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SPEAKER_36: I had heard about this crazy model years ago. Some cryptic allusion to it, maybe in the Chronicle. They just said there was this enormous scale model of San Francisco that once was on display briefly and then vanished. The idea that there was a miniature world is something just so irresistible to your childlike brain.
SPEAKER_08: This model of the city is a tangible 3D roadmap through time and space, triggering stories from San Francisco's past, realities of the present and visions of the future. These stories were collected by the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, and produced into the gorgeous audio collage we're going to play for you today. Here's Nikki Silva.
SPEAKER_29: Our story begins with this gigantic handmade model made up of over 6,000 tiny carved buildings and bridges forgotten for almost 80 years. It involves artists, curators, poets, planners, and a mega collaboration between SFMOMA and 29 branches of the San Francisco Public Library. This object has become the catalyst for over 100 public programs throughout San Francisco. It's activated bicycle tours. It's lured in thousands of locals and tourists and historians, triggered people's memories, and generated questions and ideas about how we can go forward as a city, keeping it dynamic and diverse and just and hospitable, protecting the environment, a pretty tall order for an object. Welcome to San Francisco. Stories from the Model City.
SPEAKER_20: Oh, okay, wait. The 1938 model was made to the scale of one inch to 100 feet. Bum bum bum. Where considerable carving was required, poplar and sugar pine were the woods used. Shrubbery growing on the map is made of wire wool, pieces of sponge, and beet seeds. I'm Stella Lockman, associate for public dialogue at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the current keeper of the model. Three quarters of a century of different keepers for this thing. It's a very big object to keep.
SPEAKER_02: The entire model, when it's reassembled, is almost 40 by 40 feet. Absolutely colossal. I'm Dr. Gray Bracken, a geographer over at UC Berkeley. I was alerted that this model existed by some of the custodians at the UC warehouse. Fortunately, they didn't dumpster it. The reason for building it was to put a lot of people to work during the Depression. Twelve hundred man-months of labor, according to the WPA records.
SPEAKER_20: About 35 people working every week for two years. The other thing was to create this model as a planning and educational tool that would always be on public display.
SPEAKER_02: This took place during the 1930s when the city was being completely transformed by the New Deal Public Works projects. The two bridges, the East Shore Freeway, the airports, Treasure Island. This model, it's a three-dimensional freeze frame of what the city was like at the time of the Treasure Island World's Fair just before Pearl Harbor.
SPEAKER_29: At the time of the World's Fair, the model city, featuring every single structure in every single neighborhood, was still under construction. But there's a photograph of 11 women wearing Ingrid Bergman-style hats and capes lined up along a finished portion of the model, on display for the first time in 1939 on Treasure Island. Here is a dream come true. The Golden Gate International Exposition on man-made Treasure Island.
SPEAKER_23: Treasure Island is an artificial island named after the Robert Louis Stevenson Island, made by piling up sand and rocks in the bay.
SPEAKER_36: Created for the great international exposition, the World's Fair of 1939-1940, sort of a UN-like feeling. The Brotherhood of Pacific Nations. I'm Gary Kamiya, author of Cool Gray City of Love, 49 Views of San Francisco. Its shimmering reflections bring beauty from the sky.
SPEAKER_36: The whole World's Fair concepts were kind of psychedelic. Fantastic made-up architecture and enormous courts and incredible lighting. The model would be a perfect fit for Treasure Island. The whole city in one room.
SPEAKER_29: Angel Island.
SPEAKER_36: At the same time that there was this exuberant World's Fair, probably less than a mile away as the crow flies. Angel Island, the largest island in the bay, was being used as an immigration and quarantine point. A place where Chinese immigrants were detained and often deported and not allowed into the country.
SPEAKER_28: My name is Jenny Lim. I'm a poet, playwright, second generation Chinese American, born and raised in San Francisco. My father was detained on Angel Island. And the play I wrote, Paper Angels, one of the characters' love, was kind of like a romanticized depiction of my father. They're in this jail-like barrack. They looked out the window. You can see the water, the lights within grasp, and it's unreachable. Lam talks about wanting to go to the expo and wear his Panama hat. Walking down the streets in his best suit and, you know, all the women ogling him because he looks so desirable. He's going to make his mark in this new country. He can imagine this exposition fair that shows all the best that this country has to offer an immigrant. The other guys are just saying, oh, go on, you know, big talker. You're never going to achieve all those things. And in the story, he actually is the one that escapes. We never find out whether he makes it to shore or not.
SPEAKER_20: Some things we haven't found are these little ships that are going under the Bay Bridge. The model city. It was built in 1938 to 1940 on view at City Hall till 1942. At that point, it was boxed up. Planning department would occasionally take pieces out to do studies on, and when they no longer wanted it, it was given to UC Berkeley as a teaching tool. But most of it was in these 17 wooden crates sort of put in higgledy-piggledy.
SPEAKER_29: The model was hidden away until an artist duo based in Rotterdam heard about it. They'd been invited by SFMOMA to create an art project engaging community and civic imagination. These Dutch artists, this couple called Bic van der Poel, had this great idea, like, let's get that map.
SPEAKER_17: They heard about it, and let's get it out of storage, and let's see if we can bring it back to life and make it part of the city's experience again. My name is Lisbeth Bic. I'm an artist. I live in Rotterdam, and I work with Jos van der Poel.
SPEAKER_38: I'm Jos van der Poel, part of Bic van der Poel.
SPEAKER_24: 30 pieces will go to 30 library branches. We want to organize discussions around the model.
SPEAKER_38: Not only nostalgia. But, for example, affordable housing, sea level rising. Homelessness. Issues of public space. Citizenship. How do you make these issues discussable while looking at where you are? The model really triggered the whole project. Everything fell together.
SPEAKER_24: There is an historic layering. Fantasy opens up. Imagination opens up.
SPEAKER_38: Other stories in that model start to sort of hover around.
SPEAKER_29: Lawrence Verlinghetti. It's an old myth going all the way back several centuries of San Francisco as an island.
SPEAKER_22: We're surrounded by water on three sides, and with the melting of the icebergs, the water will rise just a few feet or even a foot or two, and it will flood over the very low-lying land mass between San Francisco and the San Francisco peninsula. And then San Francisco will be an island again. There was always an island mentality. When I arrived in San Francisco, by ferry from Oakland, having come on a train across the continent, San Francisco was like a Mediterranean city, small white buildings, no skyscrapers, just a few high-rises, maybe only 12, 14 stories. In 1950, I felt San Franciscans felt they were San Franciscans first and then only secondarily members of the United States.
SPEAKER_13: All right, I think we're all here now. Welcome to our historic shoreline bicycle tour. Visiting the library branches in town, all of them actually, have pieces of the San Francisco scale wooden model built. What's washed behind you there? The model is the main subject today, and Chris Carlson and myself, Lisa Ruth Elliott, we direct Shaping San Francisco. We try to get people together in real time to talk about history, how things have changed in the city, how we can imagine our city going forward. We're going to hug the shoreline and go along to...
SPEAKER_17: But stick together in a group. The more we can congeal as a group, the more fun we're going to have as a ride and the safer we'll all be. So that's what we learned a long time ago on critical mass. Density is the key.
SPEAKER_29: The city front.
SPEAKER_36: At the time of the 1938 model, San Francisco was completely oriented to the bay. The Embarcadero was known as the city front. The vast majority of people came in by ferry, and that was what you saw. That was San Francisco. The ferry building was one of the most bustling transportation hubs anywhere in the world. It handled millions of people a year, and every single form of transportation in San Francisco came to it. Cable cars, streetcars, trains, omnibuses. The whole waterfront was at the height of its working powers then. Just four years earlier, there'd been the infamous Bloody Thursday and the great waterfront strike in 1934, which was a significant victory for organized labor. Open warfare rages through the streets of the city as 3,000 union pickets battle 700 police. Guns, tear gas, cups, and fists...
SPEAKER_36: Longshoremen were one of the main occupations in San Francisco. It was blue collar, it was muscular and hard drinking, and it was a whole different town. There was a great romance to it. Those finger piers that stick out into the bay handled different types of cargos. Copra, which is like dried coconut meat. Coffee, you could smell the coffee. Bananas.
SPEAKER_13: The last block is a little bit of a climb. By the way, this building over here, the China Basin building, which was once upon a time a place for offloading bananas from Central America,
SPEAKER_17: was turned in 1974 into a food distribution center by the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. The ransom demands of the Symbionese Liberation Army was that the Hearst family give away food to poor people. And that had a big impact on San Francisco's politics.
SPEAKER_20: Did someone check crate 6 for C4? Colograph Hill. Cleaning the model city.
SPEAKER_24: Where the Coit Tower is right here, they call it Signal Hill 1938, I guess it was. So this is like Chinatown here. Jim Boyer, volunteer at MOMA. I'm a commercial artist. I worked in the advertising district over there on the C4 area. We are doing a cleaning of downtown and Tenderloin today.
SPEAKER_20: First of all, we start off with a little brush, get the dust off. There's a lot of dust.
SPEAKER_24: So that's why we wear masks, because I don't know where this dust has been. 50 people cleaning? Yeah. I think this cleaning process is really important.
SPEAKER_38: You don't only get to know the model, but there's a different relationship. So that's the model on view at City Hall till January 1942, when they needed the room for war purposes.
SPEAKER_20: The thing is that it's kind of just so huge that keeping track of all the different stories that come out of it is just, it's a lot. And where's the ferry building? When the lights went out on the last day of the World's Fair, Herb Kane, the great columnist of the city, wrote that everyone knew that that was like the end of their youth.
SPEAKER_36: The shadow of World War II was descending over the world. That was this halcyon period that was never going to come again. The U.S. entered the war soon after that, and there was no more going out, having frivolous days wandering around on artificial islands in the Bay. San Francisco Bay became a huge arsenal, ringed by guns and anti-aircraft submarine nets under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a massive transformation of the whole way of life that happened right after this fair. Women have invaded another field, usually reserved for men. Thirty-five women butcherettes started training today in San Francisco in a step to relieve the shortage caused by the departure of 1,000 male butchers for the armed services.
SPEAKER_01: It was like every night was Saturday night. The hours were 24 hours a day.
SPEAKER_31: Not only three shifts at the shipyards, but they had three shifts for the movie theaters, the restaurants, the bowling alleys. I mean, those boys spent money 24 hours a day until they were called back to the bases and had to shove up.
SPEAKER_34: This is a test of the outdoor boarding system.
SPEAKER_05: My name is Tammy Takahashi. I'm a native of San Francisco. I lived my whole life here, except for the four years of World War II, when the Japanese American population was removed from the Pacific coast. When World War II began, there was a call out for anybody who could read and write Japanese. I volunteered. There was a makeshift radio station on the top floor of the Palace Hotel on Market Street. I was working as a translator in the Office of Secret Service. We would have these headphones on our heads translating taped radio messages from Japanese battleships on the Pacific, full of static. Then they said, everybody, if they had a drop of Japanese blood, 1 16th, we were all gathered up and taken to assembly centers. The one we were locked up in is called Tamforan, a racing field, where one Kentucky thoroughbred horse was stabled, five adults were put in. We lost everything, our civil rights. We were in camp almost four years. That's a very long time to suffer deprivation and miserable food. I had to imagine things that I was fond of, an enchilada or tamale, some Chinese food.
SPEAKER_29: The Western Edition The Western Edition in the 1920s and 30s and 40s was known as the little United Nations that had Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants.
SPEAKER_36: Filipinos had a very big Jewish component and robust Japan town centered around post. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were all mustered, rounded up at Jackson and Van Ness. Mostly the Japanese in San Francisco went to a camp called Topaz in Utah. Right at this time comes the great African American influx into San Francisco, mostly from Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. We needed to build ships and tanks. The U.S. government sent recruiters that brought African Americans in particular to shipyard towns. All of the housing that had just been vacated by the Japanese and Japanese Americans, all of that housing became available suddenly. The War on the East
SPEAKER_25: Maya Ashley
SPEAKER_29: In the early months of World War II, San Francisco's Fillmore District, or the Western Edition, experienced a visible revolution.
SPEAKER_10: The Yakamoto seafood market quietly became Sammy's Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop. Yoshiguro's hardware metamorphosed into La Salone de Butte, owned by Miss Clarenda Jackson. The Japanese shops, which sold products to Nisei customers, were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived Southern blacks. The Asian population blundered before my eyes. As the Japanese disappeared soundlessly and without protest, the Negroes entered with their loud jukeboxes, their just released animosities, and the relief of escape from Southern bombs. The Japanese area became San Francisco's Harlem in a matter of months.
SPEAKER_29: During World War II, women replaced men on the streetcars in San Francisco as conductors and motor men. Maya Angelou wrote, The idea of sailing up and down the hills of San Francisco in a dark blue uniform with a money changer at my belt caught my fancy. She applied for the job, was not well received, but she persisted.
SPEAKER_10: I would have the job. I would be a conductor and sling a full money changer from my belt. I would. I was given blood tests, aptitude tests, physical coordination tests, and roar shocks. Then, on a blissful day, I was hired as the first Negro on the San Francisco streetcars.
SPEAKER_25: Welcome to the Ortega branch of the San Francisco Public Library.
SPEAKER_20: The model is inspiring conversations all over the city. There's three other events happening right now. Our hope is that it can serve as a metaphor for the city at large to help us take a deeper look. We have had hundreds of conversations with people. Themes came up over and over again. I'm sure you can probably guess. Housing. Technology. Toxic land. Gentrification. Climate change. Displacement. Hello, I'm Jarell Phillips, San Francisco native, born and raised in Fillmore.
SPEAKER_12: My grandparents all came here from the South when that migration was happening. I'm a performer. I teach Capoeira throughout the city. I've been doing a project called I Am San Francisco Black Past and Presence, the African diaspora and its influence and impact. Growing up here in San Francisco, I grew up in a very black world, which is probably hard to even imagine in this city. And I went to an all-black private school, predominantly black church, and I went to Bayview-Hunters Point a lot. So I was bouncing between two very well-known black neighborhoods. We, African Americans specifically, have been in some ways wandering and going from place to place trying to create home and community for a long time now. As a people, we moved out of the South and we came over here. James Baldwin said we came as far west as we could go. Now we're at a point where African Americans have been going back, like boomerang, going back to the South and dispersing further out into places like Modesto. We moved out of the city when I was 17. I didn't want to, I had to. I came back a year later as soon as I was old enough. But my parents come back into the city every day. My grandma's house is still the house that everybody's mail goes to. For a lot of families, their community center, whether it's their church or whatever space that is, is still where people come to on the weekends and whatnot. I feel like that connection is still there. We have to be very mindful of the gentrification or change that can happen and the film work can happen as far as I'm concerned anywhere because I saw that change.
SPEAKER_36: After the war ended, when the shipyard jobs dried up, this large group of people were suddenly unemployed, facing racism in the hiring practices of unions and couldn't get other kinds of jobs. In western edition, the housing stock is really run down. In the eyes of city fathers, it's seen as a blighted neighborhood. They came up with this plan to redevelop the whole western edition. They ended up smashing down Victorian houses, hundreds of black-owned businesses.
SPEAKER_16: This is a very dark period of urban planning history in the 60s and 70s. Whole neighborhoods were demolished in favor of planned communities and high-rise developments. What happened in Japantown and Fillmore is a perfect example of that. My name is Allison Arioff. I'm the editorial director of the urban planning and policy think tank, SPUR. What that had the effect of doing is it put people in, frankly, some really bad architecture, destroyed local businesses, erased the connections for the people who live there in a way that I don't think people have really gotten over. And I think it was also really damaging to urban planning. Certain communities will never have trust in the process. I think we're at a really crucial moment of figuring out how best to involve, respect, and inform communities as new buildings and neighborhoods and communities are being built. I think that there's a big paradigm shift in the way that we think about these issues, but it's slow in coming.
SPEAKER_13: Chinatown and North Beach are sharing a piece of the model. Right now it's at North Beach, which is great because it's an extra hill we don't have to climb.
SPEAKER_29: San Francisco has a very long history with libraries. As the gold rush boomed, the first library opened in 1852 in a room in a men's temperance hotel. In 1877, a free library for all was established, spearheaded by Andrew S. Halliday, who also invented the cable car. From the start, the library's success was astounding, and it remains so today, with its 29 branches throughout the city, where 29 corresponding neighborhood sections of the model were put on display. So each one of these can be lifted out, is that right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: You can see the street that we biked down.
SPEAKER_33: Yes, I'm used to seeing this in Google Maps, but seeing it 3D is saying you really get a sense of the scale of the house. Oh, my house is there.
SPEAKER_20: Your house is there? When they had it made, they sent people out to look at the color of every house. So the color of your house here is the color it was.
SPEAKER_13: One of the questions actually as we were writing was, what was the point of making this model? Some pieces were used for these planning exercises where the shadows would fall for larger buildings. As redevelopment happened in South of Market in the 1970s and they started raising the hotels, barber shops, and cafes, and put in things like the Moscone Center and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, they started playing around with what's possible. One of the questions when we found it was, is there room for San Francisco in San Francisco?
SPEAKER_20: At the museum, we tried to find a place to put it all, but I realized it's so large. So we worked with the library to get as many pieces as we could into the branches, and that ended up being about 70 of the 140 pieces. What do we have here?
SPEAKER_04: GPA. That's Glen Park.
SPEAKER_20: Yeah, Glen Park has these two pieces here. The Glen Park Freeway Revolt.
SPEAKER_16: We took my 13-year-old daughter to go look at the model at the Glen Park Library, which is in the middle of our little quote-unquote downtown. Where I live on a big hill, everything above me was dairy farms and there were lots of earthquake checks. There was a developer who wanted to build a zoo in Glen Park as a way to attract people to buy homes in the neighborhood. In 1948, the California Highway Department decided they wanted to crisscross the city with freeways, and a bunch of moms and housewives stopped that from happening. The Glen Park Outdoor Art League and the San Francisco Women's Club managed to stop this freeway effort. Glen Park Freeway Revolt. Women and moms have actually led quite a number of revolts like this around the Bay Area, including helping to overturn a really bizarre plan to pave over the Bay. The Save the Bay movement, where this trio of women challenged companies, wealthy landowners, politicians, and reversed this idea that you should pave over the Bay to do more development. I'm so glad to see this model come back today because it presents a really fascinating history, sometimes positive, lots of times negative, of how this city has grown and developed.
SPEAKER_14: In the Western Addition Branch, a lot of people came to see the model. You'll notice a big red line going through. People who would never have a conversation with one another suddenly just talk about the redlining and people trying to figure out, why is there a big red line here? And people saying, because that's redlining. No, but like, what is it? Because it's redlining. The redlining basically delineated where people of color would live. It's segregation on a map. My name is Naima Dean and I am the manager of the Western Addition Branch Library of San Francisco Public Library System. My dad had a jazz club in this neighborhood in the 60s and 70s at the same time as Bill Graham doing his stuff at the Fillmore. And they did a lot of projects together. Big Mama Thornton, George Duke, Bobby Hutcheson, Miles Davis. I grew up in this neighborhood and it was all African American in the 80s. Still, this was the Mo. This was the Phil Mo. And now it's Alamo Square and Hayes Valley and Nopa and Lodi and all these nicknames. I mean, they're real estate names. They're sale names. We had made a map to accompany the project. People could write a memory on a Post-it. Someone said, my Japanese American family came off into the Western Addition Library. My husband checked out the novels of Yamamoto Shoguro in Japanese so many times that the library eventually gave these to him.
SPEAKER_15: That's great. I like this one, Harvey Milk's Wide Lens Camera Store.
SPEAKER_14: I remember my dad telling me that he really liked Harvey Milk at the time because Harvey Milk was willing to integrate and not segregate. He worked hard because the Western Addition is adjacent to the Castro. Let's see what we can find right in the Western Addition. I live in a big building. I live in the Phil Mo. I love my Mo. Junebug and Naya, 2019.
SPEAKER_25: 1133 Mission Street, the Knights of the Red Branch. It was a place where the Irish met.
SPEAKER_09: It wasn't a fancy hall. It was just, to us, the greatest. And we went there every Saturday night dancing and met all the Irish there. We had Johnny Hallahan from Oakland, nice big band. And we danced all night from 12 o'clock until 5 o'clock in the morning we go to Mrs. Pickett's house. She was Irish and her husband was a police officer, I believe. He'd go to bed and she'd stay up with us all night long. She was so sweet. She used to give her a basement for us young Irish people. 5 o'clock we take a bus and we go up to St. Ignatius. We had to get a mass, come home and go to bed for 3-4 hours. And then out to the beach LA to the Irish football.
SPEAKER_17: If you just look to your right you'll see the last little stump of Irish Hill still there. Once upon a time there was a third peak of Patero Hill called Irish Hill which has filled up this entire airspace. We're about to go hurtling down through. Had 98 steps to get to the top of it.
SPEAKER_36: In the early days rich people didn't live on the hills. They were completely inaccessible. You couldn't even get a horse to go up them. They were covered with sand dunes and scrub brush. But after the cable car that opened up Knob Hill and all of a sudden Knob Hill became where the rich people lived. Knob Telegraph Russian, the main downtown hills prevented the expansion of the city for decades. That was one of the reasons that there was this mania that went on in San Francisco until the early 20th century for filling in every single bit of water that they could fill in. What is now the financial district, that was all under water. That was filled in using ships scuttled. There's sunken ships that formed part of the bay bottom in the financial district. What interests me as a geographer is these buildings were built after the 1906 earthquake and fire to replace buildings that were leveled.
SPEAKER_02: But they're built on the same property lines that were left over from the gold rush. With no regard for the hills and the wetlands which it shouldn't have been built on because they liquefy in earthquakes. Simone de Beauvoir when she visited San Francisco remarked that it looked like the city had been laid out by somebody who had never been here before.
SPEAKER_13: We're going to head down until we get to Beach Street.
SPEAKER_17: The bay is much shallower today because of how much mining debris is coating the bottom of the bay. We had washed away the equivalent of six Panama canals worth of debris to get the gold out of the hills and mountains of California into the waterways and into the bay. And it's full of methylmercury so don't eat fish out of the bay unless they're very short term visitors like Herring. Herring are safe, striped bass are not.
SPEAKER_34: Fisherman's War. Just passing the aquatic park and all the tall ships. Big blue and white building to my right, the Dolphin Club.
SPEAKER_03: I get the slack tied right? My tied. It might start going out on you. Yeah well, it might. The number one thing about swimming in this stuff, look it in the eye and go. You don't have to swim alcatraz, just go out up to here. My name is Lou Marcelli. This club's been here since 1887 and it's a swimming and boating club. We swim in the bay all year round with no wetsuits. I started to fish when I was 12 or 13 years old. Lou Marcelli is Lou the glue. He's sort of the custodian of the Dolphin Club and he lives in a little attic there.
SPEAKER_39: And he's one of the old stoves of North Beach. At the Dolphin Club there are a lot of old Italian men like firemen and policemen and waiters and exercise a little, swim a little and then they cook for each other. And they have a lot of wine and they just sit around and talk about the old days and talk about sex and what's going to happen to somebody if he has testicular cancer. And you know, oh you've got to give him a certain kind of liver. And they have all these theories based on what their mothers told them. And they cook food for each other and I think it really keeps them going. It's really a problem for old people because where can they cook if they're relegated to smaller and smaller spaces and then they're given terrible food. No wonder they die.
SPEAKER_29: North Beach. The area known as North Beach was once an actual beach. It was filled in around the late 19th century and warehouses, fishing wharves and docks were built on the newly formed shoreline. This is the piece of the model that has Quay Tower on it and St. Peter and Paul's Church. Here's Peggy Knickerbocker at Porchlight.
SPEAKER_39: I'm Peggy Knickerbocker. I'm a native San Franciscan for three generations. I grew up over on Pacific Avenue but at about eight or nine I had an Aunt Eda Baroneo and she'd bring me over on the bus to North Beach. We'd come for pickled pigs feet, basil, you know, no store has had anything like that in those days. And we'd have a date with some of her older friends. They'd have little cotton house dresses on with their nylons kind of rolled down and they'd come out in their house shoes. And I knew there was something happening here. And the day that we left, we were waiting for the bus. It looked like there was blood coming down Filbert Street and it was a garage wine making set up of, you know, some old Italian guys. And then when I was in high school, I'd come over with my two best friends. We'd wear our mother's trench coats, put on black tights, and we'd sit in cafes and read poetry and think we were beatniks, little shiny face beatniks. And then I came when I was in college and we went to see Carol Doda and to the jazz workshop and we hung out at a bar called Mooney's Irish Pub up on Grant Avenue. The barkeeper was Sean Mooney and he never ate. And we'd come and we'd bring him sandwiches. He said, well, if you guys want to feed me so much, why don't you take over the kitchen? So we decided we start the next day. And we had leotards on, no bras, two or three skirts, lots of necklaces. And we had no idea of what we're doing. We went down to the butcher, Miss Bruno Jacobi, who was half a block away and said, we've run out of everything. And it was about 11 o'clock and we were open till two. We need help. What are we going to do? He said, we'll always have sausages, make Portuguese bean stew. The bakery was right next door, get nice hot bread. As a matter of fact, go over to the bakery and get, you know, a roll. And he'd cut some telomere cheese that had a special taste because it was May. The cows had been eating some special clover and he'd hold. He was huge and he had blood all over his apron and he'd hold a sandwich to his ample breast. And by the time you got it, it was a grilled cheese sandwich.
SPEAKER_08: We continue the Kitchen Sisters tour of San Francisco through the WPA Model City after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRS urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRS aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRS is most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRS to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRS steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses, or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter? Or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro-level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share your new blogs or videos on social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We rejoin the Kitchen Sisters in North Beach. The olive tree, that's what we need.
SPEAKER_07: Peas and poetry. Having an olive tree, I mean, it's a symbol of life.
SPEAKER_13: Good morning and thank you for coming out here today on this beautiful Monday morning.
SPEAKER_15: My name is Carla Short. I'm the Superintendent of the Bureau of Urban Forestry. For the last 15 years, we have honored people with a signature tree. Ruth Asawa was an honoree. Mongari Mathai, Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Irene Crescio is an activist in the Portola District. We are in North Beach neighborhood, not far from City Lights Bookstore. This neighborhood would not look like this neighborhood had Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
SPEAKER_35: Not actively, actively champion the thriving writers and artists community.
SPEAKER_22: The Bookstore was always in the same location, 261 Columbus Avenue. We had this anarchist slant right from the beginning and at that time North Beach was populated by, well it was like 90% Italians. Some of the first publications we sold were two Italian anarchist newspapers in Italian. And among the people who would buy the newspaper were the scavengers on the garbage truck. I remember one guy wearing a derby in baggy pants would rush in off the garbage truck and get his copy of Eumanathanova or Ladunata was the other one.
SPEAKER_28: My father bought a little house. We lived in an alley called Winter Place in North Beach. One of the first Chinese families living in that neighborhood in the 50s. And it was all Little Sicily. The smell of coffee, the bread, ravioli, factory. Cowen Mason Street car runs down. Could hear it every day. I would listen to it's like my music box, the foghorns and the cable cars. Then I was secure and I could go to sleep. I'm Jenny Lim, poet, playwright. My father was a working class immigrant. Took on jobs working at the Fairmont Hotel as a janitor and then became a busboy. My mother was a sewing woman and worked all day and all night at a sewing machine. We children, there were seven of us and we were just on the loose running the streets. Chinatown in North Beach. Chinatown.
SPEAKER_34: This is Herb Cain from San Francisco, the magic city that's a sight to behold. We're walking down the narrow shop line main street of San Francisco's Chinatown. We call it Grand Avenue, but to the Chinese it's still Dupont Gang. A block away is Portsmouth Square, the scene of a San Francisco tradition, the Chinese Boom Festival.
SPEAKER_36: The Chinese were not allowed to live west of Powell until as late as the 40s or 50s. Those covenants, it's incredible how long they remained on the books.
SPEAKER_28: My mother sang wooden fish songs, the itinerant folk songs of the peasants. I remember the old folks singing these songs in Chinatown. This one is one that my mother sang whenever she mended our clothes. Whenever there's a hole in a piece of cloth, that's a portal for negative spirits to enter.
SPEAKER_36: Before the earthquake, Chinatown looked more like the rest of San Francisco, mostly western style architecture. After the earthquake, in response to this concerted movement on the part of the White establishment to move Chinatown out of downtown San Francisco, to a more wondrous point, the Chinese managed to start rebuilding right away. Chinese merchants working with White architects came up with an idea where they would take elements of traditional Chinese architecture, Godas and Corbels, wrought iron, those all have structural function. In Chinatown, they're just tacked on to conventional buildings to make it look wild and exotic and Chinese and enticing. They put a lot of neon and a lot of electric lights, so it became this kind of fairyland environment. And that was very successful.
SPEAKER_28: We hired a marching band funeral procession for my father. We would march from the mortuary to Winter Place.
SPEAKER_04: We go back to the original grassroots at the first marching band in Chinatown. My name is Clifford, last name is Yi. People come out to look to see if they know the person. Many people out of respect will bow, people will take their hats off, just out of paying respect to the deceased.
SPEAKER_37: My name is John Coppola, I'm with the Green Street March Royal event. Come down claim and make a left on Grant, this is where we do our heavy things, you know, it's the biggest audience. So what we do is we slow down, we go into this one particular dirge march, St. Jude funeral march.
SPEAKER_22: Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Bookstore. Green Street March Royal marching band just passed by. The back door of City Lights is in Chinatown, the front door is in the western world. Green Street mortuary marching band marches right down Green Street and turns into Columbus Avenue where all the café sitters at the sidewalk café tables sit talking and laughing and looking right through it as if it happened every day in little old wooden North Beach, San Francisco. But at the same time feeling thrilled by the stirring sound of the gallant marching band as if it were celebrating life and never heard of death.
SPEAKER_20: We're going to use the model today as a catalyst for a conversation around the controversial topic of the impact of tech capital on the city of San Francisco. We'll open with the panelists. This hyper growth of tech has brought with it both extraordinary wealth and an influx of people.
SPEAKER_19: This boom is phenomenal. This is the most prosperous place in the world in this day.
SPEAKER_19: This prosperity has also led to growing inequality, gentrification, demographic changes. More billionaires per square inch.
SPEAKER_19: And some would say a really unsustainable and unhealthy impact on housing costs, infrastructure and the environment. One thing we need to do is break up some of these big companies impose much higher.
SPEAKER_36: When did we have mass housing for the working people after World War II?
SPEAKER_21: The collapse of the 20s plus the taxes of the New Deal. We've got to have this conversation at a national level about income inequality and about a living wage, about guaranteed national housing.
SPEAKER_36: One more question. Yes, the gentleman in the back with the glasses.
SPEAKER_19: If you want to talk about the homeless problem for a second, the reason isn't because of tech lords and stem lords who are destroying the city.
SPEAKER_35: It's because old people who moved here in 1975 never wanted to build a single house. You can't build a homeless shelter. You can't do anything. And you're wondering, oh, I'm going to blame the newcomers. But really, maybe just I basically agree with you.
SPEAKER_36: I don't. We're talking about class and race.
SPEAKER_21: If I may interject as a fellow young person, San Francisco cannot fight.
SPEAKER_32: Yeah, you need massive taxing at the top.
SPEAKER_21: Take one step further and like look at the reason.
SPEAKER_32: These challenging tech companies to step up, challenging others not to scapegoat the tech community.
SPEAKER_11: We're going to put another half a billion dollars into immediate funding for navigation centers. So we need to work together as a city.
SPEAKER_04: This is a rapid rehousing of mental health together as one San Francisco.
SPEAKER_27: The mission. I got the gallery and the last stop. I said, I got the gallery and the last stop blues. I can remember me, my mom taking me to old India Maria movies at the Mission Theater. I can remember Valencia Street, one of it was nothing but a long stretch of appliance stores, leather tongue video in the Chameleon bar. I can remember the people.
SPEAKER_26: My name is Josiah. I was a few. lowering ordeal sp cosmos. Again, second, and live music, big orchestra. I can remember George D'Rado.
SPEAKER_27: I can remember Daniel Alacon. I can remember that Sonia Sanchez has walked these streets. I can remember that Nancy Morejon has walked these streets. I can remember Alfonso Texedor's limp.
SPEAKER_26: People associate the dot-com waves of gentrification. It's been going on since before the 2000s. I remember first seeing that wave, there was the Oxygen Bar opened up on Valencia Street. Also, we started seeing these big puffy SUV vehicles around. I remember so that I can get out of the way of the Ubers
SPEAKER_27: and the lifts and the Google buses that are not driving me anywhere, San Francisco.
SPEAKER_26: The changes that have been the most startling and physical and painful to see in the neighborhood have definitely come from the dot-com changes and booms. But on the flip side of that, the Cucuas really dug in, you know? I mean, getting the 24th Street declared the Latino Heritage Corridor, that protects a huge amount of those areas. These amazing transformations in the mission with the Calle Venticuatro Association reaching out to a lot of the older generation. A lot of the older ones are really sort of recommitted to staying. It's actually a beautiful thing. When people move here and they come here and they think of the city, what they're thinking of is the contributions that the poets and the working people have made to this city. What I'd like to see happen, some sacred space opening up for people to move back in and raise their families. As much as the city does change, those roots are going to stay. They're way deep in the concrete. That's the bones of this place. I live where you vacation.
SPEAKER_29: Moving through the city. Here's Justin Vivian Bond, 2012.
SPEAKER_07: My name's Justin Vivian Bond. I sing, I write, and perform. A trans-genre artist. I used to live in San Francisco. I lived there from 88 to 94. And the two things that drove me crazy about San Francisco were the weather, which many people love, but which I hate. Let me preface all of it by saying I adore San Francisco. I love living there. If there's any city where I would feel like there are more people that I would have Thanksgiving or Christmas with, San Francisco's the one. But having said that, I don't like the weather. And I always got very, very frustrated by transportation, because I was at the mercy of the taxi cabs of San Francisco. And they're notoriously unreliable. So I came back to San Francisco. I guess it was for my record release. I was getting my hair blown out at Dina's Glamorama on Valencia. My friend said, Lenny Breedlove has started Homobile. Call if you need a ride. And so I told them where I was, and I needed a car. They sent, I think it was Musty Chiffon. Yes, it was Musty Chiffon. She showed up and was my driver. So all of a sudden, this person who I'd known in clubs, we were driving in a car and talking with each other. They asked for a suggested donation. And of course, you just want to give them the entire contents of your pocket book, because they're so lovely.
SPEAKER_11: See what I tell you. Traffic. My name is Lenny Breedlove. I run Homobile, a community ride service for the LGBTIQQLNOPQRST community, and its allies in San Francisco. You do not have to be a big, fat queer to get a ride from Homobile's. But it does help. No, just kidding. But you need to understand that the real reason that we are here is for people that don't get rides normally from anyone else. And so if you're putting on all this padding, high heels, a wig, and three sets of false eyelashes, and a bunch of glitter, you are high priority at Homobile's.
SPEAKER_16: If we're thinking about the most effective way to get people through cities, we should look at how different systems move people. Transit, you can move up to 25,000 people per hour through a city if they're on public transit. Walking actually comes after that, and you could move approximately 9,000 people per hour through a city on foot. Biking, moving about 7,500 people per hour. Cars can only move about 600 to 1,600 people per hour. At a very young age, we took the buses all over town.
SPEAKER_28: You'd get a municipal card with 10 rides. It was $0.05 a ride, and they would punch a hole until you used it up. We used that to go downtown to Market Street. We used it to go to Playland.
SPEAKER_36: Playland on the Beach, it was just a classic oceanfront promenade playground. Wonderfully dangerous physical attractions. Running through this barrel that kept turning. The Barrel of Joy. You walked into the Barrel of Joy, and it rotated, and it was padded. It would drop you on your head.
SPEAKER_28: Laughing south, she really freaked me out. I had a lot of nightmares about her freckled face and red hair. Confusing mirrors. You'd be fat, you'd be tall, you'd be squished.
SPEAKER_36: Jets of compressed air that they would release under the skirts of women and girls as they came in. The Wheel of Joy was a huge wooden platter that spun. They blow the whistle, and everyone would crowd and get their butts as close as possible to the center of the centrifugal force, where they'd pick them off. They'd go sailing on. Y'all having a try, Chris? It fell on hard times, and they tore it down and put up these god-awful condos that stand there now.
SPEAKER_13: I got to clean the sutro baths and Playland, much to the consternation of other people cleaning the model those days. It's such a coveted place to clean, and it was definitely fun to run the Q-tip down the chutes of Playland. I also got to clean the Laurel Hill Cemetery, which no longer exists along Geary. This big expanse of multiple blocks with trees and pathways, and that tells the story of the removal of the cemeteries from San Francisco to Colma and down the peninsula, where all of our bodies go now.
SPEAKER_18: Hello. Christopher, don't lose your homework, dude. Hi, girls.
SPEAKER_29: Reading the model.
SPEAKER_18: My name is Nicole Termini-Germain, branch manager and children's librarian here at the Portola Branch Library. When I look at this model, you can see all the different greenhouses. This was a major center of flower-growing carnations and roses. Since we're the Garden District, people, they would love it to be kind of a hub for green activity, like gardening, community garden, bicycles, walking, trolleys. The air would be so much better. I'm curious what this would look like in 800 years.
SPEAKER_06: Will the third great quake scare us away? Now we're going to be here till the bitter end. So what's the plan? I would like to see more emphasis on the greenery.
SPEAKER_23: I would envision building up rather than out. Embrace the density. I don't want high rises.
SPEAKER_18: No high rises.
SPEAKER_07: The roads are ridiculously wide. There's a good amount of wasted space in the center. Space that's more precious now and could be used more intelligently.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_34: Would this be before or after the tsunami?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right there.
SPEAKER_14: It would be really great to see this San Francisco model as a whole and to do ongoing programming, hearing people's stories. I'd like to see it under plexi-class that you could just walk on top of and just lay down and look at, like protected but free, so that you could really get in it.
SPEAKER_36: Cities all change and have to change. And anyone who wants to keep it frozen and waxed so that it forever looks like a 1938 model is delusional and is going to be disappointed. This is the issue that everyone's trying to grapple with in this city is how do we preserve it in all of its glory, but at the same time, make places dynamic as possible and make it as hospitable as possible. It won't look exactly like the 1938 model. It won't even look like the 2019 version. But I think that there's a way of achieving it without losing what makes it special. Hopefully, we can make a start.
SPEAKER_22: Well, it seems there are the beginnings of a new consciousness in a new generation of activists in San Francisco. And it seems to be a kind of wave of the future with a new coalition of young progressives that includes not only the Green Movement, but also groups like the Bicycle Coalition, with its vision of a carless city, alternative cultural institutions. There are also poetic rappers, seniors for peace, and performance artists, farmers markets selling local produce, raising the possibility of a self-sustaining ecoregion free from ecologically disastrous agribusiness. It's a vision of a possible future society in America that, of course, has yet to be realized. But it does exist in our consciousness.
SPEAKER_08: San Francisco Stories from the Model City was produced by the Kitchen Sisters, Nicky Silva and Davia Nelson, with Nathan Dalton and Brandy Howell, mixed by Jim McKee. The Kitchen Sisters Presents is their podcast from Radio Topia. Please go subscribe, download all the old episodes. You will love them.
SPEAKER_29: Soundscapes and archival audio from Jim McKee and Andrew Roth, additional recordings by Noah Landis, Grant Macamear, and from SF Loma's Public Knowledge Program Take Part, in which the museum partnered with the San Francisco Public Library and artists Bic Vanderpoel to engage the community in a series of talks and events around the model of San Francisco. Thanks to Tomoko Kanamitsu, Stella Lachman, Aaron Fleming, Valerie Wainwright, Kevin Carr, Erica Ganzi, and the entire Take Part and Raw Material project teams.
SPEAKER_04: Stand up against the threat of big business, a war over the mission, money versus addition.
SPEAKER_29: Stand up. Deep thanks to author Gary Kamiya, keeper of the model Stella Lachman, Dr. Gray Breckin, UC Berkeley, and the Living New Deal, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet Jenny Lim, our bicycle historians and activists Lisa Ruth Elliott and Chris Carlson of Shaping San Francisco, artists Bic Vanderpoel, excerpts from Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, read by the author, used by permission of Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group, teacher and historian Jarell Phillips, Allison Arieth, Spur Think Tank, Naima Dean, Western Edition Branch Library, food writer Peggy Knickerbocker, courtesy of Porchlight Storytelling Series, poet Josiah Luis Alderete, Nicole Termini-Germain, Portola Branch Library, Peggy Millet, courtesy of the Irish American Crossroads Oral History Archive, performer Justin Vivian Bond, Lenny Breedlove, founder of Homobiles, and thanks to the Internet Archive and the Kitchen Sisters Archive. For our music, we thank Blue Dot Sessions, Sol Tran from San Francisco's Mission District, Ted Savarisi, Richard Fenno, John Jang, Nathan Dalton, Vyaswav Polgajelski, and Jim McKee. And to all the citizens, librarians, and keepers who took part in the model project throughout San Francisco, we thank you. And yes, you can see the model online. Go to TakePartSF.net, zoom in, and find your favorite spots. And while you're up there, sign the petition to find a permanent home for San Francisco in San Francisco.
SPEAKER_08: 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of groundbreaking podcasts. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99piorg. We're on Instagram and Reddit, too. But our forever home on the web is 99pi.org. For every bit of love you give your baby, make sure you give yourself love, too.
SPEAKER_32: Introducing a new line of Centrum vitamins, created to support moms before, during, and after pregnancy from the Women's Choice award-winning multivitamin brand. Visit Centrum.com to learn how Centrum is collaborating with Postpartum Support International to help put moms first. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
SPEAKER_30: Is there any trip more delightfully unpredictable than a road trip? After all, who knows where the road will take you? Who knows where you'll stay? Will it be that no-name hotel that says no to every request?
SPEAKER_07: No, you'll have to find the elevators yourself.
SPEAKER_30: Or maybe the one with the extra stale Danish for breakfast. I think I broke a tooth. When you want a place you can always rely on wherever the road takes you, it matters where you stay.
SPEAKER_04: Welcome to Hampton by Hilton. Don't forget about our free hot breakfast.
SPEAKER_30: Hilton, for the stay.
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SPEAKER_36: At participating McDonald's delivery prices may be higher than at restaurants. Delivering other fees may apply.
