Gentrification; Sutro Tower; & Stealing my San Francisco Birthright

I was was born and raised in San Francisco, California, U.S.  Born in the Kaiser Hospital on Geary Blvd that is still there to the best of my knowledge.  I lived there until a few months after barely graduating high school.  In the summer of 1979, after spending my first 17 years in San Fran, I left the city to pursue my growth and although I visited the city regularly to see my parents/family, I haven't lived in the city since.  

I was there this past Saturday for a solidarity rally against intervention in Venezuela.  I was our speaker at this rally for the All African People's Revolutionary Party so I was focused on the message I would deliver, but also in my mind was the fact that I was in the city that birthed me, something that rarely happens anymore.  

San Francisco has changed so much from the 70s when I lived there that I hardly recognize anything there anymore, especially the people.  This challenge has caused anxiety for me over the years.  I have struggled over feeling so alienated when in San Fran that about 15 years ago, I decided I was going to disown the city that I felt disowned me.  About five years ago I rethought this approach.  Gentrification has changed the city so much that I can't tell you any good restaurants to go to there.  I don't know any social places.  Nothing.  Still, I made up my mind those five ago that this is still the city that raised me, good and bad.  And, Saturday reminded me of some of that good.  Mostly, that is the fact that San Francisco, and the Bay Area as a whole, is one of the most politically charged areas in this entire country.  Radical politics are not strange in the Bay.  In fact, they are expected in many quarters, but long before I reached that level of understanding on a political level I was just a child in San Francisco.  And when I was a child I was dominated by fear and anxiety about my very existence.  There wasn't much then that could sooth these constant feelings that my life didn't matter, but one strange, but consistent, mechanism I focused on that gave me strength was Sutro Tower.  I'm not sure exactly when Sutro Tower came to be.  It happened sometime in my early years e.g. the late 60s, early 70s, but once it did, it became a central point of my perspective on San Francisco.  Sitting as the highest point of the city and a major landmark that is known all over the world, Sutro Tower to me was several things.  First, it was the tower that once activated, gave us additional channels on television beyond just NBC, CBS, and ABC.  When that happened in the early 70s we suddenly had channels 40, 36, and 44.  Syndicated stations that offered shows like Lost in Space and the Brady Bunch.  With these new channels and those shows in recent syndication, I was able to capture two or three episodes of each show every day.  My active imagination came alive.  I couldn't wait to watch.  I was actually able to thrust myself into the Brady and the Robinson family.  Now, I realize the implications of white supremacy in doing this, but then, it was the drug I used to jettison myself out of the turmoil that surrounded me.  

That was one area that Sutro Tower played in my life, but there was a much more important way I interacted personally with the tower.  When I entered elementary school in 1972, I was bused along with everyone else in my neighborhood to schools in the predominantly European (White) areas of San Francisco.  For anyone younger who isn't familiar with the concept of busing, it was done on a federal level in the early 70s as a so-called effort to address the inadequacy of inner city schools e.g. to integrate public schools.  Instead of addressing those inequities directly by strengthening the inner city schools in my neighborhood Bret Harte or Benjamin Franklin, I was bused clear across town to Clarendon Elementary School in the hills, just beneath Sutro Tower.  It was a very strange situation.  On one hand my experiences, too many to count, in this White neighborhood reaffirmed everything I had heard the adults discussing about our existence within a white supremacist society.  When I should have been learning about fractions, division, and literature, I was getting an expert education in how racist this country and the people in it are.  I was physically attacked and verbally harassed by people much older than me, white people, several times.  And this theme continued through high school.  And, to underscore the institutional elements of this system, I had teachers who unwittingly reinforced white supremacy.  I remember one experience in 6th grade where Ms. Murphy wanted us to pen flags on a map indicating where our families came from before the U.S.  I asked my parents that night as the assignment instructed us to do, but they knew nothing beyond the state of Louisiana where the slave ships dropped my family.  Of course, Africa was nonexistent then.  It was the place of "savagery, starvation, endless wars, and loss."  That was all we were ever taught about Africa so there was no chance most of us would claim it as our own.  Ms. Murphy was a strict teacher so I panicked when I was called upon in class that next day to pen my flag and I was ridiculed by her and my co-students when I penned my flag in Poland.  I have never felt less than I felt at that moment, but that's the design of this white supremacist, capitalist system.  That's what it wants to do to us, break our spirits.

Still, before I had Pan-Africanism, revolution, and understanding the thrust for justice, I had my Sutro Tower.  I would stand in the yard at Clarendon and stare up at it.  No matter how much I didn't matter in this world, I had my tall and powerful tower friend that believed in me.  I was overwhelmed with excitement when the school bus would take the route through Twin Peaks on the way back to the ghetto because we would drive right by Sutro Tower, almost at its base.  Everyone around me would be chattering and yelling, but I was transfixed on my friend.  Tall, regal, powerful.  Red and white.  Unconquerable.  What I wanted to be.  Anywhere in the city, whether at a Giants game or inside in Hunters Point, I could see my tower.  Downtown or in the Mission District.  I could see it.  In the Fillmore, I could see it.  I could see it from North Beach, Fisherman's Wharf, etc.  Even from Alcatraz its clearly visible.  I know this because wherever I went, the first thing I would do was check for it.  I felt that if I could see Sutro Tower that meant it could see me.  It was protecting me.  That gave me strength because my tower friend was always there.  It would never abandon me.  It would always listen to me and it wouldn't make fun of my uncombed hair, terrible skin, thick glasses, and nonexistent social skills.  

Last night I dreamed I was at my sister's flat when she lived on Central in the Haight in San Francisco in the mid 70s.  My sister was 11 years older than me.  My favorite thing to do there at that house was sitting at the back window which gave me a clear view of Sutro Tower.  Tall tenement buildings where I lived blocked my view of my tower, but at my sister's place, often even when foggy, its lights were clear, blinking in and out.  I would stare out that window for hours.  No one could understand my attachment to my tower, but me.  I tried to explain it, but they laughed at me.  Soon, I stopped attempting to get others to understand.  The tower was my friend, not theirs.

When my sister and her partner were evicted from that Central Street house I panicked.  My clear viewing station of Sutro would be taken from me, but I was delighted to discover that out their back window at their new flat on Steiner, despite being much farther away, I was still high enough to see Sutro Tower.  It wasn't as dominant and powerful as it was from the Central Street house or the Clarendon yard, but it was there, clear to see.  I promptly established my viewing position as I did at their previous place.

Fast forward 45 years to this past Saturday.  It was raining and cloudy, so much so that Sutro Tower wasn't visible at all. I marched, listened to the other speakers, talked to my comrades and other people. When the march arrived at the cable car turn around at Market and Powell in the center of downtown San Francisco, my comrades and I used our large African Liberation Day solidarity banner to block the ability of some pro fascist counter protesters who wanted to shout down the speakers.  The counter protesters, probably internalizing the same racism that typically defines everyone in this wretched society, argued and yelled at everyone around us, except us three large African men.  They only stared at us while yelling at everyone else, despite the fact we were clearly the ones intentionally blocking them from the actual rally.  Once I was comfortable that these reactionaries would not attempt anything, my mind went back to San Francisco.  That intersection is a central part of the city for public transportation exchanges so it was a place I spent much time during my youth.  I actually lost my father's binoculars, one of the few expensive things we had, at that intersection years and years ago, but all the stores that were there then are long gone now.  Emporium is gone.  Woolsworth is long gone.  The record store that I bought so much music from is long gone.  The stores there now are mostly newer places I have absolutely no knowledge of.  The Westfield Mall there where the Emporium used to be looked so odd to me in that space, but I get it.  Times change.  Things change.  I have no issue with that.  Change is dialectical meaning much of it is necessary and good.  The problem with much of the change gentrification brings on is its mostly reflective of the oppressive mechanisms of capitalism.  For example, I was aware at that Market Street juncture that a large percentage of the Africans I saw were street people, asking people for change.  A phenomenon that indicates the degree in which poverty impacts our people, who maintain the bottom of these capitalist societies.  Societies that are built and maintained on us being on the bottom.  Recent studies have concluded that a family of four cannot live effectively in San Francisco on a six figure salary.  This explains why, beyond our houseless people, there are so few Africans in San Francisco these days.  When I was young, we were approximately 15% to 20% of the city.  Today, its about 3%.  Marcus Books in S.F. is gone.  The once vibrant Fillmore district where Africans dominated is gone.  The Lakeview area where petti bourgeoisie Africans lived is not what it once was.  My sister and her partner are dead.  My mother and father are dead.  All of them taken away long before they should have been.  Each of them in different ways afflicted by the health inequities that cause Africans in this country to have the lowest life spawns.  With my parents gone, the Haight St area which was so dominant with our people when I was there in the 70s, is so devoid of African people today that a stroll up the block I lived on while in high school elicits stares from the people there now as if I don't belong there.  Its such an issue that I haven't been in that area in years.  The last time I was there, the police were called because I was standing there "too long."  I was there then contemplating that intersection at Haight and Broderick where me and my childhood friends played football.  To those cops, I was intruding.  i didn't mention that I lived there because that's ill relevant and I refuse to let them dictate my dignity.

Sutro Tower is still there.  And, although I don't see it now as the tower of personal strength it was for me when I was 10 years old, it still helps me resolve this feeling of disconnect I've struggled with around the city of my birth.  The way I see it now, despite all those things I just mentioned changing, the fact Sutro is still there is a reminder that I did grow up there and San Francisco will always be the place where I began to become the person I am today.  No matter what else happens, every time I look up at that tower, I know this.  I also know that no one will ever be able to take that from me.  Now being much older, and hopefully much wiser, I will continue to maintain my personal relationship to this tower which helped me sustain and comfort myself so much when I was such a lost child.  Its continued stature for me represents what we can do.  How we can win.  Forty five years later, its still an inspiration in my mind, no matter if anyone else understands or not.