Hollow City. Rebecca Solnit
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The name Fly, written in seventies-style fat round red letters on the illuminated plastic sign outside, evidently refers to the 1970s blaxsploitation Superfly films that director Quentin Tarantino appropriated, a funny reference for a predominantly white kid’s bar in a formerly African-American neighborhood. (A scruffy musician in the neighborhood tells me that Fly claimed “last call” had been called when he went to Fly for a midnight beer, only to find that the well-dressed couple who came in after him was being served.) Fly is across the street from a neighborhood fixture, Eddie’s Café, a decades-old soul-food restaurant, with a more recently arrived Asian-owned liquor-grocery store and an Arab-owned café on the other corners. It’s far posher than the other businesses at this intersection, and its mural is a fantasy substituted for history—a fantasy because it proposes a fictional history based on entertainment, while it participates in erasing the real history of a neighborhood wracked first by urban renewal, then by crack and gentrification. The jarring thing about these privileged young newcomers is that they accept as unquestioned fact what those who were there before them know as deterioration, outrage, erasure, distortion of what came before. The new San Francisco is run for the dot-com workers, multimedia executives and financiers of the new boom, and memory is one of the things that is being lost in the rapid turnover and all-out exile of tenants, organizations, nonchain businesses and even communities.
The storefront Church of St. John Coltrane exemplifies culture in every sense: it’s religious, artistic, ethnic, political and social at the same time. It feeds the poor three times a week and serves as one of the last remaining links to the golden age of the Fillmore District before it was gutted by urban renewal. And as an eccentric, individualist cultural hybrid—making free jazz a sacrament—it represents what has always made San Francisco distinctive, while Fly is a commercial enterprise that could be anywhere people old enough to drink and affluent enough to appreciate hip light fixtures congregate. You could say it’s not fair to compare a bar and a church, but the neighborhood’s African-American bars all vanished long ago—though the former jazz club midway between Fly and St. John’s has become the Justice League, a hip-hop club, and nearby Storyville caters to a mixed crowd of young jazz aficionados. Both bar and church postulate a relationship to African-American cultural history—to jazz and spirituality at the one, to fashion and movies in the other. It may be unkind to single Fly out, but it signifies the new order as neatly as the church signifies the old. Last year a new owner bought the building whose ground-floor storefront the church has inhabited for so long and doubled the church’s rent, a de facto eviction. Probably, like a lot of new landlords who’ve paid enormous prices for San Francisco real estate, he needs a better return on his investment than St. John Coltrane can provide.
The Sunday after my excursion to Fly, I take my bike the few blocks from my home of nearly two decades to the Coltrane church. It’s the first sunny spring morning after a lot of rain, and people seem rejuvenated. There are some others out there waiting with me for the 10 o’clock service, and I read the program for an older man in a tweedy suit who’s getting his glasses out and we begin to talk. He’s lived here half a century and first got into politics here working for Helen Gahagan Douglas, the woman who ran for the Senate against Richard Nixon in 1950. He’s one of the more progressive forces on the Democratic Central Committee, judging by what he says about gentrification and Mayor Willie Brown, and he’s come here to see what can be done to keep the church in its present location. A couple of shaggy young men sit on the curb. A couple shows up, then another man. At 10:15 Bishop Franzo King drives by and his daughters and Sister Deborah, a sturdy, radiant woman with a kerchief over her dreadlocks, get out. As Sister Deborah puts a key in the storefront door, a young white guy in black hipster sunglasses and a stocking cap shaped vaguely like a fez opens up from inside, and we all shuffle in. There’s a good stereo system on which Coltrane plays while the white guy in the glasses sings softly and one of the daughters hums along. The church’s right wall is lined with glossy paintings on some kind of board, like giant playing cards, portraying figures in the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine sensibility of flattened, large-eyed, stiff and highly stylized figures. They’re beautifully painted, and in them all the angels, saints and the Madonna and child have dark skin. The left wall features clippings and the text of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Off by itself is a smaller painting of Coltrane himself in Byzantine-icon style, with delicate flames lined up like a graduating class inside the mouth of his saxophone. A row of fluorescent lights illuminate these and the altar that’s off-center in the back of this unremodeled storefront. Front and center on the altar is a portrait of Jesus with neat dreadlocks.
Bishop King has put on what looks like a red yarmulke, the six battered wooden pews have become half-full, and the service begins with the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and other prayers in a formal style. But after the prayers, he begins to preach like the African-American Baptists and Methodists in the neighborhood, fervently, rhythmically, with antiphony supplied by Sister Deborah’s rich voice in the back and the two young women up front clapping hands. The pale hipster in the dark glasses takes up a tambourine and beats it above his head. Some of the people in the pews are swaying to the sounds. Bishop King’s prayers ask God to soften the hearts of those up high and to care for the needy below, and he says that Heaven is the true home of this church that is becoming homeless. Sister Deborah comes forward to sing with a cordless mike, and Bishop King gets behind the red drum set next to her and drums away with the same stateliness he preaches with. Turning sideways, I see that a young Asian couple has come in and we’ve got all the races represented, if the guy with the soul patch is as Hispanic as he looks. “The strongest argument for San Francisco over, say, Dallas (other than weather and natural elements like hills and oceans),” my friend Catherine e-mails me from the Mission District that day, “is that here people still mix.”
I skip out on bible class to bicycle through Golden Gate Park, which begins a few blocks west of the church, and I pass groups of martial artists training, elderly Chinese doing tai chi, slack-faced men in cars waiting to be solicited for adventures in the shrubbery, scrambling small children and bounding dogs on the lawns, rollerbladers dancing to a boombox, homeless people sunning themselves and what looks to be a matador class with three students and an instructor (but no bull) waving hot pink capes. On my way back from a view of the Pacific, I stop at the park’s M. H. de Young Memorial Museum and admire the way the Portuguese émigré artist Rigo has turned his space in a group show of Bay Area artists into a mini-museum of American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier. Rigo’s installation includes a display of Peltier’s laboriously realistic paintings of indigenous people, a facsimile of his jail cell, and a series of footsteps, one for each year of Peltier’s long incarceration on dubious charges. In other galleries of the museum paintings, prints and photographs dating back to the nineteenth century depict the city’s history.
I come home from the park to a phone message from the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. When I call him back, he tells me of several incidents in which Latinos were attacked or thrown out of bars in a Mission District that no longer feels like their home. “It is horrible, horrible, horrible,” he says with emotion, and he repeats what several others have told me, that the San Francisco police are busting the neighborhood’s Latino bars for every possible code infraction, thereby accelerating their turnover into enterprises catering to wealthier and whiter new arrivals. The Mission is named after Mission Dolores, the church built by Franciscan missionaries in the eighteenth century, and it has had a Latino presence ever since, notably since the 1930s, but that population is under siege—mostly by money. Guillermo tells me that twenty of his friends in the Mission have already left, and the community he came to be part of five years ago may not exist much longer.
A triple wave of real estate rapaciousness is evicting people from their homes, putting nonprofits and small enterprises out of business or out of town, and bringing in hordes of chain stores that are erasing the distinctness and the memory of San Francisco, but for days after my conversation with Guillermo the news seems to come in pairs. In the New Mission News, on the left side: “Mission Armory Developer Says He Wants to Do the Right Thing”—a fortress vacant for decades in one of the bleaker parts of the North Mission,