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Letter from California, Part 2
By Betsey Culp
When Newsom moved into Room 200 at City
Hall, he inherited a city that was still nursing its wounds. He also
inherited a host of festering problems. Dealt double body blows by the
collapse of the dot-com boom and the decline of tourism after 9/11, San
Francisco’s economy was on the ropes.
During the happier, headier days of the 1990s, Willie
Brown had sought to create a bright new physical image for the city — some
called it an imperial image — by fostering a long list of major
construction projects including a rebuilt DeYoung Museum, a home for
Bloomingdale’s, a new city-within-the-city at Mission Bay, and a
consolidated TransBay Terminal. At the same time, a runaway housing market
and rampant development had priced homes beyond the pocketbook of most
residents, generating an ugly bitterness in low-income areas. I remember
sitting in a Thai restaurant in the largely Latino Mission District and
listening to a developer complaining, loudly enough so that everyone in
the room could hear, about how much it was costing him to evict the
tenants of a building he had just bought.
Frustration over high housing costs continued after
the economy collapsed, compounded by the sight of a number of projects
where work suddenly ceased when they ran out of money. Downtown, plans for
a Mexican museum designed by Ricardo Legorreta and a Jewish museum
designed by Ground Zero architect Daniel Libeskind floundered. And today
at the corner of Bryant and 20th, in the heart of the Mission,
a large pit — like an Olympic-sized swimming pool with no water — is all
that marks the site of a once-controversial office park.
A reeling economy, a disgruntled citizenry, a
frustrated business community — these were only some of the problems
facing Newsom when he took office. Add to them a perennial homeless
population and a burgeoning crime rate, and you’ve got a pretty stiff
assignment.
- - - - - - -
That’s where Newsom stood in February, barely six
weeks after his inauguration, when he announced that the city would start
marrying same-sex couples. It’s common lore that San Franciscans do not
share the worries over gay marriage that torment many other parts of the
country. But I had forgotten, until the vice presidential debates, how
easily the subject makes even articulate speakers like John Edwards
squirm. For most of us here, we’ve seen too many decent people wrestle
with cruel red tape in dealing with a loved one’s hospitalization, or
agonize over the possible loss of an adopted child. Gay marriage simply
isn’t an issue.
This is not to say that we are unanimous on the
subject. Perish the thought! This is San Francisco, after all. When Rose
Tsai, a candidate for supervisor, espouses “family
values, traditional marriage,” she often gets nods of agreement from
members of the audience.
Despite hostile talk-show ravings elsewhere, and
death threats delivered here, San Franciscans saw the 29-day wedding party
as one long happy moment. If you managed to walk through City Hall at the
time, you must have noticed the joyous atmosphere that filled the marble
chambers. Even city employees, ordinarily rather humorless civil servants
who wear their stern black suits as a badge of honor, stopped to watch as
one couple after another recited their vows. Perhaps you are correct that
the marriages restored the city “to its onetime status as an avatar of
social rebellion.” But they also healed many of the wounds left over from
the mayoral election. Who can resist a wedding, much less 4,000 weddings?
Most of us realized that the unions were unlikely to
survive a court test. But it was the right thing to do. And even now the
glow lingers, long after the events themselves. As people travel
throughout the city, they encounter 130 hearts made of fiberglass or
metal, standing five feet tall, three-dimensional embodiments of the song
made famous by Tony Bennett. Imaginatively decorated by artists or
celebrities and sponsored by local businesses such as Wells Fargo and
Intel Corporation, the hearts will be auctioned off in November to benefit
San Francisco General Hospital. In the meantime, they give new meaning to
the adage, “Home is where the heart is.”
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