Streetsblog San Francisco

A rare sight in the Tenderloin: children playing ball in the streets. Photos by Bryan Goebel.

Mary San George was sitting outside her neighborhood flower store yesterday, facing the historic residential high-rise building on O’Farrell Street where she has lived for 27 years, and was marveling at something she very rarely gets to experience in her Tenderloin neighborhood: a street full of people instead of cars.

“People use this street like a raceway,” said the 75-year-old San George, who was anxious to point out the everyday dangers of a neighborhood where streets prioritize auto throughput. “We have signs in different areas that say this is a drug-free zone, but I think we should have a no-speed zone, and make it very expensive for drivers.”

For its 25th event, Sunday Streets, now a San Francisco institution, brought car-free zones filled with healthy activities to the Tenderloin, one of the densest neighborhoods on the West Coast, where most residents don’t own automobiles. Last year’s Tenderloin event was rained out, but this year, under beautiful blue skies, between 5,000 and 7,000 people turned out to play in the streets.

While the event didn’t attract the huge crowds that the Mission’s Sunday Streets draws — there was a little music festival competing — it was nevertheless an exciting day, and an important moment for the Tenderloin and the livable streets movement.

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Mona Caron contemplates her next stroke on her new mural at Jones and Golden Gate in San Francisco.

Mona Caron is a visual troubadour of street life in San Francisco. Her murals have become increasingly famous in their gorgeous detail, portraying San Francisco’s romantic past juxtaposed to inspired visions of its future. Equally powerful is the way each mural itself comes to anchor new public space, an open-air gallery where people meet and discuss, sharing ideas often growing from the rich street life she portrays in her murals.

I spoke with Mona on the top of her scaffolding cladding the current project at Jones and Golden Gate in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Like her previous murals, this one too is “about the life in the streets, and the architecture around the streets and how that’s changed with the population.” Her earliest work is the 300-foot long Duboce Bikeway mural, which depicts the path a bicyclist must follow from the foot of Market, through the “wiggle” (the much-loved path that cyclists follow from mid-Market to the Haight) and out to the beach. In its phantasmagorical vision of the city, echoes of past and an imaginary future overlap in the scuttling of bugs, on the back of a giant snake, and in a long-forgotten creek that underlies the gradually rising bike route.

The mural is being painted on the white building in the second square from left, as seen from the Bell Tower atop St. Boniface Church on Golden Gate. (Photo LisaRuth Elliott)

A new mural is taking shape in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, at the corner of Jones and Golden Gate, diagonally across from St. Anthony’s Dining Room where hundreds line up every day for a hot meal. Muralist Mona Caron and Project Manager LisaRuth Elliott can be found on scaffolds these days, grabbing the good weather when they can to paint on a nondescript building housing a local “sewing company.” In this first of two parts, I talked with LisaRuth Elliott about her experience with the street scene in the Tenderloin. In part two, I’ll explore Mona Caron’s murals from her well-known Bike Mural on Duboce and the Market Street Railway mural on Church, to her recent Noe Valley diptych, all of which make streets and transit central themes.

From inside the scaffolding, St. Anthony's is diagonally across to the right, Jones Street flows below.