Tagged: NoPa

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

 

 

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.