Stomping Grounds

What was once home

Day 15
Neighborhoods Covered: Castro, Mission
Streets Completed: Ford, Hartford, Hancock, Dorland, Oakwood, Linda, Lapidge, Bird, Dearborn, Camp, Albion, Rosa Parks

For my first six years in San Francisco, I lived in the Castro, in a flat on Sanchez shared with three other housemates. (I actually passed my first few months here in a house on Cesar Chavez with my friend Kristen from Vassar and her two housemates, until one of said housemates--the polyamorous hydrocolon therapist--decided she "didn't like [my] energy" and essentially requested that I make myself scarce. By that point, I was happy to comply.) For a long time, things were good.

The Castro was, for me, perhaps the best possible neighborhood in which to come into my own in my adopted city. As a woman, I found it utterly non-threatening; having been catcalled repeatedly in the Mission (which I neither expected nor knew quite what to do with), it was a relief to be in a place where I was almost certainly of zero sexual interest to a huge percentage of the population. I also loved the sense of community, the fact that the heart of the neighborhood was clustered around a few streets, and, pat as it may sound, how everything always seemed to be sprouting with color and vibrancy. I even grudgingly loved the chaos of Halloween there (before things went seriously downhill).

Yesterday I walked through a bit of the Castro, and for all that's much the same (the Sausage Factory--a pizzeria [surely no double entendre intended]--still seems to be going strong, as do many of the bars that have been there for years) there's just as much that's changing. Castro Video had signs posted in its windows noting that, although it had been around since the dawn of Betamax, it was closing its doors. Other storefronts on Castro and along 18th had been ripped out and were in the process of being renovated. And, of course, there's the Diesel store on the corner of Castro and Market. It used to be a bank.

All of this made me wonder what it would be like to be a gay man who'd lived in the Castro since it was a relative enclave of safety back in the 60s and 70s. Would I welcome the changes, or would it seem like too many unrecoverable things were being lost? (It's entirely possible, of course, that much of what made the Castro what it once was has long since been lost, and that the appearance of another new Rolo doesn't cause much of a ripple anymore.) There's no question that the Castro is still, in many ways, the heart of many subsections of gay culture in the city, but I'd be curious to know whether, to those who've lived there for years, the neighborhood feels like it's drifted from what it once was--and, if so, whether that's good or bad.

I left 460 Sanchez for the sanctuary of my own place in Hayes Valley in 2003, having grown impossibly fed up with the frustrations of communal living and with the landlord's blatant desire for us all to move out and free up the rent controlled lease. (Subtle hint that he wasn't exactly concerned with what happened to us: when a chunk of my housemate Abby's ceiling fell down onto her bed, his first response was a half-joking, half-serious, "Well, tell her she probably shouldn't sleep in that spot.")

I don't know how much longer the others held on, but I do recall hearing a few years back that the landlord had finally got his wish and promptly set about making a bevy of improvements. When I looked up at the flat yesterday, I could see some of them: a new window in the bathroom, a skylight (!) and a new light fixture in the kitchen, repaired front steps. (They were so bad at one point that the Post Office stopped delivering our mail, saying that our mail carrier, who was pregnant at the time, couldn't risk injury by trying to navigate them.)

So much has changed.

Neighborhooding

Day 14
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Lower Haight, Duboce Triangle, Corona Heights, Castro, Mission
Streets Completed: Laussat, Walter, Pond, Prosper, Chula, Hoff

Where does one neighborhood end and the next begin?

That seems a particularly twisted designation here in San Francisco, where there are swaths of the city divided into seemingly random (and tiny) sections--cf. District 4, with Diamond Heights, Miraloma Heights, Sherwood Forest, Monterey Heights, and on and on and on--others where 'hoods seem to go on forever, and still others in which marginal neighborhoods that abut more preferable areas take on qualifying adjectives in an attempt to disguise their true natures. (Nope, nope, not the Tenderloin: it's Lower Nob Hill, please.)

I thought of this yesterday as, in a relatively moderate number of blocks, I managed to traverse pieces of six neighborhoods. Between leaving my house and arriving at my client's on 14th Street, I hit four of them. The other two lay between the Castro Muni station, where the client dropped me off, and 16th Street BART, where I got on a train for Berkeley.

My friend Scott, who moved here from Boston last year, found himself amazed at how much San Franciscans define others by where in the city they live. He happened to find an apartment he liked near Alta Plaza park, and in conversation after conversation, people would ask what neighborhood he lived in and then think they had him tagged when he replied, "Pacific Heights."

There's probably a solid kernel of truth in some of the neighborhood-based stereotypes we make--if you're living in Russian Hill, for example, there's a very good chance you don't have a strictly limited income. But the hard and fast assumptions just don't hold, especially because the lines between neighborhoods are so fluid. When you can cross a street and officially be in another section of the city altogether, how accurate can these divisions (and the ideas that come with them) really be?

Dark and Rainy

Day 7
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Castro/Mission
Streets Completed: Landers, Harlow, Dehon, Sharon, Ramona, Rosemont, Clinton Park, Brosnan

By the time I headed out on my walk last evening, the sun that had earlier been making one last push from the west to crack through the cloud cover everywhere else was gone, and the rain had started again. But the air was milder than I thought it would be, and there was something calming about being out on foot at that time in the evening, when so much around me was happening in cars.

I took Laguna to Market, and crossed Market at Church to walk Landers, a little two-block street between 14th and 16th that will forever be associated with Shayne and Daryl, who lived there for a few years back when all of our lives converged so heavily. (Shayne and D, I miss you, and think of you often.) After Landers I turned onto 16th and did a few of the one-block streets that sprout off of it.

Here's the thing with these tiny dead-ends: there's no way to walk them without looking slightly odd, or slightly lost. It's not like there's any doubt that they're longer than they seem from the main road, or that perhaps there's a secret way out on the other end (with the possible exception of a few of those Corona Heights streets that suddenly spring into stairways, but we'll get to those later). No. It's clear all around that they offer no outlet and won't suddenly grow in length. So I walk down them purposefully, perhaps pausing at the far end to contemplate the vista (junior high school cafeteria! heavy machinery in the back of the PG&E substation! parking lot!) before turning back. Not that anyone is watching me (that I know of).

I did a decent handful of little streets, some of which ended abruptly and some of which fed through to something else--such as Clinton Park, which between Valencia and Guerrero turns a corner and becomes (wait for it) STEVENSON! I walked the final block of Stevenson. Now I just need to go back and fill in all of the random 200-yard stretches of it scattered south of Market.