Hollow City

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Much has been said about the New Urbanism, which started an architectural movement to design suburbs that resemble urban neighborhoods, but what is happening in San Francisco and other American cities is a new new urbanism in which cities will function like suburbs. The gentrification of cities, the spread of chain stores, the ability of administrators to control the increasingly subtle details of public space and public life all threaten to make urban places as bland as homogenous suburbs.

People in San Francisco speak constantly, obsessively of what is happening and mourn what is being lost. Several photographers devote themselves to documenting the vanishing places—the same kind of salvage photography once used to document vanishing indigenous cultures. After a couple of years of being stunned, San Francisco’s radical rabble is fighting back. Newly passed ballot initiatives limit growth and eliminate zoning and tax loopholes for dot-coms and the "live/work" condos that sprang up to house their better-paid workers. Dozens of demonstrations and protests brought the issues to the street—and to the offices of Bigstep.com, a particularly invasive dot-com that was occupied by hostile members of the newly formed Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. Dancers turned a dance-studio eviction into a seige and held out for days. The walls of the Mission are covered with brilliant political posters and stencils. The two thousand bands evicted from Downtown Rehearsal, in what is widely seen as the end of San Francisco’s once thriving music scene, had a day of outdoor concerts and a million-band march. The creativity and outrage with which San Franciscans once addressed human rights and environmental issues around the world are now being spent on their own survival. People hold meetings, work on eviction defenses, write letters to editors. Many realize that the city’s rich cultural life arises out of a combination of many ethnic groups, social classes, community resources, along with those seeking the adventure of making culture, revolutions, and identity. These things are not portable; you can move the species but not the habitat. And it’s the habitat that is disappearing.

San Francisco used to be the great anomaly among American places. What happened here was interesting precisely because it was different from what was happening anywhere else. We were a sanctuary for the queer, the eccentric, the creative, the radical, for political and economic refugees. In some ways the city’s unique identity goes back to the Gold Rush, when the absence of traditional social structures produced independent women, orgiastic behavior, epidemics of violence, and an atmosphere of liberation, even amidst the greed of a boom. "They had their faults," poet Kenneth Rexroth once remarked of San Francisco’s early inhabitants, "but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather." By the 20th century, it was becoming a center for immigrant Italian anarchists, radical Wobblies, and union organizers. Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation in the 1950s, called it "the stronghold of trade unionism in the United States." Conscientious objectors flocked here after World War II, and the poets who would later be celebrated as the Beats started coming in the 1940s and 1950s; African Americans seeking wartime jobs produced a postwar cultural flourishing of jazz and nightlife. It was also a haven for gays and lesbians early on, and remains one today for those who can afford it. It was the place where the ’60s counterculture flourished most fully, as well as a major center for punk culture and related subversions after 1977. And since the Sierra Club was founded here in 1892, the San Francisco Bay Area has been a major center for environmental activism and the evolution of ecological thinking. Feminism, human rights activism, pacifism, Buddhism, paganism, alternative medicine, dance, rock ’n’ roll, and jazz all permeate the local culture.

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