Watching City Hall #295, (6-15-04)“They tore down Paradise and put up a parking lot.”
(Joanie Mitchell?)
Great wealth is a dangerous thing. Combine it with poor taste and you have Warren Hellman. … And Gordon Getty. … And Donald Fisher … And Walter Shorenstein … It’s a fucking tragedy. Their personal tastes in art and music and architecture end up incorporated into everything in San Francisco from park toilets to skyscrapers to public sculptures to art exhibitions. … And, their taste is shit. From a giant museum that looks like an aircraft carrier to a 6 story, all glass Transbay hub terminal that any car bomb will instantly disintegrate (recall, it was the 30’s era Pentagon that best took a direct hit from a jet airliner full of fuel).
You get the idea?
I’ve researched the subject closely while watching construction of the Swells’ spanking new ‘S.S. De Young’ museum arise from the ground zero where they pulverized the classic old Spanish Mission style building and … I got too angry and went to my colleague, Eileen Left who has close, (ahem) relations with the rich. I wanted to know what made them tick.
Eileen: “It’s basic Einstein, dummy.” (She’s reading Eric Allen’s JOEFIRE.com and stretched naked in the morning sun on a ratty aluminum frame lawn chair with frayed plastic straps. The unusual 9am morning Haight sun beat down upon the roof deck upon which we are sitting.)
h.: (almost oblivious to her gorgeous torso as she turned in the sun – strapless gowns are always sexier than nude beaches) … “Jens left some great smoke and some Miller Genuine Draft last night. You want anything?”
Eileen: (turns to let the rays hit her backside as Rafiki, the house cat jumps up on her chair & rubs against the sculpted side of her sand-dune sleek body) … “Gimme a beer and load that pipe. Is that Orange Crush?”
h.: (loads pipe & passes it to her … she lights and puffs and takes the proffered beer) “Yeah. It’s good energy stuff. I’ve got enough to last me all day with the beer and I want to do 2 columns.”
Eileen: (sips the beer and leans back, still reading Allen’s new column) … “You’re too God damned lazy to write 2 columns. … Why does Joefire hate me?”
h.: (continuing to alternate between typing, drinking, reading the morning Chronicle and Examiner while taking notes) “There is no ‘Joefire’. I’ve told you that before. … It’s a domain name. It’s like saying ‘Why does the President of General Motors hate me?’”
Eileen: (looks up from the column) “The President of General Motors hates me too?”
h.: (chuckling) “It’s Eric Allen, you’re talking about. Other than me, he’s the most entertaining political columnist in town. Shit, you’re the one who always complains when he doesn’t write! You met him at Gonzo’s campaign headquarters and he doesn’t hate you. He just thinks you don’t fit into a political column or that you’re particularly believable.”
Eileen: (smirks) “So, if I’m not real then I can’t explain how rich people think to you?”
h.: “I’m listening, baby. Tell me everything you want.”
Eileen: (finishes a puff & adjusts the lawn chair to a sitting position) “Let me start with the firehouse down on Oak street. … It’s an antique gem. A genuine Victorian Fire house with an original exterior surface. The layered decorative Mansard shingling on the hose tower is unmatched in the country for such structures. I mean, think about that. When the steam engine rolled out of this house in 1906 to fight the fires started by the quake, it was pulled by straining horses who knew , … these horses and the men behind them, KNEW that this was the most important moment of their lives. A lot of people would like to own that building. Perfect tongue & groove walls and ceiling. Tongue & groove ‘Ceiling’ for God’s sake! Do you know how rare that is? It has a spiral wrought iron staircase & the original brass pole. Probably around 10,000 square feet of historical landmark structure. … They’re going to sell it to some rich developer for about a half million bucks! My friend, Frank just sold an antique condo in the Mission that had about a tenth the square footage for more money than that. That firehouse is easily worth $5 million.”
h.: “Go on.”
Eileen: “A block away, in the Panhandle is a perfectly functional toilet that has been closed for 5 years because it made it easier for the cops & Park & Rec. Among a host of excuses for keeping the toilet closed, they said it wasn’t in compliance with ADA (Americans with Disabilities act) requirements. That doesn’t hold water. Park & Rec. could retrofit the building just as they did with another dozen or so structures from Beach Chalet at the ocean to this last structure in the Panhandle. They could retrofit the thing so’s it would pass ADA muster, paint, stucco and replace the original tile roof for under $100,000 max. … Anyway, the City tells the neighbors that the only solution is to build an entirely new building with an entire new system of sewage and water lines in a different location (let’s make things as expensive as possible) … Cost? … How about $650,000 (not counting demolition or moving utilities or items like that.) So’s you’re gonna be talking a million bucks easy to tear down a classic structure and replace it with a piece of shit.”
h.: “What’s your point?”
Eileen: (Stands and begins her morning stretching exercises) “Get me a glass of Two buck Chuck. … On one block up the friggin’ street they’re gonna charge you 10 times what is necessary to destroy the last pearl in the string of Spanish Mission architecture structures in the park and replace it with garbage, while … down the street, they want to pay you one tenth of the value of a property that should never be sold in the first place. … But, that’s only part of their sins. It’s not just park property. Throughout the entire City they’ve taken control of classic structures and either destroyed (the De Young) or totally gutted and perverted (the Main Library) or plan to do God knows what (the Mint) … or, put them out of the price range of the average San Franciscan (did you see the article where the 100 or so senior ladies who’d been playing Harding Golf Course for decades found that the price was going from the $11 a round it had been 2 years ago … to $70 apiece now?) … Then, comes the biggest sin. … Then, they outsource all of the jobs they could be going to BayView residents in these structures by privatizing them. They won’t hire union people. Hell no! They’ll hire the cheapest labor possible and pay them the least. They’ll make enough money off the backs of the poor to to donate to SFSOS (the Hellman/Fisher group) and go to receptions for Diane Feinstein and fund raisers for Gavin Newsom. … Their former employees don’t do that well. What they’ve created is a population of broke, out-of-work & sometimes, homeless people whom they then criticize for getting in the way of their friggin’ SUV’s.”
h.: (grabs empty beer cans & comes back with wine already poured) “You’re gonna start quoting Santana again, aren’t you?”
Eileen: (interrupting her exercise, she returns to the chair across the deck from mine, sits, sips the wine and takes a hit from the pipe as she adjusts the chaise lounge further back. She rotates her neck and continues) … “Yeah, I am. Because, what they’ve done is fucked with the feng shui of Golden Gate Park. With all of their automobiles and destruction of matching structures. The screeching dissonance of the new structures. … Yeah, they’ve ‘torn down Paradise and put up a parking lot’. But, Santana’s philosophy of pattern is about art and the greatest damage caused by these blood-suckers is human.”
h.: “How so?”
Eileen: “You start by having this wonderful, complimentary community of structures that fit into the landscape of the parks and the City and were manned by thousands of gardeners and life guards and nurses and doctors and … they all worked for the City. … Then, you tear down the physical pieces of the continuous & coherent structure that gave this place its particular energy and replace them with structures that don’t fit (simply in the name of profit) … Then, having destroyed to buildings, you go after the employees who worked in them. … You fire the laundry workers who have run the plants at General Hospital & Laguna Honda for years and you fire the … “It is the opinion of the Controller/Budget Analyst that the aforementioned function can be served more cheaply by an outside contractor” … The jobs get outsourced to unscrupulous contractors whose meetings are not subject to Sunshine laws.”
“I wonder how this reads?”
Eileen: “Huh?”
h.: “The column. All of them that include you are experiments. I’ve always liked the genre that has imaginary characters supporting political comment. I always read Mike Royko before I read Walter Lippman because Royko sometimes had his imaginary buddies in the column with him. People like ‘Slats’.”
Eileen: (pours herself another glass of merlot and relights the pipe) … “You’re delusional. If you had an actual fucking job, you’d be fired instantly. So, now you think you’re Walter Lippman?”
h.: “Never mind. Finish what you were saying about the firehouse and unemployment and all the rest.”
Eileen: (takes a long sip of win and settles back as her body sweats slightly in the rising sun) … “Like I started to say. It’s simple Einstein. … Einstein said that given the infinity of mathematics, eventually everything repeats itself. … Every moment and interaction and every possible action and reaction will play themselves out across eternity.”
h.: “How does that relate to the rich ripping off the fire house?”
Eileen: “We’ll either keep it or get it back in every variation it is possible for you to imagine and in ways that it is impossible for you to imagine. … My favorite is the one where one of the Swells buys it at about the same time his wife has used the new boobs and butt he bought for her to attract a younger stud from out of the crew redecorating their City townhouse. … So, the guy puts together a couple of billion or more while the house painter is putting it to his wife and talking progressive politics into each and every one of her orifices. … And, the husband works himself into a heart attack and dies. The wife? … She leaves the fire house she inherited back to the City which makes it into the museum it should have been in the first place. … Then, one day, … an ambitious dark stranger goes through on the tour and decides he wants to own the place to try and suck up some of the energy of the brave ghosts who inhabit the place. … Among others. … He joins with a band of similarly inspired comrades and soon they bankrupt the City and he is able to purchase the building. Unfortunately, the stress of amassing the fortune and the time away from home required, opens the gates of the mansion to a handsome young Irish painter, … there just to do a little ‘touch-up’ … who convinced his freshly widowed new love to leave the old firehouse back to the City. … You see? … It’s all very cyclical. … All very Einstein. … It can’t really be any other way, can it? … Open another bottle of wine.”
h.: “OK.”
Live your fantasy:
