior League’s Mrs. Alden Crow, the writers Watkins and Olmsted, and the masterful California landscape and architectural photographer Morley Baer.

The volunteer efforts of the Junior League are notable and praiseworthy.  Based on their  groundbreaking work, the Planning Department extended the list with the 1976 Architectural Survey of rated buildings–10,000 buildings in 60 unpublished volumes, accessible in the department’s database but less available to the general public.  For decades this  historical listing became the Planning Department’s chief basis for more severe scrutiny of facade alterations comparable to airport security’s no-fly list.   With this years online publishing of the survey field forms, the information for all listed properties is at last accessible and its inherent subjectivity evident.

It must be admitted, looking back in time, the historical porch is elegant and charming in the old black-and-white Field Form photograph.  And with the loss of the congregation the carefree chutzpah of the 1977 entry addition becomes less supportable to the values and beliefs of a new community.  Likewise, its inevitable demolition and architectural loss become trivial compared to the loss of   affordable options for a broader community.

The goal of historic preservation remains laudable, but one some can ill afford.  In the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s when redlining made home loans unavailable to residents in the Western Addition, maintenance, repair and improvement were not even an option.  Today, chipping paint, warped flooring, aluminum windows and asbestos shingles can look as attractively affordable to a budget minded renter or a TIC purchaser, as they can to well-funded developers like the Highland Ferndale Partners.

At Gethsemane, one should expect that under the watchful eye and wagging finger of the City’s Historical Review Process a new historical look will be recreated including entry and garage for the freshly painted luxury home at 601 Broderick.  And one can reckon that the so-called horrible abomination of an entry that served a rocking congregation for 36 years will be bull-dozed and our post will serve in remembrance.

LAST OUTPOSTS: VICTORIANS AND PENTECOSTALS OF THE WESTERN ADDITION

The First Apostolic Faith Church displays a Pentecostal purity of form in stark contrast to the ornament laden Victorians that populate the neighborhood.

Cleansed of its Victorian ornament to a powerful austerity and a puritanical severity, the First Apostolic Faith Church at Pierce and Bush, top,  provides an affordable and architectural alternative to the prevailing upper middle class styling common in Lower Pacific Heights in Western Addition’s upper end.  It represents one of many small and endangered churches still active as its supporting congregation is pushed out of the neighborhood to make way for a less evangelical population.

A Bible belt of small churches, Pentecostals and Baptists, cradles the former Redevelopment Area of  the Western Addition.  During the reconstruction period of the 1960′s and 70′s  the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency replaced demolished Victorian row-houses with large-scale housing blocks.  The new plans eliminated small churches, mom and pop corner stores, bars, clubs, even front stoops –all spots for neighborhood socializing.  The churches migrated west into the adjacent hospitable Victorian era neighborhoods of Hayes Valley, including the Lower Haight and North of the Panhandle.  Shown above, ”The indiscriminate mixture of commercial, industrial and residential structures … is the disease of blighted areas.” proclaims the San Francisco Planning Commission in their anti-urban propaganda “New City” of 1947.

Considered Urban Blight by the Redevelopment Agency and now called Painted Ladies, the Victorians of the Western Addition form an astounding collection of which the tour-bus beloved  Six Painted Ladies of Alamo Square are but a tiny piece.  These other Ladies of a certain age like the one below just happen to be on a different maintenance schedule.

Among the earliest, these classic italianate row houses at Grove and Scott, shown above, represent 10 of more than 1,000 identical homes built throughout Victorian San Francisco by William Hollis’ The Real Estate Associates (TREA), building developer of the early 1870′s with a very successful homeowner package.   Between 1870 to 1877, TREA building production averaged 2 to 3 homes a day, a scale of construction, mass production and landscape re-invention comparable to that undertaken by the Redevelopment Agency itself.

Presenting a Before and After view,  the Mount Hermon Baptist displays its original Victorian ornament(the Before) on its annex, above left.  In contrast, its sanctuary(the After), above right, strips down to a purity of form animated only by subtle use of color, iconography and window placement.  Both are Victorian era structures.  Both are stunning.  The modern sanctuary is also surprising.

In conflict with San Francisco’s legislated  Residential Design Guidelines, the Pentecostal Temple at Grove and Lyon and the Second Union Baptist on Page interrupt residential street pattern with positive mid-block socializing and the safety of the bright neon glow–that is as long as the light stays on.

The Solid Rock Church of God re-thinks what Victorian ornamentation can mean.  Below the elegant cornice, Victorian trims are removed and replaced with a stone  veneer and a tomb like entry.  Above the roof peak floats a heavenly cross.   Unfortunately, the church’s footing North of the Panhandle seems less than rock solid along with many of the remaining congregations.

The neighborhood churches provide a unique counterpoint in an otherwise well preserved, if less painted, Victorian neighborhood.  They up-end our expectations of appropriateness and call to question the restrictive goals of preservation and zoning which encourage greater neighborhood consistency and discourage architectual diversity and affordability at a parcel by parcel scale.  If less ornamented than the Victorians,  what the small church structures offer the community is variety and character–aesthetic, economic, cultural and  certainly spiritual.

Real estate profits, radically improved commercial activity and city infrastructure support the revitalization of the neighborhood but do less to support the fragile economic integration of its community.   Historically, the neighborhood was Victorian.  Historically, the neighborhood encouraged a middle range of incomes and a diverse community.

Thanks to Eric Fischer for his monumental postings of San Francisco City Planning maps and documents including “Reclaimed from Blight.”  Below the crosses of the recently sold Gethsemane Missionary Baptist at Grove and Broderick and the dark cypress at the door of the Emmanuel Church of God in Christ.

 

LAST OUTPOSTS: BAPTISTS AND A.M.E.S OF THE WESTERN ADDITION

On Thursday evenings and Sundays mornings, the largely white neighborhoods of the Western Addition are transfigured by  voices singing the gospel and shouting Amen from within the local African Americans churches of what were predominantly black neighborhoods.   Once occupying the entire Western Addition as “the Harlem of the West“, the now scattered black community reassembles in the church choirs and congregations with former neighbors driving in from more affordable neighborhoods across the city, and across the bay for worship and community.

Connecting the dots on a googlemap of “baptist churches”, one can chart the size of the mighty community that filled San Francisco’s Western Addition including the neighborhoods of the Fillmore, both Upper and Lower, Haight Ashbury and the Lower Haight, Hayes Valley, Alamo Square, NoPa and Divisadero Street, the Lower Pacific Heights, Japantown, and Cathedral Hill.  Along with the Baptists we’ve added to the map the names of black A.M.E.s (Black American Episcopal), C.O.G.I.C.s (Church of God in Christ)  and Pentecostals.

The churches range across the heart of the city from the imposing Macedonia Missionary Baptist in Lower Pacific Heights  to the gothic Mount Zion Baptist across from Golden Gate Park in the Haight Ashbury, pictured above, and from the rosy Love Chapel Church of God bordering Presidio Heights to the modest Mount Trinity Baptist along the new Octavia Blvd. near Market Street, both shown below.

Over a 69 year history these church communities have fought a continuing battle for permanence and relevance.

Typical of many, the founder’s plaque at the Macedonia Missionary Baptist dates the Sanctuary’s beginnings to 1943, during the heyday of wartime ship building and at the height of black migration from the deep south.  The plaque goes on to proudly honor “Mortgage burned, July 6, 1958,” while one block down, San Francisco Urban Renewal begins its buy-out and wholesale demolition of the district, replacing Geary Street with Geary Boulevard, effectively cleaving Pacific Heights and the Macedonia Missionary from the heavily  concentrated black neighborhoods south of Geary with a six  lane expressway beginning and ending precisely at the Western Addition borders, serving all but the locals.

Beginning in wartime 1943 like the Macedonia Missionary, the more nomadic congregation of the Greater Gethsemane C.O.G.I.C.  suffers both forced and voluntary relocations before settling down.   Starting on Eddy Street, ground zero for Urban Renewal Project Area A-1, the congregation relocates to Buchanan Street, soon to become Project Area A-2, where the church is claimed by San Francisco Redevelopment and demolished.   Re-established in a former theater in the Lower Haight, they sell to the developer of The Theater Lofts Condominiums.  In 1999 Lord Pastor Dad Grant leads  his congregation 5 blocks home to the stately 240 Page Street, the former St. Paul’s German Methodist built in 1909, shown below.

Nearby up Page Street, the neon cross at the 2nd Union Baptist still glows nightly after 50 years.


Among the  more prominent congregations, the Third Baptist near Alamo Square claims to be the oldest, founded in 1852.  Both believers and activists , the church  maintains long-standing connections with the N.A.A.C.P.   Below W.E.B. Du Bois  speaks in the sanctuary to the NAACP in 1958.   It has been pastored by the outspoken  Dr. Amos C. Brown since 1976, current President of the local branch.

Out at the fringes of the district, two different strategies address the issue of dwindling attendance.

The steeple of the First A.M.E. Zion, the oldest African Methodist Episcopal, congregation west of the Mississippi (1852), stands opposite the private San Francisco Day School at Golden Gate and Masonic, below, one representing the older and one the newer demographic.   In 2009, the 26 year old, Rev. Malcolm J. Byrd was called from Brooklyn to re-vitalize the aging congregation.  Check out the video of his arrival,  “A New Beginning”,  for an inside view.

At Turk and Lyon, the congregation of the multi-colored St. Cyprian’s Episcopal, below, adapts to survive, transforming from a 34 member declining black congregation to an integrated  neighborhood  church, reflecting the evolving neighborhood  with significant community outreach programs and its own voice in issues affecting new community interests.

Like the recently publicized foreclosures in Bayview, the steady loss of the churches of the Western Addition through foreclosure, eviction  and attrition echoes  the economic expulsion and flight of San Francisco’s black population, representing 17% in the 60′s before Urban Renewal and the loss of blue collar work, and now representing 6%.  The churches stand as testament of their binding strength as a spiritual homeland for a community dispossessed of its physical, geographical neighborhood.

Above NoPa’s Pentecostal Temple and nearby the recently foreclosed Gethsemane Missionary Baptist.

The next few blog posts present an incomplete catalog of the endangered Western Addition churches, representing both a spirited culture and free-spirited architectural approach.  Our interests are:

1.  to chronicle the remnants of a disappeared community and an endangered multi-culturalism.

2.  to recognize in the simple, evocative  forms and iconography of the smaller churches an historical architectural resource that provides a powerful counterpoint to the bric-a-brac laden Victorians in the neighborhoods they renovate.

3.  to critique San Francisco’s historical review process that deifies the middle class Victorians, promoting  neighborhood consistency while casting out neighborhood diversity and creative affordability.

Below, sidewalk topiary at the Love Chapel Church of God in Christ glows in the light of a setting sun.

Thanks to the recently defunct San Francisco Urban Redevelopment Agency for Geary Street Demolition photo and the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society for DuBois at 3rd Baptist and Joe Philipson for Rev. Amos Brown.  And thanks to Mrs. Dominique Jackson Byrd and the First A.M.E. Zion Church for the image of Rev. Malcolm J. Byrd and the video “A New Beginning.”

 

PLEASE, PLEASE, DON’T GO: PARTYING WITH THE HAIGHT-ASHBURY REUNION

May 25th, 2012,  Leah Garchik’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the Haight Ashbury Reunion which occurred on May 12th bringing together former and lifetime residents of the Haight Ashbury to party in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle.  The group was predominantly African American like the neighborhood 50 years ago. Garchik reports many had graduated Dudley Stone Elementary, now De Avila Chinese Immersion on Haight, in 1970 and 1971 to become among the first bussed out of their neighborhoods to A.P. Giannini Middle School at 37th and Ortega, 4.5 miles away.  Roslynn Grimal, now of El Sobrante, recalls, “Not only were we exposed to a different class of people, but it was the first time a lot of us were in school with anybody other than African Americans.”  Craig Cook, formerly of Waller Street, adds, “We were, like, sightseeing.  We saw grass.  People had lawns…”

Meanwhile, same day, four blocks away on Lyon and Hayes, NOPNA (North of the Panhandle Neighborhood Association) held its 12th Anniversary block party including tables for NOPNA, the Wigg Party, the Bicycle Coalition, St. Cyprian’s and  Paragon Real Estate.  If the reunion presents the old face of the Western Addition, the NOPNA Block Party presents the new face.

Questioning  Reunion members why most people left the neighborhood, Garchik  received mixed responses.  London Breed, running for supervisor in District 5, cites “living expense.., crime, public schools,” while Cook claims it wasn’t “an economic or financial thing.”   Not so simple, but hardly surprising, to realize that many blacks share the same anti-urban American Dream of gardens, cars, security, affordability, home ownership and better schools that sparked white flight to the suburbs in the 50′s and 60′s.

In the late afternoon, both venues, the Reunion and NOPNA Block Party, blasted the music of James Brown with a Reunion member providing a live dance tribute to the Godfather of Soul pleading to the black community:

“Please, please, don’t go!”

Our thanks to the Haight-Ashbury Reunion and to columnist and neighbor Leah Garchik for her coverage of this important event.

On a similar topic, a shout out also to the San Francisco African American Shakespeare Company for their recent insightful production of “Raisin in the Sun” scripted by Lorraine Hansberry in 1959.  The melodrama portrays an African American families’ ambiguous attraction to the American Dream where the sharecroppers pick and hoe is replaced by garden trowel and hand weeder in the heroic struggle for fair housing.  With its history of home loan redlining, Urban Renewal, low income housing projects, street improvements, and now gentrification, the Western Addition has served as testing ground and battleground in this struggle.

DOWN AT THE CROSSROADS: BI-RITE ON DIVISADERO

The Google, Facebook, Apple and Yahoo Commuter Buses have become a familiar sight along the Divisadero Street Corridor in San Francisco’s Western Addition.  The buses bring new income levels  to the Western Addition, increasing the commercial vitality as well as increasing pressure on existing housing, businesses and institutions to serve a newer, moneyed class.

Emblematic of the transformation on Divisadero is the replacement of a little used local market(shown at top) by the second outpost of the incredibly popular  Bi-Rite Market in October—their motto:  ”In our community, on our table”.  Currently successful in the gourmet ghetto of the Mission they are located mid-block on 18th Street up from Guerrero Street along with the packed Tartine Bakery, Delfina Restaurant, Pizzeria Delfina, and Bi-rite Ice Creamery.  As shoppers arrive on foot, bike and BMW, Bi-rite Market could  accurately be described as either harbinger of local food  justice or  boutique grocery.

The new Bi-rite on Divisadero will locate next to their friends at Nopa (North Of the PAnhandle), another jammed, internationally recognized restaurant which with marketing brilliance branded itself and its neighborhood with the same name, re-envisioning the neighborhood in its own hipster image.  Across the street divider Bi-rite faces off with the busy if less healthy options Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits,  Club Waziema Ethiopian Cuisine and Cocktails, Jay’s Cheesesteak, and Acme Burgerhaus.   Just 1 block up Da Pitt Bar-B-Que (formerly Brother-in-Law’s)  has served up slow cooked barbeque to the community for decades.

December 8, 2011, Forum with Michael Krasny, a local NPR talk show, interviewed Bi-rite founder Sam Mogannam and green grocer Simon Richard regarding  Bi-rite’s  new book “Eat Good Food“.    The discussion spun out during public comment to consider Bi-rite’s influence on neighborhood gentrification including neighborhood character, demographics and rents.  Despite protests from the Bi-rite founder, the  conflict between the food community and Western Addition’s local black community was clear: healthy, responsible food is great . . . for those who can afford it.

Caller Alexis formerly of San Francisco, an African-American, who has shopped at Bi-Rite and who also has deep ties to the black community in Western Addition, called in questioning Bi-rite’s claim as  a community builder:
“I keep hearing the word community as if there were no community there before.  To me the word community is a new word for privilege.  Are you going out to the community that is already there or are you trying to create a new community and ignore the one that is there.”

Bi-Rite’s Sam Mogannam’s impassioned defense:
“18th Street, that block was a pit …. Most businesses had metal bars and grates to protect against robberies that occurred weekly, and it took a business like ours to take those bars down and attract other businesses to come in and synergize and create jobs…. We’re taking over a space that sold cigarettes, Twinkies, Doritos and malt liquor.  We’re going to provide fresh foods that’s coming from farms and ranches.  We’re taking over a space that had two jobs to one with fifty.  We’re going to do what we do best.  Listen, respond and provide what the community wants.”

Both speakers were incredibly sincere and heartfelt.  Both would agree that Bi-rite is a catalyst for change, whether for the health of a local community or the extinction of a local community.

Questions arise:
-What’s the hidden cost of creating healthy communities?
-Who has the right to define a community and a neighborhood, who belongs, who doesn’t?
-How do we rationalize the oxymoron of a “diverse community”, when “community” implies boundaries and exclusion?

From 1975 to 1995 we watched our local  gay friendly neighborhood’s metamorphosis from  Eureka Valley to the Castro—gay Zion, tourist Mecca, and street carnival.  Changing levels of commercial vitality, rents, street life and demographics appeal to different people and different communities at different times.  Sometimes they will serve a local community, and sometimes, perhaps, a global one.  Claiming indigenous rights in an urban environment as fluid as San Francisco is hopeless, but we can direct our neighborhoods in positive ways.

Bi-rite’s was not the first book about creating healthy communities.

Just like vegetables, cities and neighborhoods are organic.  Proto-urbanist Jane Jacobs recognizes this in the title of her seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  They are  healthy and sustainable when well-balanced, and they are dead and unappealing when artificially preserved or when a single interest creates limited and lop-sided growth inhibiting variety.  “Dull, inert cities … contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”

In the afternoon, the general nastiness of Divisadero’s wind-swept microclimate and its 30 mph rush hour street traffic serves the street well, giving it a scruffy allure that attracts as it rebuffs the local street life huddling at sidewalk cafes or in empty doorways.   With the best of intentions Bi-rite joins a multi-cultural neighborhood down at the crossroads.

At Bi-rite we bought the frisée for $1.99 a head and topped it with a poached egg from the local farmer’s market and bacon from our freezer.  The frisée was very fresh, local and without bitterness.  We tossed it with a vinaigrette of bacon grease, shallots, vinegar and a little sugar.

Thanks for the use of image of Castro 1978   by and © Richard Dworkin(Mr. Flikkr) and of Frisée Salad  and recipe by and © smittenkitchen.