 Welcome everybody. You are watching a People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area with Rachel Brahinsky. I'd like to welcome you all here tonight. I just have a few announcements to make before we get started. First of all, let's see here, I would like to welcome you all to the unceded land of the alone tribal people. We acknowledge the many Ramatush alone tribal groups and families as the rifle stewards of the lands on which we reside, SFPL is committed to uplifting the name of these lands and community members from these nations with whom we live together. SFPL encourages you to learn more about first person culture and land rights and are committed to hosting events and providing educational resources on these topics. I would also like to add that SFPL stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and supports collective action to end structural, systemic, and institutional racism in our institution and in our communities. As a library, we are here to help our communities by providing useful and factual information. And to start off, I would like to talk about our one city one book, 16th, our 16th one city one book, know my name by Chanel, Chanel Miller. She will be doing, I believe an author talk in March and we have a few other book clubs lined up on the way to find out more. You can go to our website and check out the events calendar. We have all the information on our one city one book there along with the other two programs that I will be introducing to you tonight. One of which is the Black History Every Day Panel, 3.9 Collectives Art of Research, and the President and the Jane Ball Teast Atkins African Americans of San Francisco. Both of these will be running in February. For more information, we can provide the links to it and you can find it on our events calendar on our website. Oh, whoops. I was hoping that screen share only showed the one thing. My apologies for that. Anyway, without further ado, let me present and introduce Rachel Brahinsky. I am going to have to pull up my notes again, so you'll have to excuse that. But Dr. Rachel Brahinsky is a human geographer and associate professor of the University of San Francisco where she is affiliated with the graduate program in urban and public affairs, the politics department and the urban studies program. Her scholarship focuses on race and justice in cities, particularly in California. As a former journalist with a focus on urban policy and social change, her current research investigates the geography of race and property in the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her PhD in UC Berkeley and her BA at Hampshire College. With that, I'll pass it along to Rachel. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Let me do... It's great to be here and it's really fun to see these comments. Hello, people who I know. It's very good. It's fun to see your names in the chat. This is in the Zoom. I assume... I think there are people on YouTube and I can't see who you are. It's great that you're here too. So I'm going to share my screen and get this moving. All right. So hi, everybody. And this is a sort of mock-up of the cover of the book. It's not exactly the cover, but it's the same photos that are on the cover of the book and similar colors. And so I just want to thank Norman and Anissa, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, for inviting me to do this talk for the Public Library and for the introduction. I really appreciate it. I'm going to do one more thing there so I can see... Sorry, I need to change my screen a little bit. Okay. Here we go. So it's just... It's terrific to be here and thanks to everybody who's out there. My presentation today is based, of course, on my recently published book, A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area. And this talk is adapted from a talk that I gave in the fall with my co-author Alexander Tarr. It's somewhat different. So if you've been down this road before, it's going to be a slightly different road. So hopefully that's a good thing. And I guess I just wanted to stay for some context. I've been studying San Francisco since 1997, first as a newspaper reporter, then as a doctoral student, and then now as a professor and researcher. And so all of that experience kind of walks with me as I worked on this book and as I kind of thought through how I wanted to do this presentation today, too. So before I dive into the content, I want to acknowledge that while Alexander Tarr and I wrote most of this book and edited the entire manuscript to kind of create one voice, this book owes a great debt to wonderful Bay Area scholars with special expertise in certain aspects of local history. So if you hear me say we, which I'm going to do a lot, it's not a weird tick. It's not the royal we. It's actually just that this work, even the parts that I did myself with nobody else helping me feel like the product of collective labor. And so it's important for me to acknowledge that and just kind of recognize that. And it is kind of one of the themes of the book as well you'll see is the kind of importance of and the power of collective collective work, collective efforts. One thing is you'll see a lot of images today. The primary photographer for our contemporary images is Bruce Reinhart. And any photograph without a name attached to it will be his any image that was contributed by someone else or that's from an archive will be noted with their name. I'm pretty sure I got that right throughout the presentation. So watch for those names and otherwise it's Bruce's work. And I want to start with this kind of collage of images from the book just to orient you to the people's guide and give you a sense of the kind of book that this is. What kind of book is it? So this is an unusual book. It's a hybrid of styles and ideas, though it's a guide as you can see in the title. It's also an academic work. It's peer reviewed. It's deeply researched. It's built through a series of more than a hundred short essays about places. And typically we use each place as a starting point for thinking about something larger. For example, the role of public space or the legacy of a particular activist movement or ethnic group. So through the book we're offering stories about places while also kind of reaching for the larger meaning with an emphasis on social justice struggles and on the political and economic tensions that produce those struggles. So the essays are very short and they collectively produce this larger narrative about the social and political geography of the region, how it has been produced and by whom. So that it's shaped like a guidebook means that it's written in a way that we hope will be accessible to a broad public. Also it's part of a series all by UC Press, Laura Polito, Lara Barraclough and Wendy Cheng are geographers who produced the first people's guide and this was on the city and counties of Los Angeles in 2012 and last year another people's guide came out on Boston and there will soon be people's guides to New York and Orange County of all places and then many more. We hope over the years it will be forthcoming as well. So again another piece of the collectivity of this project. The books are all different, the authors are all different, our approaches may even be quite different but there is a common theme of kind of trying to understand people's geographies in urban places in particular, mostly urban places, not always urban. So I'm going to take you on a little journey through the book today and with that all around the Bay Area and so this first slide is an overview of the region that we cover and it's also a guide to our chapters which is how I'm going to do the talk today. So we start in the East Bay in chapter one and then you can see that we head to the South Bay in chapter two up to San Francisco for chapter three and then to the North Bay and Islands mysteriously titled North Bay and Islands chapter four and there's more to the book than this but this is kind of what I'm going to cover today, these are the basics and you know I'm going to leave this map here while I kind of set the scene and frame out some of the big ideas and what I'm going to do is walk you through some of the themes that we cover and speak at more length about just a few of the sites, a few places in each chapter. I'll also sprinkle in a couple of the interviews that we did with people on the ground so you can hear some voices from the field. Excuse me and as you can see so we cover the whole region that was an important political choice at one point we thought is this going to be a People's Guide just to San Francisco or just to some other place we went for the whole region but we start the book in West Oakland and that's not because it's hit it's not because it's transit accessible to San Francisco as you might have read in the New York Times I know I read that in the New York Times but it's because it is in many ways one of the historic centers for so much of what we think of as San Francisco so from intergenerational activism to the painful scars of urban change from the historic visual culture of Victorian homes to the murals that grow and evolve with the community all told West Oakland reflects a really remarkable spectrum of the Bay Area's culture and politics its contradictions its challenges maybe even its hope for the future this is a place for example where mid-century redevelopment devastated the neighborhood but it's also a place where people responded by building movements calling for self-determination and community control and that cry really echoed around the world so in wandering West Oakland you'll intersect with the Bart train tracks as they swoop from under the San Francisco Bay shuttling thousands daily into San Francisco or normally they do right now not so many people but normally shuttling thousands daily into San Francisco and out to the east county suburbs and in the distance you can see the cranes of the port of Oakland our economic gateway to the world you'll almost certainly notice tent camps under the freeway overpasses or in the in-between places where uneven development has produced gaps in the urban fabric and not far from where these houseless folks find shelter you'll also see shiny homes often upgraded Victorians with high-end cars tucked in behind new fences these are the now ubiquitous uh polls of the Bay Area's economic extremes and Oakland is really only one piece of the larger story of course that this tells about people and place from there we take you in all directions from residential neighborhoods to tech campuses from office towers to hiking trails we really do so let's check out some more maps and this will give you a little more of the scope of the book I don't know what size screen you're looking at right now and so it's possible that this is very hard to read the words but don't worry I'm gonna I'm gonna share some of what this says as we kind of go through but basically you'll see some familiar places in this book and some unfamiliar places so we both wanted to cover you know topics that are of some general knowledge to folks in the Bay Area and we also wanted to cover places and people and movements that were less known and so you'll see a variety of kind of content this is the East Bay of course there were 26 sites and then the other thing to know about the book is that almost every site not every single one but most also has a nearby site mentioned or related sites mentioned so really the book is kind of referencing maybe 300 sites or something like that and just only about 100 of them get a get a full write up um here's the South Bay and Peninsula and you'll see we cover a lot of territory there we had a great debate as we were putting the book together about what constitutes the South Bay is Fremont part of the South Bay or not if you're from there you'll understand the debate I think and then we wanted to in the end include the entire peninsula all the way up to Daily City which as you can see is right on the edge of San Francisco but didn't make it into the San Francisco chapter so we're organized in this way and each chapter as you can see you know we have the kind of regional map and then a zoomed in map for the cluster of sites that are often in the urban core of whatever the the chapter's covering so in this case San Jose for the South Bay San Francisco has 33 sites and you can see that they're clustered around the downtown and the kind of central core of the city the mission western addition those kinds of neighborhoods there are a few elsewhere around the city there could have been way more we could do a whole book just on this city but we didn't do it that way so this is what we did and then North Bay and Islands where and the islands are you know Angel Island and Alcatraz Island and the Feralon Islands not all of which are always associated with the North Bay but we put them in this chapter and and we can talk about why sometime if you want to know but so this is the organization and so how does it all come together why does all matter what were we thinking about to answer that I'm going to start with this image of a Black Lives Matter demonstration you may have noticed a dot on the East Bay chapter map I'll show it again later so you can check it out that was out in the middle of the Bay Bridge and many of you might remember at least the impact of this action this was a demonstration that strategically stalled traffic on the bridge for several hours on Martin Luther King Day this is several years ago now maybe five years ago to raise attention specifically to the idea that Black health matters and we write about it as just one local example of the methods and tactics and kind of spirit of the now global Black Lives Matter movement and so I'm going to leave that on the screen for a minute while I talk just a bit about some more of the big ideas behind the book you know San Francisco has a progressive reputation but we argue in this book that the Bay Area is also a place with entrenched injustices racism economic violence homophobia this means that the work of understanding what has come before and how people have survived fought back reimagined and dreamed is essential here and beyond here what this book shows is that from San Jose to Oakland to even Petaluma people continue to seek and strategize for a better world these people persist they are creative sometimes they're victorious the scholar Catherine McKittrick writes about something that she calls the geographical imperatives in the struggle for social justice and following her line of thinking this book looks at the role of place and geography in understanding justice and asks how communities have reshaped the bounds of justice over time so throughout the book we come back to the idea that investigations into the two-way relationship between people and place people and the geographies that make them or that they make matter deeply for dreaming a new future Tony Morrison one of my favorites writes about this sort of work through the metaphor of mapping she says and now I'm quoting I want to draw a map so to speak of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery intellectual adventure and close exploration as did the original charting of the new world but without the mandate for conquest that's the end of the quote so this is an approach that we emulate here in this book detailed mapping and exploration and without trying to own or conquer we are all guests here that's our attitude in this book so what kind of bay area do we reveal in this book to help answer that I want to share a quote from an interview with activist and community leader and Tanya Lee and these are interviews that are sprinkled throughout the book she said when people think about the bay area bubble they're often thinking more of the hippies of Berkeley rather than the communists of chinatown the marxists in oakland who started the black panther party or the feminists of color that created all kinds of local institutions in the 1980s these stories give us a window into what kind of leadership and struggle are required for transformation of the whole country and so that gives you a sense you know sometimes when I say it's a people's guide to san francisco people say oh yeah yeah of course because they think that they understand that it means the san francisco bubble that Tanya's referring to but we're referring to bigger and more complex in this book so let's check out more specifically what we're referring to so we're going to start in the east bank once again and I'm going to have a sip of water so we're going to head here first and we use this entry about this park middle harbour shoreline park which is next to the port of oakland that's actually what's pictured here is the port of course the park is next to it you'll see it in a second but we use the entry about it to think about the role of ports in general and this port specifically in the rise of the region as well as the rise of the power of organized labour which has grown in part through the realization that closing this port has a massive effect across the economy and so it's useful for making political statements that will really be heard the park itself there it is has a fascinating history that I won't get into tonight but it offers a terrific underappreciated view of san francisco one of my favorites not too far away we write about the 1500 block of adeline and we write about the whole block really it's about one house but we didn't want to publish an address of someone's home but this is in the heart of west oakland and this entry opens the door for a discussion about the impact of foreclosures and the 2008 crash on bay area cities and the story of activists reclaiming a home that was threatened by bank foreclosure so the entry is about the success of that action but also about the legacy and succession of community work in this neighbourhood which was central for the pulmon porters union as well as for the black panther party and this is also where the successful moms for housing occupation took place just about a year ago after we finished writing the book but it's another example of the potential of direct action organizing to save working-class homes and this succession is you know it's about you know this is a place that continues to face struggles and that's why there's continued activism of note but it's also a place that continues to see organizing in response to seek and find collective solutions to these often individualized struggles home foreclosures is a really good example of that so nearby in downtown oakland our entry latham square tells the story of the oakland general strike in 1945 which was centered around women's labour in the retail district of oakland's downtown all of those beautiful old art deco buildings you know those when i see them now having done this research i think about the labour struggles of the post war era that's what they represent to me this historical photo shows strikers gathering in front of cons which is now called the rotunda so you may have been there it's an office building here's a site i'm going to talk about at a little more length this is the the francis albreyer community center the center is not in this image as you can see but francis albreyer is and this is some ephemera from a research file at the bankrupt library at berkeley about her and you know in our entry we tell the story of this one woman but it's also about the neighborhood in which she was central the place that she helped make albreyer's migration to south berkeley from alabama and the racial and gender barriers that she continually broke through really offer an emblematic story of post war struggles in her neighborhood and in the region at large albreyer was the first african-american to run for city council in berkeley in 1938 and she was the first black woman welder at the kaiser shipyard in richmond so in demanding her rightful place for this position with for which she was highly highly qualified but at first rejected she helped open up space for a generation of black women and this is just you know one of her many accomplishments you can see her in this photo here alongside ephemera from a national civil rights campaign to boycott discriminatory businesses this entry also gave us a chance to talk about the diverse cultural creativity of south berkeley long home long a multi-ethnic community largely black white and japanese-american for many years and this place had a really special community vibe fostered connections across these groups at a time in which segregation was still strong and racial tension kind of ruled the day in many places as it does again unfortunately now today one example was was that black families held deeds for japanese-american families who were forcibly incarcerated during world war two so that they could get their houses back when they returned years later this also was the neighborhood that successfully fought to underground the bar train when it came through and another amazing black woman community leader mabel howard led that fight so another place that has this sort of history and succession of activism and there's more going on there today actually that i couldn't mention if we had time but i'm going to quickly pass through a couple of other sites sites just to show you some images and a sense of the scope of some of the other topics that we cover for example we write about nine two four gillman which is a subcultural music venue made for a particular kind of rebellious youth you'll note that the sign says no drugs also no racism or misogyny and more in a very different vein we write about a section of the east bay this is around richman and san pablo that we call the fossil fuel corridor which is our way of thinking about the contradictory impacts of the oil refineries in the richman and san pablo area elsewhere in the book we write about the border between two cities piedmont and oakland and in this case a border that is heavily watched by surveillance cameras i'm going to tell you a little more about this site this is the intertribal friendship house or really it's a mural on one side of the parking lot of the intertribal friendship house and you know this is one of several places that we use to think about the bay area as a long-standing site of native american life from pre-conquest through today and tomorrow the intertribal friendship house was founded in 1955 by members of several different tribes and as the name implies and many of whom had been coerced by the federal government to relocate to the bay area with the government's intention that they would assimilate into white culture some people did indeed lose their way and lose their connection to their culture but others came together to build an important urban native identity which connects to deeper histories but also to the radical political movements of the 1970s including what was called the american indian movement and the takeover of alcatraz island which we write about elsewhere in the book as well as to contemporary efforts to reclaim indigenous spaces like the sagorate land trust which is a woman led indigenous land trust in the east bay based in east oakland not far from the ifh it's much better known now they've gotten quite a bit of news coverage lately than it was when we first wrote this entry several years ago when it was in draft form fewer people had heard of it so it's been really exciting to see sagorate out in the news and getting attention and getting funding so with this site we emphasize how history is made and remade through people and the institutions that they build and sustain and that's another important theme across the book as a transition to the next chapter i just want to briefly mention one more east bay site this is the front steps of the pacific center others there would be lots to say about the center itself here we tell the story of south asian queer cultural organizing starting with the chance meeting of a couple of tech workers in the 1980s they met through a flyer that was posted here at the bay areas oldest lgbtq center it was founded in 1973 over in berkeley and then the organization that they created together and this is now back in the 80s when these folks met tricone is believed to have been the first formal south asian or desi lgbt identified organization in the world and the people in this image a couple of them lead a wonderful historical walking tour that they researched and told this story that's where i learned it and many others and you should check them out so let's head down to the south bay though i'm checking my time time to go to the south bay and peninsula and we're going to start with a little bit of history that's hidden in the landscape so this first one the gold street bridge this is one of my favorite kinds of people's guide sites they're all my favorites but but this kind i particularly love that the sort of approach and this kind of thinking because this is the kind of place where you can go to think about how vernacular or just every day that's what vernacular means every day landscapes don't always reveal radical histories but those histories are very likely there what so so this bridge connects the city of santa clara to the former city of el viso and though you just might see it as kind of a freeway overpratt overpass this bridge is the place where chicano activists working with activist scholar Ernesto Galarza who was then a professor at san jose state university set up their own toll booth as part of a campaign to demand that the streets here be paved back in 1973 so in the book we tell the story of how the city of el viso went from it was a city back then went from being a santa clara boom town to an underdeveloped enclave home to a succession of immigrant groups and eventually largely home to chicano families that's when the toll booth activism took place and i've got a picture here from the newspaper it's the best one we could find and now the city or that it's now a neighborhood is now being threatened by the long march of tech generated wealth across silicon valley the toll booth action wasn't intended to raise a lot of money but instead to draw attention to the disinvestment that was the norm in the city which was later incorporated into san jose so the the lack of paving of the city streets was one visible issue but of course that was just the tip of the iceberg with housing health jobs and other concerns also at the top of the agenda meanwhile as a side note although maybe it shouldn't be a side note uh today el viso is sinking literally the land is sinking in part because of the historical over drawing of groundwater for agricultural and industrial uses so i guess you could say the struggle goes on in a variety of ways so in other parts of the south bay we talk about housing justice specifically which is not always a topic that people associate with silicon valley and so i wanted to share this one story so this is the lorenz tractor it's the entry to the lorenz tract and so many mid-century subdivisions across the south bay and across the country were very specifically and consciously designed to be segregated that's what developers and realtors believed would sell best and it's what buyers who were able to buy seem to want but this place was explicitly designed to be integrated back in the 1920s the palo alto chamber of commerce had tried to formally segregate the city they did not succeed 25 or so years later in 1948 the palo alto fair play council kind of brought a different take to thinking about segregation to the city of palo alto and they led the development of this new neighborhood it started out as one third african-american one third asian-american and one third white they were very careful about those ratios and here is one of the original planning maps so this carefully calculated integration that they began with has really faded over time as you can imagine people move things change but the history is worth revisiting particularly in the ways that it represents solidarity across groups that's one of the things that i find interesting the fair play council formed just after world war two led by a human rights activist and german immigrant gerda eisenberg she was working to help japanese-american families that were returning from world war two internment camps to a city that was openly hostile to them she worked also with elsa olsberg who was a retired social worker and she was working to help german jews with their immigration papers so lots of different groups kind of working together to find their way in this place they oversaw free counseling on housing discrimination early efforts to provide culturally appropriate education to latino students and the creation of this place the lorenz tract the name of the tract comes from paul lorenz an african-american student at stanford who was on the fair play council board and he played the delicate role role of moving the project through the palo Alto planning board tough job so another big theme in the south bay is labor we offer a couple of different takes on it i'm just going to swoosh through a couple of them to give you some images and thoughts for example the new me auto plant as you can see now this is tesla but once upon a time it was called new me and the transformation of this site really represents more than a half century of workers struggles changing dynamics of race and the changing meanings of both suburbanization and industrial technology so we found it interesting for the way that it represented all of those things i'm also interested in how much space it takes up look at all of that if you know especially with this drone photo you can really see the massive parking lot the massive buildings and just consider what that means and and how else we could use places like this a little editorial so also about labor let me get back on track back to my notes we we look at the labor and environmental implications of quick silver mining so that's mercury with a story about the new almadin mine and this is an image from the san jose history room archive of either miners or people posing to be miners i'm not totally sure but they're meant to represent miners in the hills over the santa claire valley so we try to show the ways that the gold rush was more about more than just gold and about more than just the sierras with this story as well so it was also important to us to think about the role of young people even in the south bay which often i think it's stereotyped as kind of a culturalist suburbia the kind of classic americana but there's there's more than that going on there and you know so through this story at the san mateo fairgrounds we tell the story of filipino dj culture in san mateo and also thinking about the youth over at san jose state we end the chapter with the what we call the victory statue salute which memorializes the very well-known story of the 1968 olympics in mexico city and this famous fist in the air strike protesting a range of injustices and the production of the olympics but what we point out something that few people know i think or those less are known which is that this had its roots in san jose san jose state students organized for years to develop the theory and practice of athletes taking a political stand and tommy smith and john carlos who were shown here in the sculpture by rego 23 bay area artist these guys were san jose state students mentored by other san jose state students say that 10 times fast i'll stop trying but they were mentored by other students of color athletes of color at the university who supported them and taking a stand so one of the really big points here is that an act that appears to be the work of one or two people may well be the product of collective action and in this case it was and with the words collective action let's head to san francisco and i'll pause here for a minute on the map for you to just check it out again and we will start this chapter where we do in the book which is um on bernel heights where san francisco police horrifically killed alex nieto while he was sitting on a park bench eating a burrito many of you will already know this story especially if you're locals so i'll just note that this entry uses the community intervention of creating a memorial for nieto to think about the twin and not unrelated histories of left activism and latinx migration into the mission district an official memorial is coming soon thanks to organizers this photo is of one of the temporary memorials that has been made and remade several times i was there a couple of weeks ago and it's a lot larger now um so if you do the walk around bernel hill you'll find it if you don't know where this is different topic one of the themes of this chapter so you may know um the story that the african-american population in san francisco has been leaving there's been an out migration going on since at least 1970 and that's true black san franciscans have been migrating out and so it felt extra important for us to cover some of the key touchstones in african-american history in the city and i'm just kind of walk past a few of them but these include and you can look out for them if you check out the book at the public library by the way they have it at every branch um so you can uh uh get the story of the hunter's point shipyard which as locals will know this is a still unfolding story but we kind of you know we try to situate what's happening there now with the transformation of the shipyard in the kind of bigger question of what the fate of the neighborhood will be and and who has been um able to kind of participate in the process of transforming the neighborhood which has long been a stronghold for african-american san francisco still is to a certain extent um and just up the hill from the shipyard we look at westbrook court and the hunter's point hill street names there are quite a few street names up there uh that represent the activism of a group of women and their allies in the 1960s. Eloise Westbrook was one of them and there are several others you can go walk around and check them out i'm working on more research on those folks right now so maybe i can come back to the library in a couple of years and talk about talk more about those people sometime soon. Also we write about kaypoo radio that's how we say it around here if you're not from here and this is the oldest black owned community radio station on the west coast born out of the activism of the late 60s and 70s in part because of student activism at san francisco state but also in relation to urban renewal uh programs all across the city and people's resistance to them um and the radio station still stands and persists and um this is on divisadero street in what used to be more central to the western edition but it's a piece of the western edition so speaking of media in the book we take you down to market street and this is what i like to call what we we renamed the media moguls corner that is not a name that anybody uses that i'm aware of but maybe that'll start to be used um you can see latas fountain which is where people came together after the oh six quake um but what you also can see is this red office building or red tinged office building what we write about is is this is the corner where the major newspapers of the late 19th and early 20th century fought to establish visual dominance over each other through the development of larger and larger buildings so the red toned building was the first in that battle this was the city's first skyscraper built in 1890 by the de junges who owned the san francisco chronicle at that time and if you could spin around at this corner you would also see the sf call building across the street both were outdone in terms of height at least by the hearse building which was originally home to the san francisco examiner and i'm checking my time i'm going to skip past this is a site familiar to many san franciscans the international hotel i'm going to move on here and head to the trans march so we take on one thing that we do try to do in the book is take on familiar topics with new approaches so for example here at delores and 16th street streets we're at the site of the start of the trans march and this is an example of a people's guide site that is not just a single place and yet it is an event that actually creates both metaphorical and literal space for trans people and i have a reflection quote here from cecilia chung who was a co-founder of the trans march and she says up until that point we really didn't have any space that we could claim and we said why do we have to wait until somebody dies before we show up we were thinking about celebrating creating a new space now trans march has become its own animal even if we didn't step up to organize it would still happen and cecilia went on in the interview to talk to me about how taking up space in the street in this particular way has produced a whole series of other things often people say marches don't matter here's a march that really has mattered institutional support for a trans cultural district which is centered in the tenderloin funding for health care other things like this so i want to close the san francisco chapter with two sites that are centered around the themes of power and surveillance this is uh as you can see the civic center and un plaza you know if if you were in my urban studies class we would be talking about how civic centers represent urban power and studying their development and use can really tell you a lot about the fundamental values of a city where many people might focus on the classical architecture here the museums actually the public library right around the corner or the mayor these are all really terrific topics really interesting topics but what we focus on in this entry is on the people who seek shelter in these plazas and we write about the crisis of homelessness that continues to grow but we also write about the way that activists use this central civic space as a kind of venue for making their claims to the city to the state about how they see how things should be different how we should manage this problem differently in this space this this area that ends up being surveilled so much you can see that we're representing that with the police truck in the front and city hallway in the back is very very important to to activists and the way that they both help people survive and also help people make their voices heard around homelessness and I head to the other end of market street quickly this is room 641a or it's a building that contains a room with that number so this is the atnt building on fulsome street and it was revealed some years ago as a secret surveillance node where our digitized information including probably this interaction right having right now over zoom and youtube all of our information is routed and can be read with the blessing of congress so in this entry we tell you about the ways that your data is being captured and watched and we use this entry also on the other hand to talk about the open source software movement which shows how tech is not always about top-down power and the bay area has been very important in the early development and continued development I think of the open source software movement but we also argue here that to find the bottom-up tech you need to look a lot farther than the apps that claim to democratize our lives with ride hailing and things like this this point also makes the this piece sorry also makes the point that this is one of the many places of the supposedly place less internet and the bay area has lots of views I would love to see an atlas of the physical dynamics of the internet in the bay area that would be really a great book someone someone make that book please here's the north bay and then a swish through and just show you a tiny the tiniest bit of the north bay people often associate the north bay with nature and not surprisingly that is one key theme in our book but we treat it often in some unexpected ways so we look for example at this trail the tamales bay trailhead but for us this is a story of labor and land use struggles we look out at the feral on islands really beautiful amazing I love this photo of all these animals but we write about its troubling toxic history when you know the US Navy was trying to get rid of nuclear waste from hunter's point it ended up out here by these islands we talk about china camp and I'll talk a little bit more about this one this is you know a park that represents a really important intersection between chinese immigrant history and environmental and labor struggles and renae young who's the director of a nonprofit called chinese whispers chinese whispers has done a lot of work to preserve the true history not just the mythology of china camp and she explains a little bit about it here in this quote she says you hear about the railroad you hear about the mines you hear about laundry and restaurants but somehow chinese maritime history has been a hidden story and there's a strong relationship between the loss of this history and the loss of the landscapes where these events happened there were other chinese camps in this area and they were all burned down by arson and you know actually that quote does everything that I want to say about you know kind of why this place matters how this history matters and the relationship between things that happened here and the way the landscape is treated the way the people are treated and the landscape is treated by our society so just a couple more things to say before we shift to q&a and I want to close with this image here from the albany bulb which is in the east bay this is of course the former landfill that has been over the years an open space that inspires creativity and art a home to the houseless for many years not now as far as I can tell and now really a formalized part of the east bay park system which is part of why it's no longer home to people without houses I want to share a quote from susan moffat who runs an organization called love the bulb that takes care of the bulb and helps keep all this really amazing art going her quote expresses something meaningful about the way that places become embedded with history and why we should continue to excavate these place based histories she's speaking about the bulb of course specifically but the metaphors here apply more widely so here's what she says she says the bulb kind of holds up a mirror to the urbanization that has happened around the bay everything that got torn up in order to make room for change and the urban fabric got dumped out here it's where the waste created in the process of development is made visible when we build something new we forget about the old stuff that has to go away but the chunks of highway and bathroom tile and pieces of rebar sticking out here remind us that there is no away there is no away and so while not all places have such visible remnants of the past as the albany bulb does this story of the albany bulb reflects a larger need that we have I think collectively to excavate and understand what really constitutes the ground we're standing on how did we get here who claimed power along the way and what are the implications of that claiming in the landscape and in our lives are we more or less unequal now and how can we change that for the better sometimes the answer is in the histories that we walk across every single day so each place is a story and each story opens up a broad set of questions that can take you in many directions virtually or literally and in the end I kind of want to leave you again with the idea that the ongoing study of the relationship between places and people can teach you a lot about of course where you are but also who we are collectively and how to move through difficult times like the ones that we're we've all been experiencing for a while now thank you for listening thank you for your interest in the book we do have about 10 minutes for questions and I'm going to unshare my screen and thanks so much thank you Rachel um before we go ahead into q&a I just want to mention that for anybody that wants to see the recording of this of this event well we do have we will have a copy of it on our our youtube page which the link for that is in the chat bar or chat window rather and if you have any other questions for us feel free to continue using the q&a function we'll still be taking them the first question that we have for q&a is comes from Estelle Schneider and they're asking if we can I'll just read this word forward could you please explain a little regarding your your comment about surveillance somewhere between Oakland and Piedmont thanks yes thank you so this was our the site that is the Oakland Piedmont border and what we look at there is that there are a license plate reader cameras that are installed all along the border and ostensibly you know these cameras are about catching people who run red lights or they're speeding things like that but what I just lost track of his name but John his last name is going to come to me John did the research on this on this one and what he argues in this piece is that this produces this kind of invisible fence and it produces a situation where only this kind of border between these two cities you know the city of Piedmont is entirely surrounded by the city of Oakland and there has long been a socioeconomic distinction between the two Piedmont being much more wealthy and choosing not to incorporate essentially with the city of Oakland and so because of that history in light of that history the cameras that are apparently meant to be about car violations feel like something bigger right they feel like something bigger and so it ends up being kind of a surveillance fence that's invisible you know you don't notice it unless you know to look up and check out those cameras our next question is could you tell us a bit about how you and your co-author Alexander chose the sites to cover and thanks terrific yes it's you know it was quite a process over the course of many years I think we started talking about this book as a concept you know in 2012 or 13 and it took some time to get around to doing the book proposal in which we included certain sites and then it took some time to get to devising and expanding and you know there's a huge the cutting room floor is large in terms of sites that we thought about covering and then didn't write about and I would say we were looking for you know we wanted to write alternative stories about places that people kind of know about we also wanted to identify places and stories that aren't as well known about but we also wanted to cover across many different themes it was important to think about labor struggle it was also important to think about environmental issues we wanted to think about lgbtq histories and legacies perhaps ones that are lesser known you know and that's part of why we're interested no the pacific center being in the east bay and being the oldest lgbtq center whereas people usually think of the Castro when they think of the bay area at least folks who aren't from here when they think about queer histories and legacies so we you know wanted to think about racial justice in some ways we were trying to do a little bit of everything which couldn't wasn't possible of course but we wanted to cover sort of a breadth of concerns and also kind of good geographic coverage and we wanted to show how you could go to a place like the gold street bridge and be in the presence of living history even if it just looks like it's a piece of the freeway so we were looking for a lot of places like that as well and there's probably more that I could say about how we were choosing sites but hopefully that helps give some idea I see there's another question let's see our last question here is will there be a volume two no I don't think so this this was a labor of labor and love over many many years and I have to say I am tempted in the sense that since the book came out it was published the pub date was sometime in October of 2020 so it's just been out a few months and every week not every day but probably every week I come across a new story that I think oh I wish I had known about that maybe we could have put that in the book and on that front you know that makes it sort of tempting to think about more but I think it's more I want the book to be an invitation to all of you and other people to you know write your own versions of these stories and research and we do have a website that's in production and when the website is up it'll be a place where we may produce some new material I'm not sure yet exactly how that's going to work because it's a website for all of the different people's guide books there'll be a little bit of content from each book and then space for some new material but I'm not I'm not planning right now on volume to my personal project now is to write a book about one thing myself I'm not sure it looks like there might be some more questions oh David Kessler hi David will Kamala's house be in the next edition that's cute I don't know if it would have been you know that that's an that would be an interesting thing to ponder would be would be right about Kamala Harris's house which I just someone just showed it to me Donna Graves who is one of the writers for our book one of the contributing writers took me on a walk and showed me Kamala Harris's house just very recently so we'll have to consider whether it should go on the website and I see Christina Moreta who I have to thank for her help she's a on staff at the library and she I think right now is doing emergency work around COVID and not in the library but she wrote a question do I have a current research project that I'm working on and that's yes which so I mentioned the the Westbrook court and Hunters Point Hill street names and I'm working on a book about the women of Hunters Point and of the big five who in the 1960s and 70s were community leaders who kind of reshaped the way that redevelopment worked urban redevelopment in their neighborhood and and so I'm researching them interviewed several of them before they passed thankfully and that's that's the book that I'm working on right now I see one more question here from someone do you have any opinions on how we might do city do city planning and couple it with efforts that can incorporate place-based histories yeah I do have opinions about that and it's kind of a big I'd love to have a conversation with you about it I mean I you know I I've had a lot of you know I teach in a program where students are learning urban planning and I teach about histories of urban planning and sort of critical histories of urban planning and I think there's been a lot of effort over the last bunch of years recent years decade really I would say where planners are trying to incorporate local voices and artwork and kind of different approaches to planning and some of them are really interesting and creative and also they come into collision sometimes with the kind of development mandates of a neighborhood and so it can be a tricky thing but I'm thinking about you know the Buchanan mall which is this walkway in the western addition in the Fillmore district which has been redone in this really beautiful way you know it's a space between buildings it's kind of a an alleyway almost but it's bigger than that anyway it's it used to be a street but it's it's pedestrian only and it's been redone with art and with murals that include photographs of community activists and things like that and I think that's a really beautiful way to to kind of bring place-based history right into the city kind of in your face they've done it really well I think it's still underway there's going to be some new things that are coming in there but I would I would love to talk to you more about that sometimes there's more to say I see a couple more questions that have popped up and so I'm going to read those um let's see someone says what do you think about the increase in urban community gardens so they help neighborhoods or cause gentrification or both yeah I think that's kind of the answer the both which is you know it's tricky it depends who's who's using the garden and it also depends on whether there's community organizing I think in the neighborhood nearby if there's not you know gardens don't automatically produce gentrification but they can be used to sell neighborhoods and so you see this where you know in in advertisements for new homes they'll be you know the amenities are you know great there's a garden here and it and along with lots of other things I've been seeing the slow streets you know the COVID era slow streets have been named often in in ads for new homes now and so that doesn't produce gentrification but they are part of a package of things that are considered to be amenities that can be used as part of a claim to raise housing how home values which then of course raises rents as well and so it gardens can be a part of the process of gentrification but if there's community organizing in the neighborhood it's also possible to find ways to make gardens kind of productive of other kinds of things as well or instead community connection engagement support networks growing food for people in need rather than just private plots that's another way to do it so it depends it depends how it's done but it's a really tricky question for sure and a good one to ask I see one more question here which is if Kamala's house is included in you know the mythical volume two of this book so should be the Berkeley South Asian radical history tour yes and actually and I'll read the rest of the question and I'll tell you actually they're in our book already in in the people's guide and you saw a picture of them but I didn't I was moving fast and so I didn't name them but the Berkeley South Asian radical history tour connects all kinds of things actually I won't read that whole question because I don't want to go down too many different roads but basically in our book we have two sites that look at the politics of the South Asian diaspora that came that are some of the information came from you know first walking on the South Asian radical history tour with Barnali Ghosh and Anurvan Chatterjee and you should all go take that walk it's really fantastic and I believe they're still doing some version of it during COVID and you will start if they still do it the same way at the Pacific Center on those front steps so that was where you saw a photo of them leading a group several years ago starting their tour and it's a tour that kind of gives you a sense not just of history but the way that radical history and place intersect with each other so we have a lot of affinity I think or I have affinity for them you can ask them what they think of me I think those are all of our questions unless there are some in the chat I don't think so and just lots of love from YouTube okay great questions from YouTube or no questions just love and thank yous and great work and yeah sounds great great I do see one question that popped up just now in the chat here which is is there an ebook version and yes I believe there is and go to the UC press go to UC press and or go to my website which I flashed on that last screen I don't know if you got it but if you google me you should be able to find it and if you go to my website to the tab with the name of the book there is a discount for buying the book that you can get there's a code and it'll also get you to the ebook and it looks like Anissa has just shared a link possibly to the library's version of the ebook as well so you can do that for free which would be great and all the links are there so thank you and and I'll just pop into all the links are in that document that I shared with you and you can pick that up and again it is available on youtube and yeah thank you Rachel thank you Norm thanks so much I'm just here for a few words thank you Rachel uh for you know joining us tonight and you know talking about you know all the history that we we weren't aware of I'm definitely interested in picking up the book now all right and reading it from cover to cover excellent thank you thank you so much it's so great and everyone you know everyone here already knows this but support the library that's all I have to say take care see you all soon in real life I hope