 OK, thanks so much, Christina. And thanks to all of you for coming out. Right, so as Christina said, the book was just published last week, and this is the first place that I've spoke since the release. And I'm really delighted to be doing it here since, again, as Christina mentioned, I spent a substantial portion of my life upstairs on the sixth floor here researching history of the Mission District. Forgive my voice. I have a cold that just decided to settle right here this morning, so I have the power through. So I did research all over the place, though. There's a lot of research in here from the National Archives in Maryland, California State Archives in Sacramento. A lot of little archives around the state, so the Archives of the Catholic Archdiocese. There's a little Franciscan archive down in Santa Barbara that I went and worked in, the Military History Museum in Sacramento. But really the bulk of the research was done right here in the Bay Area. So I did some work out at the Labor Archives at San Francisco State. Across the Bay and the Bancroft Library, there's a lot there. The California Historical Society down by MoMA has really good collections that feature prominently here. But if there's one set of collections that really are featured more than any other, it's the ones right upstairs here in the San Francisco History Room. And they really are a terrific collection, so I encourage all of you to use those collections and to support them however you think you can. One big boon, one big win with my publisher was that I got them to put about 90 images in the book, which is a lot more, some in color a lot more than you can usually get in this kind of a book. And the San Francisco History Room provided it's got to be half of them, at least. And that includes this cover image, which I really loved. These come from deep within the archives of the San Francisco Unified School District. This is from 1948. And what it is, it's a textbook for grade school students. I think these are fifth graders, right? So this is a part of the social science curriculum. This book is called San Francisco Today. And when you read it from the perspective of the 21st century, it's very clear that what it is is a method for indoctrinating young people into the ideas of city planning. And particularly of urban renewal, which was on the way in the coming decade. So you can see here you have these poor little waves here in the shadows of the dark, dangerous Victorian city that's falling apart. And these workers here, the bulldozers and the construction, is kind of delivering them to this sunny, bright, airy, modernist future, which looks a whole lot like suburbia. So the book, I spend a lot of time looking at kind of the nitty gritty of planning power, right? Who had the power to decide what was going to be built where? What kind of coalitions formed? Whose interests won and whose interests lost, right? But I also spend a lot of time really attending to the cultural dimensions of that story. The power, urban planning power, needs kind of cultural support. So that features really heavily. So I moved to the Mission District in 1997, right before the dot-com boom really, really boomed. And I lived there until 2007 when, like so many others before me and so many more since, I was basically priced out. We lived, my then partner and now wife lived in a little place on Shotwell. And it was a really nice place, but it was also pretty dark, pretty small. And our landlord is actually quite jealous, generous. He could have charged a lot more for the place, but we just found that we were spending a lot of money for a very small place. That while I was a starving grad student at Berkeley, and it just started to make less and less sense. So we did the standard migration pattern. We went to Oakland. We lived in Oakland for three years until I was hired by the University of Oregon in 2010. And we've been up there ever since. But I always really do love coming back to San Francisco and to the Mission District, the city and the neighborhood that I love so much. It's also, however, more than a little unsettling to come back for reasons that I'm sure a lot of you will just immediately understand. The neighborhood has really changed and changed a lot, especially in the last couple of years. But the truth is that apart from a brief lull after the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, the pressures on the neighborhood have been pretty constant for about 20 years. That's pressures on the real estate market, certainly on the commercial fabric of the neighborhood, and also really on the cultural resources of the neighborhood. So while I was living here, I often found myself, because it's a fascinating story, just for my own edification, coming right upstairs here to the history room to research the history of the place just so I could have a sense of how it is we got here, just for myself. During this same period, I was trying to figure out what my big research project was gonna be. This was originally gonna be a comparative history of urban renewal in Barcelona and San Francisco. I actually went to Barcelona and started doing some research there and everything. But all the while, I kept coming back here and looking into the history of the Mission District until it finally dawned on me that I was not gonna find a more interesting story than the one that was right at my doorstep. So I dove in head first, and I found that there really is a remarkable history, a remarkable story to tell here. So this book, it's not in a history of gentrification or speculation, but those issues do, of course, come up. And I would suggest that this broader history really helps to frame, really helps to understand those issues. But what I was most interested in was the history of neighborhood-based power. When and under what conditions was the neighborhood able to plan for itself? The book begins in 1906. No sooner had the embers of the Great Fire cooled than there erupted a fight over how the city would be rebuilt. And that marks, if not the very first, then certainly a very early and very important moment when residents of the Mission first proclaimed the right to plan for themselves. The book stops in 1973 when the Nixon administration cut off funding for the Model Cities program, which I'm sure a lot of you know was a great society program that provided federal funding for well-organized low-income communities to, for planning initiatives. I stopped in 1973 for a couple reasons. For one thing, I found that the story of the Mission District from the 1970s on is actually reasonably well understood. There's a few good books on it. There's also people who just lived there through the period who remember it. And the standard histories that I always encountered, I never found anything that really sharply contradicted the stories that I found in the archives. When you go back earlier, though, when you get back into the 1960s, the literature really thins out dramatically. There's one very good memoir from an organizer named Mike Miller that features quite a bit here in the last chapters of the book. There's a good book by a guy named Tomas Sandoval. He's written some stuff about the 60s. But once you get back into the 60s, it gets pretty sparse. When you get back to World War II and the pre-war period, there's next to nothing. It's very surprising. The Mission District has almost no literature on it. There's a few discussions of it here and there. That's a big gap, because I found that that longer history was really incredibly fascinating, both on its own terms and also, if you wanna understand the history of the present. And what I found, and what I argue in the book, is that you can really trace a pretty clean lineage, even from groups like the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition that are active today, back to the 1960s, back through the war, and even all the way back to the groups that organized during the Progressive Era. Now, a lot of the goals and politics and worldviews of the present-day groups, they really could not be more dissimilar from some of the groups in the Progressive Era, whose politics are sometimes rather shocking to 21st century sensibilities, as you'll see in a few minutes. But when you look at the larger structural questions, and you think in terms of institutional capacity and strategies, there really is an unbroken lineage from the Progressive Era right up to the present. Now, in the popular discourse, as well as in the scholarship, we tend to think of urban-based planning as being reactive, right? There's a big plan for public housing or urban renewal or a freeway, let's say, and a disparate collection of people organized to fight it. But then the resulting coalition inevitably disintegrates the moment the battle at hand is either won or lost. And certainly before the coalition is able to put forward a plausible alternative vision for the neighborhood, it just kind of falls apart, right? And that's the standard picture that we have of neighborhood-based planning. It really appears to be kind of episodic and reactionary. And sometimes that is exactly how it goes. But I think the central argument of this book is that we make a big mistake when we instinctively characterize neighborhood-based planning that way. Often, that's not the story, and it certainly is not the case in the Mission District, which has a very durable and deeply rooted tradition of neighborhood-based power. So in my talk today, I wanna focus on the earlier period of my study for a couple of reasons. First of all, I'm firmly in the camp of people who hates it when someone gives a talk about a book that's 400 pages and covers 70 years and all. So this would be 70 years and 50 minutes and just like a couple of little snapshots. I prefer to go in deep on one period so I can really give you at least a little bit more of the texture of the period. I also wanna focus on the earlier period because the story is almost completely unknown, surprisingly. It's also where I have a lot of the most compelling visual material. So it just makes more sense in a context like this. Before I jump all the way in though, I wanna observe that when you spend a lot of time thinking about the history of a neighborhood, you're immediately confronted with the question of what a neighborhood is. There's a lot of different ways you can think about it, right? You can think about official mappings, right? Census tracks, Supervisorial Districts, Service Delivery Districts, but that's rarely what people are talking about when they talk about a neighborhood. A neighborhood is really kind of an amorphous socio-political formation. And it really depends on a kind of cultural consensus. And unlike, say, a municipal government whose existence is pretty much guaranteed as long as the city exists, neighborhoods can come and go, and they do. This is most obviously the case when you see a big clearance. After urban renewal, one longtime resident began to describe San Francisco's Fillmore as the No More. So this is the Fillmore District here. And for a lot of the old residents, that neighborhood is gone, right? Now, a lot of people will tell you that the Fillmore still exists, even if it exists in dramatically altered form. But consider the case of the Five Points neighborhood in Manhattan, a notorious 19th century slum. It was both physically cleared and culturally erased. There is no Five Points anymore, it's just gone. But the thing is you don't need dramatic state action for this kind of thing to happen. So let's think about an area that used to be called the Latin Quarter in San Francisco. This is kind of over North Beach. This was a pre-World War II neighborhood. And originally that term was used because the area had a large pan-European population, but a lot of Southern Europeans in particular. But I found that by the Progressive Era that the term often referred specifically to the Colonia, which was the Spanish-speaking neighborhood that was kind of between Russian and Telegraph Hills. It was, there was a lot of class diversity there, but it was largely a middle class and even upper middle class neighborhood. A lot of the Spanish-speaking residents, they were kind of higher ups in some of the importing companies, right? So like fruit and coffee importing companies. It had a really strong Latino identity. So strong that the Catholic Church located a language parish there. It's Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. So what happened though, is that the Spanish-speaking gradually moved away until sometime not long after the war. People just stopped perceiving the existence of a Latin Quarter and certainly stopped perceiving the existence of a Colonia and then there was no Colonia anymore. It's kind of absorbed into the larger North Beach. But North Beach is not the same thing as the Colonia. It's a different neighborhood. All the buildings are still there, right? Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is still there, but it's no longer a church. It's no longer a language parish in any case. So the neighborhood is really gone. So the very existence of a neighborhood requires first of all that people believe that there is such a thing as the Latin Quarter or the Colonia or the mission to begin with. And then it requires the continual investment of both material and psychological resources. People need to identify with the neighborhood. And as all of you know, people really do identify with the mission and that's often kind of multi-generational identifications. And that sense of identification really, I think needs to be understood as a cultural resource for an area. Without these kinds of local identifications, a neighborhood doesn't even exist to begin with. But even when you do have that kind of psychological investment, you still have to be really careful because when people talk about a neighborhood, they're often talking about completely different things. And I mean that in a very material sense is in where the physical boundaries are. When I lived in the mission, Noe Valley was really the hot neighborhood, right? And lower Noe Valley. So you all know this from like the real estate stuff, right? Lower Noe Valley kept creeping further and further down the hill until it was at like 23rd and Valencia was lower Noe Valley. And now that the mission is so hot, I'm waiting for the moment when all of Noe Valley becomes the upper mission, you know? So I mean, so we all know this from like real estate, Shenanigans, right? But it's not restricted to that. It's everywhere. And where a neighborhood exists depends entirely on who you ask, when you ask the question and what their interests are. So this is just a sampling of different ways that different entities have mapped the mission district across the course of the 20th century. Yeah, yes. These maps, by the way, appear a lot. They're much nicer in the book. The files were too heavy, so I have some like drafty versions of them. So here we go. This one here is something that is probably, I'm gonna guess closer to something that people here would identify as the mission district. That's from 1974. It's from the Mission Housing Development Corporation, which was a neighborhood-based housing developer. This one is from 1912. It's from the San Francisco Examiner, working with a number of local improvement clubs. That's how they map the mission. This one is from the Department of City Planning. That's from the master plan of 1963. This one, excuse me, is a really bizarre one, because it's also from the Department of City Planning from a year later, 1964. The difference is that here they're talking about, they're concerned with transportation planning, not with the larger master plan. So this is the most curious feature of this. This boundary here, that's Mission Street. So if you're like me, you're used to thinking of this area here, so 24th and Florida is not the mission district. Here they call it Petrero, something or other. But this is the mission district, and that's really a curious mapping, because the Mission Street is really the kind of economic and commercial spine of the neighborhood, and this mapping kind of just splits it in half. This is from 1937. This is the Homeowners Loan Corporation mapping of the neighborhood. They were mapping the neighborhood just in terms of a residential area, but even so, and so that maybe justifies a slightly narrower version, but this is bizarre. There's people who live all throughout here. So that's a slightly different mapping. And this one is from 1909. It's from an organization that I'll be telling you a lot about called the Mission Promotion Association. This is what they referred to as the Mission District proper. So remember that when I'm talking about the MPA, that when they talk about the Mission District and what the Mission District wants, that that is the area that they're talking about. So just allow me to very quickly rehearse some of the deep history of the area. So some of the Aloni, Indians from the Aloni Language Group apparently hunted in this area, but no one seems to have lived there pre-contact. The mission, the Mission San Francisco de Assis was founded in 1776. This is a photo of it from 1858. It's one of the earliest ones we have at. It's a little beat up at this period, but. At its peak, there are around 1,100 Native Americans living in the compound. So I mean, I really focused on the earlier period, but I did delve back into this period some. And everything I've read gives the impression that this was a pretty tough place. One visitor at the time described the Novatos, the Natives who were being Christianized as inmates saying that they were often ill and that they looked longingly to the hills. So the war for Mexican independence was 1821. That was an anti-colonial war, of course. So the new Mexican government didn't really feel a whole lot of reverence for the missions. These were instruments of colonization after all. So all the missions were secularized in 1833. In 1848, it becomes American. And there follows then a long period where the fortunes of the place really are up and down, mostly down. For a while, by a lot of reports, it was actually a brothel, the mission. Excuse me. So in the following decades, after it became American, there was apparently a very mixed population around the area, but by the late 19th century, it's really white. There's no indication of any Latino presence. And I mean Latino presence, however you might define it as the kind of Euro-Hispanic mestizo that doesn't appear to be anyone living there. It's a very white place by the 20th century. So and indeed it's become a very white place and there's also a lot of anxiety among the local elites, anxiety about their status as Anglo-Americans. San Francisco had developed a reputation, particularly on the East Coast, as a kind of barbarous instant city and a fundamentally foreign place. So in the mission Dolores, all of these kind of elite locals had some very heavy architectural patrimony to contend with in the shape of the mission district. Not the mission district, excuse me, the actual mission Dolores. They could hardly knock it down, so what they decided to do instead was to kind of put it in its place. So in 1876, they built this thing here. The style is actually called the Anglo-Gothic revival. And I hope the cultural politics of this just like jump right out at you, right? This is an architecture of Anglo-American respectability kind of towering over the humble mission, signaling the ascendancy of Anglo-American-ness over a foreign past. So in the late 19th century, the mission had become really kind of an elite country suburb of San Francisco. This is the mansion of John D. Spreckles. It was around what's now South Venice in 22nd that area. James Duval Phelan, who's the future mayor and US Senator has a mansion in the mission district. Herbert U. Bancroft of the Bancroft Library has his first library out in the mission district. By the turn of the 20th century, the neighborhood is starting to densify a little bit and it's starting to take on kind of a middle-class character. This is an 1890s photo of 24th Street showing some middle-class businesses and house types. So there's a lot of foremen and skilled laborers. They start to move into the neighborhood. It's Irish, German, Italian and Scandinavian. Again, there's no Latinos that I found any evidence of. There are a lot of Protestants, but there are more Catholics even among the local elite. And among those elite, a few of them are very important for understanding the future of the neighborhood. One is James Rolf Jr. You see him as a dapper young man on the right and as a more distinguished fella there on the left that's his mayoral portrait. He made his fortune as a shipper. Excuse me. He was a lifelong mission resident who would become the city's longest serving mayor, 1912 to 1931 and then he would become governor of California until he died in office in 1934. His friend and colleague Matt Sullivan is also very important. Sullivan was also a lifelong missionite as residents began to refer to themselves. He was an attorney who would become San Francisco's supervisor, the first president of the city planning commission when it was created in 1917 and eventually the chief justice of the California Supreme Court. You also had Timothy Fluger, real famous local architect, live in the mission district. There's really an elite population out there. So Rolf and Sullivan were the neighborhood's two most prominent boosters. So throughout the 20th century, both residents and visitors alike have described the mission as a city within a city. And I found that it's really no accident that it came to be that. And when Rolf used the phrase, city within a city or town within a town, he wasn't just describing what he saw, he was also describing his own aspirations for the place. It wasn't enough that the mission could clothe and feed you from the cradle to the grave as he put it. You should also be able to visit a doctor, consult an attorney and crucially you should be able to do your banking. So he and Sullivan founded the mission bank in 1903. This is its second location here. It's still there. It's on 16th between Valencia and Mission. Excuse me. This bank was such a success that they founded the Mission Savings Bank two years later in 1905. The mission statement of both of these institutions was to keep mission capital within the mission for its own advancement. So these institutions were really central to a booster strategy, not only to become independent of downtown but even to try to rival downtown. And now by the early 20th century there's already an intense kind of neighborhood self-identification. James Rolfe was affectionately known as Mission Jim. He had dogs named Mission Champion, Mission Chief and Mission Prince and his family had a horse named Mission Lightning. And it wasn't just like his own family's eccentricities. There were a lot of people, I found tons of evidence of this who identified this way. A number of residents were called identifying as Mission Boys. There was a little diddy that people apparently sang, I won't sing it, but the lyrics are oh I was born in the Mission, the M-I-S-S-I-O-N where the girls are the fairest and the boys are the rarest. The M-I-S-S-I-O-N. There are abundant reports that the Mission even had its own accent, a kind of Irish Brooklynese. No recordings have survived to confirm that. But what you're looking at here is an image from a local historian named John Freeman. He shared this with me. There's no date, but it's clearly the early 20th century. And it's this kind of novelty background. And there's a couple of young fellas there who are clearly from the Mission District. And notice their release. We're from the Mission, now laugh, darn you. So that line comes from an old film. And basically you translate it into a 21st century. It's like a proud taunt. I think it'd be something like, yeah I'm from the Mission, say something. It's that kind of thing, this intense local pride. Now it's easy to look at all this stuff as kind of just goofy expressions of everyday localism, and indeed it is that. But what I want to argue is that this stuff has real consequences. People believe in the Mission District. It really means something to be from there. And it makes them want to defend that culture and identity. So while all of this stuff is going on, while the Mission is kind of consolidating its neighborhood identity, and there's some local boosters really establishing some local institutions, there's some very big ideas that are being floated about the future of the entire city. In 1893, Daniel Burnham had planned the World's Columbian Exposition, the White City in Chicago. I guess there's a novel, Murder in the White City. You guys haven't read that, but this is the setting here. This is kind of an iconic view of the Court of Honor. As you can see, it's kind of, you know, a French neoclassical. It's sort of, that's not the official architectural term, it's the Beaux-Arts tradition, which was translated into the American context as the city-beautiful movement. Now James Duvall Phalen, who again had lived in the Mission District of local elite, had visited this, and was so impressed with it that he invited Daniel Burnham to San Francisco to make a plan for the city. And that was after Phalen was ushered out of the mayoralty in 1901. So Burnham comes to San Francisco and this is what he plans for the place. So those of you who know Paris will immediately recognize the inspiration. It's really Second Empire Paris. It's Baron Haussmann's revisions to Paris under Napoleon III. So if you look at this for a second, it's really kind of amazing how much stuff he was suggesting. Look at all of the new boulevards and parkways are gonna be cut everywhere. He's gonna take the panhandle and extend it all the way down to this new civic center where there's a grand plos kind of a roundabout with some statuary in it and there's these radial boulevards that cut off. Look at how much stuff there is. It's really, he's proposing some really extensive revisions to the city. Now under Emperor Napoleon III, you could just decree that something like this would happen, but it's politically impossible in the laissez-faire capitalist city, which San Francisco the early 20th century certainly was. People, even supporters of this, they look at this and they say, oh, this is such an inspiring vision and then they just stuff it into the drawer right away. There's no way they're gonna be able to pull off anything like this. But no sooner do they stuff it in the drawer than this happens. The plan comes out at the very end of 1905 and this is April 18th, 1906. Still one of the largest urban disasters in American history. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where this photograph was taken from and I think this is 10th Street, which at the time was still regarded as part of the mission. And you can see here the dome of the old city hall disappearing behind the wall of smoke. These I wanna show you just cause they're amazing and they just dug them up. They're on candy photo, color photos of the disaster. This photo is useful for me for a couple of reasons. First of all, it shows the scale of the disaster. So just take any one of these, look at how big a lot is and just take that and extend it out into the distance. So this is Market Street here. This photograph is also useful because it highlights one of the reasons that people have always wanted to rationalize San Francisco, right? You have this grid here that doesn't really talk to this grid here and doesn't really talk to that grid there. Creating this circumstance that has enraged even locals but certainly visitors and certainly transportation planners for whatever, 150 years now. This is another image of the destruction. So what happened was that you had all these people who were kind of like the idea of the Burnham plan but they said, how could we possibly do this? How could we clear all that land? And then this happens and they look at this and say, well, blank slate, maybe we really can make this a reality. So what happens is you get this kind of odd coalition that comes together to try to make the plan a reality. You have both, on the one side, you have both self-described progressive businessmen and they start working with City Hall, which at the moment is occupied by Eugene Schmitz of the Union Labor Party. And they're very influenced, they're very well almost controlled, you might even say by the Building Trades Council. The Building Trades Council really wants this. They're gonna have a lot of jobs anyway, but if they have to redo all the streets and everything, they're gonna have a lot more. So they have obvious material reasons to want this. A raid against the coalition are laissez-faire business people who don't want expanded government authority under any circumstances and certainly not when there's a Union Labor administration. They're led by Michael DeYoung, who's the publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle. Now there's a kind of standard story about this episode that people tell. They say that it's some combination of pressure from the Chronicle and the corruption of the Union Labor Party that ends up dooming the Burnham plan. My research found that that's really not the story. There's something to that, but there's really a lot more. The really decisive pressure came from neighborhood groups and particularly from the mission. And to understand why the mission wouldn't want this, it's first of all important to understand how the mission fared in the great disaster. So as if by providence, the fires stopped literally on the doorstep of the mission to Loris and it was actually spared. Here's the burn map. So you can see here, the mission actually did okay. There's about 40 blocks in the north of the neighborhood, no small area of course, but all of this survives. And when you look at this, remember that this is out here, it's all platted, but no one lives there. There's some people live there, but it's still largely just sand dunes. The city really clusters here in the east. So this is a substantial portion of the city that burns and just that very fat guarantees that there's gonna be a lot of displaced people and a lot of displaced economic activity, they're gonna be headed into the mission district. And the locals have to decide, well, is this gonna, what they're gonna do about it? They could benefit from that or they could suffer from it, depending on how they respond. Another thing, this gives me an opportunity to point out something else. There's another story that's often told about the mission district that's a little askew. What people often say is, okay, so all the labor unions they're here in south of market, they get burned out, they move down into the mission district and when that happens, all the elites, they move up to Navihill and then out to these Tony New suburbs that are being built out in the west of the city. That's true as far as it goes. Certainly that happened to a certain extent. What that overlooks is that a lot of those elite stayed, the city's longest serving mayor, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court. People talk about the mission district in the early 20th century as if it was just like a union neighborhood. It was, it was a very strong union neighborhood but it was also a home of San Francisco elite. So anyway, they have to decide the mission district what they're gonna, how they're gonna respond to the disaster. Now one thing is abundantly clear to them though is that if the Burnham plan is enacted, it is not gonna serve their interests at all. The revisions that would have happened to the mission district are really pretty much the most radical in the entire city. So you can see here, look at this, how many lots are gonna be condemned, these grand new boulevards, all of this stuff. There's a big plos up here. Now, and this is the very worst from their perspective, the mission arcade that was gonna be built here. Mission Street is right here and this is basically gonna gut all of these blocks. So that means it's really kind of ripping the commercial core and the source of all the power right out of the neighborhood. So the mission district has very obvious reasons to not want this. So what I found is that the Chronicle was very important in the court of public opinion, but the real fight played out in Sacramento. If the city was gonna do this, they needed expanded powers of eminent domain. They needed expanded powers to issue bonds in order to finance all this. And they needed the power to compel utility companies to move their lines. If there's gonna be a new street pattern, you can't have like an old sewer running underneath a sewer main like running underneath people's houses and offices, right? You have to be able to move those things to the street and the city didn't have the power to do that at that time. So they need to go to the state in order to get them to give them those powers. And now the hearings in the state legislature where the real fight took place and they came down to a debate between the Union Labor Party and Matt Sullivan. And Sullivan was speaking on behalf of an organization that was founded explicitly to fight this fight, the Mission Promotion Association. Here's their headquarters on 16th Street. It was founded by Ralph and Sullivan, who also founded the financial institutions in the neighborhood. And this was basically the political arm of that neighborhood interest. And long story here, but basically what happens is they win. And the Burnham plan was not enacted, not even a part of it. And now in the wake of this fight, there's really a power vacuum in the city. If the municipal government wasn't gonna guide the rebuilding, then who would? Well, this group of people emerged to announce very clearly that at least in our part of the neighborhood, the city, at least in the Mission District, we are going to be calling the shots. And I'll remind you again, that when they were talking about the Mission District, they were talking about that, fully half the geographic area of San Francisco. This was, again, the Mission District proper. And what I found is really surprising. This is a really surprising history. For decades afterwards, the NPA drove planning decisions throughout the entire southern half of the city. They got annual appropriations in the budget and they relentlessly lobbied, very successfully, the municipal government for investment in various public works that they wanted. So this is a big public work called the Bernal Cut. It's a widening of an old Southern Pacific line in the Southern Mission District, turning it into a road, just millions of dollars in this. The armory, this is 1915. Here you see it before the barrel vault was installed over the drill court. So I'd always been told, the local law is that the National Guard wanted the armory in the Mission District because that's where all the Unionists were and they wanted to be close by so that they could stamp out any insurrection. In the early 20th century, San Francisco is probably the strongest labor city in the entire country. I found no evidence at all to support that story. The real story is that the NPA wanted three-quarter million dollar investment from the state in a big public building that was going to, I see the barrel vault over the drill court there, it's gonna aggrandize the Mission District, it's gonna boost property values, it's all the stuff that you guys know from 21st century politics, they're just trying to get in investment. I found even further that the first design was proposed by the state and the NPA or they didn't like it and so they went and really just kind of bossed around the state architect's office and the state legislature and got them to change it until it was something that they liked. It's really surprising. The NPA also exerted itself on a city-wide and even a statewide stage when it lobbied to convert Islaeus Creek into a harbor. So this was part of a booster strategy, the NPA was gonna challenge downtown by bringing goods into Islaeus Creek here down Army Street today, Cesar Chavez Street, into the Mission District and just more economic activity in the Mission. This also had to go through the state because it was a port issue, right? And they win, they win again. There were a lot of people who didn't want this, but their interest prevailed. In this, as in so many other plans, their fingerprints are just all over everything that was done in the first three decades of the 20th century in the Mission District. I describe them as a de facto planning authority. And when San Francisco finally establishes an actual planning authority in 1917, the presidency goes to none other than Matt Sullivan. They also exerted themselves on a statewide and even a Western regional scale in the fight over fire insurance rates. They had, you know, you can imagine they just went through the roof after 1906. So they went directly to the underwriters of the Pacific, which was the industry group that covered all of the Western states, including the mountain states. And they regulated in the rates, right? So they forced them to, tried to force them to lower rates for the entire city, especially the Mission District. And they had to take this fight too to the state legislature, and they, again, they won. And they even ended up, if you read there, they ended up actually drafting the legislation that should create a state commission regulating fire insurance rates. That comes out of this little neighborhood-based group. Now, in the literature on neighborhood-based groups are normally portrayed as being concerned with, you know, like parks and potholes. Little beautification projects here and there. But here you had a neighborhood-based group that was really guiding planning at the highest levels for fully half the geographic area of the city. And on sub-subjects, the entire city. Years later, an interviewer would ask Rolf, who gave you permission to govern the mission after the disaster? He replied, no one gave us authority. We took it. Now, there's a cultural dimension to all of this. It's also very important. When the NPA helped to defeat the Burnham Plan, they short-circuited a big centralization of planning authority in the city. But they also defeated a kind of totalizing aesthetic vision, this grand neoclassical vision that would symbolically stitch together a civic whole. So this is a plate from the Burnham Plan. It's called the Athenium. This would have been up on Twin Peaks. So here's Athena, you know, looking southwest out to the Pacific Ocean. You know, it's a westward, the course of empire goes, kind of stuff. And, you know, you can see all this neoclassical language, the colonnades and everything. So every promontory in the city, every single hill was gonna have something like this on it. And it was gonna create this kind of, the idea was it was gonna create this kind of civic whole in this kind of neoclassical language. So when the NPA beats the Burnham Plan, there's a power vacuum. There's also, you might say, a kind of representational vacuum, right? The NPA was confronted with the question of how they were gonna represent their own more local power. So to understand what they went for, it's useful to return to this site. So the old mission, the original mission survives. This thing is badly damaged in the earthquake and needs to come down. So the big question, what are they gonna replace it with? So here's the old mission and this is what they go for. It's this kind of, you know, Spanish colonial, a little more sober than a lot of the stuff you see. It's kind of like Southern Andalusian, kind of architectural language. This doesn't last long. Notice these, the bell towers here, just the basic structure. So they do this afterwards. Here's the basic structure and they really amend it with all these flourishes. This is called the Churigresque, the style. It kind of looks like a fanciful sand castle, kind of a look almost. So this stuff, of course, as you all know, is all over the neighborhood. There's Mission High, El Capitan, El Cap, again, all this kind of Churigresque stuff up here. And the institution I told you about before, the second of their banks, the Rolfenz Hall of the Banks, the Mission Savings Bank. All right, so yeah, the whole bit, the scalloped parapets, the eaves with, all you had to do was slap some red tiles on something and it was Spanish. Do that everywhere. Right, so, oh yeah, okay, so, and this here, so this is the Hall of the Mission Promotion Association. Again, you have the red tiles. That's all you really need. And then this is the interior of the building and above the speaker's table. There's this little tableau, a quarter-sized replica of the actual mission. Now, I'll say, I love this stuff. The Spanish colonial architecture is really part of the heritage of California and I think it's right and proper that we should celebrate and preserve it, but it's really not innocent of politics. And to understand what's going on, I think it's useful to consider this little novella from the period. So the protagonist of this book is a young San Francisco-born woman. She takes a day to show her east coast suitor around the city. He, of course, believes it's a brash, instant city. It's vulgar and foreign. But at the end of the day, he realizes that he had been wrong all along, that there is a noble history here and he resolves to move to San Francisco to marry his guide and they live happily ever after. It's really first-class stuff. But the mission to Loris features really heavily in the story. In front of the building itself, the woman confronts her east coast suitor. At the time when you New Englanders were pushing the Indians farther and farther into the wilderness, killing and capturing them, we Californians were drawing them to our missions with gifts and friendship. While you were leaving them in ignorance, we were teaching them. He's stooped to get a full look at my eyes. I never knew a Spaniard to have eyes the color of violets. Look up your family tree, my dear enthusiast. I think, and I think you will find that you are we. I'm not, I declare it indignantly. I'm a Californian. I was born here and even if I haven't Spanish blood in my veins, I have the spirit of the old Padres. So it's a pretty frothy ideological mix in here but it's actually really typical of the period. In the late 19th century, elite San Franciscans had felt a lot of anxiety about the Spanish and particularly the Mexican past. It really just reinforced the foreignness of the place but for a whole host of reasons that I go into a lot more detail in the book. By the early 20th century, as a lot of that elite realized that there was really a usable history here but the emphasis had to be on the Spanish part. Notice that she's got the spirit of the Spanish, of the old Padres, not the Novatos, not the native, not the mestizos, not the Mexican, right? It's a European heritage, the Spanish. So if the ideal American identity was the old Yankee or Nicarbaca or kind of Northern European colonial identity, well, this was kind of just a different flavor of a noble colonial European past, right? So if it's not exactly white, it's white enough and it's European so we have a long history too. So this identity was useful in the cultural contest with the East Coast but the NPA uses it throughout the city in an inter-district contest for municipal resources. It's very slick. They always pointed out that the Mission District was the longest inhabited area of the city and that therefore gave them a special claim to municipal investment for the Bernal Cut and Islea's Creek and all these other things. It's also very important in the real estate and commercial spheres. Again, remember that there's not any Latinos living in the neighborhood during this period. So you have to see this as a kind of aspirational design language. It really is an architecture of Anglo upward mobility. The style falls out of favor by the end of the 1930s when this architecture that romanticizes a Spanish past soon begins to sit uncomfortably in relation to an increasingly Latino presence. Now Latinos actually start moving to the neighborhood earlier than most of the existing scholarship suggests. I found a lot of evidence that there's a pretty sizable population in the Mission by the early 1930s. I get into a lot more depth in the book and how all of this changes. But for now, I can't resist showing you some of the trajectory of some of these buildings. So the Old Mission Promotion Association on Valencia. Notice the forms here. It's La Cumbre, Taqueria La Cumbre on Valencia. I'm sure a lot of you know it. The interior, this is the same building. All right, so in this spot in the back where you had this kind of tableau romanticizing a Spanish past, you now have a painting that's done in the Mission muralist style that kind of rather celebrates indigenous identity, not the Spanish part of the identity. Mission Savings Bank, it's 16th in Valencia. This was Val 16 for forever. It was a Mexican market. I can't remember what it's called now. So the consolidation of whiteness in the neighborhood wasn't just aesthetic and symbolic. It had much more material and scarier expressions too, particularly in the form of the Asiatic Exclusion Movement. Both the Asiatic Exclusion League and the Anti-Jap Laundry League were located in the neighborhood. They're both associated with the Building Trades Council, which was a major political force in the neighborhood. So the Anti-Jap Laundry League right there on Guerrero Street. So this is, it's not even particularly virulent. This is pretty typical of the Anti-Jap Laundry League. So here we go. We have the cause, you know, you're giving business to the Jap Laundry and they're bustling over here, kind of shadowy activity over here. And the effect is that the white laundry is out of business and these nice white Victorian ladies are out of work. Jap Laundry patrons, attention, the dollars you make from the white man and turned over to the Japanese are helping to swell the unemployed ranks with your own kind, the Caucasian race. Is it not suicidal policy to encourage for the sake of saving a few cents per week Oriental competition that no Caucasian can meet unless he relinquishes those standards of civilization that are the white man's inheritance upon the white man's soil? So this is pretty shocking to 21st century sensibilities but it's totally typical of the period. So this entity, they were really focused on local laws and they would just harass Japanese-owned businesses but they also were lobbying the state for immigration restrictions and the Asiatic Exclusion League was also in the neighborhood. They were crucial to the lobbying effort to pass the immigration restrictions of 1920. So that also is coming out of the neighborhood. So the Mission Promotion Association ends up adopting anti-Japanese resolution, favors expulsion and exclusion from the coast. You know, the leadership of the MPI found a lot of evidence that they weren't personally racist. They were actually kind of racial liberals by the standard of the time. But whatever egalitarian impulses they might've felt were trumped by political expediency, they really needed the unions on board, right? They needed a coalition with the unions which were very powerful in order to support their own claim to speak for the neighborhood. So the early 20th century Mission District was really consolidated as the white man's territory in a number of different ways. Now in the book I get into a whole lot of detail showing how these coalitions and the associated politics really completely unravel and are renegotiated and reconfigured. But the local institutions throughout the entire period that I study, they do continue to draw on the institutional capacity even as they reject some of the politics, and they do continue to insist on the right of the neighborhood to plan for itself. The Catholic Parish Church of St. Peter's is one institution that has been in continuous operation throughout the entire period. At the beginning of the century, the church was big on defending white privilege. By the 1960s they had Cesar Chavez and a bunch of farm workers sleeping on the floor of the church. So you sometimes hear people dismiss so-called identity politics as just kind of a lot of noise and there's versions of this that come from both the right and the left. What I found though is that if you really want to understand what a neighborhood is at least, and a neighborhood is a really important socioeconomic formation that's really fundamental to our experience and to our political history, you really can't dismiss the way that people identify. Neighborhoods don't even exist unless people identify with them. And in the Mission, ethnicity has always been certainly not the only but definitely one of the fundamental ways in which people identify with their neighborhood. Now the manner in which ethnicity function changed almost completely over this period from a consolidation of white identity and a defense of white privilege until you get into the 1960s when there's a very strong Latino identity. But it's really more than that too though. A local authority, and it's really controlled out of the neighborhood called the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation would write in the late 1960s that, the Mission wants to hold on to its color. This by the way is another thing, like a discursive thing that's really curious throughout the entire period. They always, everyone always anthropomorphizes the Mission. The Mission does this, wants this, as if it's a political actor. And I say that in some senses it is. The Mission wants to hold on to its color, its fluidity, and its traditional role as port of entry for San Francisco. But it also wants to deal with the traditional problems of immigrants and foreign stock of low-paid, hardworking, family-oriented, blue-collar workers who live within San Francisco, a city with a large population of white-collar transient but frequently unmixed neighborhoods. Its objective is to retain its multicultural, multi-ethnic, healthy mix of tenants and homeowners, and its easy flow between income and racial groups. So that was written at the end of the 1960s. And in spite of all the obvious problems, the Mission has actually done pretty well on this score, maintaining its character even as it changes. Now, I definitely count myself among those who are becoming very worried about whether or not it's gonna continue, be able to continue to preserve that character. But I will say that at least this history, the history that I wrote makes me hopeful that it can, that it will be able to. There's really a deeply rooted tradition of neighborhood-based power here. And the Mission District is a place that not only underwent tremendous change over the course of the 20th century, but whose residents and institutions were themselves often responsible for bringing that change about. Thank you.