guerrilla curatorship

Found this article via emptyage; thanks neighbor!

A few notes:

“The Haight doesn’t look like any other neighborhood in San Francisco because its houses survived the 1906 earthquake, which leveled most of the city.”

Okay. (1.) The architecture of the upper Haight, while beautiful and special and precious and I the preservationist relish living among it even though it’s not all that well-preserved (AHEM when can we get a survey of historic resources up in here!?), is not wildly divergent from the San Francisco vernacular of the period (a teensy bit more flamboyant, maybe.) You’ll find its cousins in the Castro, Noe Valley, many parts of the Mission (especially up and down Capp, Treat and South Van Ness), the Bayview, and all the other neighborhoods left standing by the 1906 disaster (which was really concentrated in the northeast quadrant of the city: downtown, Nob Hill, the Tenderloin, south of Market, etc.) ALSO, much of today’s 94117 was built AFTER the 1906 earthquake as the city’s people moved westward out of the rebuilding downtown core. (Quite a few neighborhood buildings were built hastily in the year 1906, actually.) And (2.) If its most closely related analogue is not visible to the casual observer, that’s because the Western Addition was leveled in the 1960’s, not 1906. (New Yorkers may like to draw a parallel with their Robert Moses years.)

“It doesn’t even sound like anywhere else. Electric buses rattle down the street, almost drowning out the come-ons of a fortune teller sitting on a paisley carpet and the droning of a sitar player. “

Electric buses are by no means unique to the Haight; they must account for at least a third of SF Muni lines? Also, I have lived in this neighborhood most of my adult life and I have never once been beckoned to by a street-level fortune teller (there are a few on 2nd floors, I know) or seen a motherfucking sitar player.

“At times the scene gets seedy, especially if you enter Golden Gate Park near the intersection of Stanyan and Haight Streets (you may prefer to enter the park two blocks to the north, on John F. Kennedy Drive). In parts of the neighborhood, you might even stumble across a man sleeping off a bender on a futon laid out on the sidewalk, or see harmless but determined dealers offering “sticky green bud,” a potent form of cannabis, to everyone in sight.”

LOL. Watch out for those futons and that cannabis! They may sully your outerwear!

“Instead of Starbucks, there’s Coffee to the People at the corner of Masonic and Haight”

Also, there’s a Starbucks five blocks up at Masonic and Fulton.

Sorry I know this is rude, and it’s not that I don’t like tourists. I’m often a tourist myself, and I try to maintain understanding at home. Also, I love that my home is a place so many different people come to searching for so many different meanings, and I do think the article paid tribute to that. But there’s something about this kind of travel writing I abhor; it makes me feel like the little kid who stands on the road to Bolinas drenching yuppies with a hose. Maybe “rankled neighborhoodizen” is just the kind of local color someone is looking for. They probably will not find it at Eos. (Although to be fair, anyone with a smidgen of taste loves the Alembic and I’m glad they recommended it.)