by Gary Kamiya
The sinful side of the neighborhood flourished openly until it was forced into hiding by the U.S. military, which was alarmed by sky-high rates of venereal disease among soldiers, and by Prohibition. Sin City prospered even in hiding, but a double whammy set it on the road to decline. “The big hotels in the southeast Tenderloin were banking on being part of a theater district, but after the quake, most of the theaters moved north, to Geary and O’Farrell,” Field said. “The hotels had to readjust their sights to a lower class of tenants. Then the Depression hit and caused upkeep and maintenance on the buildings to go down.”
Despite the neighborhood’s decline, it was still clinging to respectability. By the 1930s, the typical Tenderloin resident in one of the SROs was a transient worker, a hobo, or a step up from a hobo—someone who worked seasonally harvesting crops or in manufacturing. There were also a lot of merchant seamen. Bums had not yet appeared. Some seasonal farmworkers returned to the same rooming houses for 50 years.
“When World War II came, the TL prospered again with all the military around,” Field went on. “But after the war, it slumped again. It briefly picked up again during the Korean War—in the 1940s and 1950s you have military shore patrols cruising through the area side by side with regular police.”
Horny G.I.s were keeping the Tenderloin on life support, but in the 1950s a number of things happened that sent it into a death spiral. Swing music played by big bands had drawn crowds into TL clubs: when the big band era ended, those clubs lost most of their audience. Bebop, the more harmonically advanced jazz that succeeded swing, was not nearly as popular. And the rise of folk music drew away still more paying customers. The last jazz club in the Tenderloin, the legendary Black Hawk at Turk and Hyde—where Miles Davis recorded two classic albums in April 1961—went out of business in 1963. At the same time, the remaining theaters in the area, which had switched to showing movies instead of live shows, began to go downhill, becoming grindhouses.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood’s population was getting older and poorer. “The residents were aging and retired seniors living on limited means,” Field said. The big cafeterias where the people of the Tenderloin used to eat, Clinton’s and Compton’s—which in their heyday had table service—also began their final descent. When SROs were razed in other San Francisco neighborhoods in the early 1960s, their poor residents had nowhere to go except to the Tenderloin. “In the 1930s, the papers started calling this a ‘seedy neighborhood,’ “Field said. “By the 1950s it was a ‘very seedy neighborhood.’ By the 1960s it was ‘a central city neighborhood.’”
The cultural upheavals of the 1960s sent runaways flooding into the Tenderloin. These boys and girls, the lost souls of the Flower Generation, hung out on street corners, doing drugs and prostituting themselves. The few working-class residents of the Tenderloin moved out as manufacturing jobs left the city. The housing stock deteriorated further. Then thousands of social outcasts flooded in during the 1960s and 1970s as prisoners were released from overcrowded jails and the mentally ill were deinstitutionalized. “These people became a customer base for drug dealers, hustlers, and street criminals,” Field said. In the 1980s the Tenderloin became increasingly black. The first homeless in the neighborhood were mentioned in the Tenderloin Times in 1984. “The eighties are when the Tenderloin actually becomes dangerous,” Field said. “When I started to work here.”
We turned down Taylor Street and approached the corner of Turk. A half-dozen people were milling around in front of a doorway. “This is the Tenderloin’s own private jail,” Field said. I looked more closely at the crowd. It was mostly young Latino men. One guy was wearing a Steeler’s jersey and gesticulating. They gave off a familiar sense of confused desperation mingled with bravado. “To get in there, you have to show ID, have a reason to be there, and go through all kinds of security,” he said. “It’s run by a company that contracts with the state of California to house parolees, people on probation, awaiting trial. It’s cheaper for the state to keep them here.”
As we spoke, a young Latino guy a few feet away was talking on a cell phone. I paid no attention, but Field had street ears. “Did you hear what that guy just said? ‘Do you think he recognized me?’ That’s typical of the conversations you’ll hear on this corner.”
An ominous Indian-looking guy dressed all in black swaggered past us on Taylor, exuding a major don’t-fuck-with-me vibe. Field had street eyes too. “Did you see that?” Field said under his breath, pointing at the guy’s leg. A knife at least 10 inches long was tightly strapped against his thigh. “Uh, I don’t think that’s legal,” I said. “Yeah. Well, maybe no one will notice,” Field said drily. “It kind of goes with his outfit.”
I asked Field what he thought was going to happen to the neighborhood. “The Tenderloin is the last battleground,” he said. “For nonprofit housing outfits and social services, this is Fort Apache. It’s Custer’s Last Stand. Historically, poor people and improving neighborhoods don’t mix. Either the poor people move out or the neighborhood collapses. The Tenderloin is a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. As a historian, I’m curious to see if the Tenderloin can resist the forces that always win out in cities.”
An example of the irresistible force was the impending gentrification, green-lighted by Mayor Ed Lee, of the blighted mid–Market Street area. Spearheading the assault on this legendarily bleak and intractable stretch was Twitter, which in June 2012 moved 800 employees into a building between 9th and 10th Streets. Though mid-Market is on the Tenderloin’s borders, the move was a portent. It struck me as ironic that a social media company, specializing in creating disembodied “communities,” might simultaneously destroy and revitalize the neighborhood that had once been a dense nexus of city life.
The immovable object, the thing keeping the Tenderloin from being gentrified, is a combination of city policy and nonprofit housing entities, both dedicated to providing extremely low-cost housing in the heart of San Francisco. If it were not for these factors, the Tenderloin would probably look like any other revitalized downtown neighborhood, a high-priced 2013 version of Jane Jacobs’s urbanist utopia.
The city made two crucial decisions, Field said. In 1981 it passed a law forbidding owners from demolishing SROs or converting them into tourist rentals unless they replaced the converted units or paid a fee into a fund for affordable housing. Then in 1985 it imposed height limits on new buildings in the Tenderloin, preventing Manhattanization. These decisions, combined with its active enforcement of rent laws—in particular, those preventing eviction of existing tenants—and its purchase of some SRO buildings, have helped keep market forces out of the Tenderloin.
Just as significant, nonprofits like the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic have purchased or leased many SRO hotels in the neighborhood, providing subsidized housing and social services for people who meet their criteria—those who are poor, disabled, have substance abuse problems, etc. Field said their rent is typically one-third of their monthly income, which means a lot of people living in the Tenderloin are paying less than $200 a month rent. (The median asking rent in San Francisco in December 2012 was $3,100, making it the most expensive U.S. city in which to rent.)
As we stood on the corner, a young black guy stumbled up to us. “What are you doing?” he demanded, pointing to my notebook. “We’re just talking,” Field said. “No, no,” the guy said. “You come down here to my neighborhood, you gotta …” “Look, my friend, it’s my neighborhood too,” Field said. “It belongs to all of us.” When he told the guy he had worked here for 12 years and had himself briefly slept on the streets when he first arrived, the guy’s jive bluster deflated like a pricked balloon. He seemed abashed and didn’t know what to say. We both shook his hand and he wandered off.
Field was deeply conflicted about what he wanted to see happen in the Tenderloin. “As a social worker, I want to do everything in my power to protect these people from the landlords who would
throw them out,” he said. “They’re evil motherfuckers. But as a San Franciscan, as a guy who likes to walk, I want all this stuff cleaned up.” He was sick of the crime, the prostitution (“as a social worker, I see absolutely no redeeming value in it”), the filth, the drugs.
“When I give my tours,” Field went on, “I ask how many people live in the Tenderloin. More and more people say they do. They’re in their 30s and 40s. They’ve been living here a few years. They’re invested in the neighborhood. OK, they go off to work and they relax. When they come home, they get tense. How long will this go on? And then there are all the Southeast Asians with kids who have moved into the neighborhood. How long will they put up with this?”
In the end, Field came down on the side of letting the Tenderloin be. “I’ve got my dark glasses on so you can’t see me blushing,” he said. “But God help me, I do see it as romantic.”
The tour was over, and I said goodbye to Field. I was glad that he had been my Virgil on this tour of San Francisco’s Purgatory. His ambivalence about the Tenderloin mirrored my own. Like him, I found it appalling and fascinating and consummately strange. And like him, I could not imagine San Francisco without it.
I went down Mason, turned on Turk, and headed toward the setting sun. People were milling around in front of a defunct old porno arcade. It was still warm, but a cool wind was kicking in from the west. I looked up at the rows of hotels and apartments, once-elegant buildings where countless ordinary working people had lived. All those vanished lives seemed to have sunk into their shabby lobbies and blank windows. In a city without memory, they were still here. There was a sadness about them as they stood there in the harsh slanting rays of the late-afternoon sun, but it was a good sadness, like the peeled apple that falls from the father’s hand at the end of Ozu’s Late Spring. A sadness to keep.
Chapter 3
The Alcatraz Triangle
Harding Rock, submerged between
Alcatraz and Angel Island, San Francisco Bay
Beneath the waters of San Francisco Bay, slightly to the north and west of Alcatraz Island, lie three large submerged rock formations called Harding, Arch, and Shag Rocks. During the 19th century, at low tide Arch Rock used to appear above the bay like the eye of a needle, attracting daredevils who would try to row through it. This pastime was abandoned after two young men were killed when their rowboat was smashed against the arch by a heavy swell. “The forty-niner cannot recall the day when this picturesque menace to navigation was not anathematized by the sailor man,” noted the Portland New Age in 1900. Arch Rock was saved for a while by “the sentimental opposition of a few veteran Californians who hated to see their odd-looking old friend disappear forever,” but the rock was dynamited in 1901.
The fact that there was a Gold Rush–era aquatic thrill ride in the middle of the bay is an odd footnote to San Francisco history. But Arch and its fellow spires have a much older and infinitely stranger history. For among these towering rocks, thousands of years before the bay existed, the first San Franciscans engaged in life-and-death struggles with some of the most stupendous creatures ever to walk the earth.
Human beings probably arrived in San Francisco around 13,000 years ago, some 2,000 to 4,000 years after their ancestors left Siberia. (Just when humans left Asia for North America, and how they got here, is a subject that occasions nasty footnoted brawls between archaeologists, geneticists, and linguists.) But these earliest San Franciscans, so-called Paleo-Indians, left no traces. The oldest skeleton found in the city is that of a female, unearthed during excavation for the Civic Center BART station in 1969, dating to about 5,000 years ago. Human beings are known to have been present in what is now San Francisco from 6,000 years ago, and present twice that long in the greater Bay Area.
The Paleo-Indians arrived during the geological epoch known as the Pleistocene, which started about 2.5 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, roughly coinciding with the end of the last glacial period. The middle and late Pleistocene was the age of the enormous beasts known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous Rancho La Brea tar pits that yielded a treasure trove of prehistoric fossils. Which meant that the biped newcomers to North America arrived just in time to witness the curtain call of a pageant of wildlife so extraordinary that archaeologist E. Breck Parkman calls it “one of the greatest natural phenomena of all time.”
These awe-inspiring creatures moved across a landscape so different from today’s that it would have been scarcely recognizable. To begin with, there was no bay. There had been one 120,000 years earlier, during the previous warm, or “interglacial,” period, when the melting polar ice caps released vast quantities of water into the sea. And the bay had come and gone several other times in the million years before that, like a bathtub filled and emptied by a capricious god playing with a tap. (We ourselves have now become that capricious god, and are filling the planet’s bathtub quite quickly.) But when the first humans arrived in San Francisco, the last glacial period was not yet over, and the sea level was 300 feet lower than it is now. The bay was a valley, dubbed the Franciscan Valley by archaeologists. A mighty river ran through the Golden Gate, thundering in waterfalls and cascades, its relentless force carving out Angel Island from Tiburon. This vanished river flowed through a coastal prairie, the Farallones Plain, that extended all the way to the Farallon Islands, 28 miles away, where it emptied into the sea.
Much of the terrain was covered with scrub brush, although groves of live oak, California buckeye, and bay laurel trees grew in a rectangle running from the southern border halfway through central San Francisco, with isolated stands elsewhere. Juniper, pine, birch, poplar, and salix trees ringed prairie grasslands, bogs, and freshwater ponds in the low-lying terrain in the eastern part of the city. Huge sand dunes, carried down from the Sierra by vast rivers and deposited at the coastline, had begun to cover the western part of the city, blown by the wind. Streams ran down from the central peaks, Twin Peaks and Mount Davidson and Mount Sutro, and from springs in the Presidio and north of the Civic Center, draining into the bay in curling streams and estuaries. Mission Creek ran all the way from the bay to the Mission District, surrounded by tidal flats and swamps.
But the strangeness of this landscape would have paled in comparison to the animals that inhabited it. A Paleo-Indian who climbed to the top of Telegraph Hill would have witnessed a procession that would make the Serengeti look like a petting zoo. Across the wide grassy plain now covered by the bay roamed vast herds of enormous beasts. Huge Columbian mammoths rumbled along next to gigantic mastodons. Hundreds of giant bison, weighing two tons and standing more than eight feet high, headed through the Golden Gate on their seasonal migration, next to the roaring river. Herds of the Western horse and its larger cousin the Giant Horse trotted past. Western camels, antelopes, deer, elk, and possibly moose made their way across the plain. Tapirs and ground sloths the size of oxen lurked in nearby forests and woodlands.
These grazing herd animals were stalked by the most terrifying mammalian killing machines ever to walk the earth. At the top of the food chain stood the American lion and the short-faced bear. The American lion, which probably had come fairly recently across the land bridge known as Beringia—where it had terrorized the people crossing to Alaska—could weigh as much as 750 pounds, 25 percent larger than the modern African lion. It had a larger brain than any other lion and, at its peak, had the widest range of any wild land mammal species. Parkman estimates that there were 800 of these lethal animals prowling the Bay Area.
Even more frightening was the short-faced bear. Standing 13 feet tall and weighing one ton (25 percent larger than the grizzly), the short-faced bear was the largest and most powerful carnivore ever to live in North America. Able to run an astonishing 40 miles an hour for up to a mile and more rapacious than modern bears, it was the most feared predator of them all. An estimated 450 short-faced bears inhabited the Bay Area.
As if those ferocious beasts weren’t enough to give an ungulate—or a feeble bi
ped—indigestion, they were joined by saber-toothed cats, grizzly (brown) bears, dire wolves, scimitar cats, coyotes, and even jaguars, which existed as far north as San Francisco until the 1820s. If an animal was wounded, giant condors with 12-foot wingspans sailed overhead, waiting to pounce.
Together, hunters and hunted made up a bestiary of staggering size and diversity. Parkman estimates that the Bay Area was home to 227,000 bison, 35,000 horses, 7,000 camels, 1,450 mastodons, 725 Columbian mammoths, 450 saber-toothed cats, and 400 dire wolves. And many of these mighty animals would have gone past Arch, Harding, and Shag Rocks.
Parkman calls the area occupied by these rocks, between the Golden Gate, Alcatraz Island, and Angel Island, the “Alcatraz triangle.” The Alcatraz triangle was on the migratory path that led from the Franciscan Valley to the Farallones Plain. The three lofty pinnacles—Harding, the tallest, was more than 300 feet high before its top, like Arch’s, was dynamited as a hazard to navigation—would have provided the first San Franciscans with a perfect ambush site.
The hunters would have gone after the smaller, less ferocious animals like the bison, the horses, and the tapirs. But desperation could have led them to take on even dangerous behemoths like the Columbian mammoth. Working in small groups, they would have leaped out, surrounded their prey, and tried to spear it in its underbelly or throat. If they succeeded in wounding it, they would follow it until it collapsed from loss of blood or infection. It would have been extremely dangerous work. But a successful hunt could feed their band for weeks.
