Watching City Hall #343, 2-13-05

“He has the look of both predator and prey.”

(suave gay actor defines Wyatt Earp)

There are lots of people like that walking beneath my window these days. Yeah, I’ve landed in some kind of place, campers. I’m surrounded by some of the most amazing commercial buildings in the City and lack the vocabulary to describe them. I’m gonna give it my best though.

The Greeks didn’t build a better looking building than the Hibernia Bank at Jones & McAllister. City hall itself has nothing to match the bank’s 10 foot or more heavily decorated bronze doors. Granite and copper and more granite. It echoes the old Mint and like that piece of history, is now graced these days mostly by pigeons, drunks, junkies and the insane. Daily, a couple of the pigeons from the building’s dome fly over to the rail of the fire escape in front of my window, settle in, and watch me type. They don’t beg. They just watch. Beautiful, healthy looking birds which is amazing given the filth and danger through which they wade daily. I wonder if they’re ones that I saved through the years when I was janitoring and put those that survived the falls from nests away from harm where their parents could care for them. Maybe 10% survived by my guess but they live to be 35 or more.

`I digress. What I’m saying is that I live in an ideal urban laboratory for any serious social scientist, teacher, writer or political activist … all of which I claim to be. Trust me, I know it. My goal is to gain enough trust from my neighbors to generate stories and, hopefully, pictures from the major pieces of the demographic and architectural landscape of this loud, obnoxious & sometimes tender place filled with violence and fear and drugs and sex and charity. Hell, I’m not going anywhere (got turned down for interview at my first hot prospect job interview in 3 years this week). It ain’t bad. I grew up in a neighborhood not much different in St. Louis long, long ago.

I’m in the first block of non-governmental buildings at the North-West corner of Civic Center. My room, on the front of the old Evangeline, faces 90 open windows of the Renoir Hotel. (I love the way the tourists never close their drapes).

Seventh street crosses Market at the edge of my field of vision. What I call the ‘Burglar’s Bazaar’ runs 24/7/365 in the eastern ‘end zone’ of the Civic Center. While the Farmer’s Market is open a couple of days and week and various craft and substance tents fill the main concourse most days of the week, the ‘Bazaar’ never closes.

It’s said that if you discover you’ve been burgled within 10 blocks or so of here in any direction that you have a good chance of buying your stuff back from a sidewalk vendor at the Bazaar in front of Carl’s Jr. if you get there quickly enough.

Dress well if you go there to shop. Bart’s there too. The furthest eastern entry/exit opens right into the Bazaar. A federal building adjoins the Bazaar and their cops drive their cars around the building ceaselessly (if ever there was a waste of gas) but don’t disturb the trade scene. SFPD pays cops overtime just to sit at the Bazaar site and do occasional sweeps.

They aren’t serious about clearing the area though. I wouldn’t be either if I were them. That’s why I said you should dress nice. God knows how many cameras the various agencies have focused on that corner. What the hell would be the sense of scattering the petty thieves to somewhere you couldn’t keep them on video surveillance?

I walk through the confluence of thieves and drug peddlers to get my whiskey most days. The crowd on the sidewalks look like they’re waiting to audition for a sequel to ‘Leaving Los Vegas’. I’m on a nodding basis with enough of them to pass without much scrutiny. They do their shit in front of me. Selling freshly lifted (?) car stereos & the like. … Check cashing joints stare at one another across two of the intersection’s corners. Donut joints occupy the others. It’s a half block to St. Anthony’s dining room where most of the bloated wrecks sprawled along the sidewalk take the little sustenance they enjoy.

I’m one of them

You’d think this shit might depress me but it doesn’t. There’s actually a kind of sigh of relief. As my buddy Jens says when something gets knocked over at his house and the knocker starts to upright it: “Leave it alone! If it’s already laying down, it can’t fall anymore.” Naw, I feel more like Doctor Switzer landing here; I’m trained to observe and help.

Anyway, I wanted to get the initial description of the neighborhood down early. If everything works out, I’ll be back as the weeks pass with photos and interviews. Let me get back to the stack of notes of observations that never got written.

The bright idea to move the seating position of the Board Presidency from top of the heap to sitting down with the Clerk of the Board can only have come from a pin head like Eric Jaye who was probably encouraged by Homeland Security’s Eric Steinberg who seems to have taken control of the entire building (he’s the only one who uses the old Board President’s chair now – ironic huh? – sent by Bush and sits atop the most progressive major political gathering in the U.S.?). The two Eric’s are pigs.

Eric Jaye is to the Newsom administration what Carl Rove is to George W. Bush. He’s a fat little back stabber with no ethics or taste who extorts cash (preferably stolen from the tax payers – see his $25k kickback from Kevin Shelley while Kevin still had a checkbook) extorts cash, devises polls and mailers of a heinous nature that I can only dream of some day equaling) Pier shouldn’t have carried Jaye’s insult to Peskin, the office of Board Presidency and herself so easily.

Folks, when I finally got away from class to go watch the Board and got my video-streaming going to watch it, I couldn’t believe it. Over a hundred years of tradition down the drain for some red-herring bullshit about not offending the disabled. There was the symmetrically perfect Board chambers, the crown jewel of which is the chair of the President of the Board and sitting in it is some goon from Homeland Security catching my eye across the room and laughing as he leans back in the top chair.

I have a Masters in Special Education. I am not insensitive. I also managed many buildings over the past several decades and am acquainted with wheel-chair ramps. Getting a wheel chair to the President’s chair in the Board is a piece of cake. I’ve moved thousands of em. For the one percent of the time that Pier runs meetings, she can ascend on a portable ramp. They’re light, cheap and they don’t damage the antique oak … which I think should be everyone’s chief concern. It looks stupid to have Peskin sitting down with the Clerk. It’s up to Pier to throw away her instructions from the Mayor’s office and say it’s OK for Aaron to sit in the seat she elected him to occupy. Throw Steinberg out in the street.

That’s enough. I’m busy interviewing imaginary candidates to take Eileen Left’s job and that ain’t so easy. You wouldn’t believe their expectations.