I had first visited the building and met Mr. Young five days after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. The nation, having reached its maximum of economic equality, had voted in someone who was going to reverse direction, stop black progress, reconcentrate wealth in the hands of the few, dismantle the programs that had helped so many rise, create mass homelessness. Crack was soon to come to the city and other cities, and to our neighborhood and our block. My own experiences around that time with the sense of potency and grand destiny cocaine produced made me wonder whether it was seductive specifically as a counter to the despair and desolation this reversal brought, the drug you took when you hit the wall built to keep you out. There were other walls, prison walls behind which some of the men in the neighborhood would go, and graves for yet others. The Western Addition was black, but realtors and others carved out spaces in part by renaming them, chipping away at the place’s identity, as the black community was pushed out of an increasingly expensive, elite city. (Later on I’d come to understand gentrification and the role that I likely played as a pale face making the neighborhood more palatable to other pale faces with more resources, but I had no sense at the start that things would change and how that worked.)
The beautiful wooden houses had been built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with all the era’s lavish ornamentation: bay windows, pillars, lathed railings, ornamental moldings, often with botanical motifs, fish-scale shingles, porches framed in arches, turrets, even the occasional onion dome. They were full of biomorphic curves and eccentric intricacies that made them seem organic, as though they had grown rather than been built. A Muir Woods park ranger once remarked to me that she saw in these structures the great redwood forests that had been cut down to build them, and so those tall groves up and down the coast were another ghostly presence.
The materials and craftsmanship of the original buildings were magnificent, but by the postwar era white flight was taking one population to the suburbs and letting other populations—nonwhite, immigrant, poor—into these places that were treated like slums by their absentee owners. The buildings had their ornamentation scraped off and stucco or plastic siding pasted over their wood, or they were divided up into smaller apartments, often built with shoddy materials and techniques, and many of them were allowed to grow shabby and rickety.
Blight was the code word used in the 1950s and 1960s to justify knocking down many of them to the east of our little neighborhood, leaving behind open wounds in the city’s skin of structures. In some of them, grim housing projects were built, some so alienating and oppressive that they were torn down a few decades after they were erected. Other lots in the heart of the Fillmore, which had once been the vibrant cultural zone Mr. Teal liked to reminisce about, were still sitting vacant through most of the 1980s, behind cyclone fencing. A place had been killed, and it never quite came back to life.
Change is the measure of time, my photographer friend Mark Klett likes to say, and little things shifted. When I had arrived, there was a Kodak photo booth on the corner a block west, back when film was how you got photographs, and a glass-walled phone booth on the corner across from my place, next to the liquor store. It became a pay phone bolted to the wooden wall, under a hood like a stove hood, and then disappeared altogether as mobile phones proliferated.
The texture of that bygone life seems hard to convey now: the solitude of a wanderer in the city who could wait for a bus or a taxi to come by or find a phone booth to call a taxi or a friend from a memorized number or by asking the operator or by looking it up in the ruffled tissue-thin pages of the phone book if there was one there, dangling in its black case from the metal cord; who’d look for what she wanted in many stores before the internet meant that you could pinpoint things without getting out of bed, back when there were fewer chain stores and more variety. We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairie before the waterfall of acceleration we would all tumble over. We were prepared for encounters with strangers in ways that the digital age would buffer a lot of us from later. It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.
In that less expensive era, eccentricity had many footholds. A lot of small businesses doubled as museums devoted to various things—there was a dry cleaner near the Castro with a display of antique irons artfully arranged, and various stores with ancient photographs of the neighborhood as it had been long ago, and a corner store in the Mission with a rubber-band ball several feet in diameter, sitting on the linoleum near the chips. The Postcard Palace in North Beach sold nothing but old postcards, most already stamped and inscribed in the confident penmanship of their era with cryptic or jaunty messages from long-dead people to other long-dead people. I still have dozens I bought, a few at a time, mostly black and white, of various mountain roads and chapels and grottoes, on evenings when I wandered out of a punk show to browse there.
The city felt like something old and crumpled with dust and treasures caught in its crevices, and then it was smoothed out and swept clean and some of its people were pushed out as though they had themselves been dirt. A junk shop became a high-end pizzeria, a storefront church became a hair salon, a radical bookstore became an eyeglass boutique, and a lot of things became sushi bars. The place became blander, with more chain stores and more cars, and without flyers layered atop each other on telephone poles, without family pharmacies and odd businesses like old temples where the priest still performed the rites whether or not the congregation had moved on.
There was an actual lunch counter at the Scully Owl Drug Store a couple of blocks to the west of my apartment, like the lunch counters of the South that people sat in at to protest segregation, and then the lunch counter vanished, and then the drugstore was gone, and then, at the millennium, the whole place with the union grocery store, liquor store, butcher, and bakery was bulldozed to build a big chain supermarket with condominiums on top. Many cities that had been centers of blue-collar labor and the manufacture of tangible goods saw these industries die in the postwar era, but their death was not much noticed when new information and finance and tourism metropolises were exploding into being in their ruins, as was the case, spectacularly, in San Francisco by the 1980s. In that era, Silicon Valley was actually manufacturing silicon chips in clean rooms staffed by immigrant workers and dumping the toxins, and then those jobs went overseas and the tech industry began to supernova, and a region that had been an idyllic edge and sometimes an exception became a powerful global center.
Change is the measure of time, and I discovered that in order to see change you had to be slower than it, and that by living in one place for a quarter century, it became visible to me. Gradually. Not at first. People came and went in the building I stayed in, and many of the transient inhabitants imagined that they were passing through a stable neighborhood, but they were part of what was changing it, a river of people scouring out the place, making it less and less black, more and more middle class. The newcomers lived in the space their money secured, not the space that belonged to everyone, and a vitality faded away as the neighborhood became less a neighborhood.