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I came across the above image the other day, which is of the intersection at Powell and Sutter in 1895. I realize that this is most definitely not the Loin, but it’s a great shot of how this general area used to look. I’ve never seen this shot before for some reason and it’s really sad given that everything there was leveled in 1906 with the Big One. And yes, your eyes don’t deceive you, there was a cable car on Sutter.
If you take a look at the affected devastation areas you see that the Tenderloin was pretty much completely obliterated by the earthquake and fire. Had that not happened, obviously a great many things would have been different in San Francisco, but probably the biggest one is that the Loin wouldn’t be the Loin as we know it. It would have been full of single dwelling homes that would have looked a great deal more like Alamo Square than the tall, multi-dwelling apartments that we have now. Don’t get me wrong, because of when the earthquake happened, we really got some great architecture rebuilt in the place where all was lost. It’s just that I like to muse about what maybe coulda been.
Dave of the blog Squalor and Despair (already one of our favorite Tenderblog readers, we must say) reminded us of another famous book set mostly in the Tenderloin: McTeague: A Story of San Francisco by Frank Norris (of Frank Norris alley fame, which runs between Larkin and Polk, Pine and Bush).
The book, which was written in 1899, describes the life of a turn-of-the-century dentist in Polk street, named McTeague (his first name is never revealed). What we didn’t know, though, is that the book was the basis for Erich von Stroheim’s classic film, Greed (the thing one learns by having a blog).
As it turns out, the whole book is available at Google Books, which means that we really don’t have any excuse for not having read it. For those uncultured people like us, here’s the opening paragraph to give you a little taste of it and hopefully to inspire you to read it:
It was Sunday, and according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductor’s coffee joint on Polk street. He had a gray, thick soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna’s saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.
Obviously, the McTeague’s Saloon on Polk street (which, by the way, has a happy hour every day until 7pm) is named after the book and you can guess why it has a tooth hanging from the facade…
Since this month is Pride Month and next Sunday is Pride Day, it seems only appropriate to pay a tribute to a Tenderloin event that marked a turning point in the San Francisco LGBT movement: the Gene Compton’s Cafeteria riot in August 1966. Although the June 28, 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City are generally considered the starting point of the modern gay liberation movement, this incident is considered to be the first recorded transgender riot in United States history.
From the Wikipedia entry: Compton’s Cafeteria was one of a chain of cafeterias owned by Gene Compton, and the San Francisco branch was located at 101 Taylor Street at the corner with Turk, and it was open from 1954 to 1972. The Compton’s Cafeteria was one of the few places where transgender people could congregate publicly in the city, because at the time they were unwelcome in gay bars. Because cross-dressing was illegal, police could use the presence of transgender people in a bar as a pretext for making a raid and closing the bar down.
On the first night of the riot, the management of Compton’s called the police when some transgender customers became raucous. When a police officer accustomed to manhandling the Compton’s clientele attempted to arrest one of the transwomen, she threw her coffee in his face. At that point the riot began, dishes and furniture were thrown, and the restaurant’s plate-glass windows were smashed. Police called for reinforcements as the fighting spilled into the street, where a police car had all its windows broken out and a sidewalk newsstand was burned down. The next night, more transgender people, hustlers, Tenderloin street people, and other members of the LGBT community joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow transgender people back in. The demonstration ended with the newly installed plate-glass windows being smashed again.
Although the riot was a turning point for the transgender community in San Francisco, for 40 years, it was an almost-forgotten incident until the documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, came out in June 2005. Here you can watch a clip of the movie:
On June 22, 2006, forty years after the riots, a memorial plaque was placed in the sidewalk in front of the cafeteria site, which is now the Oshun Center, a free clinic for women decorated by a beautiful mural. The text in the plaque, pictured at the beginning of this post, reads this:
Here marks the site of Gene Compton’s Cafeteria where a riot took place one August night when transgender women and gay men stood up for their rights and fought against police brutality, poverty, oppression and discrimination in the Tenderloin: We, the transgender, gay, lesbian and bisexual community, are dedicating this plaque to these heroes of our civil rights movement.
The United Nations has a history in San Francisco in that the charter forming it was signed here. So, it only seems reasonable to build a plaza in tribute of this fact. That was done in 1975 as part of overall Bart construction. Ever since then, little has been done to maintain and improve upon what could be a rather stupendous entrance to the otherwise gorgeous Civic Center area.
This is where things get kinda ugly because for any of us who have walked through the 2009 version of UN Plaza, we know that it’s pretty ugly. Obviously this is only accentuated by the fact that in order to deal with the homeless problem there, the benches were removed. To deal with the bronze trashcans being too heavy for garbage collection, they were replaced. It’s something of an endless list and really quite the flagship of stories when one wants to talk about the anti-homeless architecture schemes in San Francisco as of late (don’t even get me started about the horrid things that were done to Union Square in the current remodel.) But, for those interested, take a look at what The Cultural Landscape Foundation has to say about the current state of UN Plaza. They tear in to all the issues, but also offers suggestions on how to save it. My personal favorite is having the F streetcar line run up through it, which would be über cool.
But there is something that few people talk about. In fact, I’m curious if it’s the reason as to why there is a plaza in this area in the first place because you see, that whole space used to be a cemetery from UN Plaza to City Hall. That’s right, the Yerba Buena Cemetery took up the space bounded by Market, Larkin, and McAllister. This quote from 1850 is quite humorous:
We are informed by the city surveyor that he has staked out this cemetery upon the town reservation and that there is no difficulty in the way of using it as a place of sepulchre [sic]. It is situated upon the Mission road and is not difficult of access. He also informs us that already some fifty interments have been made upon the spot. There is enough town property in that locality to make a cemetery sufficient to accomodate [sic] the dead of the city for the next half century–at least such is the opinion of Mr. Eddy, and as he had surveyed the lands we presume him to be a good judge of the matter. The great object of having an abundance of ground reserved for the imporant [sic] purposes of burial should not be overlooked and we trust that other localities belonging to the town will also be reserved for this sacred purpose.
Naturally that “half century” of burial sales pitch didn’t hold out. Starting in 1889, the bodies were moved out, most probably to Colma, and you get what we have today, this open space that has a lot to offer, but a long way to go in getting there.
Via Eye on blogs we just discovered the newly launched Asian Art Museum blog and Twitter. We love the AA Museum, not only because it has one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world, but also because of their cool Thursday night MATCHA events.
The blog is mostly about their exhibits, but one of their latest posts on the history of the Museum caught our attention:
One of the first questions I get when people come in the door is, “What was this building before it was a museum?” Well, it was the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, which opened to the public in 1917. But with the help of Rick Prelinger and his archives, we can see back even further. In this film from 1914, government officials are fighting the opium trade …
It is cool to see the building of city hall in the background, and just by the amount of opium pipes being burnt I can’t imagine what a wild west city this used to be.
Watch the little video of the opium pipe burning here. Oh, and do visit the Museum, especially on Thursday nights or the first Sunday of the month when admission is free!
Browsing through Flickr we found on mebesaturday’s photostream this picture of an old business card from the King Arthur hotel that used to be on 242 Turk street.
Here’s what mebesaturday wrote about the hotel:
This is my fathers business card from the late 60’s, when my parents lived in the Tenderloin section of San Francisco, CA.. I found this in a box of junk that I have been toting around from apartment to apartment for over 10 years. Someday I hope to see the building formerly known as the King Arthur, just so I can see where many stories that my parents told me actually happened. I find it interesting that California was abbreviated to CALIF. After a little research I found that it was called the Hotel Von Dorn in 1909. It was built just after the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. It has been remodeled into apartments for foster children and homeless by The Salvation Army.
