The American Prospect

Judith’s and my choice to spend our sabbatical in San Francisco, where we have family and a free place to stay in the SoMa district, has stirred up quite the economic tornado in my psyche.

For those of you familiar with San Fran, you already know that Market, which cuts a northeast to southwest diagonal through the city, was known as “The Slot” for being the location of the first underground metal cable trough in which constantly whirred the cables pulling trolleys up from the waterfront and into the city. North of The Slot is where the rich folk lived and worked and remains home to Union Square, Nob Hill, etc. South of The Slot was where the immigrant communities, the docks, the warehouses, tenement buildings, saloons and gambling halls were to be found (as well as Jack London’s birthplace). That is until the 1960 and ‘70s, when the national phenomenon of “urban renewal” grabbed San Francisco by the throat, shook it a few times, and succeeded in ripping its working class guts out of its downtown area.

Today South of The Slot is known as SoMa or South of Market, mirroring the trendy SoHo (South of Houston) neighborhood in New York City, another converted warehouse district. But what you’ll find in SoMa, instead of the gorgeous and historic cast iron warehouses-cum-expensive lofts and shops of SoHo, are newly built condo-scrapers; the blocks long Moscone Convention Center; and a large mall-like development known as the Yerba Buena Center. And mostly you’ll find high tech conventioneers (lots of ‘em); tourists; and, well, the 1% who can afford to live here.

And for a month, me and Judith.

We’re just up Folsom Street (which for you may conjure up images of Folsom Prison; for me, a gay person from the 1970s, Folsom Street was known as the leather district or, er, the “meat district”) from a fine restaurant named Prospect, a second restaurant launched in 2003 by award-winning chef Nancy Oakes of Boulevard fame. San Francisco today is a foodie’s food town as many fruits, fresh produce, wines, etc. all hail from the surrounding region, and Oakes and her restaurants sit near the zenith of foodie heaven.

The trick with all of this foodie-ness (in which we of course happily partake) is, well, the amount of hunger and homelessness that immediately surrounds it. You can literally cross one block, at 5th Street on Market, and go from fancy-dressed shoppers bustling in and out of the Apple Store, Abercrombie and Fitch, Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue to sidewalks empty of any other than men in sleeping bags, blankets, and cardboard on the street.

This is not even to mention that the leather bars and baths anchoring the west end of SoMa were closed by the City in the early 1980s thanks to the AIDS epidemic. That same epidemic considerably weakened the gay component of SoMa’s working class and artist communities, eliminating some of the strongest community resistance that originally existed to the gentrification of this neighborhood.

In light of all of this, the name Prospect captured my imagination.

“Prospect” as a noun means “a. an apparent probability of advancement, success, profit, etc. b. the outlook for the future: good business prospects.” Or how about “something in view as a source of profit,” or “a potential or likely customer, client, etc.”

And then there’s the verb form of the word, also highly appropriate both historically and currently in this neighborhood: “to search or explore (a region), as for gold; to work (a mine or claim) experimentally in order to test its value.”

In other words: to be a gold digger! An optimistic gold digger: a prospector with prospects!

And that’s pretty much who surrounds us now, South of the Slot in SoMa: a lot of people with enough money to make them believe they can and will always have more. Surrounded on all sides by folks who have nothing: not homes, or warm coats, or food to eat. Soup kitchens underfunded by federal budget cuts at the same time they are being overwhelmed by the working poor: people who work full-time but at jobs that don’t pay enough for them to feed their families.

We’re on an island of prosperity kept afloat by the surrounding sea of despair. And I have to tell you, much of the time I feel I'm drowning.

Interestingly, the Latin root of “prospect” is “prospectus” which meant to foresee, to see far off, to watch for / provide for / look out for. What if an “American Prospect” on life could shift from self to other; if we could really look ahead, see the future, and want to provide and look out for each other?

The challenge is crossing The Slot.

It doesn’t sound difficult, but it is filled with whirring machinery which seem to separate these two worlds as widely as if they were on separate continents. Instead of pulling us together, the ceaseless motion of the Slot’s cable divides us--until we trip, stumble, fall into it.

Take for instance how we best know the term “prospectus” today: as “the formal legal document required by the Securities and Exchange Commission about an investment offering for sale to the public.”

So much for the long view.

Might we define an era as “The American Prospect?” Can we cross The Slot?

Our Journeys Under Sea and Beyond

As we prepare to return home to our island after a six-week writing sabbatical, I’m fondly remembering our big summer production, “Burt Dow, Deep Water Man,” and reflecting on the power of “being away.”

Going away and coming home is a huge privilege for most of us, a by-product of the wealth and mobility of our North American culture. How then might we use this privilege to deepen our own consciousness of who we are and what our roles in this big world might be?

For centuries, in different cultures and traditions, journeying has had more of a mythic than an ordinary quality. Journeys are often quests to reach a mystical “holy grail.” Think King Arthur and his knights (about whom we will hear a solstice tale, “The Loathly Bride,” read by Judith at the Opera House’s holiday event December 18); Odysseus; Jonah and the Whale and thus yes . . . Burt Dow, Deep Water Man. In the ongoing tradition of Jungian analysis, these stories and dreams exemplify no less than our own journeys to develop self and perhaps most importantly, with the individual self, community and culture.

But our modern, western culture becomes less and less about self-development (in its most superficial sense, education and the aspiration to continuously improve) almost by the minute. In the U.S., we don’t want to be challenged by the fantastical, alluring mysteries of what we don’t know; we prefer to surround ourselves comfortably only with what our rational brains and senses are already familiar. This is perhaps most evident in our love of national chain stores and restaurants, which make one American place look, taste, and feel just like the next. And as Thomas Friedman recently reported in his satirical column “From WikiChina” (from an imagined Chinese perspective), Americans “travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind.”

“Jonah was unable to speak with sufficient wisdom until he had made a journey under the sea, that is, until he had explored his unconscious,” wrote famed Jungian analyst Joseph Wheelwright more than 30 years ago. What was it, I wonder, that Burt Dow and his Giggling Gull brought back to Deer Isle after evicting themselves from the belly of their own whale? Was it the artistry and creativity Burt discovered there, as he splashed paint like Pollack? McCloskey’s legend of the real man has gone on to give our community gifts for generations.

What gifts do we bring back to our communities when we return home? What will I bring home this week?

Why We All Need a Shake Up Now and Then

Sometimes having the earth move under your feet is what it takes to make healthy change.

Grassroots and urban and community development activist Jane Jacobs knew this well, and here in San Francisco there is a particularly wonderful Jacobs-style parable of such change.

We just spent the morning at the huge and bustling Saturday Farmers' Market here in San Francisco, at the beautiful Ferry Terminal building at the foot of Market Street. The market is one of the nation's largest and most acclaimed, serving a wide variety of farmers and food producers, plus approximately 25,000 customers a week.

The Ferry Terminal building, which famed columnist Herb Caen called "a famous city's most famous landmark," was opened in 1898. It was the transportation focal point for everyone coming to the city from the Gold Rush through the 1930s, when both the city's bridges, the Bay and Golden Gate, were opened to car traffic. The steel frame construction became the largest such foundation for a building over water anywhere in the world--and importantly has survived two major earthquakes, the 1906 and 1989.

What didn't survive the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake is as important to today's vibrancy of the Ferry Terminal building and its markets as what did: the double-deck Embarcadero Freeway. Built across the face of the Ferry Building in 1957 at the height of the nation's car craze, with Eisenhower's highway act and urban and transportation planners such as Robert Moses in full steam, it cast the historic building into obscurity, cutting it off from the city.

Jacobs successfully stopped Moses from building a similarly raised highway through Lower Manhattan (the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, or LOMEX), along Broome Street, in the mid-1960s--but she never had such dramatic help from Mother Nature. Many of Moses' auto-centric designed and driven projects--the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Cross Bronx Expressway--divided and separated New York's poor neighborhoods, casting them into the gloom and filth of the expressways' shadows.

The 1989 earthquake so damaged the Embarcadero Freeway that it was completely torn down in 1991 and never rebuilt. The immediate impact on the historic Ferry Building was striking. Increased auto congestion caused the re-institution of many of the cross-bay ferries, and the building, suddenly re-connected and visible to the city, began to come back to life. The renovated building now holds 65,000 square feet of marketplace, with an additional 175,000 sf of premium 2nd and 3rd floor office space. With its unmistakeable clocktower gracing the intersection of Market Street with the Bay and the communities across it, it is once again a bustling central location for the city's residents; and one of the city's most grand and cherished landmarks.

Jane Jacobs is cheering from her grave.