Hollow City. Rebecca Solnit
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backers may eviscerate the city. Some of them are buying art, and sales are booming for a few artists—but that doesn’t counterbalance the impact on the arts community as a whole. Even the Wall Street Journal notes that the dot-com newcomers like cover bands more than innovative ones, and so San Francisco’s famously creative music scene is withering as well.12 Whatever the Internet may be bringing the masses stranded far from civilization, the Internet economy in its capital is producing a massive cultural die-off, not a flowering.
San Francisco used to be the great anomaly. What happened here was interesting precisely because it was different from what was happening anywhere else. We were a sanctuary for the queer, the eccentric, the creative, the radical, the political and economic refugees, and so they came and reinforced the city’s difference. In some ways the city’s difference goes all the way back to the Gold Rush, when the absence of traditional social structures, the overwhelmingly young and male population, and wild fluctuations of wealth produced independent women, orgiastic behavior, epidemics of violence and an atmosphere of liberation. “They had their faults,” the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth once remarked of San Francisco’s original inhabitants, “but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather.”13 For many decades afterwards, the city was celebrated as a cosmopolitan version of the Wild West town, with malleable social mores, eccentrics and adventurers a big part of the social mix. By the twentieth century, it was becoming a center for immigrant Italian anarchists, Wobblies and union organizers—“not only the most tightly organized city in America but … the stronghold of trade unionism in the United States,” asserted Carey McWilliams.14 Conscientious objectors flocked here after World War II, and the poets who would later be celebrated as beats and as the San Francisco Renaissance started coming in the 1940s and 1950s; African-American emigration to the wartime jobs of San Francisco produced another postwar cultural flourishing of jazz and nightlife. With bars like the Black Cat, it was also a haven for gays and lesbians early on, and remains one today for those who can afford it. It was the place where the counterculture of what gets called “the sixties” flourished most, as well as a major center for punk culture and related subversions after 1977.
Labor Day parade on Market Street, 1935 (damaged photo). Courtesy San Francisco Public Library.
Throughout the 1980s, it was a sanctuary city for refugees from the Central American wars, and the movements sometimes called multiculturalism flourished here, from the environmental justice movement to the 1980s explosion of visual arts dealing with questions of ethnicity and identity. And of course since the Sierra Club was founded here in 1892, the San Francisco Bay Area has been a major center for environmental activism and the evolution of environmental ideas. Feminism, human rights activism, pacifism, Buddhism, paganism, alternative medicine, dance, rock and roll, jazz are some of the other phenomena infusing the local culture. The city has also changed radically many times. In 1960, it was 78 percent white, but by 1980 whites were less than 50 percent of the population and it was the nation’s most ethnically diverse large city (with a diversity similar in many ways to what it had during the Gold Rush).15 But San Francisco’s is a history of pruning as well as blooming: since the 1950s it has been mutating from a blue-collar port city of manual labor and material goods to a white-collar center of finance, administration, tourism and, now, the “knowledge industries.” Since 1997 this change has accelerated spectacularly. As Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, put it, we have had fifteen years of change compressed into a couple of dozen months, and nobody saw it coming.
This is a story about love, but there is also a lot of anger. Some people have focused on “newcomers,” and a sardonic discussion of what constitutes a San Franciscan—how many years, what kind of habits—filled the letters page of the SF Weekly for a while. Some people have focused on yuppies, and there is definitely tension on both sides of that divide—those who know they are considered yuppies, and those who hate whoever qualifies as a yuppie in their eyes. Some people have said that it’s not the fault of those who came here looking for a job that there’s a housing crisis, and it’s the local politicos, real estate speculators, greedy landlords and developers who should be targeted. Some fault a system in which a basic human need—housing—exists largely as a free-market commodity, so that need takes a back seat to profit.
My own writing has been about culture and politics in other senses. I have written about senses of place, and the geography of culture, about specific issues and sites, as well as about particular artists and movements. Lately it seems to me that even to be able to recognize and resist the forces that threaten the environments and communities that sustain us requires time and space that are rapidly eroding: time eroding as an ever-more-expensive world presses us to produce and consume ever more rapidly, catapults information and distraction at us, eliminates the unstructured time for musing and meeting; space eroding as public space, access to the sites of power, culture and protest—and also the unexploited space where one can hear one’s own thoughts—is undermined. My last book was a history of walking, and it is in part an exploration of the circumstances in which culture, contemplation and community are possible and of the embodied and geographically grounded basis of thinking and imagining. This book is about a more gritty version of the same subject: San Francisco has been not only the great refuge for the nation’s pariahs and nonconformists; it has been the breeding ground of new ideas, mores and movements social, political and artistic. To see the space in which those things were incubated be homogenized into just another place for over-paid-but-overworked producer-consumers is to witness a great loss, not only for the experimentalists, but for the world that has benefited from the better experiments (and been entertained by the sillier ones). Think of San Francisco as both a laboratory of the new and a preserve for the old subversive functionality of cities. Think about what happens if both these aspects get bulldozed by the technology economy. The Internet too may be a laboratory for the new, but even if it is a great organizing tool it is not presently of much value for social critique or the expression of cultural genius.
A 1971 documentary about San Francisco titled “The City That Waits to Die” presumed that San Francisco would be destroyed by its unstable geology, but the earthquake that has come at the millennium has been a temblor of capital and its unstable distribution, altering San Francisco more than could almost any natural disaster. This book is not about the new technology economy, nor is it an economic history of cities or gentrification. It is a portrait of what a sudden economic boom is doing to a single city and a reflection on what is being lost and what its value—its nonmonetary value—is. It focuses almost entirely on San Francisco, not because what is happening here is unique, but because it so resembles what is happening elsewhere that I believe it can stand alone as an example of a crisis in American cities. Hollow City focuses on artists, particularly visual artists, because artists are the indicator species of this ecosystem: from their situation can be gauged the overall breadth or shrinkage of the margin for noncommercial activity, whether that activity is artistic, political, spiritual or social.
A few days after my excursion to the Coltrane church and the park, I go to see Chris Carlsson in his office on Market Street, a big room that with its posters, clippings, abandoned coffee cups, bicycles and beat-up furniture looks more like the living room of an activist household than anyplace else I visit now—and it is an activist household of sorts, both the site for Chris’s typesetting business and a gathering place for myriad political activities. In 1981 Chris cofounded Processed World, a situationist magazine analyzing and promoting subversion of the white-collar workplace. Along with Re/Search publications and the punk-and-populist-politics magazine Maximum Rock’n’Roll, P.W. represents a little-recognized punk-culture golden age for alternative publishing (Processed World folded in 1993, but the other two grind on). In the mid-1990s Chris cofounded Critical Mass, the collective bicycle ride that has since become a global phenomenon to protest the lack of safe space for bicycle transit and to help create that space. For a few days in 1997, San Francisco’s Critical Mass became a national news story about bicyclists’ confrontation with the law and with Mayor Willie Brown. Chris’s concerns with public space, technology and social life continued with the City Lights anthology Reclaiming San Francisco he co-edited, and with his CD-ROM Shaping San Francisco expanding on that history