Once again, The Filthy Midwest is calling on us to experience in person the reason that we left in the first place.
We will be back in The Place To Be on January 4th. In the meantime, pls take this time to visit some of our friends in those links over there on the right.
Happy New Year and we’ll see you in 2k8!!
Yesterday, our hard working shutter fingers and due diligence in the comment sections of others paid off.
Local yokels Laughing Squid and CurbedSF picked up some of our sub-prime fotos and gave us front and center. We love it when a plan comes together!!
Pls bookmark these fine contributors to the blog-o-sphere and check em out on the daily.
Do you like these guys? So do we. Seen them everywhere of late? So have we. See even more of them here and here and here.
We’d surely rather see them on the walls than angry tigers.
Ahhhhh, 2007 — your days are numbered.
Looking back….The weather: sensational, as always. The Newcomer poked his head into the clouds, towering above our Eastern skyline. The Giants were seldom worse, and the 49ers may be disappearing. But a New Year and a new bad-ministration are just around the corner, and all could yet be well with the world.
That said, Happy Holidays to you and yours….live and direct from beautiful Baghdad-by-The-Bay.
Angels of Death greet thee heading North on Kearny near California.
Decking the halls, garage and front lawn can go down in a couple of different ways.
You can choose the tasteful, well thought out, less-is-more approach. Or you can piss off the neighbors, run up a hefty PG&E bill, and get real obnoxious with it.
San Francisco is not all cable cars and rolling hills and thick, wet fog.
The Chamber of Commerce, which seems to have never heard about six people living in one tiny room in The Mission sector and which would rather not talk about the record number of unsolved murders in The Bayview and HP sectors this year, would also be just as happy if you didnt hear about Skid Road, where the down-and-outers mingle with the has-beens and the never-wassers in an atmosphere of failure and cheap wine and nickel bags of funk.
Every big city has its Skid Road — the home of the homeless — where pockets and hearts are always empty and corner store “tabs” are always full. In some cities the district is tucked away, out of sight, where the “respectable” citizen doesnt have to look at it every day and perhaps feel the slight pain of a conscience.
But our Skid Road cant be ignored so easily. It dirties the fringes of The City’s Civic Center. It spreads like a cancer along Sleazy Sixth Street, leaving its smudges on Mid-Market. It is a daily irony of failure rubbing elbows with success, a hard fact of life that This City has to live with every day and night.
You can smell the unmistakable aura of Skid Road — the Takka Vodka, the menthol cigarettes, the disinfectant, the poverty — as you step into Tu Lan for some spring rolls and chicken fried rice.
This is Skid Road, where the men who might as well be dead go on living, perhaps gathering the needed ounce of strength from their realization that there are so many others as miserable as they. In their torn, filthy clothing and their rotting shoes, they stand in knots on the corners talking of better days, of their last meal, of their next drink.
Meanwhile, the big cars purr by, their occupants purposefully avoiding even a glance at the miserable ones who stand like living examples of how The System failed. The tourists pass thru in double decked sightseeing buses feeling the smug, delicious thrill of “slumming it” comfortably, protected from the squalor of a few feet away. The cops patrol the streets in pairs, for here on Skid Road they are surrounded by criminals — it being a crime to be a failure in The Land of Opportunity.
This, then, is Skid Road, where the misfits fit together in a half-world of the half-dead, a stones throw from all the smells success and respectability. Skid Road, where the booze is cheap and plentiful, where a man can raise a thirst but not always the money to quench it, and where human dignity is peddled on any corner for a a buck or two.
Almost everything is thin down here in the hard heart of The City, and only the thick-skinned survive.
Inspired by the Late, Great Herb Caen
Part 2 of a 2 part look at Battery Mendell in the Marin Headlands….
All fotos by Plug2
Leftovers….
Flickr set here.
Part 1 of a 2 part look at Battery Mendell in the Marin Headlands….
Battery Mendell was named after a 19th century Army Engineer visionary — Colonel George Mendell — in 1902.
After his graduation from The West Point Academy in 1852, Mendell began a long career in planning and designing many of the military structures found along the NorCal coastline. Battery Mendell was completed in 1905, shortly after his retirement. It was armed with two “disappearing” guns, which would fold back out of site after they were fired.
The fort remained in active service until 1943. Today it serves as a graffiti gallery and home to dozens of angry, feral cats.
Southeastern view of The Great Gate:
Flickr set here.
This past fall, neighbors of Mount Davidson noticed that something was missing atop the tallest hill in The City. The 160-lb bronze plaque that was installed at the base of the big, white cross was gone — victim to either theft or a hate crime.
The 103-foot cross was erected in 1934. In 1997, the citizens of San Francisco voted to approve the sale of the cross and the land beneath it to an Armenian-American organization for the low, low price of 67k.
The giant plaque commemorating the Armenian Genocide was bolted to a concrete base. The 3′x5′ memorial was installed after a decade-long legal battle over the constitutionality of the presence of a cross in a public park.
On Thursday we received some bad news and some good news….
The bad news was brought to our attention by the good folks at FECAL FACE dot com, letting us know that some jerk stole the Barry McGee installation from an N-Judah MUNI stop.
Wack. Wack. Wack.
The good news is that The Fecal linked our foto, driving mucho traffic for the day @ a whopping 603 hits!!
Niooooooce. Very nice.
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In completely unrelated news, we got a chance to see our site on an iPhone. If you a web-enabled mobile interetting device, pls email us a foto.
Tommy Guerrero was born in The Sunset sector in 1966. By the mid-80s he was a member of the infamous Bones Brigade, and the first street skater to go pro. Today he is a 40-something exec at Deluxe and owner of Real Skateboards. Oh, and did I mention that dude has his own band, too?
While all of this may seem rather high-profile, Tommy remains pretty low-key about it all. “My first dream was to become a professional skateboarder, and it happened”, he says. “My second dream was to become a musician, and its happening. Not that Im going to get huge or anything. Ive already achieved more musically than I ever thought I would”.
Yeah, whatevs….1/3 of my iPod is full of his music and for good reason.
Heres an Oldie-but-Goodie (Future Primative circa ‘85):
Flickr set here.
It seems like I cant walk further than the corner store anymore without seeing yet another GIRAFFE and Mummy lurking in tandem on the rotten walls of the abandoned buildings in my neighborhood. I love it.
Obviously capitalizing on the high number of soon-to-be gentrified converted dwellings around The City, these anonymous lurkers get my vote for “Most Up in ‘07″.
Heres looking towards an ‘08 filled with pigment and aerosol fumes.
At intersection of Haight & Ashbury sits Forever After Used Books. Behind the counter sit two of the meanest, angriest Hippys I have ever met. Behind that counter also sits a fine example of what went wrong after The Summer of Love.
Dont ask them any questions about books. Dont take any pictures of books. Dont ask if they have any Herb Caen books. Dont touch any books. Dont look thru any books. Dont use Discover to pay any for books. Dont ask if they have a bathroom somewhere in the back of all those books. Dont bring your backpack to carry home any books.
And most importantly: Dont ever buy any books here. I wont. I hate reading, anyways.
Foto by Plug2
“San Francisco to me is like a house of cards: postcards in glowing colors stacked against the hills that march from The Bay on one side to The Pacific Ocean on the other.
The real magic of The City lies in the way these snapshots remain in the mind, no one impressed more sharply on the consciousness than the next. And when I am far away, The Citys myriad details come floating back to me as tho they were unwinding endlessly on the movie screen of my memory.
Each picture is sharp and complete, glamorized a little by a wisp of fog in one corner and a pennant streaming in the wind atop a skyscraper. Its a sentimental, perhaps corny way to look at a city, but the San Franciscan is hopelessly sentimental and I am hopelessly San Franciscan.”
– from The Late, Great Herb Caen
In 1870, 23-year old Leander Sherman put together a few thousand dollars and started what would become the worlds oldest living piano store. Over the years the company has sold not just pianos but also vinyl records, record players, and even TVs.
Sherman, Clay & Co. first opened its doors on Kearny near Sutter, and a few years later became The Citys exclusive dealer of the top-notch Steinway line. In 1925 the company moved to its current location, a five-story building on Mission near NewMo. By the late-1920s, the company had stores all over NorCal including Oakland, Sacto, San Jose, Fresno, Stockton, Santa Rosa, and even Watsonville.
Oddly located, a statue of Mohandas Gandhi stands right behind The Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street. His likeness was a gift to The City from the Gandhi Memorial International Foundation in 1988.
As the story has it, this 210-foot Art Deco tower was built by Lily Coit in 1933 — a gift to The City.
A more interesting story goes that Miss Coit was involved in a sordid love affair with a firefighter who died in The Great Quake & Fire of 1906. The monument stands as a tribute to their adultery and lust in the form of one very tall firehose nozzle.
That said, there is an even more interesting — albeit less seedy — story painted on the interior walls of this most infamous of local landmarks….
It is a story told via 31 different murals by 25 artists of the 1930s. The panels were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration, with a strong fresco Diego Rivera influence.
As signs-o-the-times, most of the murals contained a very leftist political and social theme relating to The Great Depression and other current socialist political movements.
The Bay Bridge pulled off a disappearing act yesterday while the thick, stubborn fog couldnt seem to make up its mind.
Fortunately, there were no fender-benders.
The drug pandemic makes its way into the SOMA sector again, this time claiming the formerly hi-profile lives of Sonic the Hedgehog and Teddy Ruxpin.
To note: Everyones least favorite purple Tyrannosaurus met his fate around this same time last year.
How tragic.
Warehouse No. 6 aka “The Cathedral” is located at The Eastern most end of Potrero Point @ Pier 70.
Formerly known as “The Light Warehouse”, this 512-foot long building was once the storage location for a large number of parts used in the outfitting of a ships hull before it was birthed into the waters of The Bay.
The shipyard was one of the nations largest thru WWI & WWII, producing and servicing 100s of Naval vessels docked on The West Coast. The yard has been owned by several corporations over the past century including Union Iron Works, Bethlehem Shipbuilding Co., and most recently BAE Systems.
Warehouse No. 6 is currently “maintained” by The Port of San Francisco and used as a location for filming, SK8 practice, graff Hall-of-Fame, and tipping over old pianos.
Flickr set here.
The Little Container Ship That Couldn’t — better known as The Cosco Busan — is now parked at Pier 70’s wetdock.
The goliath watercraft responsible for leaking 60,000 gallons of fuel into The Bay last month is being held on bond under a surety hold until repairs (physical and legal) are complete.
Views with “The Oceanic Independance”, docked here since 2001.
Views from Warehouse No. 6 aka “The Cathedral”.
Flickr set here.
Off Potrero near 17th is an end-to-end mural painted by Andrew Schoultz and Andres Guerrero, circa 2003.
