Hollow City. Rebecca Solnit
Читать онлайн книгу.
pace seems younger than his forty-something years and whose nearly white, sea-captainish beard seems older, he settled down on one of the thrashed couches in front of a bookcase full of San Francisco’s history to give me his version.
“I’ve lived here since 1978. I came here as a twenty-one-year-old guy and got a job with an environmental group doing canvassing and thought, This is it, I want to live in San Francisco. At that point Haight Street was fifty percent boarded up and overrun with alcohol and heroin and there was no sense of gentrification being around the corner at all. When I got here it felt kind of bleak and slumlike. I didn’t know what to expect and didn’t have a sense of the previous cultures. The punk scene was unfolding around me, and the city’s been reshaping itself around me ever since. I have a sense of connectedness to San Francisco as this site of change. There’s something very exciting about the endless influx of new energy looking for something inexplicably magical. Everybody keeps coming here to renew that quest or had until now. And that’s exactly what I think we’re losing at this moment, this endless arrival of the young, the radical, the political and the marginal and the edgy. They’re not coming here anymore. If they do come here, they can’t stay or they’ve gotta find themselves a six-day-a-week job, which is what people here think is an acceptable mode.
“It’s ironic that, in a city that was the founding place of the eight-hour day in the 1860s, there’s no eight-hour day anymore 140 years later. This is the first city in North America where the eight-hour day was really established. The first technological coup against organized labor was the transcontinental railroad, which broke the back of the eight-hour day in San Francisco. The railroad builders brought all the unemployed laborers back from the east, but before the railroad was finished there was a tight labor market. The workers who were here at the end of the Civil War realized, ‘Hey, we can control this,’ and so they published decrees in the local newspapers announcing the eight-hour day. Group after group did that, and in 1867 they had a march of a thousand workers up Market Street marching in the order by which their trade had established the eight-hour day—but by ’72 it was gone.
The St. John Coltrane congregation arrives at its temporary home.
“Now we live in a world in which the eight-hour day is not only a wistful memory for a lot of people, but they don’t even conceptualize it as an issue. You individually have to deal with remaining competitive in the market, and the number of hours you work is just not a relevant issue to band together with other people about, because there’s no sense of class, no sense of shared commitment. You are an independent entrepreneur in the world. Your job is to work as much and as long as you can in the labor market. It’s a laughable predicament, and there’s not much time to find your way out of it, it’s a bit of a rat’s maze. And that’s speedup. That’s my experience of San Francisco: we are living through the greatest speedup in human history, and nobody’s even saying it out loud.”
“Is there a dot-com culture?”
“No, there’s no culture, we’re all greedy … no,
that’s a joke. A few months ago in Fortune magazine
there was an article called ‘Doing Business
the Dot-Com Way.’ The priority is definitely making
money—fast. It’s a multicultural business—or
maybe forced to be. It’s hard to find skilled people,
so you’re drawing from everywhere in the world:
Asia, Africa, India, Europe—anywhere skills have
been acquired.
“It’s a fast-paced industry, with long hours and
constant learning—though sometimes it’s not the
money, it’s the adrenaline.”
“The company is in e-marketing. We provide
loyalty solutions. We build the technology that
makes people come back to a website.
We think of it as a tool that manages loyalty
between customer and company.
“Most of the people in this business
are very young, and they don’t all have
experience in communication.
So you have to reconcile that with
this space we work in. There are lots
of places to sit and meet: couches,
outdoor tables, the pool table.
It’s a casual environment.”
“This company was founded in the late
’90s. When I came on board there were 80
people. We now have over 400 employees,
including all the acquisitions we’ve made.
“Now that the company is so large, it’s
hard to know what’s going on. We talk a lot
about how to make people happy. How do
we make displaced people happy in a new
company?”
“I feel bad that the dot-com movement is the first trend in this city that’s pushing people out. It’s all about economics. I’m in this industry and I think it should be more socially responsible. We’re becoming this technological, scientific center. I think science can hurt social life.” –Financial systems analyst
Vacant lot, Western Addition, 1950s. Photograph by David Johnson.
The Shopping Cart and the Lexus
Vacant lot, Western Addition, 2000.
Campaigns to get rid of the poor have a long history in San Francisco. African Americans, working-class seniors, other residential-hotel denizens and the homeless have all had their turn, and other campaigns—against undocumented immigrants and refugees and against Latinos and Asians generally—have attempted to erase or undermine populations on a larger scale. As the Second World War was ending, the city came up with a master plan that featured elements of redevelopment, and by the beginning of 1947 specific proposals were being made to annihilate portions of the Western Addition. Blight was the magical word of the era of urban renewal, a word whose invocation justified the destruction of housing, communities and neighborhoods in many American cities, and San Francisco was no exception. The Western Addition had, not coincidentally, become home to San Francisco’s African-American community, and urban renewal would eventually be nicknamed “Negro removal.” Earlier in the century, according to the African-American historian Albert S. Broussard, African Americans had lived in various parts