If you missed our TenderNight last week, then you missed the story Julie told on where she found the inspiration for her wonderful I live here: SF project. The short answer is: at Queen of Sheba, a Middle Eastern store at the corner of Sutter and Larkin run by this lovely Yemeni lady named Ghalyia. For those not up on history, the Queen of Sheba was a legendary story with a ruler that was thought to be from any number of places including Yemen, thus the association.

The long story goes something like this:

I meant to go to the Castro, but instead I ended up in the Tenderloin (again).

Walking up Sutter Street, it started to drizzle and I tucked my camera inside my coat. I’m learning. I’m not getting my camera wet anymore.

Across the street from a pawnshop was a corner market where most of the writing on the awning had faded or was rubbed out. But you could see where it said Middle Eastern Foods. That was enough to get me across the street. The open door with the smell of spices got me inside.

Near the doorway were three older women wearing long tunics and headscarves. The eldest woman had a blue painted line running vertically from her lower lip down her chin. (I am not sure what that marking means, if anyone else does, please enlighten me.)

A television was playing in Arabic.

Feeling somewhat shy, I ducked around the back of the store to see if I could find some of my favorite coffee. I love my Cafe Najjar with cardamom, and it’s hard to find. And I was enjoying wandering the narrow aisles, looking at all of the juices (blueberry, mango, pomegranate, tamarind) and packets of spice blends (kebab, za’ atar, baharat).

I came up to the counter with my little bag of coffee, and noticed near the register boxes of Turkish delight, and little candied fruits wrapped in plastic.

The woman behind the counter beams as I finger the candies. “Oh my God,” she says, with a little lust in her voice. “I love those so much. I eat too many of them.”

That’s all I need for a testimonial, so I choose one of each. She takes an apricot. “Oh my God, this one is my favorite.” She unwraps it and takes a bite of it like it’s her last meal.

“You like cardamom?” she asks, looking at the coffee.

I love cardamom, I tell her.

You like tea? she asks.

Just tell me what to buy and I’ll get it, I tell her.

Come with me, she says, and I follow her to the back of the store. She disappears into the back room and then emerges with a sizeable tub of black tea leaves.

She smiles as she takes the plastic lid off of the tub.

Smell this, she says knowingly. She makes it herself, she tells me proudly, mixing four different kinds of tea with cardamom.

OH my god, I think. It smells like heaven.

You can read the rest of Julie’s lovely story over at Tangobaby, her old blog that she doesn’t update anymore. You can also see a picture of Ghaliya and her friend Aicha over at Caliber.

Unfortunately, now you won’t be able to find Ghaliya at the Queen of Sheba Market anymore. She had to retire due to some knee problems, that require surgery. It’s sad to be losing such a person in the neighborhood, but as they say, that is life. The store has a new owner now (a big Palestinian fellow with a deep voice named Nasser). It’s been remodeled and is now called the Jerusalem Market, but more on that later.

A quick note to tell everyone to get off your lazy Thursday and get down to People, Places, & Spaces. While this new show is running at DWNTWN at 644 Hyde for the next month, tonight is the opening at 6:30PM.

It’s an exhibition of urban photography that’s 2/3 comprised of photographers from Caliber, Troy Holden and Travis Jensen, as well as Brad Evans whose work we didn’t know before. Looks to be solid work in our hood, and the opportunity to meet two of the best San Francisco photographers as well as online celebrities.

Have a gander along with your good time!

Update

Unfortunately we couldn’t go to the opening last night (which was quite a success, it seems), but Emb4ever took a few photos of it. Surprise, surprise, in spite of how small the DWNTWN store is, Frank Chu somehow managed to be there with one of his famous signs. Of course.

Although writing a blog is a lonely and largely unrewarding endeavor, one of its greatest satisfactions is the chance to meet extraordinary people thanks to it. It can also be intimidating, since it’s one thing to post some links sitting at home in pajamas and a very different thing to be confronted with people who actually know what they’re talking about. And when we’re talking about the Tenderloin/mid-Market area, one such person is photographer/historian Mark Ellinger. Some of you might know his blog Up from the Deep, where he publishes some his photography and historical research about the neighborhood. That site is such an amazing treasure trove of information about the Tenderloin, that it demands everyone to run and check it out (the site is currently being re-organized, so take your time to browse it).

The title Up from the deep is an adaptation of the Latin phrase De Profundis, “Up from the depths (of misery),” the incipient of the 130th Psalm and the title of numerous musical settings and works of literature that include a letter by Oscar Wilde, written while he was imprisoned. It is also a reference to his own life journey that took him to the depths of “fucking death and destruction”:

Between 1985 and 1995 I lost most all that was dear to me: friends, family, business, home, and possessions. Crushed by mortification and grief, I turned to heroin to numb my pain, but my suffering was only increased by physical dependence on the drug. For six years I wandered the mean streets of San Francisco and found out exactly how low I could sink.

Mark loves to photograph skies, and buildings in the Tenderloin

After spending 6 years living in the streets experiencing “the dark night of the soul”, predictably he lost everything, including himself. Also, his leg was nearly amputated and yes, you’ve probably guessed it: he nearly died in the process. Then he had an epiphany, but fortunately it wasn’t one of those finding Jesus type of epiphanies. Mark found that life was sweet, simple as that. After a couple of months in the hospital and 5 surgeries later, he finally managed to get a roof over his head for the first time in many years. That’s when he realized that having a roof over your head is “what makes it possible to engage with the rest of the world and accomplish anything”. And engage he did, drawing, painting and making friends. Like a Hungarian fellow named Josef who gave him his first camera at the beginning of 2003.

It was a cheap camera with a bad resolution, and he always took it with him and took photos of everything all day long. When he finally managed to download them into a computer he almost threw the camera out of the window. The photos were so bad, he says, that if a friend hadn’t been with him that day and convinced him to continue taking pictures, he would have given up.

Joy of life

When I asked Mark about his favorite pictures, the first one that came to mind was “Joy of life” (above). Perhaps because Mark loves brick buildings? (I love them too).

Incandescent

Another favorite of his is the one above, which he has on his business cards. This is what he wrote about the picture:

This image exemplifies why I love San Francisco so much. Fiery sunsets such as this set my mind and emotions ablaze, making life’s problems seem mere trifles; elevating me to some higher plane of awareness by making me conscious of what a tiny cog I am in the vast machinery of the Universe.

Ironically and unbeknown to me, around the time I took this photograph, the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist was condemned by the City and will most likely be demolished.

Personally, I like it because it clearly shows that the Tenderloin does have a golden hour, but also because it’s so dreamy and surreal it almost looks like a scene from a sci-fi movie.

Another personal favorite of mine is the one above of the Hotel Mentone, mainly due to the dominant red color tone – and I love red. But be warned: it’s extremely hard to pick favorites amongst Mark’s photos, since they all show the love and passion, the gratefulness and admiration he feels for the neighborhood.

All of his hotel photographs are extremely beautiful, some of them even look like paintings. Particularly the vintage signs are the reason why the Tenderloin is the most awesome neighborhood in San Francisco, hands down. Like this one of the Columbia hotel, at 411 O’Farrell.

Mark has been living in San Francisco for over 40 years, since he was a teenager coming from Ohio to study at the San Francisco Art Institute as a painting major. During all these years he’s worked as a sound engineer, he’s been a music composer for an animation film in which Orson Welles read a poem by Coleridge, he’s traveled the world, and he’s even worked as dog kennel driver. But it was the experience of living in the streets with nothing to live for that brought him closer to this neighborhood and made him want to photograph it to show the world its beauty.

• Mark’s blog & photography: Up from the Deep
• Mark’s newly created Twitter account

As if it wasn’t enough that the director’s commentary on Jeepers Creepers forever associated “golden hour” with “golden shower”, now Generic claims the Tenderloin doesn’t have this illicit time of photographic beauty. He says:

Like everything else, the lighting is harsh and then dies.

However, we have to disagree. I’m too lazy to search my huge, disorganized photo archives of the neighborhood. Fortunately The Tens, a highly recommended photoblog with frequent pics of the TL, has a photo to refute the accusation:

Golden hour in the TL (photo by The Tens)

So what do you photographers think? Is there a golden hour in the Loin?

We love, love, love I live here: SF, a wonderful series of portraits & stories ofy San Franciscans by the incredibly talented photographer Julie Michelle. And while it’s not very often that her beautiful subjects are photographed in the Tenderloin, we know that she has a soft spot for our neighborhood and are thrilled every time she showcases it (such as in these two stories that we’ve linked to in the past). Like in her most recent portrait of a psychologist named Bill. Here’s how Dr. Bill explains why he doesn’t own a fax machine or a cellphone:

Sometimes I’m asked to fax a report to the courthouse. Instead I have my morning espresso and walk to City Hall. San Francisco’s a small town so I usually run into one or two people that I know along the way. I pick up a newspaper (from the store, not the dispenser) and stop for breakfast: Eggs, bacon, but always fruit instead of potatoes. As I get closer to Civic Center I enjoy watching all the hustle and bustle: The self-appointed parking guides, the makeshift food trucks, the politicians, the lawyers – Especially those lady lawyers in their suits with their glasses on and their hair up. One time I ….Uhm, never mind. Then I go into the courthouse, hand in my report and chat for a few minutes with people I’ve known for years – face to face. We talk about our lives, families and travels. On the way out I stop and get a hot dog at that little stand in Civic Center Plaza and look at whatever protesters happen to be out that day.

Photo by Julie Michelle for I live here: SF

Read Dr. Bill’s full story about the end of the world on I live here: SF here, and check out his full photo shoot here.

Local photog Ron Font has a photoessay up on SF Public Press showing the shuttering of Sutter Street. Over the past few years, the recession has hit Sutter Street hard, closing galleries and shops. A few new businesses have popped up in the area, mostly tiny hipster shops like Invisible Stripes, but there’s still a lot of empty storefront. Now, as Tenderblogois blogged earlier, whether you consider Sutter Street part of the Tendernob  is a matter of opinion. To see more of Sutter, click here for the entire photoessay.

Tenderblogette came across The Tenderloin Project the other day. It’s an interesting project that, well, let me just copy and paste what they have on their about page:

The Tenderloin Project is an ongoing artistic endeavor focused on one of San Francisco’s most marginalized neighborhoods, The Tenderloin. Utilizing the interactive mediums of photography and film, we aim to capture a compelling and honest portrait of this diverse community.

With living exhibitions that will travel through San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York the project will be showcased in a variety of outlets, creating access for a range of viewers to see these intimate, yet objective images, and to understand what life is like in the Tenderloin.

The project will culminate in publishing the images in book form, with proceeds from the sales being donated to organizations that promote and give access to art in the Tenderloin. This, we feel, will allow our project to live on for years and generations to come in the form of art within the community.

Seems cool and I wish them the best of luck with it all, although given the hyper-digital life of folks in the Bay Area, I might recommend skipping the whole book printing process as I’ve done it and the returns are slim. Electronic publishing is kinda the way of the future.

A hometown friend of mine and I were joking that we should start up a company called, Human Safaris™ to take packs of over privileged white hipsters from the Mission up to our crappy hick hometown in Northern California so that they could taste how the other half lives. See what a real dive bar smells like! (Nobody drinks PBR there by the way). Experience the inside of a double wide in a trailer park! Try and buy non-Chinese Organic foods at a Walmart! Be able to walk under lifted 4x4s! Watch the 1st of the month “Parade”! We meant it all as a joke, but it appears someone took the idea, flipped it around and ran with it in the Loin.

The big buzz about Blog Land has been the LoinTours being proposed. From what I recall, the idea has been around for some time, but naturally, it was in the New York Times so suddenly it gets called news despite the fact that they continue to allow Nicholas Kristof to write his wickedly inaccurate and moronic articles there. So it goes.

There is so much swirling around about this that I don’t really know which side/angle/drink to take. At first I thought I was going to hate the Times article, but that was okay. It was just reporting what had been said. Then I thought I’d go after what Bronstein said. I mean, after all, in my one and only encounter with him at a party, he was a serious ass (surprisingly Sharon was nice), so I thought it’d be easy to hate what he wrote about the Loin. Sadly, I agree with it and can’t really be at fault with anything. Maybe Ms. Stone made him the tough guy in the relationship. He is quite muscly.

But then tenderblogette fed me this Broke-Ass Stuart article. Fantastic… So, let’s get one thing straight, I don’t like Stuart. I think he’s banal, overblown, and just a general ass as most hipsters in the Mission are wont to be. In short, his article is garbage and it’s the reason that we started this blog because basically, the fact that his Mission on/off facial hair relationship is pulling a “my rough inner city ghetto that gives me my supposed street cred is so much better than your rough inner city ghetto” crap annoys me to no end.

There is nothing new said in his article and it’s just a series of cheap, very generic potshots at my neighborhood*. I will not say that these don’t exist by any means, but the fact stands that there is a lot of history in this district and it’s more than just good Asian restaurants. Oh, those good Asian restaurants are due to the fact that Asian families live in the area and it’s one of the few areas with actual kids in it and it feels a lot more real than say Pacific Heights which looks abandoned after sundown. Oh yeah, there’s also the Asian Art Museum there as well as the main SF Public Library. Sure, you can say those are Civic Center, but to me, it’s really all the Loin given that a great many of the residents sleep at Civic Center at night.

But back to the actual idea of the tours because if you’ve read this far you must have some kind of vested interest (or all your Facebook/Twitter friends are at lunch). It sorta seems like a decent idea at first, but then there’s that cringe factor that creeps up my leg in response to it. It’s a lot like the Township tours in Johannesburg or a German guidebook to a Roma camp in Belgrade. Tours of poverty (rephrased as “grittiness” in some attempt at being politically correct) are scummy. There’s a reason that aspects of them are big in South Africa and Germany as it seems that in places where white supremacists were/are big, they love that shit. It’s like going to a human zoo for them. This of course fits in line with how they view anyone not white. Rather shocking that it’d be tried in San Francisco.

And no, it will do little for business. Same thing unintentionally happened before with tour buses stopping to show folks [probably named] Pam & Tom Wooster from Iowa just how gay things were in the Castro by parking at the top of the district for a couple of quick, pandering Pride Flag photos and thus confirming that they did indeed had to vote McCain/Palin in 2008. I mean, while we’re on the topic, why not have MarinaTours? People could go up to the Marina on a Sunday afternoon and observe drunken yuppies (whether from the North Bay or still in SF.) They could watch as the guys in polo shirts hit on the waitresses and the women with fake tits and showing roots hit on the waiters. No, it’s always gotta be what’s considered the fringe elements of a society. There’s something wrong with us if we really think these kinds of things are in any way good.

* That pic under “People Passed out in Very Uncomfortable Positions” isn’t even from the US let alone the Loin. It’s kinda obvious given that the license plates aren’t US plates. Sure, on the rare chance I have a car, I drive in the middle lane up Leavenworth because these kinds of things can happen, but at least find a pic from the US to illustrate it, Stuart.

I saw an article on Laughing Squid about SepiaTown which is a project that uses the power of Google Maps and history for good. Basically, it overlays photos from days of yore (thus the sepia name) where they were taken on Google Maps and allows you to see a then and now comparison. Quite cool really and San Francisco is one of the first towns where they’re doing it. It just seems that most of their shots focus around the Union Square/Financial District/Nob Hill area. Hopefully this will change to include more Loin as time goes on given that a great deal of San Francisco’s history is tied up here and I’m a total history nerd. I’ve never actually made a trip to the city archives, but maybe it’s time to go and look up more photos of “St. Anne’s Valley” as the Loin used to be known and submit them as they do take user submissions at SepiaTown. A nudge-nudge, wink-wink to any readers with the initiative as well.

This is off Leavenworth between Post & Geary. It’s the PG&E substation and its smokestack. I figured that given the post from the other day, I might as well swing around and show the back of things.