Abstract

When the old San Francisco Armory was sold to the Internet porn production company Kink.com in 2006, they paid $14.5 million. The long-abandoned property, which is said to resemble a “Moorish castle,” once housed the National Guard, stationed there to quash the city’s 1934 general strike. The armory stands at the corner of Mission and 14th Street, a few blocks from the lone fire hydrant that saved the neighborhood from the flames of the 1906 quake just six years before the armory was built, and also a few blocks from the salvaged-wood cafes and velvet-roped dive bars that herald, for many, a new form of siege. It’s Kink’s flags that fly now from the top of one of the armory’s brick turrets, with the company’s URL visible even on Google Street View.

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