Uses of Market Street - Revision history

Ccarlsson at 05:43, 20 June 2025

2025-06-20T05:43:57Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:43, 19 June 2025
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	[[Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis\|Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis]]		[[Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis\|Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis]]

	[[category:roads]] [[category:downtown]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:2010s]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Real estate]] [[category:Technology]]		[[category:roads]] [[category:downtown]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:2010s]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Real estate]] [[category:Technology]] [[category:Book Excerpts]]

Lisaruth: brought source to byline, corrected broken link to book

2024-07-11T00:11:02Z

brought source to byline, corrected broken link to book

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	'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''		'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''

	''by Erica Dawn Lyle''		''by Erica Dawn Lyle, excerpted from [https://www.ericadawnlyle.info/streetopiabook ''Streetopia''], in the essay "The Uses of Market Street", 2015''

	[[Image:Westerly-view-from-Hewes-Bldg-2005 DSC00108.jpg]]		[[Image:Westerly-view-from-Hewes-Bldg-2005 DSC00108.jpg]]
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	[[Image:Streetopia cover 9780692424285.jpg\|200px\|left]] ''Excerpted from [~~http~~://~~streetopiasf~~.~~com~~/ ''Streetopia''], in the essay "The Uses of Market Street"''		[[Image:Streetopia cover 9780692424285.jpg\|200px\|left]] ''Excerpted from [https://www.ericadawnlyle.info/streetopiabook ''Streetopia''], in the essay "The Uses of Market Street"''

	See other parts of this essay:		See other parts of this essay:

Ccarlsson: fixed Erica's name

2023-06-20T03:35:08Z

fixed Erica's name

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:35, 19 June 2023
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	'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''		'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''

	''by ~~Erick~~ Lyle''		''by Erica Dawn Lyle''

	[[Image:Westerly-view-from-Hewes-Bldg-2005 DSC00108.jpg]]		[[Image:Westerly-view-from-Hewes-Bldg-2005 DSC00108.jpg]]

Ccarlsson: added link

2021-02-09T20:35:07Z

added link

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:35, 9 February 2021
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	<font size=4>949 Market Street</font size>		<font size=4>949 Market Street</font size>

	In early 2001, I was among a group of artists and activists who created an arts venue and community space in an illegally occupied abandoned pool hall at 949 Market. Our group had been fighting the displacement and gentrification of the early dot-com boom era in a losing battle for years and had grown weary of picketing the offices of sinister landlords and crashing Board of Supervisors meetings. We wanted to do an action that was more utopian in spirit. With a rallying cry of “What are we FOR, not what we’re against,” we broke into the building, changed the locks, and began fixing up the place in hopes of hosting an enormous public art and performance event.		In early 2001, I was among a group of artists and activists who created an arts venue and community space in an illegally occupied abandoned pool hall at [[949 Market Street: Life in Abandoned San Francisco\|949 Market]]. Our group had been fighting the displacement and gentrification of the early dot-com boom era in a losing battle for years and had grown weary of picketing the offices of sinister landlords and crashing Board of Supervisors meetings. We wanted to do an action that was more utopian in spirit. With a rallying cry of “What are we FOR, not what we’re against,” we broke into the building, changed the locks, and began fixing up the place in hopes of hosting an enormous public art and performance event.

	In that era, with its tremendous scarcity of affordable space, the incredible abundance of unused space in that building—and indeed all over that part of Market Street—was astonishing. When people entered for the first time, I would watch their jaws drop as they took it all in—a completely empty space, almost a block long, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Market. After researching the place, we found it had once been a twenty-four-hour pool hall but had been shuttered and unused for thirteen years. We spent a month cleaning up thick layers of dust, fixing the plumbing and getting the electricity in order, while dreaming up the kinds of events we could do in that kind of wide-open space.		In that era, with its tremendous scarcity of affordable space, the incredible abundance of unused space in that building—and indeed all over that part of Market Street—was astonishing. When people entered for the first time, I would watch their jaws drop as they took it all in—a completely empty space, almost a block long, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Market. After researching the place, we found it had once been a twenty-four-hour pool hall but had been shuttered and unused for thirteen years. We spent a month cleaning up thick layers of dust, fixing the plumbing and getting the electricity in order, while dreaming up the kinds of events we could do in that kind of wide-open space.

Ccarlsson: added to new category Technology

2020-11-01T22:52:10Z

added to new category Technology

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:52, 1 November 2020
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	[[Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis\|Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis]]		[[Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis\|Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis]]

	[[category:roads]] [[category:downtown]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:2010s]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Real ~~Estate~~]]		[[category:roads]] [[category:downtown]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:2010s]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Real estate]] [[category:Technology]]

Lisaruth: Protected "Uses of Market Street" ([Edit=Allow only administrators] (indefinite) [Move=Allow only administrators] (indefinite))

2017-07-08T00:15:52Z

Protected "Uses of Market Street" ([Edit=Allow only administrators] (indefinite) [Move=Allow only administrators] (indefinite))

← Older revision	Revision as of 17:15, 7 July 2017
(No difference)

Ccarlsson at 23:37, 15 March 2017

2017-03-15T23:37:24Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:37, 15 March 2017
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	[[Image:Streetopia cover 9780692424285.jpg\|200px\|left]] ''Excerpted from [http://streetopiasf.com/ ''Streetopia''], in the essay "The Uses of Market Street"''		[[Image:Streetopia cover 9780692424285.jpg\|200px\|left]] ''Excerpted from [http://streetopiasf.com/ ''Streetopia''], in the essay "The Uses of Market Street"''

			See other parts of this essay:

			[[Problem with Parklets\|Problem with Parklets]]

			[[Redevelopment vs. Ecotopia\|Redevelopment vs. Ecotopia]]

			[[San Francisco Singularity?\|San Francisco Singularity?]]

			[[Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis\|Displacement and Trauma: A Public Health Crisis]]

	[[category:roads]] [[category:downtown]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:2010s]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Real Estate]]		[[category:roads]] [[category:downtown]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:2010s]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Real Estate]]

Ccarlsson: added photos

2017-02-20T00:16:21Z

added photos

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 The clear-eyed ''flaneur'' on Market Street might well conclude that civil society has at last broken down completely. Yet the gritty reality of the street has lately become indistinct, difficult to bring into focus. What once may have been understood as a humanitarian crisis has been rebranded as “The Tenderloin Arts District.” Hallucinations of luxury hotels and shopping malls crowd the street as the past slowly dissolves into the future.
 Conservative mayoral candidates and newspaper publishers with their perennial calls to “Clean Up Market Street” appeal to nostalgia for a kind of civic consensus that in real life has never truly existed. Indeed, the cable car slot in the center of Market Street was for generations seen as a literal border between the upper classes from the hills north of Market Street and the poor homesteaders on the flats “South of The Slot.” I wonder if it is accurate after all to say that there is a city comprised of these competing realities, these alternative futures, so much as it is to say that there are only these alternative futures, and that the place where they stage their perpetual battle is what we call the city. Either way it is certain that Market Street has never really been a “Main Street” for everyone so much as the border where San Francisco’s competing realities collide.
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 But to solve the problem is not their goal. If it were, building affordable housing and putting a stop to illegal evictions would be a priority. Instead, as the city gives more tax breaks to corporations and green lights the construction of one massive luxury apartment tower after another, each successive mayor simply uses the police to move the homeless encampments strategically around town, keeping them out of sight of the new zones of development and property-value boom. The problem is always said to be improving — except when it isn’t. At election time, homelessness inevitably becomes a crisis again, more evidence of how the permissive Left has allowed the city to disintegrate out of control.
 After living for almost a decade on Market Street and in the Tenderloin, I can only agree that Market Street is a broken or failed civic space.  But my proximity also allowed me to see, up close, the ways conservative politicians and property owners manipulated and indeed perpetuated that situation for their own gain. While the crisis of “what to do with Market Street” is a real one, it has also been—like the city’s homeless problem—heavily stage-managed.
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 The utopian thinking that led to the 949 Market squat brought hundreds of people together for a four month period in 2001 to stand together in an abandoned building and explore possibilities for what another Market Street might look like. Proponents of Market Street redevelopment and projects like the Market Street Place mall have always dismissed such utopian thinking as unrealistic. But if anything, their attachment to the idea of a magic shopping mall solution reveals just how much redevelopment forces rely on pure fantasy in their own efforts. Market Street Place is currently an enormous hole in the ground. Yet its website features a slick promotional video, complete with drone flyover footage and a lavish computer animated fly-through simulation of the proposed six level center. The plans for Market Street Place are as much an arbitrary work of the imagination as O’Farrell’s original plans for the street itself.
 Meanwhile, the computer-generated architectural renderings for shiny, futuristic new buildings to be constructed up and down Market Street depict crowds of pedestrians and cyclists, smiling and enjoying each other’s company on the sidewalks of a fantasy future Market Street. The people in these renderings are like people in a dream — always hazy, semi-transparent, indistinct. It is as if they are in the process of being beamed down from The Future. Yet, the images, fuzzy and blurred, also evoke a nostalgic sense of civic consensus in an urban setting that today we tend to associate with the lost past, the comforting fantasy of Main Street.

Ccarlsson: added more photos

2017-02-11T00:07:33Z

added more photos

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Ccarlsson at 06:05, 10 February 2017

2017-02-10T06:05:31Z

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