 Turn the lights down a little and talk about the mission for a number of reasons one is I have a personal interest I've lived in Bernal Heights for about 33 years now in the same house Last time I gave the speech someone wanted to start an argument about whether Bernal Heights was part of the mission But we can deal with that later on After the south of market district the mission is the city's oldest working-class neighborhood Because of the resistance to what the redevelopment agency did in the Western addition in the mission district the district is largely intact There was massive destruction as we'll see of Victorians in the Western addition It didn't happen to the mission because of the of community resistance so the mission in terms of the development of the neighborhood the development of bizarre architecture is full of lessons about neighborhood activism and community-based planning and you can see from where I'm going is that Yes, my book is about architecture and history But it's also about how the community gets involved in architecture and its own history and in in planning The mission district I'll talk about how it's made major contributions to the city's culture contributions that are known outside of San Francisco even outside of the United States Also talk about it as a neighborhood that's under pressure Facing an uncertain future, so I'll talk a little about the fight over the dot-com dot-gone phenomenon and the issue of affordable housing in the city and as you'll see in my talk I'm going to relate the issues of preservation which we associate with Perhaps upscale living with a more working-class type of neighborhood Here's the mission district seen from Bernal Heights Downtown of course and we're looking down Folsom Street and over here. This is baby federal about 20 second admission So it's all familiar. It's familiar to you if you know the city Well, here's General Hospital Petro Hill, so it's this large basin here is what we know is the mission district This is how it looked last year next. Whoops. I've got the machine And this isn't the mission district, but it's close enough for us to get a sense of what it looked like about the time of the arrival of Western Europeans or soon after the arrival of Western Europeans This is actually ninth admission not far from here, but you can see a very forbidding landscape lots of land lots of sand dunes Not very much in the way of trees kind of scrubby So scrubby scrubby trees and a very inhospitable physical environment and We'll talk about this later on but this is the plank road which was the first Connection besides a a mere trail between the village of Yerba Buena, which became San Francisco And the mission Dolores that was built in about 1851 next line The first inhabitants of course were native Californians There were when Spanish showed up in 1776 or approximately a hundred and sixty people living very close to where mission Dolores was established they called themselves the Alamu and In the city of San Francisco where there were three Communities one in Visitation Valley one in the mission district and one out near Fort Point that were Semin semi-nomadic who are living in this area This wasn't an area of large population for native peoples because it was a fairly fitting forbidding environment mission Dolores was built over a period of time from 1785 to 1791 here it is in 1856 it was Built the original building was built which was just a brush shelter was built in 1776 And the Spaniards arrived as part of an effort to build 21 missions Along the El Camino Real from Southern California up into Northern California Spain was very concerned at that time about the encroachments in Northern California by the British The French and the Americans and the Russians who were here primarily out of interest in in seal seal skins and sea otter skins So as part of the effort to establish Spanish Control over California they built the Presidio and they built the mission Dolores and this building was actually designed by Francisco father Francisco Palu and as I said it was built from 1785 to 1791 it's very much in the style of Mexican and Spanish ecclesiastic Buildings of the time with its tiled roof and its heavy adobe structure and actually I learned recently that sits on large pieces of serpentine that were acquired nearby the The mission had this is the interior of the mission and I note the ceiling here It's a native design that's been restored recently It was thought that the native population that was basically enslaved by the Franciscans that the mission Painted the ceiling according to the kind of patterns that they use in their clothing and and other articles the arrival of the missions the missionaries which was meant to establish to convert the native population to Christianity had a disastrous impact on the on the people living in the area The first real encounter first negative encounter between the missionaries between the Palu and his people in the in the local population incurred very soon after they arrived when one of the native people attempted to kiss the wife of one of the soldiers and was killed and by the 1830s virtually all the Villages in the Bay Area were deserted either because people had been rounded up and brought into the missions or on to the mission farms or and Among those people were had fled and among those people who were converted with about 72,000 people Only about 18,000 of them survived most of them dying from various diseases, which they were not immune to that were introduced by the Spanish population and just to back up Mexico became independent from Spain and the missions were secularized in the 1830s in this picture taken in 1856 the mission was still used but in between The mission in the far the building on the far right was a roadhouse in this area was very popular for horse racing And there was a regular market and bear and bullfighting. So the missions had fallen into decay By the by the 1830s if you read for instance Alfred Robinson's life in California gives you a very vivid picture of what it would look like In the span of time between the 1820s in the 1830s when the mission system was falling apart This picture, I'm sorry to say is hard to see but I'm trying to give you some sense of the terrain in the mission And this is Mission Bay right here, and this is Market Street Right here. This is Market Street And this is the plank road that I spoke of here's the mission down here This is where mission rock is today the mission rock resort So the ballpark is right here and Rick and point Where the the bridge goes over to Yerba Boyne Island So you can see the the mission Bay and then Mission Creek which ran up into Approximately where Dolores where Folsom Street is Was still Navigable in the 1850s and up into the 1860s and you can get a sense of here's downtown, San Francisco This is an 1852 map and here's the the mission so the mission The area immediately around immediately around the mission had become kind of a village And you get the beginning of San Francisco becoming a sort of collection of villages with the mission being one of them downtown San Francisco being another eventually the hate the Western addition and so on and so forth Early in its history. Oh, here's a more detailed map. Here's Mission Creek coming in from Mission Bay and There's a actually you'll see in a later slide. There's a there was a pier right here and then here's 16th Street running running up to to Mission Dolores And just back again for a second and then here's the plank road coming through this, you know very Sandy sand dune kind of scrub scrub oak terrain Robinson rode through it in the 1820 said that he encountered bear and and wolves in in this area and very little else And it's early years the mission was known for its resorts one of them Of course being the resort at the mission Dolores. This was Woodward's Gardens. It was built in the 1850s By an entrepreneur who built a hotel. He actually was a tea totaler He built a dry hotel downtown called the what cheer house, which was the site of the city's first library And then he built the mission plank road and Woodward's Gardens, which sits near the restaurant Woodward's Gardens Which is at the corner of What's it called under the freeway there and Mission Street? division division to bows and People would come out on the weekends in their carriages along the mission plank road or another plank road that was built on Folsom Street to visit Woodward's Gardens And also Another resort known as the willows and here you can see The mission as a as a separate village in a kind of an agricultural landscape. So I showed you Mission Creek Here it is right here. You can see there's a a Sailing craft on here's a bridge Over it and the mission is back in here and you can see farmlands Along here and then the beginnings of a kind of of a village around Around the mission itself This is 1860 this is twin. This is I can I always call it lonely mountains, but it's not it's the one by the Randall Museum What is it called Corona Heights And then Red Rock this is Red Rock Hill I believe and this is Twin Peaks up here and this is Dolores Heights over in here Mission also had two racetracks and the first baseball game was played at Garfield Park around 26 and and Harrison and soon the mission became an industrial area and this is looking up From in the north mission and this looks like a stockyard To me and there's some factories in the area and we're looking up. I don't know whether this is 16th Street This could well be 16th Street, but we're looking roughly from the area of around Bryant and in 16th. So this might be This might be actually around a little farther north than that and again looking out of out of The willows toward the downtown south of market area I want to Call your attention to this smokestack right here because I'm going to show you a picture of that and just scenario in just a Moment they were looking over at Market Street and you can see the size of the sand dunes Over at Market Street in fact when they built the original City Hall which sat on this site When I was working on a book on the library found a picture of A bunch of guys a wheelbrows and shovels taking down an enormous sand dune that sat right on this site And this is that smokestack that I showed you this is The first sugar factory in San Francisco and it gives you a sense of what was going on in terms of the leveling of the city So you get the dunes over here, and this is what was known as a steam patty. This is a narrow gauge Railroad really with a bunch of cars and they're shoveling The sand in the cars to take it down and dump it into Mission Bay, which is what eventually happened in Mission Bay It was partially filled Kind of on a steady basis up until 1906 and then when the earthquake occurred in 1906 a lot of the The damage structures were were dumped either in there or on the north side of the city and and the filling proceeded didn't really end until the 1950s and another Industrial site around 16th Street Pacific Chemical Company and back over here. We're looking south. So this is Bernal Heights over here And in the in the 19th century First the mission was hooked up to the downtown through a series of Transportation systems Thomas Hayes built a railroad from downtown to the mission in 1857 Horse-drawn carriages appeared on Valencia Street in 1863 and the first street cars showed up in 1866 and the mission faced two possibilities. It was the Sun Belt so it It quickly became known starting in the 1856 and 60s for and into the 1870s for very large Houses first people built sort of their country homes Francois Pioche who was built the the mining town of Pioche in Nevada. He was a French banker and Mining magnate he built an enormous estate right next to the mission Dolores and he's known for having brought 40 French chefs to San Francisco and seems to have had a major impact on on the cuisine of San Francisco in its early days His estate was called the Hermitage He built it on ranchos that he bought from the Noe and and From the Noe family and the other rancho the Rincon rancho and this is John Spreck Spreckles house in the Typical kind of Italian 8 design of the time and that was at 23rd in the South Finesse 21st in South Finesse So you had wealthy San Franciscans James Duval feelings father built his house on on Valencia Street around 16th and 17th you get these very large houses built in some neighborhoods Here's one of them today. This is at 17th in South Finesse and then more typically you have the Victorians that we were familiar with in the mission. These are built by the real estate associates in the 1870s the real estate associates were very interesting because At one time was the largest housing development company in the United States. They built a Thousand or more houses in San Francisco and they were mass producing these things We associate Victorians with kind of craft skills hand craft skills, but they really have to do with the the development of the scroll saw and the mass production of the ornamental Materials that you see on the front of the buildings You know the brackets and the and the pediments and the and the various ornaments the pipettes around the windows Which were mass produced by mills in San Francisco and then if you were a Going to buy one of these buildings that you went down to the REA office on Market Street And they showed you a series of pattern books from which you chose the design And then they built blocks of these things and this is on Valencia between 20th and 21st and if you go around into the Lexington Street, which is right behind it You'll see a number of other ones and the idea behind the Victorian which we now associate particularly Even some of these smaller ones with kind of upscale living was really to build Housing for middle-income people and when you go back and look through the records and see you own these houses you'll see that It range from mechanics, which is what skilled workers were called in those days to white collar workers These things ran for they sold for about twenty five hundred to six thousand dollars The blocks were laid out in such a way that the corner buildings Were bigger and fetched a higher price you could borrow money from REA For a certain amount down a certain amount of a month and and moving it So, you know to keep in mind as you as we go into the history of the mission further that that the Victorians were were built really with a provision of of Housing for middle-income people as the part of the strategy and then their different kinds This is Harrison Street around 22nd 23rd So you had working Victorian cottages for the working people and the North Mission was as you saw from the earlier slides was Particularly industrial so you get these kind of cottages. This was you know, it's obviously it's a four-unit building So each one of those apartments was very small and probably each one of these apartments had a family living in it and then the mission became as a working community it started to lose its identity as a Place valued by people for sort of their summer homes or for people like the Spreckles who were building large missions mansions and it became a a An ethnic working-class community predominantly Irish with Italians and others and this is St. Peters at 24th in Alabama, which burned a number of years ago and was restored and it was built in 1886 and that was the the home parish of Father Peter York who was not only a The parish priest, but he was an Irish nationalists and a big supporter of the labor movement in San Francisco but there are other nationalities immigrants in the Mission District So the women's building and I'm not sure who the architect or the date is on this building But it was originally a Norwegian-American meeting hall St. John's Lutheran Church on South NS in 22nd. I believe Was built for the German community and then the other buildings reflecting the working-class neighborhood nature of the Mission District Such as the sheet metal workers hall on Guerrero across from Valencia Gardens Read it somewhere that half the unions formed in San Francisco originated in the Mission District and then the woodman's hall which is now the Baha'i temple on Can't remember it's mission or Valencia Valencia, thank you and along with the construction of Union halls and I'll show you later the San Francisco labor temple, but along with the construction of Union halls And in note the evolution of architectural style. I showed you a kind of an Italian eight building earlier on This is a 1920s kind of deco looking building which has recently been clean So it's looking better than it looked in this picture that I took about a year ago Was the construction of of community service operations? This is the San Francisco Girls Club that was founded in 1896 And you can see that the shingle style is becoming popular moving away from the Victorian style and This was emblematic of the development of community services in a low-income neighborhood It's now the Mission Neighborhood Center and the That's on cap between 19th and 20th and this is the Community Music Center, which is in a was a private residence that was built in The 1880s it was founded in 1921 This is on cap in on cap between 20th and 21st another venerable community institution and then near and dear to my heart is Proceed a center, which is right down from where I live which was built by neighbors in 1922 There were a number of significant developments in the early part of the 20th century that shaped the mission that we know They gave the mission some of the characteristics that were more familiar with today One was the arrival of Hispanics the Latinization of the community. The other was the construction of public housing the beginnings of minority ownership home ownership in the neighborhood and Of course, as I mentioned earlier it had lost its characteristics as a desirable Neighborhood for wealthy people live they'd moved on to parts of the Western Edition and Pacific Heights and In moving into the period after the Second World War was the beginning of white flight to the neighborhood Someone told me that the Maguire Realty Company Was really instrumental building st. Francis Woods was really instrumental in helping the the Irish move out of The mission to st. Francis Woods So if you take a parish like st. Peters, which I showed you earlier It's now I read in the papers the other day 97 97 percent Latino It was an Irish parish up into the 50s when it began to be transformed into a Latin parish And there's very fine history actually of this parish which describes some of the tensions between the the Irish population Hispanic population and if you look carefully at this mural who which portrays some of the heroes of of Mexican history and Martin Luther King and so on Peter York is is nowhere to be seen I spoke of public housing. This is the city's first public housing project built in Holly Court by Holly Court Circle Holly Park in 1939 They're more interesting as Valencia Gardens Which is at 15th and Valencia and this was designed by William Worcester went on to be the Well, he designed the Bank of America building and the restoration of Ghirardelli Square very much influenced by European architecture modernist architecture particularly architecture and social ideas developed in the Bauhaus in Germany about trying to build a decent small-scale housing for for low-income families and if you've seen this Development, which is now surrounded by a huge fence You'll notice that there are a number of bufano statues in the courtyards. So it was designed With ample courtyards around it two-story buildings three-story building flat roof and very much in the modernist style no ornamentation and entryways so that each family would have its Separate kind of condo unit another building from the same period a little earlier This is the mission campus of the community college system With Samuel Gompers High School. It's architects Mastin and Herd from 1939 in the in the modern style and Just to remind you that The mission remained an industrial neighborhood This is the hams brewery, which was an early convert to a to a lived workspace. It's a hams brewery down at Just north of 16th and and Bryant. It was built in the late of the 1850s. I came 1950s I came here in 1968 and there were five breweries in this immediate neighborhood And I think a number of you probably remember that just at the end of Bryant There were a couple of demolished breweries that sat there for two or three years with the tanks hanging out Before they took the brewing tanks out and in fact this was an early scene of a number of kind of Crash pads where people went in were living in the tanks which were known as as the as the vats and then With the arrival of Latino population, of course, you had people who were not only working but had small businesses This is one on on Bryant Street that's been there for quite a while This is my own neighborhood Bernell Heights. There were a number of significant Changes in the city in the period the post-war period the mission became less industrial The city which had peaked as an industrial city really around the turn of the 20th century Was moving more and more toward a kind of corporate headquarters city with a very large white-collar working-class downtown The immigrant population in the mission which was initially of a mixed from mixed Backgrounds in the sense that people came from Costa Rica and Mexico, but was primarily Mexican became more Influenced by immigrants from Nicaragua and El Salvador and people's access to jobs was in the union sector to the extent To which the unions were were integrated and that was a fight that went on of course after the war and really Was successful I think probably by the 1970s Yeah, this is this is on Nevada at the top of Bernell Heights and So there weren't a lot of high-paying jobs available because it was hard to get into the union So met much of the of the immigrant population went into low-paying Service jobs, and I just want to give you a quick quick look at my neighborhood. I arrived in 1968 and This was this is what my neighborhood looked like Guy here who is now a sandblaster is of Hawaiian Filipino extraction this young woman. I don't know this guy's father was a sailor and Mexican background and is no longer living African-american woman who's a meter maid This is a guy who took most of the photographs and his name is Richard Hall if anybody wants to read a detailed Description of a mission neighborhood. He wrote his master's thesis for San Francisco State about Bernell Heights about this particular group of people and I had it put in the library in the in the archives Carol Deutcher came from Chicago with me in 1968 she was she ran the precedence Center for a number of years young woman who moved to the mission from Pacific Heights a Woman of Portuguese Hawaiian extraction whose father was a dock worker Richard's son another young Mexican-American A guy from from New Mexico was a Mailman for a number of years. He's an interesting to know who ended up being a homeowner's too. He became a homeowner I became a homeowner. He became a homeowner is a plumber from from Utah Another young man from New Mexico young African-American man who's in in prison in Texas today and A young woman of Mexican Nicaraguan background is also a homeowner So it's interesting to see who these people's families were and whether they stayed in the mission I think one of the things that strikes me about these people all of them I've been very close to for a long time was a very a number of them particularly or specifically the young men did not live And more of my neighbors Looking out at the city This was our mayor He was a painter Italian-American from Sicily Remember local for which was in the Redstone building on 16th Street member of the San Francisco Motorcycle Club The politics of the mission of course you recognize these three gentlemen, or maybe you don't we have John Burton on the left Philip Burton in the second in the center and Willie Brown on the right Now you may have a variety of opinions about About all three of these but the thing in relation to both mission politics and the city politics is to recall That these guys in a number you know dozens and hundreds and thousands of other people brought about fundamental changes in the nature of city politics Because the political class in the 1850s 1950s when these guys became active was White male largely Irish with some Italians and in the machine the extent there was a Democratic machine in those days was based in the mission Philip Burton moved to Guerrero Street in 1954 and Aimed his organizing efforts not only at the mission, but at Chinatown and Hunter's Point in the Western edition But in the mission he aimed it right at the heart of the Irish political machine He ran against an Irishman Who died during election and and defeated Burton in his first election He later on be the well-known south of market politician known as unbeatable Tommy Maloney Who was the speaker Pro Tem in? 1956 Brown in 1962 took on Ed Gaffney who was another resident of the mission whose family owned a Department store and Brown lost in his first race and Gaffney was quoted as having said he beat that little nigger The issues that really mobilized the mission had to do with the plans to build freeways in San Francisco And this of course you're familiar with Here's 101 north here's 101 north going to the Golden Gate Bridge, and here it is connecting up to a And this is of course the north mission district and the plans were laid out for the freeways in 1954 to connect the freeways coming north up the peninsula to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge and they were to go through the areas adjacent to Golden Gate Park and through Golden Gate Park and through The mission and over Pacific Heights and of course the section and the mission district was was built There was very little opposition when there was opposition to the freeway construction in the Golden Gate Park area They recommended moving it to the To the mission district so there would have been two freeways in the mission one on the east side one on the west side Because it was considered as kind of a rundown working-class neighborhood where you get away with this kind of thing And this really mobilized began the mobilization of neighborhoods and Willie Brown's first successful campaign His ability to function as a crossover politician in the black and white communities had to do it is his getting behind the fight the so-called freeway revolt and part of the The notion of rebuilding the city of course was redevelopment and here's redevelopments plans for diamond heights and Of course the high-rises were not built and this is the safe way right in here and you recognize this little park and This isn't exactly what it ended up looking like but the yet. Wah restaurant is in here and the kind of parking lots around here And the mission was targeted to become part of redevelopment particularly after Justin Herman became head of redevelopment in 1959 Redevelopment of course started in the Western addition Where it had a disastrous impact and by the late 1950s the Western addition was being leveled the black and Japanese-American population was being Run out essentially and relocated. I came here in 68 And we had an office down where the performing arts center garages on Grove Street and the Western addition by that time Looked like it had been carpet bombed residents of the mission and saw what happened to the Western addition so when Jack Shelley Mayor Shelley and Justin Herman decided to to expand the redevelopment agencies project areas to Golden Gateway downtown south of market Chinatown Diamond Heights Western addition a two region so on the mission district They triggered quite a bit of opposition People's had seen what had happened to the Western addition and the idea was to to continue the Transportation system that was started with the construction of freeways and build Bart on your mission Street Connecting it up with downtown and it was in the initial reports for redevelopment the mission 5000 buildings It was recommended that 5000 buildings be torn down, which is essentially what had happened to the Western addition first Bart came in and and decimated Mission Street shut it down as a functioning commercial district for a couple of years at least while they they did the construction work on Bart there are lots of plans for For the mission about having you know if you read the plans smart shops on Mission Street high-rise clusters Like this around the Bart stations is one of the few high-rises who's actually built but a very interesting coalition of Old-timers small businessmen Irish Italian Armenian whatever background and Community organizers including various Marxist Leninist groups Faith-based acts activists and a number of newly formed Hispanic organizations organized against the redevelopment and By 1966 they had persuaded the board of supervisor was with the help of John Burton and George Moscone to Have the mission district removed from The redevelopment agencies control and this was a major major victory And of course what what it did for the mission is what did not happen to the Western addition So if you compare the two neighborhoods you can see the decimation and then the reconstruction of the Western addition with a lot of really Shabby low-income housing and the preservation really of the housing stock and in the mission district And it left a quieter legacy of course once redevelopment was driven out of the mission district the question became what to do with it this was a Symptomatic of other activities neighborhood activities that took place at that time This was the San Francisco State Strike strike of 1969 which was really a very early campaign for affirmative action number of people from the Western addition were trying to persuade San Francisco State to admit Latinos from the mission to go out and do outreach in the community and bring Latin Latinos into San Francisco State when the redevelopment agency disappeared the the organizers who had formed the mission coalition and Mayor Alioto who was brought in to replace Jack Shelley Jack Shelley was really ousted because of his inability to foist redevelopment on the mission He was only a one-term mayor and Joe Alioto previous head of the redevelopment agency was brought in and There was an agreement to introduce model cities and model cities at that time emphasize community-based planning and this is This is part of the plan that was developed under model cities in the late 60s early 70s for the mission Mission Housing Development Corporation, which you may recognize as being around today was of course part of that plan and this is this is the area around 16th and I think Bryant is in here someplace here is Petro So 16th and Bryant and notions of what could be commercial industrial space So this was this was a plan that was developed with community input was not a plan that was imposed on the mission By the redevelopment agency This was done in 1974 The plan noted that it was a community-based plan and noted that there was a lack of Federal funds for housing and they called for creative approaches to solving the housing problems They need for low-income housing in the mission and it also opposed the construction of high-rises around Bartz stations Model cities funding ran out in 1973 and they spent about three million dollars in the mission which should be compared to the millions and millions of dollars It was spent by the redevelopment agency around the city Ultimately the mission coalition collapsed from internal Conflict but that whole period left a very important legacy mission housing development corporation I mentioned earlier. This is a project of theirs on on Valencia Street Between 15th and 16th called Plaza de Estelle Soul. It was built in 1995 and Designed by Hood Miller Associates with Alan Martinez and the mission housing development corporation over the last 25 years It's about built about a thousand units of of new housing in the mission and Also part of the of the effort to deal with the housing situation was an interesting preservation movement called The Victorian Alliance, which was quite different from the National The San Francisco foundation a heritage foundation The Victorian Alliance was started by neighborhood people in the mission in response to the butchering of Victorians like the one on the right which has been Modernized or deconstructed or whatever you want to call it and They were serious a group of homeowners who wanted to get together first to figure out Well, you know, how do you fix up your house? And you have to understand that in the 60s and 50s and 60s of Victorians were considered white elephants They were falling apart. They were expensive to heat and people who had aspirations To move up the social ladder. We're going to the burbs and did not aspire to live in a Victorian Mission so when they wrote the mission housing development Corporation plan they had a preservation element in it and the notion was to try to spread home ownership Victorian home ownership among moderate income people and in fact Through an outfit called Caritas Homes a number of homes have been renovated Without being gentrified in the mission Caritas is managing about a thousand units of commercial and residential space Of course, not all of the Victorians, but the blue the bluish Victorian here on Cap Street near 25th near 24th is One that they renovated and and presently managed and they're associated with the Mission Housing Development Corporation And then other efforts, this is a little far afield, but this is the Bernal Heights neighborhood foundation being a Bernal Heights chauvinist I have to get this in this is the The market towers at the alimony farmers market that was built a couple of years ago, and then the new Bernal Gateway dwellings which the scaffolding is gone, and I think it's being occupied as we speak and this is it at army and Caesar Chavez I Think the interesting thing is is to see the legacy of the struggle against redevelopment that had a positive impact not only did it result in stopping the destruction, but it led to the ability to Continue community efforts toward building low-income housing I wouldn't argue that the the amount of housing that's been billed as adequate is Adequate to satisfy the needs of the community, but it has had a significant impact And then there are other impacts of life in this very interesting multi ethnic multi-class community cultural impacts the mime troop of course we all know and Know well and of course they are are internationally renowned. They're based in the mission Founded in the mission have been there for years and years You may see some people in this picture that you recognize or you've forgotten that they look like that years ago and places like the Galleria de la Raza which was founded at 24th and Bryant Street in 1970 by a bunch of Chicano civil rights activists also the Mission Cultural Center on Mission Street between 24th and 25th, which was also the work of all these interrelated groups of people and And this this is particularly fascinates me this was a book published by Glide called Time Degrees in The early 1970s by the Third World Communications Collective, which was not solely mission-brace, but there were a number of significant mission writers involved and it was Janice Mirkatani and Tezaki Shange Jessica Haggadorn Victor Hernandez Cruz and I think that this is one of the collections first collections of multicultural Literature published in the United States Here's the editorial Collective Joe Ramos on the left who looks quite different these days who designed the jacket and Rupert Garcia who some of us know and Alejandro Morghia and there's Janice Mirkatani Right here who is now the poet laureate of the city and Roberto Vargas a barrio poet who was One of my neighbors for a number of years and so on and so forth and of course there was a lot of solidarity activity with what was going on in El Salvador and Nicaragua at the same time The murals of the mission spectacular collection of murals Procedure eyes fatted in the 1970s by Mulheres Muralistas have done a remarkable job of decorating the buildings of the mission This is one of their Studios in Procedure Park. They have another office down on 24th Street and they do a lot of educational stuff in the neighborhood with kids Leonard Flynn on right across the street in Procedure Park and I think this is I'm not sure is this a swimming pool or what is this building? Yeah, it's a swimming pool on Linda on Linda's street another mural and Then the Bethany old folks home at 21st and and cap with this mural and another major event was Carnival and of course the mission is well known for its Latin music Carlos Santana is a mission homeboy as Is John Sontos? Nothing happened. There we go Gentrification began really in the 70s and we've been through three waves of gentrification gentrification in the mission district Sadly bohemianism and the mission district was attractive to Bohemians starting in the in the 50s in 1960s is often the harbinger of gentrification Houses like this one on Guerrero is about Guerrero and 25th have been Restored and are selling of course at extremely high prices And then in Bernal Heights in my own neighborhood where at one time 25% of the vacant lots in the city We're in we're in Bernal Heights You get kind of very interesting modern architecture on some of those whole side lots and The mission district of course has changed dramatically in the last ten years Valencia Street where I had an office in They're late 1960s virtually abandoned the time most of the storefronts were Boarded up is now extremely hip and then the contrast is Hipness is what you see under the freeway for instance One of the solutions to the housing problem in San Francisco another this is under the interchange at Cesar Chavez and 101 I Drive through here every day the population rises and falls it gets very large the city comes along Throws everybody stuff out runs everybody out within two or three days. It's there's another I guess they used to call these Hooverville's back again And then starting in the 1990s you have the arrival of the dot-coms This is a building on on Bryant and Cesar Chavez and they moved particularly into the north mission district Targeting old industrial buildings. This is best Foods and another factory on night on Bryant right across from KQED and A lot of these places were converted or in the process of being converted to live workspaces New live workspaces were built. This is one of the kind of poster child Live work efforts that was built ostensibly as a live work Building to avoid the various fees and taxes that residential buildings have to use and it's not at all residential and is barely occupied And of course, this is kind of dropped down sadly this slide Resistance in the community to the arrival of the dot-coms the fights are a proposition K and L and Quite a bit of success although not on the proposition but in terms of electing the current board of supervisors And of course one of the targets of the resistance in the community the anti-displacement movement in the mission was our favorite developer and a friend of mayor Joe O'Donohue Described in San Francisco make that magazine is the neighborhood bully and various centers of resistance cell space on Bryant Street, which is a community art center aspiring to take this this particular building over to turn it into a Community art center on a on a permanent basis and the old labor temple Which is now the redstone building site of the rhinoceros theater and also another center of Resistance to date displacement number of artists and non-profits living in this area And then something new I Should mention that there was a moratorium passed by the board of supervisors on the construction of live work This is John O'Connell. This is a new high school on Bryant Street. Just opened the other day designed by Marshall Lee Interestingly this was it's a vocational high school. So, you know, so it was a basic course in auto mechanics and that kind of thing and now they're teaching electronics and It's a very attractive building So I've given you a kind of a very quick run-through in the on the history and architecture of the mission of a very intriguing and dynamic Community and I think of the Victorians often when I when I think of the mission district because the original notion of the Victorian Which is described so well and Randolph Dela hanty's book in the Victorian style was really to build housing for moderate-income people and The notion of the mission originally is this kind of mixed-class mixed-race neighborhood was to be a group of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and that tradition continues today and There's been a lot of pressure on the community to change and the you know the lower-income people are definitely being squeezed out but Partly due to the downturn in the economy There's still all sorts of opportunities for the mission to preserve its its basic characteristics. Thank you very much Questions or Comments somebody have a mic does somebody have a mic David. They're recording this they wanted to get the questions on a mic Yeah, it's just for the recording equipment Okay, I'll repeat the questions you want me to repeat the questions Dave Okay Yes, ma'am You know, I don't know where it originally was. I became aware of it. It was on Bryant at Eighth and I don't know if that was the original building, but it's only been in the mission district for in the last ten years and That building was was built and of course, it's a architectural atrocity and Yeah, it was built specifically for a KQED and to How's their operations which to my mind? I like the radio station the TV station sort of recycles the stuff that comes out of Out of the rest of the system and you know KQED it was known for its local programming. We had a local news program We had a lot of very excellent Programs on television and it's very little that's done anymore. Yes. Here we go. I forgot to repeat the Repeat the question Well, that's very interesting because I moved in 1968 which is 33 years ago and That was very much a phenomenon on my block. There were three gay couples on that block Very living very discreet very quiet lives because as you know the gay community was not That out right and the other thing that you that I didn't mention which I meant to when I was showing that line of houses Was that I was talking about minority home ownership? Bernal Heights was one of the few neighborhoods in the city where a person of color could buy a house because you know, we had a housing restrictions up into I think 19 early 1960s and I my neighbors which is a very mixed group of people Have many of them been there since the immediate postwar years because it was the only place that they could buy a house in the city So it has this very interesting Characteristic kind of around the margins of this kind of refuge community for homeowners. Thank thank you for Well, there are two of them there's st. Anthony's and st. Peter's and I think the Sicilians were knocking heads with the the northern Italians Immaculate conceptions on fulsome and st. Peter's burned down has been rebuilt. They could not build the Size of the structure. They couldn't afford to build the one that was that was burned It was sadly burned by somebody robbing the poor box a number of years ago but immaculate conception was there and it was the site of a famous miracle a number of years ago where Where people claimed that they saw? Jesus Christ in the in the roof of the building and they had the block This is true They had the block off fulsome street with police barricades because there were so many people praying in front of a maculate immaculate conception somebody else Danny Ask it again. What the history of that construction was or why they were built there what their relationship to the neighborhood was Got me I mean my the the one on on Harrison I was assume it was built there because it was in both of them are fairly close together because it was largely an industrial area But I don't really know Please Okay, Peralta Heights is a in Procedo Valley. I mean you can get really precise here Procedo Valley is where the water runs down between Alabama and fulsome and ran into Procedo Creek, which then hooked up with Islis Creek just past just east of the freeway Peralta Heights sits over the freeway, and it's sort of York and Hampshire And actually I found a photograph in the library archives showing Peralta Heights before they carved off the east side of Burnal Heights in other words they carved off the east side of Burnal Heights and level it off and put one-on-one on it and prior to that there had been a Heights that extended farther to the east and there are a large number of Victorian Houses sitting on that and I saw this picture I was just staggered by the number of you know how densely the develop how dense the development was and how far much farther to the east It went about a couple blocks farther to the east Middle-income Victorians that we could buy that they could buy they all had flat windows They had the Bay window, but it was three-sided with flat lights, and I think you showed the mansions beforehand and They had the rounded windows Okay, so was that sort of like Was that an easy way to tell when it was I keep wanting to say prefab, but obviously they weren't pre-fab But was that sort of where the where the drop-off came where the round windows went away unless you had a big giant mansion from sugar No, you mean to the did the fancier ones have the rounded windows, and I don't think so It's the the style evolves from from the the Bay window Which is slightly tapered on the side I don't know how to describe it exactly into the square around we window the the squared off Bay window, which is when you're moving into the East Lake Style and the stick style so that's that's architectural historians, which I don't claim to be a great expert on architecture By the way, I'm a historian more by trade, but the differentiation they make which I explain in the book is Around the shapes of the bays, but it doesn't have to do with the windows being being rounded themselves Unless there's someone here who is more knowledgeable and can correct me Susan hi Peter I noticed at one point you were referring to a house or an area that had been renovated but not Gentrified and I'm curious how you differentiate those two terms, okay? Mission Housing Development Corporation works with an outfit called Caritas and Caritas Manages and manages the renovation of old residential and commercial buildings and a number of those are Victorians some of those are privately owned by people who have been Subsidized in one way or another to buy them some of them are owned and rented and The guidelines developed in the Mission Housing Development Corporation called for an attempt to restore Victorians so that Ownership of Victorians could be distributed equitably among low-income people and you know I don't mean to knock the heritage for San Francisco's architectural The foundation for San Francisco's architectural heritage, but heritage started in the Western addition To preserve historians, but they kind of went through and cherry-picked a few of the Victorians They could persuade redevelopment agency to allow them to move and they moved them to beat them in place out by Divisidero and there was no effort at that point to try to At least among heritage. I mean heritage later on did try some Efforts like this didn't get very far, but specifically in the original 1974 Plan there was a call for an effort and there's actually a guidebook on On the mission on Victorians in the mission that was developed as part of this effort so the notion was that you know you could protect the housing stock and Not have gentrification or gentrification means people of better means coming in and buying Cheap housing and you know that's basically is what happened. I mean I'm essentially I'm a suburbanite from New Jersey I won't even tell you what I paid for the house That I bought in Bernal Heights and that's gentrification Got one way in a backyard slightly familiar with the redevelopment activities that happened in different cities in the United States And there was a lot of pressure. It was what was hip in urban planning at the time, but what drove The planners in San Francisco to choose the Western addition and the mission was it Issues with maintenance of the housing or was it trying to increase the housing density? What were they driving? What were they trying to achieve with redevelopment? You know, I think this is this is an area that really needs to be more fully investigated But in the research that I did there was a private Housing agency and advocate for housing and the reconstruction or remodeling of housing in San Francisco in Late 1940s and they targeted the western western addition. It was dead-on racism and I mean, it's the language is despicable About, you know, white and bright communities like the marina and dark and grimy communities black communities We're not saying black skinned people, but it was it was dead-on racism So that was a private agency redevelopment agency comes along. This is a number of things one Prime real estate adjacent to City Hall To what we call Cathedral Heights, you know, not only primary real estate but prime real estate with with views three dilapidated housing stock and The original intent was in the a1 district, which was along Geary Street. That was the first Project Golden Gateway was the first commercial one downtown commercial mixed commercial and residential it was very clear the the initial intent was very clearly to Clean out low-income people clean out the the housing stock. There was absolutely no thought given to preservation whatsoever the redevelopment agencies reports on historic buildings are absurd and I quote them in my book about how they were I Think they said there was something like five historic buildings in San Francisco and one of them was in the western addition I mean, they had no idea what they were talking about no interest in in preserving or restoring or fixing up the housing stock for the primarily renting Populous there although there were homeowners there and there still are there's a large african-american home-owning community particularly in the western part of the western addition So it was only when the community organized and you when you start thinking it back Oh, the civil rights movement. Well, you know, there's happens to be a sort of a coincidental thing going on automobile row Organizing in the western addition only when that started to pick up speed It was Justin Herman forced to change a lot of the ideas of what would happen So the ILWU was brought in and they built st. Francis Square, which is cooperative housing I think the the interesting thing about st. Francis Square, which is in some ways a model project what it only Took one family that had been dislocated from the neighborhood. Everybody else moved in from the outside It just wasn't they weren't they weren't upper income or middle-income people They were low-income people because that was the notion But if you walk around st. Mary's Cathedral, you'll see the Presbyterian Church for instance has a number of kind of elder care facilities The Lutherans st. Mark's there. That's a really interesting. They have a little, you know these little histories of Churches and neighborhoods are rich with material and they got Involved in it and then when the resistance the pastor at st. Mark's was appalled at what was going on because That was a prime area to be targeted and at first they endorse it and then they realize that what was being done to the community So they got in they built the st. Mark's complex there. I think it's called the Lufthun Life Center or something so, you know the The idea of redevelopment was modified because of community pressure and You know, it's a whole very complicated story about the a2 district which is down around Grove and McAllister Street where basically they they got the black ministers in the area to Get involved in building each one sort of got their own little housing development You know, I mean the scams are a mile long. I'm afraid most of the records have been destroyed, but you know It's one of my ambitions is to go back over this terrain And try to figure out what happened and you know, Danny Says talk to Leroy King Because he knows Any other questions? Got one down here in the front It's right here Yeah, I was the mission district was the Sun Belt and it was considered a very desirable place and it was semi-rural And there were clusters of development. There were clusters of factories in the north mission, but it was fairly undeveloped Our mayor Sonny Jim Rolf for instance, he had a very Fancy house at 25th and San Jose So there were a number of houses and look on Dolores Street for instance there's in Guerrero There are a number of very large houses. So it was considered a very desirable place to build Originally, but then as it became more working class it was Not considered a place that you wanted to you know, you went to st. Francis woods or not st. Francis would you went to Pacific Heights or Russian Hill or Nob Hill to build and run rather than that district But initially it was appealing and they were actually country of states Built out there very early on 1850s 1860s because it was rural Oh, I'm sorry, oh, I didn't get the connection with earthquake Because they stopped the fire And if you look at for instance Gladys Hansen's book on the fire you can see very clearly the map And it burns south into the mission and I can't give you the exact line But if you look at the buildings you can figure out where the line is everything up to that line, which is around 18th Street Burned everything north of the line north and east of that line burned But by dynamiting and setting backfires they they were able to stop it. And so that was all protected we need to Yeah, we need to wind that up because the library is closed and The security guards gonna pull the lights and there's gonna be a blackout. It'll all be over. Thank you