City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco

4. The Neighborhood Fights Back

56 4 The Neighborhood Fights Back One of the greatest injustices in South of Market redevelopment has been the callous obliteration of the neighborhood’s past.The name chosen by the Redevelopment Agency to dignify its project, “Yerba Buena” (Spanish for “good grass” or “good herb”), was the name of the original Spanish settlement that in 1847 became San Francisco. While preserving the old pioneering name serves public relations, in reality the project represents the destruction and eviction of a human past not regarded as worth acknowledging , much less honoring.The irony here is compounded by the fact that the original settlement was wrested from Mexican Californians by American pioneers in the Mexican-American War:The redevelopment process is but a more sophisticated wrinkle in the long American tradition of land grabbing. Workingmen’s Quarter For nearly a century, the South of Market area, the site of Yerba Buena Center , had been a home to men and women whose lives and labors formed the rich tradition of San Francisco and the West.1 Once also a haven for the wealthy, who moved out as the human and industrial wellsprings of their wealth closed in around them, South of Market gradually became a neighborhood populated mainly by single men: the workingmen, immigrants, transients, and hoboes who gathered to live, work, or just while away time between opportunities. Jack London, himself born South of Market, described the division of the city’s downtown area that persisted until the YBC project was devised to The Neighborhood Fights Back / 57 obliterate it. In his story “South of the Slot” (after the cable slot of the Market Street streetcars), he wrote:“Old San Francisco . . . was divided midway by the Slot. . . . North of the Slot were the theaters, hotels, and shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business houses. South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries, machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class.”2 There are South of Market areas in most American cities.Their primary economic function has been to shelter and maintain a reserve army of skilled and unskilled workers. Here grew up the workingmen’s institutions in San Francisco: the hotels and lodging houses whose proprietors acted as bankers so that men spending their regular offseasons in the city had safekeeping for their money and could not splurge it on a single spree; saloons that furnished smorgasbord “free lunches” for ten to fifteen cents and sometimes doubled as informal employment agencies; pawnshops where a person might put up a tool or some clothing to pay for food, drink, or shelter; and, at one time, a dense network of fifty-one secondhand stores, employment agencies hiring mainly for out-of-town jobs (seven on a single block), poolrooms , movie theaters, barber colleges where apprentice barbers could practice and men got free haircuts, and the missions, varying in number with the season and the state of the economy. Until the mid-1920s, the neighborhood housed the local headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World. Often on opposite street corners, bands, choirs, and preachers from the various missions, along with the IWW, could be heard singing different words to the same tune and making altogether different arguments. This network sheltered and supported the homeless: seamen, miners, woodcutters , men who built the railroads, agricultural and other seasonal workers, hoboes, bums, and the regular “home guard” of casual laborers who worked regularly or irregularly at unskilled jobs in the city. The last half of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of a large-scale influx of both skilled and unskilled workers, resulting from greatly increased exploitation of western resources and the opening up of commercial activities in the Pacific region, stretching all the way to Asia. Between 1870 and 1880, the South of Market district became more congested as the city absorbed the many German, Irish, and English immigrants, families as well as single men.These same years marked a great expansion in the hotel, lodging , and boarding-house populations, continuing a tradition from the 1850s Gold Rush, when winter rains and snow drove thousands of miners to the Bay towns. Miners still returned to pass the winter pursuing the amusements of the city, joining sailors on leave and agricultural laborers from the valleys. Cyclical unemployment and the seasonal nature of many of the jobs 58 / Chapter 4 held by South of Market residents led to...