When the new economy arrived in San Francisco, it began to lay waste the city’s existing culture—culture both in the sense of cultural diversity, as in ethnic cultures, and of creative activity, artistic and political. Both are under siege, and while the racial aspects of gentrification and urban renewal have often been addressed, this book focuses particularly on creative activity (and, of course, the two are extensively overlapping sets—hip-hop and mural movements being two hallowed examples). Cities are both the administrative hub from which order, control and hierarchy emanate and, traditionally, the place where that order is subverted. This subversion comes from the free space of the city in which people and ideas circulate, and bohemia is most significant as the freest part of the free city, a place where the poor, the radical, the marginal and the creative overlap. Bohemia is not so much a population as a condition, a condition of urbanism where the young go to invent themselves and from which cultural innovation and insurrection arise. As that cultural space contracts, the poor and individual artists will go elsewhere, but bohemia may well go away altogether, here and in cities across the country.
Eviction Defense Network poster, Mission District, 1999, with graphic by Eric Drooker.
Artmaking has been, at least since bohemia and modernism appeared in nineteenth-century Paris, largely an urban enterprise: the closer to museums, publishers, audiences, patrons, politicians, other enemies and each other, the better for artists and for art. For if cities have been essential to artists, artists have been essential to cities. This complex gave rise to the definitive modernisms of the Left Bank, Montmartre and Greenwich Village. Being an artist was one way of being a participant in the debate about meaning and value, and the closer to the center of things one is the more one can participate. This is part of what makes an urbanity worth celebrating, this braiding together of disparate lives, but the new gentrification threatens to yank out some of the strands altogether, diminishing urbanism itself. Perhaps the new urbanism will result in old cities that function like suburbs as those who were suburbia’s blandly privileged take them over. In the postwar years, the white middle class fled cities, which created the crises of abandonment, scarce city revenue, and depression that defined urban trouble through the 1970s, but the poor and the bohemian who stuck to cities often made something lively there anyway; now those who once fled have come back and created an unanticipated crisis of wealth for those raised on the urban crisis of poverty. Wealth has proven able to ravage cities as well as or better than poverty.
In discussions about gentrification here, artists are a controversial subject—sometimes because the focus on the displacement of artists eclipses the displacement of the less privileged in general, sometimes because artists have played roles in promoting gentrification as well as resisting it, sometimes because artists and their ilk are conceived of as middle-class people slumming and playing poor. After all, modern bohemians are often people who were born among the middle class but who chose to live among the poor, while some artists socialize with and service the rich. For the time being, remember that painter means both those who have covered the Mission District with murals celebrating radical history and those who sell in downtown galleries (and that some of those in the downtown galleries, like Enrique Chagoya, are making paintings too incendiary to be publicly sponsored murals). And for this book, bohemian refers to all the participants in the undivided spectrum of radical politics and artistic culture here, a spectrum that includes Marxists who look down on culture and artists who don’t notice politics until it evicts them, as well as a lively community of innovative activists and political cultures, or rather dozens of such communities. Whether it was Allen Ginsberg decrying “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!” in the first reading of Howl in 1955 or the Sierra Club in the early 1960s lobbying for wilderness preservation with lavish photographic books, art and politics have been all tangled up together here for a long time.
Artists, however, are just bit-players in a major transformation of cities. Those who really orchestrate urban development have another agenda altogether. Neil Smith and Peter Williams summed it up in 1986: “The direction of change is toward a new central city dominated by middle-class residential areas, a concentration of professional, administrative, and managerial employment, the upmarket recreation and entertainment facilities that cater to this population (as well as to tourists)…. The moment of the present restructuring is toward a more peripheralized working class, in geographical terms.”8 This is the context behind multimedia replacing meatpacking in the South of Market, Fly arriving as the Coltrane church departs in my own Western Addition neighborhood, and valet parking suddenly appearing where lowriders once cruised Mission Street. As for the effects of this gentrification, what is happening in San Francisco is happening everywhere, which is precisely the problem (and because the term gentrification traditionally describes the transformation of a neighborhood rather than a whole city or region, it may be an inadequate term altogether for this awful upgrading). What Bill Saunders, editor of Harvard Design Magazine, writes of the changes in Harvard Square could describe this city and many others: “The new Square reflects the worldwide increase in the imperialism of a small, delocalized number of rich and powerful organizations…. The Square is now: more impersonal (e.g., the sales and service people are rarely familiar or interested in the buyer), more expensive (after inflation), more exclusionary (less welcoming and less affordable to eccentrics, the middle and working classes, and the marginally employed), more predictable, more uniform, and more like other places (a Gap is a Gap is a Gap)…. Along with the Square’s greater polish, luxury and upscale taste come new subtle pressures to be rich and beautiful, constrained and role-bound. The new red brick architecture—often replacing low, tippy, wood-frame buildings—is decorous and solid but boring. One longs for more bad taste, for more surprise, dirt, and looseness, more anarchic, unself-conscious play…. I think of appealing college towns as at least somewhat Bohemian. That word now applies to nothing in the square.”9
One Friday night a few weeks after Fly opened, I go there with a friend and look at the crowd mingling with the utter absorbedness of the very young. Clean-cut but aspiring to be cool, the women in very tight and the men in very loose clothes drink big glasses of beer and saki cocktails. The front half of the bar has expensive chairs and frosted red glass light sconces, but in the back, along with a purple pool table and thrift-store couches and chairs, is a mural on shiny purple paint featuring elongated females of various skin colors in skimpy seventies clothes waving their tubular limbs. It’s clearly meant to