My home is your home
The current energy debate has brought
latent issues of seemliness to the surface, at present in
the form of the Great Laundry Debate. Writing from Berkeley
last week Alice Meyers struck a blow for open-air
clotheslines in a letter to the Chronicle, “The objection
to them is one of snobbery dating back to Victorian times,
when the well-to-do sent their wash to the Chinese laundry
or to a laundress who lived on the wrong side of the tracks.”
Mary Lambert, responding from Mill Valley, spoke up for
decorum: “I live by choice in a neighborhood with a
homeowners’ association, and I don’t wish to view anyone’s
laundry in the back yard, including my own.”
How much of the quotidian should be
visible has been a burning topic ever since the position of
social arbiter arrived on American shores. In San Francisco,
proponents of propriety have fought valiantly against
traditions of muddy boots and fast bucks, sometimes winning,
sometimes not. After World War II, the debate ventured out
of the drawing room, as clean-up crews formed diabolical
alliances with developers to bring respectability to
downtown areas. They did their damnedest, but those pesky
clothes kept popping right back up.
In the mid-1960s, the produce market near
the Ferry Building was deemed unsightly and banished beyond
the Bayshore, opening up space for the Golden Gateway
Apartment complex. The rundown Victorians of the Western
Addition were replaced by nondescript housing projects, and
their mainly black residents were redeveloped all the way to
Hunters Point, well out of sight of the burgeoning white
business community. The old buildings south of Market, home
to migrant industrial workers and other low-income people,
somehow escaped repair until their blighted aspects
qualified them for redevelopment into Yerba Buena Center.
And now there’s concern over the shabby
state of mid-Market.
It’s true: even Starbucks, which
occupies nearly every corner above Fifth Street, does not
venture here. It seems to be a wasteland of empty buildings,
shabby nonprofits, and unpredictable street people. And
whether by design or destiny, its unsavory qualities are
growing, like suspicious-looking toadstools.
Sharon Kizziah has noticed the change: “I’ve
been walking up Market Street from work (One Market Plaza)
to home for therapy (had a motorcycle accident three weeks
ago and bashed up my knee) and I have to say it is a strip
of misery. I’m not one for gentrification but it really is
miserable out there. I see the same old faces, some days
with more bruises and cuts than others, and hear the same
old pitches as I hustle on by. Is it getting more crazy on
Market between Powell and Van Ness? Are there just way more
people on the street now that the weather is getting warmer?”
Other, more official types have also
noticed the change. A downtown equivalent of the Great
Laundry Debate is raging: what should we do about the
unsightly lines of people on mid-Market? Suggestions range
widely — you’ve heard them: Transform the area into a
Times Square clone. Invite nonprofits to fill the vacancies
so they can serve their clients in a central location near
City Hall. Recapture some of the history of the area, Susan
Stryker says, with an impressive gay and lesbian museum.
Fill in the spaces with residential units, proposes Market
Street Association’s Carolyn Diamond: “When you get
someone living there, and you have eyes and ears there 24
hours a day, that cleans things up.” The South of Market
Anti-Displacement Coalition makes a similar suggestion, but
envisions a different set of eyes and ears.
Whatever fills the area will have to
contend with some rather noisy ghosts: from the beginning,
San Franciscans played out their lives on these streets.
Take the southeast corner of Eighth and
Market, which now boasts the soviet-style architecture of
Trinity Plaza. In the late nineteenth century this was the
site of Central Park, one of the city’s three ballparks.
Here kranks (fans to you modern baseball aficionados)
cheered on the home teams — including the Athletics and
the San Franciscos — in rough-and-tumble games where
gloveless outfielders chased balls made of sheepskin-covered
rubber and yarn. The enterprise came to an abrupt end in
1906, when the earthquake literally knocked out the park’s
underpinnings.
Return to the corner a few years later,
and you’d find it occupied by a giant complex of markets,
on the order of Baltimore’s now-trendy Lexington Market.
When the Crystal Palace Market (see page 4) closed in August
1959, one of the first casualties to the postwar
anti-laundry campaign, its last day made the front page of
the Chronicle. The story began, “More tears were shed
yesterday over lettuce and bologna than over the death-bed
scene in ‘Camille.’” Loyal customers objected to the
demise. A poultry dealer named Tony Zanca recalled that a
little old lady stormed up to him: “That man who takes
over here, he’ll be sorry.” Zanca told her that “that
man” was going to build a hotel in its place. “I know,”
she replied. “But how many people who come here to shop
can afford to pay $5 for a hotel room?”
The fact is that if you take down laundry
in one place, it will pop up in another. The downtown
ballpark at Eighth and Market has moved a few blocks away,
to Third and King. The downtown market is about to find a
new incarnation at the Ferry Terminal at the end of Market.
Instead of banishing the figurative clotheslines from this
particular community, let’s string them high where
everyone can see the bright garments they hold. Let the
breezes of daily life blow through mid-Market. I don’t
know about cleanliness, but humanness is certainly next to
godliness.
Betsey Culp
cybervoices
Bill Roddy, Growing
up in San Francisco: The Crystal Palace Market
Port
of San Francisco selects developer for renovation of Ferry
Building
