October 24, 2009, Bay Street in San Francisco: Riders traverse one potential future shoreline

I'll be leaving in ten days for Scandinavia, and will be sending reports to sf.streetsblog on the upcoming Climate Change conference (known as COP15) and the massive demonstrations that are expected to surround it. I've been to Copenhagen (my mother was born there) so I'm excited to return to a place where bicycles reign and the political culture is surprisingly reasonable compared to anything here in the U.S. COP15 will be joined by most of the world's nations, while outside its perimeter, a range of political organizations and ad-hoc political cultures will also converge, bringing memories of Seattle a decade ago, and the half dozen other dramatic confrontations between protesters and police at G8 or IMF summits since then.

Anthropogenic climate change is well underway, with polar ice caps, glaciers, and arctic tundra all melting at unprecedented rates. In San Francisco's mild climate, where we still enjoy abundant fresh food, water, and easy transportation and communications, it's hard to feel climate change as an imminent disaster. In fact, according to recent polls, U.S. residents are increasingly skeptical about climate change and more resistant to remedial actions. (On a local note, I was distributing my new red global warming bicycle license plates at the last Critical Mass and had two unrelated young men go off on me, each claiming that global warming is a government hoax! Apparently we get some Glen Beck fans on bikes even at Critical Mass!)

Global warming license plates! No bike should be without one!

But the know-nothing approach will not sustain itself. Droughts and desertification are increasing in some areas, torrential rains and floods in others. Oceans are sure to rise, some say as much as 10-15 feet in the next few decades, inundating coastal regions where a large percentage of the world's population lives in large cities. As glaciers that supply most of the world's fresh water continue to shrink at alarming rates, a future with diminishing supplies of fresh water seems certain. Biodiversity is another casualty, as one of the great extinctions in Earth's history continues to gather momentum, worsened considerably by the destruction of habitat that the aforementioned consequences of climate change are causing.

It's all too easy to despair at the accumulating news. Let's face it, the facts are very very bad. But all is not lost. Human beings are resilient, and it's not impossible for us to reorient our lives towards a more harmonious and integrated approach with the logic of nature. But it's difficult to reconcile the enormity of the crisis with the individual choices we can make, which are important but seem so small. After several decades in which "the personal is political" got turned into a series of marketing slogans, we have the opportunity to make this tired old cliche something profound. Our individual behaviors are the starting point, and a necessary piece of the puzzle. But it's when they start merging with one another, when new communities emerge in our practices, when we can start envisioning a different way of life based on these different choices, that we start getting somewhere. (Ultimately the work we do every day has to be redirected to a completely different way of life, an argument I make at length in my book Nowtopia.)

Still, even if thousands of people start cycling, recycling, eating less, using less water and energy, living better, etc., the real power in this world still sits outside and above us. Corporations and governments collude in reinforcing a system that focuses narrowly on profits and accumulation of wealth in a tiny few's hands. Their power is what impedes a thorough-going reinvention of life. Copenhagen is one of those moments when the global culture comes face to face with itself, with the institutions that are actually running things, and the cavernous gap between their agenda and one that might actually address the planet's predicament.

One fraction of the population that has perhaps greater responsibility than most are the technicians, professionals, and bureaucrats whose labor reinforces the ideological and political power of these moribund institutions. All too often scientists and technical professionals abdicate any responsibility for the consequences of their work, basically doing what they're told to do to keep their cushy lives intact. But occasionally social movements benefit from those who refuse to quietly go along to get along. A couple of days ago a Berkeley couple who work as attorneys at the San Francisco office of the U.S. EPA, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, appeared on Democracy Now!. They have been told by the EPA to take down a 10-minute video they made called "The Huge Mistake," in which they take on the current climate change legislation in the U.S. Congress that promotes a scam called Cap-and-Trade. They got to tell their story quickly on Democracy Now!, and it's well worth checking out the original video too.

Once you start thinking about it, what we don't see is a much bigger category than what we do see. But what we don't see ON PURPOSE is a really interesting category. When you add to the mix mobility, walking or riding or driving through city streets, not seeing can become a mysteriously dangerous stew indeed!

In The Botany of Desire food scribe Michael Pollan gives a history from the point of view of four plants: the apple, the tulip, the potato, and marijuana. In his description of human response to marijuana he describes what he calls the "cannabinoid system," a system of nerves and chemicals in our brains (somewhat analogous to a nervous system) that serves to screen out extraneous information. I had always been puzzled by the effects of marijuana on most people, but this helped explain it. Not only does it make you feel good, it also tends to make it difficult to multi-task for most people. Your ability to concentrate is impaired. Or is it? Pollan suggests that marijuana's psychoactive ingredient, Tetrahydrocannabinol, enhances the effects of the cannabinoid system, screening out even more than usual, leaving us with all our senses filled with whatever is front and center-a bowl of ice cream, sex, a visually stimulating movie or art show, or what have you…

"Miéville has given us an extraordinary meditation on otherness. Whether we gaze out from our nation on the peoples of the world and see something less than we are (we're #1?), or we walk past the homeless person sprawled in their own vomit, we are all adept at not seeing."

The City & The City is a complete departure from the twisted nightmares of his famous triology. But his grasp for the fear and horror that lie at the edges of our daily lives haunt this book in more subtle, but perhaps more powerful ways. Instead of an imaginary world of inexplicable species and uncertain rules of physics, in this book we get a thrilling murder mystery. The setting for this story is what takes it out of the realm of the run-of-the-mill and into a Kafka-esque puzzle palace equally political and psychological as it is a criminal. It starts out with the discovery of a dead woman's body in a derelict corner of the city of Besźel. Inspector Tyador Borlú is our hero and narrates most of the tale. Based on these proper nouns alone, we strain to figure out where in the world we are. Serbia? Bosnia? Maybe Bulgaria or Moldova?... But before long we find out that Besźel has a neighboring city called Ul Qoma, a name that sounds Arabic, leading a casual reader to think we must be in the Balkans somewhere. But these fictional twin cities are actually in different countries, never named, and have an extremely unusual relationship that lies at the heart of the story.

"As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrász, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realized that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone."

What is going on? This is in the first twenty pages and immediately we are puzzled and trying to figure out what the author means… "unnoticing"? As the story progresses, we slowly get a more complete picture of an almost impossible urban space. Two cities, rigidly separated, but completely interpenetrating one another. Children taught from an early age how to not see. Here's a passage much later in the book, when Inspector Borlú is on the other side in Ul Qoma with his counterpart Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt, gazing from Dhatt's window:

"It was quickly obvious that Dhatt lived within a mile, in grosstopic terms, of my own house. From their living room I saw that Dhatt and Yallya's rooms and my own overlooked the same stretch of green ground, that in Besźel was Majdlyna Green and in Ul Qoma was Kwaidso Park, a finely balanced crosshatch. I had walked in Majdlyna myself often. There are parts where even individual trees are crosshatched, where Ul Qoman children and Besź children clamber past each other, each obeying their parents's whispered strictures to unsee the other."

Crosshatching refers to the overlapping parts of the city, where along one block some buildings are Besź and others are Ul Qoman. Public thoroughfares are also crosshatched, so that as you walk down the street you have to "unsee" people from the other side, but at the same time, make sure not to run into them. If you're driving on one of these cross-hatched streets you have to avoid "protubs" (i.e. vehicles from the other side) that are in your path but without actually seeing them, or mentally noting their existence.

"I'm sure you're aware of all the controversy around early artefacts in this region, Inspector. Bol Ye'an's uncovering pieces that are a good couple of millennia old. Whichever theory you subscribe to on Cleavage, split or convergence, what we're looking for predates it, predates Ul Qoma and Besźel. It's root stuff... You understand we know next to nothing about the culture that produced all this?"

More than half the book has passed by the time Borlú gets permission to pursue his investigation in Ul Qoma. Going over is a rare experience, and he hasn't done it for a long time. As a high-ranking detective he is given a fast orientation on his way across:

"Mostly, as with our own equivalents, the orientation course was concerned to help a Besź citizen through the potentially traumatic fact of actually being in Ul Qoma, unseeing all their familiar environs, where we lived the rest of our life, and seeing the buildings beside us that we had spent decades making sure not to notice…

They sat me in what they called an Ul Qoma simulator, a booth with screens for inside walls, on which they projected images and videos of Besźel with the Besź buildings highlighted and their Ul Qoman neighbors minimized with lighting and focus. Over long seconds, again and again, they would reverse the visual stress, so that for the same vista Besźel would recede and Ul Qoma shine.

How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realize that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border…"

Miéville has given us an extraordinary meditation on otherness. Whether we gaze out from our nation on the peoples of the world and see something less than we are (we're #1?), or we walk past the homeless person sprawled in their own vomit, we are all adept at not seeing. The day-to-day invisibility of bicyclists and pedestrians is another all-too-common example. By making it an active process of "unseeing," Miéville's novel highlights the automatic quality of most of our own not-seeing. We mostly don't choose to not see, much like the citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma don't have to choose because they've been inculcated in not seeing since earliest childhood. Maybe by being shown not seeing in such a stark and unexpected way we gain a better view of our own blind spots. We maybe have been trained to not see too, but there is no Breach to disappear us if we learn to see things as they really are.

The Emperor's New Clothes fell off Bush right away, but the new guy is still walking around like he's got a fine suit on, even though his nakedness is clearly apparent. The Orwellian world so many hoped had been left behind has only become more absurd as Obama fondles his Peace Prize while authorizing more missile strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan in his first 9 months than Bush did in three years. Seeing through the Spectacle of Power is one thing, but seeing what's really going on in our daily lives is another. Literary efforts like The City & The City cleverly illuminate our synaptic self-delusions while telling us a great story.

How often do we not see who or what is in front of us?

Stephen O'Brien has been coaxing an oasis out of a most unlikely environment for a long time: the small green patches at either end of the ground level Mission Street frontage of the Transbay Terminal. He started back in 1958, when the old Key System train tracks that used to bring East Bay electric streetcars to the Transbay Terminal were being torn out. The Transbay Terminal in those days was a crucial commuter hub, bringing passengers from all over the East Bay. If you've ever ridden the F bus from Berkeley to San Francisco, you've ridden on the descendant of the same-lettered streetcar that once transported you from downtown Berkeley to downtown San Francisco just a minute longer than BART does today!

O'Brien is having his last day working his gardens at the Transbay Terminal today. His company's contract with Caltrans has ended, and he has been transferred to the State Building or the PUC building grounds. He's almost 80 years old and if he doesn't like his new posting, he'll probably retire soon. It'll be hard to match the half century he's spent cultivating the quiet, almost invisible oases at the Transbay Terminal. I heard about O'Brien from my friend Susanne Zago:

"Every morning I step out of the Transbay Terminal, one of the ugliest places I've ever been, and I notice this small green space as I leave. Sometimes it was completely trashed, but the next day I'd look in and it would be restored to its pristine condition. I looked at the trees, surprisingly mature, wondering what was planned for them as they build the new Transbay Center. I started asking around, and no one knew. One day I met this man who was in the space and it turned out to be Stephen."

July 20, 1953, Key System train awaits on platform in Transbay Terminal. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

Passengers boarding Key System train, June 8, 1948.

A natural oasis at 1st and Mission.

Beneath this 45-year-old pine lies a hidden patch of nature, nurtured for a half century by Stephen O'Brien.

A garden flourishes in a forgotten corner.

Stephen O'Brien knows what's going to happen. His 52 years of nurturing these garden spots will be bulldozed with the rest of the old 1939 Terminal, making way for the new tallest building in San Francisco and a multi-billion dollar transit center. The project has been gestating for years. I once had an office at 37 Clementina, which is only about a block away, and I remember the original plan in the late 1980s to bring Caltrain into the city center at 1st and Mission in order to connect to BART and MUNI, establishing a true regional transit hub. The Caltrain extension was deep-sixed by transit planners. Years went by, during which BART was extended to the airport and MUNI extended its N-Judah by building waterfront tracks around to 4th and Townsend (massively subsidizing the Giants' "privately financed" stadium). Now they've resuscitated the Caltrain extension, in order to bring High-Speed Rail into the center of downtown. The profligate waste of resources is breathtaking. But as long as engineering firms and contractors and building trades workers are all keeping busy, it's good for the economy right?

Anyway, as we go through our daily lives it's easy to not see the little patches of nature struggling to gain a foothold in the aptly named concrete jungle. I spoke to O'Brien on Wednesday and learned a bit about his long service at this deeply layered historical site. He told me when he showed up in 1958 there were just brown patches where today there is dense foliage and tall trees. I went to look for old photos at the Main Library's online collection, and as you can see from these pictures, the spots that Stephen has been maintaining have always been "green," albeit nothing like what he's helped them become.

In this December 27, 1939 photo taken in the first year of the Transbay Terminal's operation, you can see the two garden spots laid out from the beginning. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

By August 10, 1964, Stephen O'Brien had been watering and attending this garden for almost six years. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

October 8, 2009, just months before demolition.

O'Brien has an interesting history himself. He's got an Irish name but on his mother's side of the family, he has an English grandfather and a German grandmother. His English grandfather once owned a dairy ranch on the western slopes of Mt. Tamalpais before selling it off for $500! O'Brien grew up in Tomales Bay, and as a young man he jumped at the chance to purchase a lot in the newly subdivided Inverness back in the 1940s: $25 down and $25 a month until he'd paid off the $1,000 price. Today his lot is the only one left in Inverness that hasn't had a house built on it.

He told me about the barber who used to have his business inside the Terminal. After helping him sink his plumbing O'Brien got free haircuts for a long time. There used to be three different restaurants inside too, including the James Gray Company restaurant, and shoeshine and shoe repair were also thriving businesses there. Continental Trailways bus service once used the station in competition with Greyhound, just as other train lines once ran across the Bay Bridge along with the Key System, until the Bay Bridge was converted to motorized vehicles only.

O'Brien was in the basement a few years ago and saw that the vast underground space was still as good as new. Nevertheless, it's all coming down soon. He noted that the rebuilding of the Fremont Street ramps from the Bay Bridge had probably saved his gardens for an extra seven or eight years. The gnarly pine tree closest to First Street was saved from a nearby State Building, when O'Brien transplanted it from a discarded planter. It's grown to be 20 feet tall and while it's oddly shaped there's no denying that is seems to be thriving with its roots in the ground! The twin pines at either end of the Terminal were planted more than 45 years ago and though they've grown rather tall, they're dwarfed by the skyscrapers that have continued the southward march from downtown. O'Brien told me about the various birds, LBB's, gulls, hawks, and pigeons that have made this mini-habitat a resting spot. Varieties of butterflies have found a home here too.

The eastern end of the Terminal plaza.

The Millennium tower dwarfing the 45-year-old pine tree at Fremont and Mission.

To the west, this ungainly monster dominates a hearty pine tree that was saved from a discarded planter by Stephen O'Brien.

Who remembers that the highrise in the photo above was built on the site of the old arcade known as "Fun Terminal"? The same "Fun Terminal" that gave its name to the seminal album by local rockers The Mutants back in the early 1980s?...

Fun Terminal! Right across 1st Street from O'Brien's Garden back in the 1970s-80s.

Stephen was philosophical about losing his half-century's work. It makes him sad, of course. O'Brien's gardens have survived in surprised juxtaposition to the changing neighborhood that surround them. Easy to overlook, his gardens are larger examples of the persistence of nature even in a highly built environment. For those of us who haven't noticed the garden spots as we've scurried by, preoccupied with the day's work or the domestic dramas ahead, their imminent disappearance (they will no longer be maintained, but should stand for a few months more at least) might serve as a cautionary note. Shouldn't we stop and smell the flowers? And shouldn't we honor the essential work of the invisible toilers in our midst, people like Stephen O'Brien who has selflessly and without ulterior motive kept these little patches of urban greenery flourishing for decades? Stop by today and say thanks to Stephen O'Brien!

In 1953, pigeons had the roost of the lawn... (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Going, going, ...

November 1965 view looking southeast over the Transbay Terminal. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

Terminal History

San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal was built in 1939 at 1st and Mission Streets as a California Toll Bridge Authority facility in order to facilitate commuter rail travel across the lower portion of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.  It was paid for by Bay Bridge tolls, which were then 50 cents per automobile.  At the time, the lower deck of the Bay Bridge was not only used for automobile travel, but also hosted two rail tracks on the south side. The rail portion was run principally through the Key System.

The Terminal was designed to handle as many as 35 million people annually with a peak 20-minute rate of 17,000 commuters that were transported in 10-car trains at headways of 63.5 seconds. In its heyday at the end of World War II, the terminal’s rail system was transporting 26 million passengers annually. After the war ended and gas rationing was eliminated, the Terminal’s use began to steadily decline to a rate of four to five million people traveling by rail per year. In 1958, the lower deck of the Bay Bridge was converted to automobile traffic only, the Key System was dismantled, and by 1959, the inter-modal Transbay Terminal was converted into a bus-only facility, which it currently is today.  (from the Transbay Center website)

Guadalajara, Mexico was host this month to the 2nd annual Congress of Cyclists in Mexico, a national gathering of bicyclist activists from around the country. I was invited to give a speech, which I somehow managed to do in Spanish (thanks to my media naranja for translating and coaching me!), detailing the history of cycling and Critical Mass in particular. I loved being at the Congress, meeting people from all over Mexico, a few old and new friends from the U.S., and one remarkable woman from Quito, Ecuador.

The city of Guadalajara is an ironic place for this conference. It is a town overrun with SUVs, streets jammed with cars, 6-lane, one-way boulevards, sprawling suburbs in five other municipalities making a metro area of 6 million or so. In spite of its obvious car-centrism, Guadalajara has a number of beautiful public plazas, several pedestrian-only zones closed to cars, both in its downtown and in a gentrified artsy-touristy neighborhood some distance from the city center. They've even installed a real European-style bike lane (or ciclovia as they're generally known in Spanish) on one of its major thoroughfares, with plans to extend a network of such lanes in several directions.

SUVs at an athletic club in Zapopan, a wealthier suburb of Guadalajara.

Six-lane roads all over, mostly jammed with SUV-heavy traffic. This is the norm in Guadalajara.

One of many pedestrian-friendly plazas in the center of Guadalajara.

I was surprised to find many streets closed to cars, full of pedestrians and shoppers.

The only ciclovia, or bike lane, in Guadaljara is on Federlismo... but it's a well-designed separate bikeway at the edge of the sidewalk, different pavement and plenty of room.

The same bike lane continuing towards a major intersection.

The Congress opened with several short speeches, a perfunctory welcome from the distracted mayor of Guadalajara (he left as fast as he could after his talk), and a much lengthier speech from the minister of culture. His talk was more informative and sounded very good, full of "new urbanism" concepts, favoring public transit (there is already a BRT system in part of the city), bike lanes, public spaces, denser and taller urban planning, etc. He explained that the city government could not provide the impetus for this agenda indefinitely, and in fact, that time may have already passed (far short of achieving any meaningful transformation of the city's transit priorities). He urged the audience, civil society in general, to take the lead and push for the changes it wants to see. An ecologist from the state of Jalisco, in which Guadalajara resides, spoke last and was quite adamant about how little had been achieved and how severe the impediments were.

Giving my speech in LARVA, opening morning of the Congress.

In fact, this was a common lament among the folks here (a couple of friends I made at the Car-free Cities Conference in Portland last summer made the effort to get me down here). The city is not only not advancing a sustainable transportation agenda, they are impeding it. Even if they were sincere in their efforts (which was not considered credible among most of the Congress participants) the common problem in Mexico is official corruption, where monies dedicated to any public infrastructure are often siphoned off into private pockets.

The Women's Panel on the 2nd day.

That said, the Congress itself was a great experience. Delegates from around Mexico showed up, representing such towns as Monterrey, Puebla, Mexico City, Queretero, Aguas Calientes, Ensenada, Xalapa, Tijuana, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi, and more. The CACITA folks from Oaxaca showed up in a biodiesel bus packed with a dozen amazing contraptions, all pedal-powered appliances and tools, and had fun demonstrating them during the Congress. Lots of women attended and participated in spirited panels and discussions. Generally the delegates were under 30, but there were a few of us older geezers too...

The bici lavandera, or pedal-powered clothes washer.

The CACITA folks were great stencil artists too!

The gathering reminded me a lot of the old days in San Francisco, before the Bike Coalition had become so large and "official," when a strange amalgamation of personalities were pulling and pushing to build new organizations, to find ways to get the ears of local politicians and planners, and to finally make bicycling an everyday transportation option... and there were some of us--then and now--who wanted to see bicycling as a starting point for a much deeper transformation of everyday life. Here in Guadalajara, all these types were present, the organizers and control-freaks, the plain-old freaks and hippies, the efficiency-obsessed, the techies and tour organizers, the revolutionaries and velorutionaries, the bicycle merchants, and the hopeful, youthful, idealistic, naive, savvy, and inspiring individuals who were ready to be part of something bigger. To be sure, a bicycling movement is growing in Mexico. Bicitekas of Mexico City has been going for 10 years, but in the rest of the country, cycling activism is in its formative years. At the Congress the well-rehearsed arguments made their appearance of course: helmets or not? Bike paths or vehicular integration or bike boulevards? Are we accommodating everyone or commuters? Short trips, long trips, or both?... and so on...

Not everything was focused on the nuts-and-bolts of cycle activism. A poetic contribution came across the sea with Oscar Patsi, blogger at La Revolucion de las Mariposas. He's a funny, unprepossessing guy, late 40s or so, speaking with a gravelly voice as he smoked his way through his presentation. He gives the bicycle credit for restoring his mental health and self-esteem after a darker period of his life. "I ride my bike and I know my city," he told us, and that he is the "finder" among his friends. When they want to have a bite, or procure an object, he knows exactly where it is because as a cyclist he has a much more developed sense of where things are.

Oscar Patsi, blogger at Revolucion of the Mariposas.

No todos los bragas son principes
No todas las braguitas son princesas
Pero los culos mas hermosos todos van en bicicleta!

(loosely translated)
Not all briefs are princes
Not all panties are princesses
But the most beautiful asses are always on bicycles!

The Sunday Streets of Guadalajara.... but it's EVERY Sunday, on major central city thoroughfares!

Via Recre-Activa crowds.

Guadalajara has a "Via Recre-Activa" every Sunday, closing 12 kilometers of major boulevards through the center of town from 8 to 2 for free open use (similarly Mexico City has a big Sunday bicycling scene). Guadalajara has also established a fleet of free public white bikes, or bicipublicas. By many measurements, the Mexicans are WAY ahead of San Francisco, from the dozens of public pedestrian streets and plazas that are heavily used, to the free public bikes and the Sunday street closures every week. (Partly it's that Mexican culture has not been as thoroughly subsumed by the modern atomized life that prevails in the U.S., so it's still part of the fabric of life to go out for walks, to enjoy shopping in pedestrian zones, etc.) That said, there's a long way to go here, just as there is an even longer way to go in San Francisco.

Bicipublicas, or public white bikes. They have a fleet parked around Guadaljara.

A spirited Critical Mass took over the streets on Satruday night. Guadalajara has a First Thursday Critical Mass normally, which has recently reached 4,500 riders!

One of the most inspiring examples I learned about at the Congress wasn't in Mexico but in Quito, Ecuador. While riding in a boisterous Critical Mass through Guadalajara on Saturday night, I found myself next to Heleana Zambonino, an intense and dedicated activist making her first trip out of Ecuador. We started talking (she had very good English, thank goodness, since my ability to converse in Spanish remains terribly limited) and before long she started telling me about her work in Quito with a group called Ciclopolis. A quick summary: starting about six years ago, inspired by the idea of Critical Mass that they'd gotten wind of, they started a "Ciclo Paseo" every Sunday from 9 to 3 over 29 km, that is now drawing as many as 50,000 people to a ride! They have an email list in Quito of over 40,000 people! There are four different social-public rides EVERY week! They do bike games on sidewalks one day, a night ride once a week, and much more... Even more impressive is that they got 70 km of ciclovias put on city streets. The city installed the bike lanes on sidewalks at first, but after their group organized protests, they got the city to rip out what they'd done and do it all over again!! Amazing!

Heleana from Quito, Jorge (Aguascalientes), me, Mariana (Mexico City), Jesus (Mexico City), and Bob (Ensenada and Oakland)

All this is to underscore how slow and unsatisfactory our progress here in San Francisco is. How can we be having 4 blocks of Valencia rebuilt without having proper Copenhagen-style bike lanes installed... after ALL THESE YEARS?? How many more times are we going to have to settle for tepid, unsafe, ill-maintained painted bike lanes in the car door zone? Leaving the U.S., even just across the border to Mexico, I'm reminded again of how little progress we've made, how car-centric we continue to be (against all common sense and planetary ecological concerns), and how much further along many parts of the world are, but almost entirely invisible to us!

On our way in to the Congress on the first morning, we came upon this bicycilng panadero (bread man), making his rounds. The bicycle continues to be an important vehicle for many kinds of workers.

Famously, we live on a crack in the earth. The San Andreas Fault gets most of our attention, followed not too far behind these days by the equally ominous Hayward Fault. A major earthquake on either of these could alter local landscapes forever, and will certainly damage or destroy freeways, bridges, and the water system. That's one of our catastrophes waiting in the wings, and it's good think about preparing for such eventualities.

Less obvious, but just as much a part of our local natural landscape (largely obscured by asphalt and buildings), are the old waterways on which the city is built. The evidence for these underground waterways is in plain view as well as being represented in various public documents. Joel Pomerantz wrote "San Francisco's Clean Little Secret" a few years ago (first appearing in a book I edited "The Political Edge" City Lights: 2004) wherein he found in SF Water Dept. official reports the saga of the "Mighty Hayes River." Starting deep underground somewhere near Lone Mountain, the subterranean river flows southeast under Civic Center, and as you can see on this map, once surfaced around 7th and Mission.

1852 U.S. Coastal Survey Map of San Francisco, from Yerba Buena Cove at upper right to Mission Bay on right. Mission Plank Road is the long diagonal that clips the edge of the swampy wetlands at apx. today's 7th and Mission.

"With a hydromorphology not unlike Florida’s everglades, [the Hayes River] broadsides Market Street, encountering a long concrete subway tunnel that interrupts its gait. So copious are the waters of the Hayes that, to protect their investment from damage, BART runs “de-watering” pumps day and night in the Powell Street BART station. Removing, each week, 2.5 million gallons of tested, high-quality, potable groundwater (into the sewer!) the transit agency keeps the Hayes from flooding the tracks."

It's not far to the obvious subsidence at Natoma Alley just west of 7th where the street level falls at least 5 feet from the grade on the larger 7th Street.

Natoma Street, easterly, just west of 7th.

Same intersection of Natoma and 7th looking from east to west.

On Howard Street, a hundred or so feet south, two warehouses have been slowly sinking into the underlying marsh. Several efforts to cosmetically disguise what's happening have been implemented in recent years, but this latest version, painting the horizontal red boxes, seems to emphasize the effect.

Sinking warehouses on Howard Street opposite Langton Alley. Note the red horizontal boxes painted on the front of the darker warehouse... the second one noticeably angles downward. Note too how the stripes in the road indicate the dip.

Same warehouse straight on.

Extreme Pizza brick building on Folsom near Russ Street. Cracks in the facade have been patched, but there's no denying the building is slumping to the right, sinking into the marsh!

Just around the corner from the Pizza brick building, on Russ Alley, these cars highlight a sinking spot.

These buildings on Folsom between 6th and 5th show signs of subsidence too. The older ones are tipping back from the street, as the rear of the structures are sinking. Before a lot of new lofts were built in the 1990s in this area, many old warehouses were obviously sinking after the 1989 earthquake, on Folsom, Harrison and the alleys in between.

In an 1878 history by J.S. Hittell (History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally of the State of California, cited in Nancy Olmsted’s Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay. San Francisco: Mission Creek Conservancy, 1986) the 80-100 foot deep marshes presented a significant barrier to surface transportation. The first road to cross them was the Mission Plank tollroad, but there engineering problems right away.

“Mission Bay’s slender connection to Gold Rush San Francisco is the Mission Plank Road. (today’s Mission Street), which opened as a toll road in 1851. Its three-and-a-quarter-mile length ran into trouble for the contractors where it crossed the line of Seventh Street (shown but not named on the map).

Here they projected a bridge built on pilings, “but that plan had to be abandoned, to the astonishment and dismay of the contractor; the first pile, forty feet long, at the first blow of the pile driver sank out of sight, indicating that there was no bottom within forty feet to support a bridge. One pile having disappeared, the contractor hoisted another immediately over the first and in two blows drove the second down beyond the reach of the hammer… there was no foundation within eighty feet… pilings were abandoned, and cribs of logs were laid upon the turf so as to get a wider base than offered by piles. The bridge made thus always shook when crossed by heavy teams and gradually settled till it was in the middle about five feet below the original level… the cost of the road was ninety-six thousand dollars, about thirty thousand dollars per mile… the plank road company obtained another franchise for a road on Folsom Street… in 1854 a high tide overflowed the [Folsom] road between Fourth and Fifth and floated off the planking.”

J.S. Hittell observes that, although these marshy areas were called swamps, “They seem to have been for part of their area at least, subterranean lakes from forty to eighty feet deep, covered by a crust of peat moss eight or ten feet thick… When the streets were first made, the weight of the sand pressed the peat down, so that the water stood where the surface was dry before… More than once a contractor had put on enough sand to raise the street to the official grade, and gave notice to the city engineer to inspect the work, but in the lapse of a day between notice and inspection the sand had sunk down six or eight feet… heavy sand crowded under the light peat at the sides of the street and lifted it up eight or ten feet above its original level, in muddy riddges full of hideous cracks…it was also pushed sidewise so that houses and fences built upon it were carried away from their original position and tilted up at singular angles…”

The toll road to the mission probably would have gone out Market Street instead of trying to cross these soggy swamps, but in that era tall sand hills still dominated the terrain. The relatively flat Market Street we know today was blocked by an 80-foot sandhill between Second and Third Streets… What happened to all that sand? In the period 1859 to 1873, the "steam paddy" (or giant steam shovel—it was said to do the work of twenty Irish laborers at a single stroke) took south-of-Market sand to fill Mission Bay, establishing a century-long pattern of leveling hills and using the sand, rock, and soil to fill in nearby wetlands to "make land." It wasn't until the 1965 McAteer-Petris Act established the Bay Conservation and Development Commission that the pell-mell filling of the bay was halted.

Market and Powell are written in hand on this 1851 photo. This view is from apx. 2nd and Folsom. Note the very tall sand dunes to the left and in the distance. This is today's rather flat South of Market area!

Cities don't stand still. Going back at least to WWII, U.S. cities have been radically altered again and again. Economic restructuring has been part of it, as urban areas have shed manufacturing in favor of the so-called service sector: FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) and Tourism (restaurants and hotels plus retail and entertainment). Transportation changes have played a big part too, with the suburbanization of the 1950s-60s fueled (literally) by the interstate highway system and intraurban freeways, and the inexorable expansion of private cars at the expense of public transit. The populations that occupy various neighborhoods in cities, once relatively stable for generations, have moved away, leaving behind spaces whose character has changed with the arrival of new city dwellers, whether from other countries or just elsewhere in the U.S.

It's a long story, and every neighborhood in every city has its own tale to tell. During the past generation a populist opposition to urban gentrification has emerged. It probably starts with the bitter struggles to prevent the 1960s "urban renewal" programs from displacing whole populations (in San Francisco's Fillmore it became known as "negro removal," a precedent well-remembered by those now opposing the Redevelopment Agency in Bayview/Hunter's Point). But during the real estate booms of the 1980s and again during the dotcom boom at the end of the 1990s, right through the historically unprecedented housing bubble that finally popped in 2008, many progressives have worked to confront the forces of gentrification.

Gentrification as a term tends to conflate different "facts on the ground" though. Sometimes it defines a process of social displacement, usually class- or race-based, wherein a poorer population is forced out by rising prices and the steady influx of new residents who can pay those prices. To acolytes of the market, this all seems perfectly reasonable and fair, and the idea that there should be some kind of social restraint on such "efficient" "self-organizing" market mechanisms is anathema. To leftists and housing activists committed to defending the downtrodden and the poor, this system is a thinly disguised process of ethnic cleansing most of the time, and when the outcome isn't blatantly racist, it's still another chapter in a long saga of the rich screwing the rest of us.

Those of us who lean towards this latter way of seeing things are enjoying some schadenfreude today as the Lembi Group, one of San Francisco's most notorious landlords and exploiters of tenants, is sinking under a mountain of debt it incurred during the frenzied market conditions that only recently subsided.

Anti-Google, anti-gentrification graffiti popped up around the Mission a year ago or so. This is on 18th near Dolores.

On the other hand, folks fighting the displacement dynamics of the real estate markets in cities have sometimes fallen into a weird cul-de-sac where they seem to think keeping things seedy and decaying is a good thing, as if that were a way to ensure community stability. I can't cite anyone's public declarations to this effect, but I've certainly heard many friends and comrades tsk-tsking disapprovingly when they see someone painting their building, or putting in sidewalk tables and flowerpots, or any of a number of street-level neighborhood improvements. The sidewalk depaving and gardens I wrote about in January earned that response from some radicals I know too. I suppose the feeling is that if such improvements begin, it's only a matter of time before the Devil of Displacement rides in behind the ferns and wrought-iron ornamentation.

David Byrne, the New York musician (once of Talking Heads fame), has a new book out called "Bicycle Diaries," in which he travels to many cities around the world and the U.S., bringing his bike to help preserve his mental (and physical) health while touring. In his "Diaries" he ruminates on many interesting questions of the role of art, history, urban design, and decries the role of freeways in destroying inner cities and waterfronts among other things. But in one curious part he visits Pittsburgh, PA and has this to say about a clear-cut process of gentrification:

"About four years ago when I was here, [a friend] told me how the Heinz family was intent on bringing life (and eventually urban living) back into the downtown of this former industrial giant. Sometimes a rebirth can be started in one neighborhood and then it spreads to the surrounding areas--if they're not cut off or isolated. Artists move into a former factory district and soon cafés and grocery stores follow. A music club opens, a gallery and a bookstore. Developers turn the warehouses into luxury condos and the process begins again, somewhere else."

In other parts of the book Byrne is quite critical of the dynamics of modern capitalism and the results of unfettered market life on the quality of living it leaves in its wake. But here he embraces the building blocks of gentrification, a version of a life-cycle for urban neighborhoods. True enough, this has happened in many places, sometimes aided by the participation of the poorer residents who struggled to clear vacant lots and start community gardens, or who started street festivals when times were harder that have since become charming ethnic attractions.

To my thinking, the problem is not the efforts people make to improve their physical spaces. Of course there's always an issue of "taste," and what is cool and chic for some is cheezy and offensive to others. Some folks might be glad to see an influx of new cafés, while others would prefer the neighborhood remained forgotten (and thereby open to exploration and unmediated interventions) and "unimproved." The real issue is the right of folks who live in an area to make it their home, to have a sense of stability and comfort in their own communities. In the U.S., and in San Francisco, if you don't own property, you have no stability. With the property-trumps-all logic always hovering over city neighborhoods, tenants and the poor are regularly displaced when inflationary dynamics begin, especially if there is no rent control to stabilize their right to remain.

Conflicts arise predictably though, when an incoming population of hipsters, artists, gays, etc., are openly hostile to the population that is being displaced simultaneously to their arrival, often poor, black or latino, and dependent on the underground economy to sustain themselves. The wealthier new arrivals are naturally targeted for harassment and sometimes crime by those who see them as both invaders and insensitive boors with a disproportionate sense of entitlement.

I'm part of the CounterPULSE art/community space at 9th and Mission in San Francisco, where I curate public Talks on three Wednesdays a month. When we opened in 2005, the neighborhood had a lot of vacancies in the wake of the post-dotcom bust, and we felt lucky to find a place we could afford and get a long-term lease near to BART and transit. Within a block there are also numerous public agencies serving the transient poor and homeless, and the corner in front of CounterPULSE has a bus stop for both the always exciting 14-Mission, as well as several SamTrans lines, mostly used by working class commuters. By 2007, our place had been tagged countless times and our windows had been thoroughly wrecked by teen vandals with etching acid they used to graffiti the glass. Homeless addicts were often sprawled on our sidewalk, at or near the bus stop, for hours during the day, and our front doors were open toilets during the night. We worried about our vulnerability, especially at first, but over time we realized that there wasn't much actual danger, just the day-to-day reality of living in a central city area with a lot of down-and-out folks living on the streets.

CounterPULSE is at 1310 Mission, the turquoise and windowed facade to the right.

A couple of years ago in September we set up out front to enjoy PARK(ing) Day and were joined by dozens of neighbors from the buildings on our block. Together we decided to launch a neighborhood association (it has since gone into limbo) called "Planktown Neighbors," a name we chose to signify the fact that we were on a stretch of Mission that had originally been a plank toll road in the early 1850s. In our discussions we struggled to define our goals (to make our streets more beautiful, more comfortable, and safer, esp. vis-a-vis the car-dominated 9th and Mission Streets), but to be as inclusive as we could be. We were in no position to solve the homelessness drama on our two-block stretch of Mission, but we didn't want to be another NIMBY-ish group of small businesses and cultural organizations who called the police to shoo away "undesirable people." So for starters some of the group decided to invest in large planters to help beautify the block, and we all vowed to put more effort into cleaning the sidewalks and getting to know the people in and around our buildings. We all thought it would be smart if we could get enough of a street transformation under way we might be able to get a city grant, and we could pool resources to hire local street people to help maintain our new trees and sidewalk gardens.

A different planter next to St. James Infirmary, further west on Mission, nearer 10th Street.

One of the ongoing dilemmas for landscape architects, city planners, and yes, even transit geeks, is the chicken-and-egg question regarding public space. If you build it, will they come? Is there a “public” demanding wider sidewalks, public squares and plazas, pocket parks, and depaving, and who, exactly, are they?

Starting several decades ago, San Franciscans began to reassert a public life, famously highlighted by the early San Francisco Mime Troupe getting arrested in 1965 for performing free in public parks (initially permitted, the Parks Commission revoked the Mime Troupe’s permit when they disapproved of the play’s content). The Mime Troupe’s legal battles led the city to recognize a new notion of public commons with respect to its parks. This logic was extended further by the Diggers, an anarchic group that emerged from the Mime Troupe to make theater out of everyday life. They began by distributing free food in the Panhandle, and within a few months, a whole culture of “free” was proliferating a year or more before the “Summer of Love” put the Haight-Ashbury on the national map. Free stores, free concerts, free dope, free food, and for some, free love, pushed past the boundaries of the capitalist society.

Golden Gate Park Be-in, 1967.

People poured into San Francisco and especially the Haight in the late 1960s, milling about on the sidewalks, spilling into Haight Street, and even provoking police attacks to re-open the streets filled with people. The Golden Gate Park Be-in in 1967 was but one of dozens of events in those years in which tens of thousands of people filled parks and plazas, to celebrate the new culture with music and dance, or to protest the Vietnam War.

1971 demonstration in Golden Gate Park turns bacchanalian...

After the demise of this flowering era, public space fell into disuse. Big social events petered out, or were commodified in the form of pay-to-enter rock concerts. Missing the spirit and life of those times, some folks began organizing neighborhood street fairs. In 1978, the first Haight Street Fair was held, and over the years, the concept took hold and spread to many of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. One might quibble that these public fairs are basically “alternative malls” with free music, but they’re free, and they’re open, and they’re heavily attended.

Haight Ashbury Street Fair, 1979, photo by Robert Pruzane

Flash forward thirty years, and a new public space renaissance seems to be taking hold hereabouts. To be sure, it hasn’t emerged out of thin air. Food Not Bombs took up the free use of public space in the late 1980s, serving free food in the Civic Center, in Golden Gate Park, and elsewhere, enduring hundreds of arrests for not having a non-existent permit! In the past 17 years Critical Mass has been an important cultural reclaiming of city thoroughfares for political and social reasons outside the instrumental logic of political demands, or economic products/services for sale.

Whoops! Critical Mass on bikes meets Critical Mass on foot at gates of Giants-Rockies game, Aug. 28, 2009.

24th Street jammed with Sunday Streets enjoyment.

Slow Food Nation crowds enjoy Victory Garden in front of City Hall, August 30, 2008.

In the past two weeks the Bay Area has had two new food fairs bring thousands of people to public locations. In the Mission La Cocina staged a “Streetfood Festival” on August 22nd., jamming a one-block stretch of Folsom all day long as people came to eat and drink and talk to their friends and neighbors.

Streetfood Festival on Folsom Street, August 22, 2009.

Eat Real Festival, Oakland.

At Eat Real, a highlight was the Butchering contest, seen here from behind.

In 30 minutes two teams totally dismembered and prepared a quarter cow each. Amazing entertainment! Old-style butchery, a disappearing skill?

A more surprising and less mediated public space has erupted on the slopes of Dolores Park in the past year or two. I lived at Dolores and 19th in 2001-02, and as recently as that it was quite uncommon to see many people sitting on the slope facing Dolores Street between the tennis courts and 19th Street (homeless folks tended to sleep under the trees during the mornings). Nowadays, you can find a huge social scene on that same parkland every nice day. Hundreds of people have made this their defacto bar or café, a place to meet new and old friends, and to just enjoy a public space that has no further purpose than its own enjoyment.

The slope is the place to be... not Golden Gate Park's "Hippie Hill" but Dolores Park's "Hipster Hill" (or is that Fixie Hill?).

Sunny days guarantee a crowded Hipster Hill...

Dolores Beach has been a long-time fave of the gay community, near the 20th Street edge of Dolores Park.

Intrepid explorers of San Francisco regularly stumble upon the many ghost streets that still hide all over town, rewarding the patient pedestrian for their diligence. Mostly they are on hillsides where steep grades impeded road building at earlier moments in history, but they're still presented as if they were through-streets on the maps.

A tour begins with an old map and lots of photos below the break.

1909 map of southeastern San Francisco. Most of the streets here are still under water, awaiting a bayfill effort.

Other ghost streets can be found not on foot but by exploring old maps, where one can enjoy the strange city that extends well into the bay off the southeastern shoreline. I've heard rumors, or maybe I saw a story in the Chron decades ago, about families that continue to pay their property tax annually on parcels that are well into the bay and thoroughly under water. On this 1909 map of the Yosemite Creek area, streets going NW/SE are numbered and alphabetized but they later got real names. The perpendicular grid of alphabetized streets were eventually given real names (similar to what happened in the "outside lands" of the Richmond and Sunset). But on this 1909 map, Jennings, Ingalls, Hawes, Griffith, and Fitch (J, I, H, G, F) are followed southeast into the bay by E, D, C, B, and A streets, and five further blocks with the names, Ship, Dock, Tevis, Von Schmidt, and Pollock before arriving at "Water Front" boulevard. Obviously these streets were never created since the bayfill on which they depended never happened.

Spectacular garden adjacent to Harry "Street."

Harry "Street" in its forest.

Where Harry Meets Laidley.

My favorite ghost streets are short blocks, usually either bedecked with amazing gardens tended by loving neighbors, or else just odd stubs that continue to defy the rigid grid-imposing city planners of days gone by. In these small patches of nature, sometimes groomed, sometimes not, we can free our imaginations from the sterile symmetry imposed by endless blocks of asphalt crisscrossing the city. When we whisper to each other "One Lane for Food" or other equally "preposterous" depaving notions, the ghost streets echo back to us a knowing wink with a survivor's resilience. Probably the best patch of ghost streets in town is the Filbert Steps and its cross "streets" Napier Lane and Darrell Place. The Grace Marchant Garden that fills most of the Filbert right of way on the east side of Telegraph Hill is one of the true ecological treasures of San Francisco, home too to a big flock of much-celebrated parrots.

Filbert Steps on Telegraph Hill, Grace Marchant Garden to right in photo.

I live near 24th and Folsom which gives me a good staging area for visiting the ghost streets of Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, and both Noe and Eureka Valleys. There are many more than I can fully list or display here, and yes, you can take that as an invitation to get out there and explore! But a couple of my favorites on Potrero Hill are Kansas between 22nd and 20th, and 19th Street between Rhode Island and DeHaro. Potrero Hill in particular used to be a favorite walk many years ago when you could walk up the hillside below McKinley Square and visit the amazing community garden at Vermont and 20th, or take this Kansas ghost path uphill, continue to 19th, and then go right (east) to the ghost of 19th, popping out above the high school and then skirting the Potrero Commons that once graced the slopes above the old Northwest Pacific railroad tunnel (the train's right of way makes another ghost of transit past, cutting diagonally northwest from Potrero Hill through the Showplace Square area before petering out in the confluence of Potrero, Division, 10th, and Brannan Streets...).

Kansas "Street" just north of 22nd Street.

View south from top of Kansas "Street".

19th "Street" at Rhode Island.

A real undiscovered treasure close to the intersection of Corbett and Clayton that I wrote about not long ago in the context of historic water wars and the charming garden that's been planted on the corner, is Al's Park. This curious ribbon of whimsy and nature rises from the mural on upper Market Street (next to the pink historic Joost House) and emerges on Corbett. My 1995 Thomas Bros. map has it labeled as 19th Street (multiple ghostly incarnations for 19th!) but Google's Satellite map doesn't show there as being any public right of way there. Enter Al's Park from Corbett and enjoy a strange, almost 19th century-feeling slice of eccentric San Francisco land use.

Al's Park along the thin red line between Market and Corbett. It is on some maps labeled "19th Street."

Al's Park or 19th Street?

The entrance to Al's Park on Corbett Street.

Al's Park is a veritable museum of oddities.

Al's Park boundary.

Market Street below Al's "19th Street" Park.

Not too far from Al's Park on the northern slopes of Eureka Valley is the ghost of Saturn street that plunges from a cul-de-sac where the street seems to end into a slope with view benches, two staircases, and a lovely landscaping that accompanies one down to Ord Street. Just a few hundred feet to the north are the Vulcan Steps, another of San Francisco's many amazing public stairways serving private homes with cool, inviting porches and elegant, tree- and flower-filled gardens.

Saturn "Street" with views across Eureka Valley.

Back on Bernal Heights, where hundreds of new stairs have been installed in the past few years, especially around the rim and the eastern slope, there's a long legacy of ghost streets. Peralta and Franconia both start and stop from north to the summit and in the case of Peralta all the way down to the Alemany Farmers' Market, punctuated by incredible views, stairways, and gardens all the way. An east-west street near the southern edge of the hilltop is Powhattan and it has its own ghost block between Gates and Ellsworth. Further to the southeast Tompkins Street also has a ghost block between Nevada and Putnam. And probably the best known ghost street on Bernal is Esmeralda, which has a brief life as a thoroughfare on the east side of the summit, but is one of the hill's most glorious stairways down the west side.

Esmeralda above Elsie Street.

I only found this ghost of Harrison Street beneath Ripley a few weeks ago, missing it for years on many walks up Bernal.

Tompkins and Nevada on southeastern slopes of Bernal Heights.

Peralta "Street" looking north.

Powhattan at Ellsworth looking east.

I joined the India Basin Neighborhood Association for a guided tour of their shoreline on August 8, and enjoyed the fantasies and plans of the neighbors juxtaposed to the designs of the Redevelopment Agency for that long-lost corner of the city. India Basin is a favorite haunt of mine, home to Heron's Head Park, India Basic Open Space, and the historic Albion Brewery. It's been the main access to the Hunter's Point Naval Base, but these days, with the rebuilding starting and the naval shipyards long gone, the area is just beginning its gentrification process.

Historic Albion Brewery, now a private residence.

Long-billed Curlew and Egret share some chow time along India Basin shore.

A big roadblock to full-scale upscaling are the dozens of 1940s barracks-style public housing projects at Westbrook and Hunters View. I was struck by the ghost streets here too, staircases filling the zone that could have been Fitch Street or Griffith Street. But out here the landscape is parched, the neighbors indifferent, and the possibilities of flourishing, permaculturally designed corridors along the stairs remote at best. Even as native species habitat it was pretty bereft.

Westbook Public Housing at Fitch Street above Innes Avenue.

Interestingly, the Neighborhood Association presented many ambitious development plans for the area, including a "restaurant row" along Jennings, more offices and shops near the open shoreline at the south side of the basin, and another idea that some of us found a bit disturbing: Hudson Street is a ghostly presence out there, like a derelict alley running east-west just north of Innes Avenue, the main boulevard. But where it should cross Innes and continue westward up the hill into the Hunters View Projects, there is only a fence to mark the city's "right of way." The slope here is a hotspot of native habitat, so aficionados of plants and insects of our original eco-niche are especially interested in saving this hillside from becoming a through street. The Neighbors, for their part, saw a through Hudson Street as a way of relieving the heavy traffic on Hunters Point Blvd and Innes Avenue.

"Hudson Street" (the fence) above Hawes and Innes.

From a quarter mile further west, looking back along Hudson Street towards same hillside as photo above.

"Earl Street" at edge of Hunters' Point Naval Shipyard.

Looking north along Earl from Innes.

On Sunday BART workers might strike, throwing Bay Area transportation into chaos. It's a tiny echo of the kind of warfare that used to erupt regularly a century ago on the streetcar lines of San Francisco. 1,500 streetcar men voted to strike for an 8-hour day, leading to "Bloody Tuesday," May 7, 1907, when gunfights exploded between armed guards and men shooting from nearby vacant lots, while strikebreakers housed in United Railroads carbarns opened fire on protesting crowds, killing two and injuring 20. By the time the strike was lost in March 1908, six had been killed in the violence, 250 more hurt, and over two dozen had died in accidents on the system while it was run by scab labor.

A decade later, almost exactly 92 years ago, streetcar workers struck again:

On August 11, 1917, at 9:45 p.m., one hundred "platform men" employed by the privately owned United Railroads (URR) streetcar service in San Francisco, abandoned their streetcars near the corner of Market, Valencia and Haight Streets, rapidly tying up many of the main lines in and out of the city center. Weeks of secret agitation had set the stage for a strong, well-organized walkout.

The SF Examiner (8/12/1917) details the strike's beginning:

"The strike's leaders... arranged with the crews of three cars to block Market Street and connecting lines at a certain hour. The crews were to run slowly so that when they stopped their cars a big blockade would result. The time was set at 9:50 o'clock. Five minutes before this Car 1534 of the Valencia street line stopped at the Market street junction. A Gough, Cortland car and a Market Haight car stopped at the same time. The cars following closely on each of these lines piled up quickly. The blockade was effective. The crews stood by their cars for a few minutes. Some removed their badges and mingled with the big crowd that collected. They all announced that they were on strike, that they were not satisfied with wages or hours or conditions.

Company officials and police arrived a few minutes later. Thirty or forty of the strikers left for the Labor Temple. They had been told to congregate there. On the way they tried to get the crews of several Sixteenth street and Mission street cars to desert. They were successful with the crew of one Sixteenth street car. Demonstrations took place in the street at this point. Poles were torn from the trolleys. A brick was hurled through a car window... It was an hour before the blockade was cleared... due in great measure to the fact that the striking motormen threw their controller bars away [and] the new crews had to hunt for the bars in the streets."

The strike spread, as URR workers quickly joined the strike and within just a few days over 1,000 were on strike demanding union recognition, $3.50 a day, and an 8 hour workday. Daily parades of strikers surged through the streets, all the way to the ferries and back up Market and Mission streets, exhorting those still working to walk off and join the strike. Mass meetings were held at the Redstone Building (at 16th and Capp), where delegations were selected to visit major industrial sites around town, such as the Union Iron Works, to rally workers to abandon the URR streetcars, while others headed for outlying carbarns to enlist more workers to strike.

Mobs repeatedly attacked scab streetcars throughout the city. On August 13 police dispersed crowds at Bryant and 24th streets in the Mission and at 8th and Market. By the 14th, the strike had spread so thoroughly that the URR was forced to shut most of its lines.

By 1934, during the famous San Francisco General Strike, streetcar workers had become civil service employees. When their union head, Edward Vandeleur, was made president of the General Strike Committee, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins telegrammed him that there was nothing to worry about because the strike was led by conservative union leaders. True enough, at least in part. Vandeleur pressed the Strike Committee to exempt his streetcar men from participating in the effort, so as not to jeopardize their civil service status. After WWII, when the MUNI absorbed the remaining lines of the privately owned United Railroads (just when the war-time boom of ridership was about to drop off due to suburbanization and the postwar push for private cars), the workers were integrated into a cozy relationship with the transit management, leading to the peaceful and cooperative labor relations that have mostly prevailed since then. Efforts to undo the cushy work rules have been central to the "reforms" of the past two decades, as efforts have been made to impose market-like discipline on MUNI workers.

When BART started running in 1972, it was meant to function not as an urban transit system as much as a regional commuter train system, which is why it's held on to its cushioned upholstery and been so anti-bicycle and pro-parking. The workers were unionized from the get-go, and a mutual back-scratching relationship has mostly prevailed. Now we face a second strike in the past 12 years.

Already crowded highways will be jammed with commuters who have few alternatives to the BART system. We can predict that there will be a lot of anger directed at the workers, by inconvenienced commuters of course, but the corporate local media is sure to slant their coverage to portray BART workers as a greedy, already well-paid bunch of selfish workers. We can predict this because we already lived this particular drama in 1997, when BART workers struck to protect their wages and conditions.

The temptation is to delve into the details of contract negotiations and see which side is being "unfair" or demanding "too much." But it really doesn't matter who is taking which position. The bigger drama is that BART is a badly designed heavy rail system that we're stuck with, and the cost of maintaining it is borne by its users, not the management nor the workers. The employees of BART have the capacity to pursue an independent path, one that builds solidarity with the riders instead of pitting workers against riders.

But within the terms of existing trade unionism, a highy bureaucratic collective bargaining context, and the endless effort to maintain "middle class" living standards, it would take a mighty effort to rethink strategy and tactics. It's especially farfetched in the absence of a wider culture of solidarity and resistance, wherein workers in offices, schools, hospitals, restaurants and hotels, and the remaining factories around the Bay find common ground in rethinking the purpose of our overworked lives, and use the collective power of our labor to reinvent how ALL OF US meet ALL our needs, together.

I wrote about the 1997 BART strike in its time, arguing that:

If the BART workers were interested in gaining some real class-wide solidarity, their cause would have been far better served, and the strike would have been over in an hour or two, if they had merely continued to run the trains BUT REFUSED TO COLLECT FARES! Of course, BART's hated and idiotic fare collection system, which must waste thousands of human hours per year as we all struggle to feed paper money into its recalcitrant jaws, is really designed to prevent this kind of working class solidarity. With one station attendant at each gate area at most, a fare strike would be easily stopped by police intervention, unlike the MUNI, which is still designed to give the driver discretionary power over fare collection. Automated fare systems clearly have nothing to do with convenience or public service, and everything to do with pre-empting working class solidarity over the fare box and other types of popular resistance to unjustified and unnecessary fares.

BART workers could have promoted a class solidarity by contesting the direction of BART, resisting the absurdly wasteful expansion to the SF Airport, and insisting on integration with Caltrain, MUNI and other transit systems. But the unions are as afraid of that kind of larger political agenda, and in the case of BART unions in particular, the gravy train is pretty tasty, so why rock the boat? As BART commandeers more and more available transit funding in the Bay Area, there is more for BART workers, too, which is good for the bottom line of the unions that represent them, and their well-paid executives.

I hope the BART strike ends quickly, or somehow changes its spots and becomes a more generalized effort to challenge the way we live. Absent the latter rather unlikely scenario, I hope the workers will stave off the worst take-aways, and maintain their wages and conditions. In a culture hostile to the working class while glorifying work, it's only fitting that the people who actually have leverage succeed, even in the limited terms of a labor aristocracy, a trade union organized for its members betterment, not the broader class of which it's a part. Meanwhile, the rest of us, transit geeks, cyclists, and others, can take this opportunity to reflect on what a truly self-managed, reorganized transit universe might look like.

Photo by Bryan Goebel.

So like Pavlov's dog, I learned how to ride evasively and defensively by being quick and assertive on the streets, and always flowing towards the emptiest places. Forty years later, I have been well-served by this approach, remaining a wreck-less rider all these years, in spite of what some motorists and even some cyclists might consider reckless riding. And no, I don't wear a helmet, and never have. I don't oppose anyone using one if they want to, but I feel perfectly safe riding through the streets, fully responsible for my own safety, and a helmet does not enhance that safety in my experience. (Obviously there is a subset of bike accidents in which one's head hits the ground or a vehicle hard, and a helmet can be very helpful in those cases. But there are many more accidents that mangle other parts of the body, often resulting from bad road design or maintenance, indifferent and hostile motorists, and yes, sometimes, unsafe cycling.)

Photo by Chris Carlsson.

* Drivers must:

- look carefully for bicyclists before opening doors next to moving traffic or before turning right.
- safely merge toward the curb or into the bike lane.
- not overtake a bicyclist just before making a right turn. Merge first, then turn.

There is a list of what bicyclists must do too, including having access to some freeways and being allowed to use left-turn lanes. Unlike the Golden Era of cycling where we could and did go anywhere, in any direction (as plenty of bike messengers and those of us who ride like them still do), the DMV admonishes that bicyclists

- must ride in the same direction as other traffic, not against it.
- must ride in a straight line as near to the right curb or edge of the roadway as practical-not on the sidewalk.
- must ride single file on a busy or narrow street.

None of this particularly corresponds to what is good for cyclists, but does conform to how motorists want cyclists to behave. It underscores how out of kilter the licensing process is with the current reality of cycling and street usage in San Francisco. Now that we're having four blocks of Valencia redesigned, with wider sidewalks to suit more pedestrians, let's hope a more thorough rethinking and redesign of city streets can follow. If we can move towards dedicated street space for bicyclists, like in Copenhagen, Montreal, New York, Berlin and other great cities, maybe we'll be able to claim that mantle too.

Until then, bicyclists, you're on your own! Your safety and survival are your responsibility, not the motorists who can't or won't see you.

Gavin Newsom is running for President, er um, I mean Governor (you gotta take these things one step at a time). Maybe he’ll make it, maybe something will wreck his chances. It’s an interesting drama from the point of view of recent American history, as he follows in the footsteps of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and has surrounded himself with a retinue of advertising professionals… you know, those people who do nothing useful for society but are extremely well-paid to craft lies and deceptions and help the powerful stay on top. Newsom is a vacuous politician with no rudder or internal gyroscope grounded in any values other than what will get him on to the next stop of his political ambition. His advertisers (do they advise? I think they just advertise) are shrewd enough to keep associating the Newsom Brand with the innovative thinking and practices that are practically boiling out of political sight in San Francisco. But we cannot and should not think of him as an ally since his track record is demonstrably empty when it comes to doing what he says.

Newsom got a bunch of local press last week when he announced that he was directing his department heads to examine their city-owned surplus real estate holdings for the potential to kick-start a serious effort at locally grown urban agriculture. As a person who has—even here—promoted the idea of “One Lane for Food” I am of course glad to see the idea of urban agriculture gaining traction. But having Gavin Newsom using the idea as the buzz-of-the-week in his gubernatorial campaign is simply aggravating.

Alemany Farm below Bernal Heights, June 2009

San Francisco has a flourishing urban horticulture amidst over 100 community gardens. The Alemany Farm just south of Bernal Heights is a 4.5-acre productive farm, run largely by volunteers who have brought it into production after it almost collapsed a few years ago. Elsewhere, the SF Glean group are out picking plums and loquats and anything else they can find in front yards, sidewalk medians, and even some backyards and public lands. Another similar effort called Produce to the People is dedicated to getting the food already growing in the city to the hungry people who can best use it.

Flourishing plum tree at Mullen and Franconia on Bernal Heights.

Did Newsom think to salute these efforts or offer city support for them? Is he proposing to use City resources to support the dozens of community gardens and thousands of gardeners, who are the obvious backbone of any move towards urban agriculture? Did he even throw his support behind the Victory Gardens program launched a year ago with much fanfare during the Slow Food Nation gathering? You all know the pathetic answers…

Heavily laden loquat tree on south side of Bernal Heights, June 2009.

There are a lot of examples of Newsom’s vacuity and hypocrisy, but one that he's not even that directly responsible for leaped out at me last Friday. I was going to the Inner Sunset to lunch with a friend, and took a detour through the Golden Gate Park Concourse. Those of you who have been around for a while will remember the intense fight that erupted over the rebuilding of the DeYoung Museum and the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, especially with regard to building a parking garage under the concourse. After much ado, including a hotly contested election, a number of lawsuits, and then the construction of the garage with entrances inside the park violating the original proposition, it’s all finished now. The main promise of the garage proponents is that it would allow the Concourse to become a pedestrian oasis, with space for walking, cycling, and no parking or cars, which would be kept below ground.

Newsom wasn’t personally involved much in that original fight. He came to the Board of Supervisors from the Pacific Heights district where the monied interests who backed him had been the financiers of the campaign for a garage. Those same interests promised that the underground garage, with its entrance directly to the museums, would preclude the necessity of having cars driving through the Concourse. Once built though, there was a road put back to the front door of both museums, at the behest of the museums and their wealthy benefactors, so people could get “dropped off” at the door.

The so-called pedestrian oasis, ringed by busily trafficked roads.

As these photos illustrate, this has proven to be a lie. Granted, it’s a small issue in the scheme of things, but it’s a perfect example of the kind of politics and baiting-and-switching that brought us Gavin Newsom in the first place. Today there are signs at either end of the Concourse saying it’s closed to through traffic, and that only drop-offs are allowed (why they can’t loop through the underground garage to drop off passengers has never been explained). But on Friday, first around 1, and then later when I took these photos around 3 pm, there was a steady flow of private cars streaming through the park, not making drop-offs, but just using it as a shortcut between the Inner Sunset and JFK Drive, just like they always have! Add the many taxis and the 44 Muni line that runs through, and the promised pedestrian oasis is a joke. As Park Ranger Rodriguez told me, it’s always like this, and as much as she tries to block cars from driving in the bike lane, she’s given up worrying about enforcing the “no through traffic” rule.

Cars drive through against the "no through traffic" signs. Park Ranger Rodriguez stands in road trying to keep traffic moving.

It’s aggravating, but twice so when you consider all the blather about a crisis in city finances. Why not set up some officers at either end of the Concourse and generate a few tens of thousands of dollars per day on scofflaw motorists driving through? Why were they trying to charge entrance fees to the Arboretum (thankfully abandoned now) when there’s a huge revenue source in enforcing existing promises and rules a few yards away? Gavin Newsom doesn’t want to ruffle the feathers of all his wealthy benefactors, who for all their tolerance of green rhetoric (good marketing after all), can’t bear the idea of not being able to drive wherever they want, whenever they want, including right to the front door of their museums, past promises be damned.

Are there museums here? Who knew? And where was that pedestrian oasis?

One essential way to enjoy the streets of San Francisco is to get out and walk around. We have so many amazing walks at our doorsteps. In the hills are hidden staircases, promontories and open hilltops with amazing views, and secret treasures. I'm particularly curious to dig through the layers of history wherever possible. For the last seven years I've been hiking up Liberty Hill, across Kite Hill and then up and over Market to the intersection of Clayton and Corbett Streets, just below the spot where the Pemberton Steps come down. If you've only passed this way by car, you're missing the whole show!

The intersection is quite a huge expanse of asphalt, but in plain view are some hints of what once was, and a fantastic garden that neighbors have brought to life at the point where the streets meet. To the west of the intersection is an open lot with outcroppings of chert, the ancient seabed thrust upward that makes up a good number of our hills. Somewhere beneath that hillside is a bubbling spring of fresh water, surging to the surface year round. That water is sometimes visible to passersby even now, as in this photo (below the break) showing water running out on to Clayton from the hillside.

You can often see water seeping from the hillside at Clayton and Corbett, evidence of the historic spring here.

Just to its north are the Pemberton Steps, a lovely staircase that takes one up the hill to Graystone Terrace, a nice way to access Tank Hill from the south, across Clarendon Road (the other way to get to Tank Hill, with its spectacular views of the city, the Golden Gate and on clear days, Bolinas and Pt. Reyes, is by going to the very top of Shrader Street and turning left, walking to the end of the cul-de-sac and following the path out of the end past the wildflowers to the summit). The uppermost flight of the Pemberton Steps are still beautiful old stone, but the lower two flights were redone in the past few years, with pink cement and a water fountain. As is the case with most stairways in upper Eureka Valley, there are some amazing homes along the steps with gorgeous gardens and fantastic viewpoints.

This pink wall doesn't necessarily look very inviting, but walk up and discover the amazing stairway and find your way to Tank Hill!

The upper flight of Pemberton Steps still has an ancient feeling...

The lower flights of Pemberton are good examples of how to do it right, when stairways are redesigned...

The landscaping along the Pemberton Steps is lovely, harmonizing well with the triangular garden at the intersection below.

Clayton-Corbett Garden, Pemberton Steps wall across street behind.

The intricately landscaped garden has some standing and sitting areas to enjoy it from, but is otherwise behind small fences.

The mysterious spring-fed water, though, is where our story lies. Two landmark buildings near this intersection housed historic characters who once fought over the water. Our characters are Behrend Joost, whose pink farmhouse is one of the older structures in the area, sitting atop the rainbow-ish mural along upper Market as it turns southward on its ascent, before the intersection with Clayton (a hidden garden connects the pink house's garden with Corbett above it, open to the public from the Corbett end).

The Miller-Joost House on upper Market Street.

Joost was an important player in San Francisco's early transportation and real estate development (two things that always go hand in hand). Our other character was a San Francisco eccentric named Alfred "Nobby" Clarke, who built the amazing turreted mansion at Douglass and Caselli, just a few blocks downhill from Clayton and Corbett. If you're visiting this on bicycle or foot, you will notice quickly that the low point in upper Eureka Valley is 18th Street, descending almost directly from below Clayton and Corbett, and just downhill from the mansion on Caselli, known in its time as "Nobby Clarke's Folly." Clarke got his fortune by becoming the City Clerk during the 1880s, a time when anyone needing city permission for anything needed his signature, a lucrative monopoly whose proceeds he apparently channeled into the construction of the 20+ room mansion.

"Nobby" Clarke's Folly under construction at Douglas and Caselli,1890s.

Joost owned the Mountain Spring Water Company that had its water origins southeast of his home. Residents in the neighborhood today recall a surface spring at Corbett and Clayton from which water was sold by the bucket or cup. A wooden bridge across Corbett on Clayton made the road muddied by the spring much more passable.

Clayton and Corbett, c. 1915.

That Mountain Spring water turned "Nobby" Clarke's and Behrend Joost's lives into daily warfare. In the early 1890s, Alfred Clarke bought seventeen acres of land in and around Caselli and Douglass Streets. Clarke's land was downhill from Joost's. The spring in dispute flowed through Joost's property down to Clarke's. Clarke didn't like Joost's water service and started his own. In turn, when Joost extended his water service, he ruined business for both of them.

"Nobby" was clearly contentious and maybe a bit proud. After he built, or overbuilt, his mansion in the Gilded Age, he and his upslope neighbor, Behrend Joost, began a feud that lasted their lifetime. While the frequently given reason for the daily warfare was the Mountain Spring Water Company service Joost owned and provided to Clarke and others in Eureka Valley, it is probable these two "rags to riches" businessmen were destined to compete about anything and everything. Their stormy relationship didn't stop with sharp words; neighbors still recount stories of their fist fights on 18th Street.
(from Mae Silver's contributions at FoundSF.org)

I was glad to see “We Are the World” on the ridiculously inadequate Climate Change bill that finally emerged from the corrupt U.S. Congress. Sadly, the bill could only emerge with the support of a number of mainstream environmental lobbyists in DC, who clearly have sold out to get something, anything, in the direction of addressing the climate catastrophe. Here in San Francisco there’s an inordinate amount of enthusiasm for the Bike Plan getting okayed by part of the city government, even though it’s still under an injunction, and even when that finally gets lifted, it’ll take three years to finish this Plan, one which will have relatively little effect on this car-dominated city. In some strange way the Climate Bill and the Bike Plan are eerily similar: sources of great pride to those who believe in incremental change, “the best we can do in the current political climate” to political realists, but falling way short, sorely disproportionate to the actual needs they ostensibly address. (An article in the UK Guardian Weekly June 5-11 edition “Climate Change Creates New ‘Global Battlefield’” quotes a new report from Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum that there are already 300,000 deaths a year due to the warming climate, and 300 million people have already been affected!)

I’m not saying anything that most people can’t readily see if we pause from our daily frenzy long enough to think about the bigger picture. I’ll go out on a limb (barely) and say here and now that the Climate Catastrophe conference scheduled for Copenhagen, Denmark in December will fail to do anything meaningful. It’s not hard to predict, since even with a 60-vote Democratic (comedian-reinforced) Majority in the U.S. Senate, there’s no chance of a treaty being ratified that addresses the structure of the U.S. economy or the geographic arrangement of our dwellings, our transit infrastructure, or our energy use. And yet, this is simply what is necessary to have ANY CHANCE AT ALL of averting catastrophic ecological and economic collapse… funny to think that things are that stark, and hard to see if we don’t stop and look, but there it is.

Bike and Irreligious Pride! Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence indulging in the June 09 Critical Mass...

I get a lot of readings coming my way. Here’s a few to help you source what I’m arguing, in case you’re not sure—"this all seems rather hysterical," “the sky isn’t really falling is it?”, and so on… In the June 29 New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert profiles James Hansen, the NASA director who was shut up by Bush Administration decree, but wouldn’t go quietly. He’s still at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and in the article, Kolbert traces his emergence as one of the world’s most eloquent and urgent climate catastrophe bell-ringers.

NASA scientist James Hansen (left) gets busted protesting coal. (Photo: Rainforest Action Network)

Hansen has now concluded, partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, that the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Carbon dioxide isn’t just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken—including the shutdown of all the world’s coal plants within the next two decades—the planet will be committed to change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with… Speaking before a congressional special committee last year, Hansen asserted that fossil-fuel companies were knowingly spreading misinformation about global warming and that their chairmen “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

Lately, he’s taken to marching on coal plants, and was even arrested recently. I’ve enjoyed the brilliant and funny tv spots by This Is Reality who have been doing a good job of ridiculing the rhetoric around “clean coal.” (And let’s not forget, this is the centerpiece of Obama’s energy strategy!) Not only is coal not clean, it’s about the dirtiest technology going, and if you look at what’s happening in West Virginia now, with mountaintop removal becoming the norm, it’s hard not to grow numb with despair or want to do something drastic.

The new Orion magazine has some good articles and photo essays in their July/August 09 issue on coal, but in their typical fashion, they manage to put together a treatment that goes a lot further than the basic facts. Photographs by Rick Stevens show the effects of mountaintop removal up close on the ground, but in a way that aestheticizes what should be simply ugly and monstrous. A short companion essay by West Virginia native Ann Pancake makes the point:

The photos take the ugliest landscape I’ve ever seen, the one that hurts me most profoundly, and make that landscape also beautiful. “A terrible beauty”; it was Yeats I first heard in my head. Rick has a more fitting and original phrase. He calls it “ruthless elegance.”

West Virginia is being destroyed for coal, one mountaintop at a time.

Aerial shots taken by activists are the only photos I’ve seen before this essay. Go to Mountainaction.org for the basic story with photos and videos. In West Virginia the economy has been coal-centric for two centuries, so breaking with it there is even harder than coastal latté-sippers figuring out how to reconfigure our utility bills and food-buying habits (though, as Derek Jensen argues elsewhere in the same Orion, “personal change does not equal political change,” an argument that I appreciate him making, even if he generally sends us into the cul-de-sac of blaming the “industrial economy” rather than capitalism, wage-labor, or specific technological choices and work patterns for our plight). Another piece (Hell Yes We Want Windmills) in the same issue introduces us to Coal River activists in West Virginia who are campaigning to replace the fantasy of “clean, carbon neutral coal” with wind farms.  

Caravan at the gate of Kingsnorth, UK, Climate Camp 08, Kent, 9 August 2008 (photo: metamute.org)

As activism has grown around the planet, the rising call is not simply to address the Climate Catastrophe, and certainly not to blindly assert that “everyone must make sacrifices,” but rather to see that the capitalist system depends on crisis, and never fails to use it to sharpen inequalities and reinforce power relations. “Climate Justice,” like environmental justice, is the answer beginning to take shape in the global south, and in many parts of the industrialized world too. Over in Newcastle, England, near the border with Scotland, a conference was organized last November (Class, Climate Change and Clean Coal--the Climate Campers and the Unions) bringing together members of England’s storied National Union of Mineworkers with a motley crew of Climate Campers, mostly anarchist, to debate the role of coal going forward. England had a huge coal industry until the early 1980s when Margaret Thatcher decided it was the perfect target for her larger effort to break organized labor in the UK, an effort that proved fairly successful. John Cunningham (whom I had the pleasure of visiting in April) has a good account of this curious confrontation in the latest issue of MUTE magazine (A Climatic Disorder?) 

Tripods with Kingsnorth power station in the background, Climate Camp, Kent, 9 August 2008 (photo: metamute.org)

Long standing anarchist activist and ex-National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) official Dave Douglass issued a polemic against the [Climate] camp. He addressed the anti-coal bias of the Climate Campers alongside a perceived lack of class analysis within the camp and the wider green movement. There is undoubtedly a feel good anti-capitalism implicit in much of the discourse around Climate Camp that can exclude any consideration of class in favour of blandly utopian sentiment…against the fluffy anti-capitalism of much of the camp's official discourse, Douglass introduced the perspective of those who may not have ‘somewhere else' to go, locked into jobs and communities that a politics of exodus cannot easily address. The yearly anti-climate change roadshow attempts to offer a response to climate change that would destabilise business as usual, suggesting at least nominally anti-capitalist alternatives. However, its model of protest camp and sustainable community gleaned from the post-Seattle summit protests can seem too abstracted from everyday life to break the general perception that climate change exists ‘out there'… Its model of sustainability can also appear as a holiday in scarcity to the casual observer…

Climate Camp ran workshops on class and emphasised a ‘just transition' in the official booklet's dialogue with workers in carbon-based industries. This is the notion that a transition can be made to a non-carbon based economy that does not penalise the poor or workers in carbon based industries such as coal miners. It is an argument for responses to climate change that place social justice at the forefront of any structural shift in the economy. While it is often posited as a decentralised, autonomous response, it can also be part of a social democratic state-led one…

The conference often threatened to become nothing but the conjunction of two forms of reformism - trade unionism and environmentalism - disputing the response to climate change rather than providing a challenge to the commodification of the world that both climate change and capital are predicated upon... The central question the conference raised for me is how to formulate a response to climate change capable of resisting capital's own one - given that capitalism loves a good catastrophe from which to extract value. Is there an inherent connection between capital, disaster and labour?...

Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard at MLK Jr. Middle School in Berkeley... one of the more coherent responses to the imperative towards Transitioning!

Editor's note: This piece was written for Shaping San Francisco and is now incorporated into the new wiki version, your best place to research San Francisco history, FoundSF.org.

Protesters march along Embarcadero in early 1960s, stump of Embarcadero Freeway ends behind them at Broadway.
Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library

In the 1950s, the California Division of Highways had a plan to extend freeways across San Francisco. At that time the freeway reigned supreme in California, but San Francisco harbored the seeds of an incipient revolt which ultimately saved several neighborhoods from the wrecking ball and also put up the first serious opposition to the post-WWII consensus on automobiles, freeways, and suburbanization.

Early plan for 8-lane freeway to cut under Russian Hill on its way from the Embarcadero to the Golden Gate Bridge.

On November 2, 1956 the San Francisco Chronicle graciously published a map of the proposed and actual freeway routes through San Francisco even though its accompanying editorial was already chastising protestors: "The remarkable aspect of these protests and claims of injury is their tardiness. They concern projects that have for years been set forth in master plans, surveys and expensive traffic studies. They have been ignored or overlooked by citizens and public official alike—until the time was at hand for concrete pouring and when revision had become either impossible or extremely costly. The evidence indicates that the citizenry never did know or had forgotten what freeways the planners had in mind for them."

In the 1940s the California Dept. of Highways came up with various plans to blanket San Francisco with freeways. This is a version proposed in 1948 by San Francisco's Planning Department. Image: San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR)

James Lick Freeway under construction in 1953: San Francisco's first. Seals Stadium, the old ballpark is visible in center-left of photo. Photo: Ed Brady

Proposed freeway routes for the continuation of the Embarcadero Freeway to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Today, San Francisco's freeways have changed again, thanks to the Loma Prieta 1989 earthquake. The much maligned Embarcadero Freeway has been removed, as has an unsightly spur of the Central Freeway. A raging debate over the future of the Central Freeway ramps that go north across Market was finally resolved and has now been replaced by the surface Octavia Boulevard. The 101-280 interchange was a mess from 1989 to 1996. New offramps were added to I-280 to serve a new waterfront roadway and the planned Giants ballpark at China Basin in 1997, but no new freeways will be built in San Francisco. New transit money goes to BART and MUNI, while Caltrans and SF Dept. of Public Works continue to spend vast quantities of social wealth on maintaining the San Francisco road system. The rapid rise in value in both areas where freeways were removed, along the now open waterfront, as well as the rapidly gentrifying Hayes Valley/Civic Center area, show that profits can be drawn from forward looking urban planning, de-emphasizing cars and re-emphasizing neighborhood, community, and nature. But most U.S. urban planners still adhere religiously to the cult of the car, hence constant efforts to expand roads and parking at the expense of numerous more sensible alternatives, from decent mass transit to ubiquitous bikeways.

Demolition of Central Freeway over Market Street, 2003. Photo by Chris Carlsson

Various freeway plans over the years.

Maps and photos of San Francisco's original freeway plans

Images and maps of many San Francisco freeways that were never built and some that were

I got an email forwarded to me over the weekend titled "BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA HATES URBAN GARDENS" which naturally sparked my interest. Turns out to be a lot more interesting than the title even suggested. Asa Dodsworth has lived in his place on Acton and Allston Way in Berkeley for about a decade, which he owns. He's a gentle, lanky fellow who decided some years ago to plant food in his front yard and on the six-foot wide median between the curb and the sidewalk running in front of his property. He's not officially associated with Transition Towns or any of the many new initiatives cropping up (pun intended!) that are trying to find local ways to address a world out of kilter. But clearly his dedicated effort to use his small area to grow food instead of keeping it strictly ornamental or recreational is part of a bigger agenda of urban redesign and transformation that benefits us all, and sets a standard that many more of us should be working towards.

I took my bike on BART to seek out this controversial streetscape and see for myself. As luck would have it, I arrived in late afternoon and found Asa pruning some of the foliage in his median, while a cluster of folks stood around discussing not just his situation, but the also the larger dynamic associated with the overblown "crisis" of the light brown apple moth. (For a full download on this topic, go to www.DontSprayCalifornia.org). To get to Asa's place I got off at Ashby BART and rode north on Acton until I found it, not knowing precisely where it was, but having seen some photos on-line. As I rode along I couldn't help but notice that LOTS of homes along Acton are characterized by dense foliage in the front yards, sometimes fruit trees, sometimes just a variety of thick shrubs, flowers and on one occasion at least, artichokes!

Artichokes on Acton Street median.

The rest of the yard where the artichokes are growing.

Another dense front yard on Acton St.

Obviously lots of Berkeley neighbors want to use their front yards in non-suburban ways!

I arrived and chatted with the folks there. Max is an activist with the Don't Spray California campaign and pointed out that the nearby pocket park has several insect traps placed in it, just in the past week or two. She felt that the harassment the city was subjecting Asa to was part of a broader campaign that would use the presence of food-growing urban gardens as an excuse for extensive pesticide spraying on behalf of the state's agribusiness interests. I wouldn't dismiss that out of hand, for sure, but it's hard to think that local Berkeley code enforcers are working for the big ag interests that dominate state politics... so what is really going on?

Neighbors discuss politics in front of Asa's house.

Here's an excerpt from Asa's appeal:

The City of Berkeley Code enforcement has decided my front yard fruit trees and garden beds are an "unpermitted violation" and must be removed. They have fined me $4,500- already and threatened daily additional fines of the same. That's $135,000 per month!

In conversation they tell me that I'm supposed to have a lawn just like all the other houses, they say that the front yards is for recreation. But they don't put those crazy statements on paper, on paper they write citations for

    * vegetation over six foot tall, a five hundred dollar a day fine, now cited twice in a two week period
    * Unpermitted Trees, a five hundred dollar a day fine, cited twice
    * Unpermitted Garden Beds, a five hundred dollar a day fine, cited twice
    * two counts of obstruction of the right of way, at five hundred dollar a day each.
    * And a we already told you so citation, a five hundred dollar a day fine
    * and to further damage me, they mailed copies of this mayhem to my Bank

In recent walking surveys of our Berkeley yardscape: 25% of Berkeley Properties have a fruit tree in the right of way, 80% have vegetation obstructing the sidewalk, or egress for cars, and 90% have vegetation over 6 ft tall. These numbers establish a clear community standard of appreciation and support of front yard gardens. And that community standard is defensible position in a court of law.

And I will fight these citations all the way, Code enforcement Officers Maurice Norrise and Gregory Daniels have selectively enforced these laws, as a tool of harassment, against myself and every community garden, and activist household I know of in Berkeley. Its time to turn this tide. Its time for an investigation into the questionable practices of Berkeley's code enforcement department.

Step in for a fellow neighbor, and Stand up for your right to plant you own Victory Garden, for your right to choose the trees that you are responsible for pruning and sweeping up after. Don't let them take away this valuable tool in the fight against global warming.

We need you to call these important local decision makers and tell them how you feel, call and leave a message tonight
Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna, (510) 981-7600
Neighborhood Services Officer Angela Gallegos-Castillo (510) 981-2491
City Manager Phil Kamlarz (510) 981-7000

if you wanna see pictures of the Garden, visit www.berkeleyvictorygardens.tk
If you want to help us organize events, email fruit-jam-renegades (AT) googlegroups.com
if you want to stay in touch, or come to a garden building party, check out
http://groups.google.com/group/food-not-lawns-eastbay-events

Sincerely, Asa Dodsworth, moped45 (AT) gmail.com
oh, and dont forget to forward this message to your friends

Asa Dodsworth

It's pretty difficult to imagine a city with Berkeley's self-image of progressivism and ecological sanity standing behind this kind of obsolete, suburbanite bureaucratic behavior. Take a moment to make a call, or if you live in Berkeley, lean on your council members and the Mayor to not only back off, but honor and reward Asa! His actions are a model that should go well beyond the medians and front yards and extend to narrowing roads and taking up a lane wherever possible for food production...

Coming soon: One Lane for Food!

San Francisco cyclists leave on Valencia May 30 for the Maker Faire 20 miles south in San Mateo.

Following the siren song of the Fossil Fool, or expecting to anyway (he was very late!), I joined a surprisingly large contingent of San Francisco cyclists to ride the 20-odd miles to the Maker Faire at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds. Gray foggy skies kept us cool as we headed out, and right away the etiquette of a Critical Mass broke down, as we separated into ever smaller groups of cyclists, broken up by the red lights.

Southward on Bayshore Blvd., beneath the freeways.

We headed for a bayshore route, and took Bayshore Blvd southward, zigzagging across the freeway before finally getting into the relative open of the toxic landfill that was once San Francisco' garbage dump in Brisbane lagoon. It's a nice place to ride now, presumably relatively safe for passersby, but known to harbor some of the hottest of toxic hot spots that rim the bay. We slipped under the freeway again to regroup under San Bruno Mountain's last spring greenery (we were in a sprawling Marriott parking lot), but a lot of the musical accompaniment was so far behind us that we never saw them until hours later at the Faire.

Regrouping beneath San Bruno Mountain, one of our area's least-appreciated ecological treasures.

From the parking lot we meandered through the weird suburbia built on old bay wetlands, through office parks and wide, deserted roadways.

Cycling through Oyster Point, weird suburban landscape just south of San Francisco.

Few of us had ever cycled to the airport and we joked about meeting each other there on bikes next time we travel. After passing the airport entrance, we rode amidst fenced-off runways and wide freeways, truly aliens in that motorized landscape. Coyote Point appeared ahead of us, a green parkland bulging up and into the bay. At last we were on the bayshore, and from there we could stay on well-maintained Bay Trail paths all the way to Foster City, south of the San Mateo Bridge. The views are spectacular back to the north, and at several points there are observation decks and other ways to approach the wild wetlands.

Observation deck over wetlands, just north of San Mateo bridge.

View northward from bayshore, San Bruno Mtn with SF behind it.

At last we found our way to the Maker Faire. The San Mateo County Fairgrounds is a good place for it. It's a sprawling collection of tinkerers, artists, craftspeople, nerds, scientist gadflys, and more. Thanks to the Faire for encouraging cycling by giving a $10 discount on tickets. As a result, they got quite a lot of bikes!

This sight is becoming common in the Bay Area: Valet Bike Parking overflowing with bikes!

In some ways, the entire Faire is summarized by this obscure sign on the back of a steampunk laptop user... 

An increasingly popular sentiment!

The unabashed enthusiasm for technology as an arena of play and innovation, creativity and invention, is the dominating ethic. In several pavilions and over acres of outdoor displays, strange machines, unfamiliar devices, and curiously beautiful artifacts of unnatural origin (depending on how you want to define "nature"!) regaled the attendees, a mishmash of suburbanites, San Francisco bohemians, crazy radicals, nature-loving hippies, and the ever-present throngs of tech workers who coexist in all those subcultures.

A reigning aesthetic subculture there, spawned from Burning Man (like many of the projects at the Fair), was Steampunk. Combining lacey and racy clothing and jewelry, steam-powered vehicles and machinery, and echoes of Victoriana in performance and signage, the Steampunks were a big presence.

Steampunk Clubhouse, another project that began at Burning Man.

Cover of steampunk laptop!

Steampunk laptop?!?

Steampunk Snail.

Victorian Fandance: The Hottie from Cotati!

Kineticsteamworks.org

To help make all that Victoriana clothing! Steam power!

Takes an awful lot of gasoline to get this from place to place!

Gotta make steam out of something! Global warming anyone?

Credit to the Maker Faire folks, who are actually a corporate-owned magazine, for giving space to so many worthy projects. Unlike what you might expect, dozens of booths and displays were invited to be at the Fair gratis, highlighting one of the interesting aspects of this moment in history. The new issue of Make magazine is titled "Remake America;" they are a commercial operation seeking to capitalize on the growing phenomenon of DIY tinkering, selling magazines to consumers and advertising to vendors selling tools, kits, videos, and more. But the folks who edit and produce the magazine have a bigger vision of their purpose than simply profit, or so it would seem from their open and accommodating approach to the noncommercial subcultures that flourish among the same people that they see as their market share.

There was a great cluster of bicycling related groups and projects, from Momentum Magazine and BikeMonkey from Sonoma County (great piece in it, not online unfortunately, about the pros and cons of paving a good dirt road along the Santa Rosa Creek), the Woodenbike guy, the Big Kid Bikes, and a bunch of others... a lot of fun was rolling around us as we strolled through that corner of the Faire.

Woodenbikes.com

Another wooden bike.

The Bike Kitten!

I wrote in my 2004 novel (After the Deluge, set in San Francisco in 2157) about neighborhood workshops, tool libraries, etc. They are not so sci-fi after all. There is already a Santa Rosa Tool Library (and as I just checked, the San Francisco Public Library lists one, though I don't know anyone that's aware of it, and both Berkeley and Oakland have Tool Libraries too), and as demonstrated amply at the Maker Faire, a company has figured out how to turn this into a business, a membership-based series of workshops and classes, TechShop. Once again, a great idea for a Commons, something we all own and share together, is turned into a business niche by our voracious economic system. But like the Faire more broadly, it's the kind of "green business" where you hope the logic of sharing, both skills and equipment, overcomes the pecuniary logic of profit that probably informs the business plan of the TechShop investors.

The DIY hunger affects all ages.

DIY starts early at the Maker Faire.

Hopeandfearometer

"The Revolution Will be Carmelized!" declare the CandyFab geeks, makers of an indecipherable Candyfab 6000 that somehow produces custom designed desserts! (I didn't know I needed a fancy CAD machine to do this!)...

But what does it do?

The Piano Liberation Front combines pianos and art for a noisy and entertaining exhibition space. There was even space for my pals Rick and Megan and the Prelinger Library, as well as a booth for the Freelancers Union... Outdoors near the Kineticsteamworks train and its periodic blasts of the steam whistle (harkening back to times none of us can remember), there was a booth for the Greywater Guerrillas, a variety of local beekeepers and other foodies, and even a table dedicated to Primitive Ways, stone and bone tools and more...

Greywater Guerrillas, demonstrating how to change our water use.

Old tools too!

A robot's paradise!

This absorbing installation was called "No Reward for Good Behavior." (by Benjamin Cowden)

The best thing that happened at the Faire: I struck oil! Climate change? Never heard of it!

We’ve been waiting for years now to see some physical changes to accommodate the huge increase in daily bicycling. We did get an odd set of painted bike lanes and green bike route signs, and a significant number of bike racks for parking, before it all came to a halt due to the injunction three years ago. After perusing the much-anticipated Draft Bicycle Plan and its dense bureaucratese, full of overlapping redundant promises, I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a good while longer to see the kinds of changes that we ought to be getting.

It’s really hard to believe that after all this organizing and earnest campaigning we’ll basically end up with a few thousand “sharrows” and another batch of partial, end-in-the-middle-of-nowhere bike lanes, lanes which in any case are horribly inadequate patches on our misallocated and car-centric public streets. How is it that after almost two decades of rapidly expanding bicycling, the city’s transit priorities still treat bicycles as an annoyance that they only grudgingly are willing to accommodate? When will there be a systematic commitment to altering the streets of this city to create dedicated bikeways, separated from cars and pedestrians, comprehensively linked to provide for easy, graceful, convivial bicycling to all parts of the city?

Over at the blog Copenhaganize their basic point is summarized in two short sentences:

Each and every day 500,000 people ride their bicycle to work or school in Copenhagen. This blog highlights who they are, why they do and how it was made possible.

Forty years ago Copenhagen was just as car-clogged as anywhere else but now 36% of the population choose the bicycle. Copehagenizing is possible anywhere.

My mother is from Copenhagen so I’ve visited the Danish city many times. I think it must have influenced my early thinking, because it was back in 1987 when I drew up a little flyer calling for a “City of Panhandles.” San Francisco cyclists all know the Panhandle’s cyclepath as one of the real pleasures around here (granted, it would be better if pedestrians would have their own path to its side!) and the way it links to the Wiggle route between the Mission and the Haight is just icing on the cake. A city with some vision, rather than a plodding traffic planning bureaucracy that is led by a Mayor who is only interested in what is going to facilitate his election to the next office (and always blatantly biased towards car owners and the wealthy), would have already been working on converting key routes across the city to bicycle boulevards… not just car-centric streets with “bike boulevard” signs, but whole thoroughfares that are closed to cars and only open to bicycles and emergency vehicles. Going a couple of steps further, why not open such thoroughfares to horticultural design and public art? Imagine sculpture gardens, curving murals, daylighted creeks, linear food forests, vegetable gardens, benches and fountains… the list goes on. The city would benefit in so many ways through such a comprehensive conversion of space currently sacrificed to the insatiable uses of private automobiles.

It’s self-evident how much better such street spaces would be for neighbors, pedestrians, children, and cyclists. It would open space for a systematic approach to re-localized food security. For those who clamor for “green jobs” (I’m not one of them), such natural ribbons crisscrossing the city would require first a lot of major construction work, and then a great number of gardeners, farmers, bicycle mechanics, bike parking attendants, landscapers, artists, and more. Juxtapose such quality, engaging, meaningful work to the stupid jobs that pass as “important” in the financial district, or the wasted labor producing so many luxury highrises, office buildings and other pointless projects of “economic development”… Let the tourists join us in riding and walking through the garden paths of San Francisco! Let’s think about the work we do and the design of our city as a canvas on which to create something really astonishingly better than what we’re settling for now. The SF Bike Coalition should be a lot more aggressive and push for much more far-reaching and far-sighted transformations than this tepid and uninspiring Bike Plan, in order to live up to its political and social responsibilities!

Critical Mass, March 2009. Photo by Bryan Goebel.

I got a call a week ago from the SF Bike Coalition's media person. She was looking for someone to talk to Joe Vazquez of CBS 5, a reporter who was going to do a piece on Critical Mass. I declined, having been interviewed far too often over the years, and having learned time and time again that the mass media is not going to do any favors for Critical Mass by covering it. Sure enough, the piece is now online, and you can see for yourself just how absurd the slant is. I'll give Vazquez credit for at least going on the ride, and in fact, in his sidebar piece, describing what it was like, he admits to becoming more sentient and feeling himself, instead of playing the (impossibly) neutral observer:

...along the way, I found myself unusually sentient. As a reporter, I am not supposed to feel anything while covering a story. That's how we are trained:  focus on the story.  Get it right.  Be fair.  Leave your human reactions out of the story. In this case, though, I was feeling it. My legs were sore and tired (because I haven't been on a bike in two years!)  The sunset was glorious.  Music was blaring from boom boxes on bikes... most riders were well-behaved and even polite (I watched one rider actually apologize to a car driver for tying up traffic). Critical mass is a riot, not just because it's a moving mob with a cause.  It's a riot because it's a celebration every bit as exhilarating as it is exasperating.  A true San Francisco tradition.

We can only wonder what behind-the-scenes pressure led to this new coverage. Did an editor get stuck in traffic recently? Did a local politician put them up to it? Did the station's owners get a call that a campaign would be helpful right now, in order to justify a coming attempt to control and abolish Critical Mass again? We'll probably never know. But given the ridiculous angle the main story took, it doesn't look promising. Vazquez's main point? Critical Mass "costs $155,060 in taxpayer dollars annually!"... and how does he  arrive at this bizarre number?

Here's an estimate of what critical mass would have to pay if they followed the rules: an event permit would be $1000. For a permit once a month, that's $12,000 for the year. Required portable bathrooms are another $500 each time, or $6,000 for the year. Add a $1000 cleaning deposit twelve times too, so $12,000 a year. And then there's police protection. For 20 officers, it's more than $112,000 a year, and another $13,000 for two sergeants. That's a grand total of $155,060 -- tax dollars never recovered.

This is a patently absurd argument and really funny! First of all, there's no permit, because there's just an organized coincidence going on. We happen to all show up to ride home together once a month. I haven't heard any plans to charge motorists who clog the streets EVERY DAY for a permit to fill the streets with their cars! I assume the $500 for "required portable bathrooms" would go to the private company that sells that service? So how does that impact the city's budget? And what's the "cleaning deposit" for? the porta-potties? or for Pee-Wee Herman Plaza? or what?... and if it's a deposit, doesn't it get returned? So that's another irrelevant number. (And how exactly are the porta-potties going to be used by cyclists rolling randomly around the city?) And lastly there's this curious idea of "police protection"! We're NOT protected by the police! We're being POLICED by the police! If they want to spend their money that way, which we've often encouraged them to forego and just leave us alone, that's the Police Department's problem, not ours! As far as I can tell, after riding in well over 100 Critical Mass rides since 1992, the police LOVE this duty. They get to bomb around on their motorcycles, occasionally writing a harassment ticket for corking or red light running (which usually gets dismissed in court), and have little to do but look at all the nice bodies and funny people on the ride. It's as safe and pleasant as overtime can be and many of the cops seem to like it! So Joe Vazquez's crazy math actually adds up to... Zero!

But there's a deeper problem here, and this gives us a chance to address it. Our culture is in the grips of a deep madness that keeps trying to monetize all human activity. Too many people have internalized this crazy idea that everything, from public transit to schools to libraries, to social gatherings in the streets, are supposed to "pay for themselves." On the contrary, we need to expand the realm of human life that is outside of that logic altogether. We should be ecstatic that Critical Mass remains one of the few authentically free uses of public space in this city, one that is not reduced to instrumental purposes that suit the needs of business. Instead, it's a rare example of normal human life, where people meet each other in a convivial and open-ended process of sharing space, moving through the streets of the city under a logic quite alien to the endless buying-and-selling that so many people seem to think is the be-all and end-all of our lives.

There is much to say about the etiquette and ethics of the ride, how it might be better received by passersby and participants if there was a greater commitment to the ideas that animated us from the beginning: a celebration of a better way to move through cities, an inviting experience welcoming to all, an assertion of a new kind of public space. As we've often said, "We're not blocking traffic, we ARE traffic!" We do not go out, as Vazquez would have it, during rush hour to block traffic. We proceed after 6:15 on the last Friday of the month, after most rush hour commuters are on the bridges and highways, and do not for the most part have an agenda to make motorists lives worse, but rather, for one brief two-hour period each month, to make our lives as urban cyclists as magical as they could be all the time, if only our roads were radically redesigned to make meaningful space for all uses, and not just the endless asphalt sprawl dominated and overwhelmed ALL DAY EVERY DAY by private automobiles.

Every time there's a new media story on Critical Mass, we have to go over all this again. This idea of "Critical Mess," that something really awful and dangerous is happening (which Vazquez helpfully did not promote this time, noting that claims of violence or mayhem from years past were not part of his experience, where most cyclists were quite polite and exuberant) is seriously out of kilter to the reality of a simple bike-in that happens once a month for about 2+ hours. From the hysteria created, and the breathless invocation of huge lost taxpayer dollars, you'd think something much bigger and more dangerous were underway. Channel 5 and all the other heavy breathers out there: Take a deep breath, relax, and come on the ride next month. It's a great way to see the city in a new light, to experience the intensity of real life in the city, to work things out in the heat of the moment with other cyclists or motorists or pedestrians you may or may not feel comfortable with, and to have your imaginations altered forever.

Cultures meet over real work at Heart of the City Farmers' Market

Ever since the much-promoted alliance between “teamsters and turtles” at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, there’s been a renewed hope that the decades-long opposition between organized labor and environmentalists might be resolvable. The original Teamsters and turtles weren’t really in much of an alliance in 1999, what with AFL-CIO leaders trying their best to keep the labor march away from occupied downtown Seattle on November 30, 1999. But we don’t have to rehash that old story because we have a new, local angle on this here in 2009 San Francisco.

Steve Jones wrote about a split between “progressives and labor” in the SF Bay Guardian recently. It is an interesting framing of the current possibilities for social liberation, improvement, or—gasp—even revolution. While thoughtful and well-researched, Jones fails to escape a recurrent set of assumptions that continue to confuse the possibilities of a more thorough-going reshaping of oppositional politics in this era. The most delusional assumption is that “pwogwessives” of a green hue should find a common platform with old-style unionists, most likely over the empty demand for “green jobs.” Before laying out why ‘jobs’ don’t work, let’s recap the recent tempest in a teapot:

The basic story is that Larry Mazzola, Jr., the son of Mazzola Sr. (together they run the nepotistic Plumbers Union), was denied a seat on the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District Board of Directors that has traditionally gone to a Labor representative. Mazzola Jr. was fully backed in his attempt to get the appointment to the seat by the San Francisco Labor Council and other local Labor leaders, but was thwarted by a 6-5 majority at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The Board’s Rules Committee, chaired by lefty Chris Daly, rejected Mazzola and quietly asked local labor leaders to advance an alternate candidate at least vaguely qualified to address transportation issues, but the Labor Council and Building and Construction Trades Council and other labor luminaries refused, insisting that Mazzola get the nod. The impasse was resolved by the full Board vote which appointed Dave Snyder to the seat instead of Mazzola or any other labor choice. Snyder (a personal friend of mine) is widely credited with resuscitating the SF Bike Coalition in the mid-1990s, and later helped launch Livable City and most recently has been the transportation policy analyst for SPUR. (He took this appointment as his chance to resign from SPUR, which he generally found too conservative, especially when it comes to class issues and development.)

His discomfort, like that of Steve Jones writing in the Guardian, represents a hangover that is long overdue to go away. It’s one of those Emperor-has-no-clothes situations: the unions in San Francisco, and trade unions more generally, are not bastions of progressivism or forward thinking! As Jones notes throughout his article, the local unions are at each other’s throats in jurisdictional squabbles, with Andy Stern’s SEIU jettisoning local union democracy and expelling Sal Rosselli, long-time stalwart of the United Healthcare Workers, while raiding the UNITE HERE amalgamation of hotel, restaurant, and textile workers (whose head, Mike Casey, leads the SF Labor Council)… It’s all very Byzantine, and if you’re in the (backwards-heading) “movement” it becomes a matter of great urgency which faction’s flag you fly, or which leader claims your loyalty.

Restored Crissy Field wetlands foregrounding the Golden Gate.

But at the end of the day (no, wait, it’s right at the beginning of the day!) the unions are peddling a lost cause, whose purpose even in the best of times was primarily to broker the price of labor power to capitalist employers. Over the past few decades they’ve become more transparently “service-providing businesses,” hawking credit cards to their members along with insurance deals and various other deals. Leftists and progressives of various stripes find it very difficult to come to grips with just how reactionary unions often are. The problem is that we’ve long lost a critical ability to distinguish between unions (business and legal entities hemmed in by extremely restrictive labor laws, in addition to the union management being primarily self-interested in their own survival as highly paid salaried professionals) and workers. All of us concerned with a better world know in our hearts that workers organizing themselves are a crucial part of a broad strategy for social liberation. The problem is that the unions as we know them are almost always at odds with worker self-organization. (Even in the glorified 1934 Big Strike in SF, union leaders played a conservative role, doing their best to undercut the strike when it became general, and urging their members back to work on capitalist terms.)

One of the most compelling examples in San Francisco’s past that demonstrates how self-interested unions oppose the city’s best interest is back in the fateful fight over the freeways in San Francisco (had they been built, some of our favorite neighborhoods like the Valencia corridor, the Haight-Ashbury, the Inner Sunset, and more would have been destroyed by elevated cement freeways). In the crucial vote in 1964, the Board of Supervisors was split 5-5 between the labor-leaning progressive faction (pro-freeway) and the more neighborhood-oriented and small business-leaning faction (anti-freeway), while the mayor at the time was Jack Shelley, a former head of the SF Labor Council (he was of course pro-freeways). Organized labor strongly backed the freeway-building plans. The deciding ballot was cast by the first-ever black Supervisor, Terry Francois, who surprised everyone with an hours-long speech before casting his ‘no’ vote on the Panhandle-Golden Gate Park Freeway.

The past decades are littered with back-biting, betrayals, and narrow self-interested behavior by most U.S. unions (e.g. back in 1980-81 OPEIU #29 settled a strike with Blue Cross in Oakland while their sister local #3 in San Francisco was still on strike against Blue Shield, leading to their defeat; in the mid-1980s meatpackers were de-unionized across the Midwest with the active complicity of UFCW—See Barbara Kopple’s remarkable documentary “American Dream”; local union offices in the Bay Area have often mistreated their own unionized workers; the more you look the more you find.). But even if you put all that daily corruption and unethical behavior aside, the basic issue that organized workers ought to be centrally concerned with—what work is done, why and how—has been left off the agenda for over a century. New progressive forces, whether environmentalist, housing- or transit- or food-oriented, DO start—haltingly—to address fundamental technological and economic issues. What work is done, how and why do we do it, and what are the ecological and social consequences of various choices? These are issues that trade unions might begin to address to save their skins in this era of radical change, but up to the present, they are mired in an obsolete pro-growth agenda that sees jobs and income as the only goals, rather than a broader view of a good life for everyone on the planet, including the planet itself!

The radical restructuring of capitalism since the early 1970s has destroyed most of the politically once-powerful working class. In our daily lives we are all workers who think of ourselves as “middle class,” whether we’re making $18,000/year or $88,000 a year (or more!). Instead of seeing ourselves as part of a broad social class that reproduces daily life with our shared labor, we tend to see ourselves as individuals on career paths, negotiating individually our upward (or downward) mobility through complicated networks of short-term contracts, precarious jobs subject to sudden elimination, temporary holding patterns while we wait to find work doing what we “really do,” etc. Our political agency, the place where we feel we can be effective and take action, is hardly ever the workplace any more. Nowadays, it’s all about buying the right products, disposing of our garbage correctly, shopping “responsibly,” and supporting groups that are helping oppressed groups in other places.

I’m sorry to say, but we’ll never shop our way to a free society. Of course “better is better than worse,” so go ahead and make your best decisions as shoppers and consumers. But until we begin to redesign work at its most radical root, and stop making such a mess with the work our culture does all day long, we’ll never make meaningful changes to the dynamics that are destroying us. Individual trade union locals might join this broader push, but so far it’s unheard of. Most unions are top-down entities that at best pay lip service to union democracy (even the much-vaunted union democracy of the ILWU is a pale shadow of what it once was).

Most unions think “jobs” are something to demand! I say, “Start Talks Now on Work Reduction!” We are working too long, too hard, at activities that are a complete waste of time if they’re not actually destroying us and the planet (why not eliminate banking, real estate, advertising, military production, shoddy commodity production, bad medicine, etc.?). We have to stop! We should be organizing ourselves in a political fight for a world where we work a lot less, everyone has everything they need (scarcity is largely a product of markets and money), and life is much more enjoyable than this sped-up, frantic, fear-mongering, and increasingly barbaric world. Expecting unions to support an urban agenda that actually changes how we live is to ignore that they are firmly committed to an obsolete and retrogressive agenda of capitalist growth with “jobs” controlled by bottom lines and corporate managers. We can invite them to join our more thoughtful and far-reaching agenda, or we can ignore them. But we cannot let them continue to retard the urgent tasks of social transformation that are before us. It’s time for the unions to join us or get out of the way!

Crowds stretch down Glasgow, Scotland's Buchanan Street pedestrian-only zone.

In Glasgow, Scotland a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with a lovely feature of many European cities: broad central city streets converted to pedestrian only. In Glasgow it's on Sauchiehall Street and makes a grand turn onto Buchanan, covering over 20 city blocks. Mostly lined with stores and offices, the landscape created can be "read" as an extended shopping mall, but outdoors, with storefronts opening onto a real street, now converted into a pedestrian and bicycling oasis. The zone is crowded with walkers and shoppers at any given time. (Similar zones that I've visited are the Strøget in Copenhagen, Denmark and Istiklal Caddesi in Beyoglu in Istanbul, Turkey.)

Istiklal Caddesi in Istanbul, Turkey.

It's an immediate challenge as a resident of the U.S. to enter one of these spaces, where thousands of people are comfortably wandering around, talking, sitting at outdoor cafes or bars, and generally making full use of a public space. Our culture has done its best to diminish and/or eliminate such public spaces. In San Francisco, Market Street has been suggested as our grand public boulevard several times in the past two generations, but somehow the public fails to make use of the space. One could argue that it's because we've never given up on having cars running down the middle of the street, or even that there's just too much public transit occupying too much space. In Istanbul there's a charming historic tram running down the middle of the otherwise pedestrian-only Istiklal. Various streets in Zurich, Switzerland also have trams running through pedestrian-only areas, as do many other cities, so the presence of transit alone is not a sufficient explanation of why we have such trouble.

Tram creeps through holiday crowds on Istanbul's Istiklal.

In Chicago some years ago they closed State Street to cars and installed a pedestrian-only zone, but after less than a year, concluded that the absence of automobile traffic had killed the district as a place to go! Along Market Street there used to be a large number of black granite square blocks serving as benches, but they were all taken out in a punitive effort to deprive homeless folks of a place to rest (granted, some of these benches were more or less colonized by different individuals for hours on end). The result is a less convivial and pleasant cityscape.

It seems that Americans are unaccustomed to making good use of public space. Or perhaps there's a problem with the design of public spaces here, in contrast to places like Glasgow or Copenhagen or Istanbul, so they're just not inviting or comfortable. We can say for sure that the disregard and outright contempt shown to homeless people leads to higher levels of stress and confrontation in the public spaces we DO occupy. No wonder. Imagine how difficult it would be to be basically destitute, all your possessions on your back or in a shopping cart, and have to coexist among relatively affluent folks, all properly housed, who are hanging out enjoying themselves. A proper program to animate public space can only be taken seriously if there is an extensive program of providing decent housing to everyone. These are simply inseparable.

Families share public bench on Glasgow's Buchanan Street.

On Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow.

I also think it's a chicken-and-egg drama. You can't have a population that is accustomed to enjoying time in public thoroughfares if there's no place to congregate away from traffic and the incessant pressure to make a purchase to justify your presence. But the various efforts to create such spaces seem always to fail to attract sufficient numbers of people, leaving them hollow simulations of genuine public spaces. There has to be a population that demands public space and then makes use of it once it exists. And public spaces have to beckon into existence the people who will use them. San Francisco's waterfront is starting to feel like it's hosting such a dynamic (though it's largely tourists who are enjoying it to the fullest).

There are some good signs of this newly demanding public these days. In Dolores Park over the past few years the broad stretch of rich grass sloping up from Dolores Street, south of the tennis courts, north of 19th Street, east of the recreational field, has suddenly and unexpectedly become "Hipster Hill," full of young fixed-gear riders, loiterers, smokers and drinkers, dancers, and all manner of young folks, all insistently staking out a spot on this comfy slope. Funny, because only 3-4 years ago, and for as long as I can remember before that, hardly anyone sat in this area. Now it's jammed full whenever the weather allows for it.

Is an urge for conviviality and public life growing in San Francisco? Certainly. Can we learn from the ubiquitous public spaces of Europe? I hope so!

Pigeons get their's too on Sauchiehall Street.