South of Market

Saturday afternoon, Howard Street between 3rd and 4th Streets, 1981

Helen and her husband at the Helen Cafe 486 6th Street, 1980

Hamburger Mary's, 1582 Folsom St. at 12th Street, 1980

Transbay Terminal Newsstand, 1982

Langton between Folsom and Harrison Streets, 1979

Pat serving coffee at the Gordon Cafe on 7th Street at Mission Street, 1980

Skip Wheeler and his wife groom their horses after the Veteran's Day Parade, Folsom at 2nd Street, 1980

Office workers near the periphery of the new convention center, Minna at 4th Street, 1980

Across from the Moscone Center, 3rd at Tehama Street, 1980

Oh hey, look. It's SOMA not looking like ground zero for overfunded tech startups and $6,000 a month metrosexual apartment buildings. I hardly recognize it and yet I still do. It's like looking into the face of a familiar stranger. These photographs were taken around 1980, during and shortly after the construction of the Moscone Center, a massive redevelopment project that displaced residents and businesses in a 10 block radius. The people remaining on the fringes of this invading behemoth were about to have their lives changed by rising rents, gentrification, and an influx of new visitors from all over the country. It's the same old story. A few people win and many, many more lose. Looking at these photographs I am overcome with feelings of nostalgia for a place I never visited and people I never saw. It's a feeling peculiar to seeing old photographs of a dearly loved city.

The SOMA of my teens was still under-developed and strangely vacant. The long, lonely blocks stretched on and on into the abyss of Bayview and Hunter's Point. Many of the residents in these photographs were already long gone, but the crowd-sourced, on-demand cloud-based SaaS platform HQ's hadn't arrived in great numbers yet. It was a neighborhood on the cusp of change. And now that change has come, and people are angry. Do I blame them? It's hard not to look at these photographs of what still looks like an old fashioned, quintessentially Great American City and feel pangs of remorse. What hath we wrought now, with our tone deaf, homogenized luxury high rises and artisanal conflict-free coffee shops?

But isn't it just as pointless and self-indulgent to bemoan the changing face of a metropolis as it is to loathe the changing of seasons? Both are equally inevitable and unstoppable. Yet people throw bricks at Google buses, and the past is still held up as a bastion of now unattainable societal perfection. I keep thinking I've heard this storyline before. Even this blog post has been written before, thousands of times, by people who are smarter, more astute than myself. I don't think I know the answer. How does a city remain resolutely unique and true to itself while having to absorb the collective sameness of an invading population, all drawn to it for the same reason? Can a city remain affordable and welcoming to a working class population even as the tech upperclass eliminates their jobs with ever more automated food/shopping/ridesharing apps? The truth is, I don't know, but I secretly hope we can pull it off. I hope we can retain some of the texture and grit of the San Francisco of Ye Olde Days even as venture capitalists sink 55 million dollars into a startup that inserts gifs into your email. Because they both have their merits.