Someone was telling me the other day that I shouldn't ride my bike to the Fruitvale BART station because 1. I might get run over, and 2. a couple of people had been killed there recently.
Immediately surrounding the Fruitvale station is a Latino-American neighborhood and commercial district. Shop signs and billboards are written in Spanish. Women selling roses and day laborers stand on the corner while men sell tacos out of trucks. There is no tofu or mango in the burritos sold on International Boulevard. Adjacent neighborhoods are primarily African-American and Asian-American. Fruitvale is off the map for most Bay Area residents, who only hear about it on the news or know that it's on the way to the Oakland Airport. Traveling by bus from downtown Oakland to the Fruitvale station on International Boulevard, I realized that the name is no joke- the street is lined with the shopfronts of businesses, community organizations, and places of worship with signs written in every imaginable language, changing every few blocks- Vietnamese to Chinese to Korean to Spanish- marking the beginning of a new district or neighborhood.
Near the Fruitvale station, there are pawn shops, travel agencies, money wiring services, restaurants with men wearing cowboy hats and smoking outside, women pushing strollers, and people of every color going to and from the station and the indoor market. At the center of it all is a recently-built transit "village", a mix of apartments, shops, and offices including the La Raza health clinic. The village is everything a transit-oriented development should be. It replaced a parking lot with high-density, mixed-use buildings, affordable housing, local-serving retail, outdoor cafes, and you don't even have to cross the street to get to BART and a bus hub. Potential gentrification aside, the concept makes my planner's heart flutter.
My first trip through the station was just a few weeks after the area, and the city of Oakland, had experienced the trauma of waking up on New Year's Day to hear that a young man named Oscar Grant was shot and killed by a BART police officer as he lay face-down on the station platform in the early hours of the morning. At the time, a makeshift memorial of candles and flowers had appeared on one side of the station, but was cleared by my next visit.
Today, a group of community members, Black, White, and Latino, were handing out fliers for a rally commemorating Grant's birthday and calling for justice in his case. Passersby took pictures of their table and their banner with Grant's image. Taking pictures is a way for people to reduce their discomfort when they are feeling insecure and disoriented in a space. It's a way to take control and distance yourself from a situation or a subject without feeling emotion, or perhaps just a way to try to digest it when you are at a loss for words- like telling someone whose loved one has died that you're sorry for their loss. The fliers and the banner, like the makeshift memorial, keep the event from becoming divorced from the place or fading from memory. People should feel uncomfortable and unsettled about Oscar Grant's death and what it says about our society.
Oscar Grant, I strongly suspect, did not have the luxury of 'avoiding' the Fruitvale station. Neither do most of the people who travel through this vibrant urban space every day, should they even want to.
Oscar Grant would have been 23 years old today.
E. Mattiuzzi
2.27.2009
2.22.2009
The Mayor of Castro Street
The development of the Gay Rights Movement in San Francisco is a wonderful example of the often central role of geography in urban social movements. As I sat in the Castro Theater watching Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch deliver excellent roles in Milk, I was struck by the strong connection between their activism and the urban environment.
Before he ever defines himself as a politician or an activist or even begins to imagine a movement, Milk maps out in his mind an imaginary line, “a six block area,” that will be safe and welcoming for gays in a city and a society that was overwhelmingly hostile toward them. Milk tells his lover Scott Smith (James Franco) that there should be at least one street in the world, at least one neighborhood, that is a haven for gay people. At the time, the Castro was a working class Irish-Catholic neighborhood. In the film, Milk builds this haven by identifying businesses that were friendly to gays and targeting those that were not for boycott, spreading outward from his own camera shop.
Some of the most rousing scenes in the film involved Emile Hirsch’s character, Cleve Jones, rallying thousands of people to the street to protest events such as passage of a ballot initiative restricting the civil rights of gays. The methods by which he gathered a crowd included not only working a mad phone tree, but running into the shops and bars along Castro Street and shouting that there was action going on in the street. Only through intense concentration of gays in the Castro could this be possible. In a sense, it was a ghetto- an area where a particular population concentrates, indirectly or by force, to seek refuge or become separated from the rest of society and its scorn.
The production of the Castro as a ghetto from both the inside and the outside increased violence but facilitated organizing. Milk and his followers exercised agency and self-determination by imagining a utopian node from which acceptance of gays could spread. However, building the district was hardly a “choice,” but rather a matter of survival because gays were not welcome outside the Castro as a group or as individuals. Concentrating gay homes, businesses and bars provided an easier target for police brutality. Ultimately, though, the ghettoization of gays through the formation of the Castro district provided solidarity and brought visibility to police violence. Just as Jane Jacobs tells us that eyes on the street make it safer, concentration of violent acts against gays in a specific geographic location helped ensure that the beatings and killings would not go unnoticed. Milk and Jones and others could act ask eyes on the street, channeling anger and outrage into organized disorder on the street.
Market Street was the nexus of this anger and organization, serving as a symbolic and a physical conduit of truth to power. When demonstrations threatened to boil over into rioting, Milk and his followers would march down Market Street to Civic Center Plaza right up to the doors of City Hall. The intensity of this imagery on film, the dense, noisy mass of people in motion taking action to make themselves heard, reminded me strongly of The Battle of Algiers. Like the native Algerian population storming down from the Casbah, the gay population forced San Francisco, and the nation, to listen to their cry for equal rights. Just as powerful, if not more so, was the image of thousands of people processing down Market Street from the Castro bearing candles after Milk’s assassination.
E. Mattiuzzi
Before he ever defines himself as a politician or an activist or even begins to imagine a movement, Milk maps out in his mind an imaginary line, “a six block area,” that will be safe and welcoming for gays in a city and a society that was overwhelmingly hostile toward them. Milk tells his lover Scott Smith (James Franco) that there should be at least one street in the world, at least one neighborhood, that is a haven for gay people. At the time, the Castro was a working class Irish-Catholic neighborhood. In the film, Milk builds this haven by identifying businesses that were friendly to gays and targeting those that were not for boycott, spreading outward from his own camera shop.
Some of the most rousing scenes in the film involved Emile Hirsch’s character, Cleve Jones, rallying thousands of people to the street to protest events such as passage of a ballot initiative restricting the civil rights of gays. The methods by which he gathered a crowd included not only working a mad phone tree, but running into the shops and bars along Castro Street and shouting that there was action going on in the street. Only through intense concentration of gays in the Castro could this be possible. In a sense, it was a ghetto- an area where a particular population concentrates, indirectly or by force, to seek refuge or become separated from the rest of society and its scorn.
The production of the Castro as a ghetto from both the inside and the outside increased violence but facilitated organizing. Milk and his followers exercised agency and self-determination by imagining a utopian node from which acceptance of gays could spread. However, building the district was hardly a “choice,” but rather a matter of survival because gays were not welcome outside the Castro as a group or as individuals. Concentrating gay homes, businesses and bars provided an easier target for police brutality. Ultimately, though, the ghettoization of gays through the formation of the Castro district provided solidarity and brought visibility to police violence. Just as Jane Jacobs tells us that eyes on the street make it safer, concentration of violent acts against gays in a specific geographic location helped ensure that the beatings and killings would not go unnoticed. Milk and Jones and others could act ask eyes on the street, channeling anger and outrage into organized disorder on the street.
Market Street was the nexus of this anger and organization, serving as a symbolic and a physical conduit of truth to power. When demonstrations threatened to boil over into rioting, Milk and his followers would march down Market Street to Civic Center Plaza right up to the doors of City Hall. The intensity of this imagery on film, the dense, noisy mass of people in motion taking action to make themselves heard, reminded me strongly of The Battle of Algiers. Like the native Algerian population storming down from the Casbah, the gay population forced San Francisco, and the nation, to listen to their cry for equal rights. Just as powerful, if not more so, was the image of thousands of people processing down Market Street from the Castro bearing candles after Milk’s assassination.
E. Mattiuzzi
2.20.2009
Thursday night in the Mission
Walking through San Francisco’s Mission district at night will cause you to readjust your eyes every few moments. It is an exercise in contradiction. Hipster dives stand side by side with SROs. Round a corner from the west-coast yoga day spa and you will find a dollar store and a shop selling wonderful Mexican-style pastries. In one storefront you will find the latest indie clothes and music and from the next emanates the sweet sounds of salvation at a thunderous pentacostal church service.
Gentrification has made the Mission a neighborhood of sharp contrast. A mural depicting Latino folk imagery covers an entire side of an apartment building a stone’s throw from the 18th-century Mission Dolores as rents push low-income residents of color out of the now-trendy area and farther from the BART (light rail) station.
The neighborhood is diverse and vibrant, but not without contradiction and an ever-shifting cultural geography. It is a haven for the young and creative, for artists and activists, but its very popularity is what most endangers the cultural “authenticity” that people come to absorb, if such a thing exists. It is worth entertaining the idea that the presence of burritos with whole avocado, mango, and tofu on local menus is more situated in a Californian culture than in yuppie cooptation of Mexican food. However, the people whose tastes drive this place-rooted culinary style also drive the area's high rents.
It is easy to cynically dismiss the mix of cultures in the Mission as consumption-based or the night life as overly-focused on alcohol. As with any discussion of a 24-hour city, it is difficult to look beyond the more obvious expressions of night-life: young people getting drunk at bars. But I think there is more to it than that- after the sun goes down over the Pacific, it is the noise and commotion of street poets and worshippers, skateboarders and salsa dancers that brings the Mission alive.
E. Mattiuzzi
Gentrification has made the Mission a neighborhood of sharp contrast. A mural depicting Latino folk imagery covers an entire side of an apartment building a stone’s throw from the 18th-century Mission Dolores as rents push low-income residents of color out of the now-trendy area and farther from the BART (light rail) station.
The neighborhood is diverse and vibrant, but not without contradiction and an ever-shifting cultural geography. It is a haven for the young and creative, for artists and activists, but its very popularity is what most endangers the cultural “authenticity” that people come to absorb, if such a thing exists. It is worth entertaining the idea that the presence of burritos with whole avocado, mango, and tofu on local menus is more situated in a Californian culture than in yuppie cooptation of Mexican food. However, the people whose tastes drive this place-rooted culinary style also drive the area's high rents.
It is easy to cynically dismiss the mix of cultures in the Mission as consumption-based or the night life as overly-focused on alcohol. As with any discussion of a 24-hour city, it is difficult to look beyond the more obvious expressions of night-life: young people getting drunk at bars. But I think there is more to it than that- after the sun goes down over the Pacific, it is the noise and commotion of street poets and worshippers, skateboarders and salsa dancers that brings the Mission alive.
E. Mattiuzzi
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