Wrecking Balls Aimed at Yerba Buena Area Target
Unattached Single Males and Poor Families
The next swing of the wrecking ball was to be in the area of South of
Market from 3rd to 6th Streets and between Mission
and Folsom. First publicly marketed as the “Prosperity Plan” by Ben
Swig and his realtor backers, it hoped to build a downtown stadium in
the area, and bring in the highway access, parking lots and super shopping
malls to complement this kind of auto-directed urban playground. Interestingly,
under existing federal and state guidelines of “blight,” the area did
not qualify, despite Swig’s efforts to alter boundaries and manipulate
definitions to bring reality into line with his vision. Tellingly for
what would occur later, this initial attempt was foiled by a spontaneous
coalition of small business owners who successfully resisted this effort
to devalue their property and ruin their livelihoods by ignoring the
residential/small commercial mix that had typified the neighborhood
from its beginnings. The area was de-designated in 1958.
Nonetheless, moneyed interests do not surrender easily. With 1961 plans
calling for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to be extended downtown,
a new wave of redevelopment pressure hit. The South of Market corridor
running just south of the envisioned BART stations was re-designated
in 1961. By 1966 changes in state law had made official definitions
of “blight” more amenable to the developers’ intentions, and the redevelopment
plans were publicly packaged in 1966 as “The Yerba Buena Project.” Originating
in 1964, the Yerba Buena Plan was meant intentionally to remove the
area with highest concentration of housing for the longshoremen who
had dedicated decades of service to the building of San Francisco’s
economy, and who were to be ignobly and summarily displaced now that
the port was in decline. Many residents of South of Market were now
“unattached single males”—a moniker of dishonor in the postwar conformity
of the cold war 1950s.
Homophile Activists in 1960s SOMA/Central City
Do Battle with the War on Poverty…
Interestingly, just at this time, under the guiding hand of President
Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. Congress established the Federal Poverty Program,
which was in intention an alternative mechanism for resolving problems
occurring in urban areas filled with lower-class and poor individuals
and families.
The idea was not to relocate and replace through redevelopment, but
to work with existing populations to assist them in uplifting themselves
while preserving their sense of identity and neighborhood. By the end
of 1964, four Anti-Poverty Target Areas had been established in San
Francisco, under the aegis of the Economic Opportunity Council, all
aligning along an assumption that peoples of color necessarily correlate
with poverty—Western Addition, Hunter’s Point, Chinatown and the Mission.
A powerful, subversive potential to use the Poverty Program to combat
the Redevelopment Agency in San Francisco, and to free the Poverty Program
from its latent racist underpinnings, was realized in June 1966, when
a fifth Anti-Poverty Target Area was established, called Central City
and covering the areas north and south of Market Street, known as the
Tenderloin and SOMA. The movement to launch this fifth target area designation
originated in 1964, when a new generation of homophile activists who
founded the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) [the largest queer organization
in the U.S. in the ’60s] came into contact with a group of progressive
Protestant ministers doing social outreach and alternative urban missionary
work.
…And Launch San Francisco’s Stonewall at California
Hall
Their alliance, the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, led to the
famed California Hall incident of January 1, 1965, which was in effect
San Francisco’s Stonewall. It also led to a unique and energy-charged
coalition of activists who were empowered by the larger Civil Rights
Movement, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and by the writings
of Saul Alinsky, a theorist-practitioner who created a model for social
action based on organizing populations around where they live and work
and helping them to petition and advocate for themselves based on the
needs that come out of these everyday situations.
Enter Eclectic, Inclusive Organizing -
The Hallmark of LGBT Organizers in SOMA Central City
Building what today could only be called a post-modern coalition
of immigrant Filipinos, impoverished African American families in South
Park, aging radical leftist longshoremen, indigent elderly, transsexuals
and gays and lesbians, runaway queer youth (many of whom were hustlers)
and Protestant service agencies advocating for the homeless, elderly
and addicted, a neighborhood advocacy group—the Central City Citizen’s
Council—forced the city to accept the notion of a “white ghetto,” or
what it also termed the poverty of “unattached individuals.”
The coalition also forced the federal government to allow convicted
felons and persons of “dubious” moral character to be hired by the Central
City Multi-Service Center - a national first. This paved the way from
November 1967 through May 1969 for the chief administrator of the Central
City Anti-Poverty Target Area to be a gay man, Don Lucas. Lucas had
been openly active in gay civil rights work since 1953. His two personal
aides were also gay men before there was such a moniker: Jean-Paul Marat,
an underage gay male hustler, who helped found the first queer youth
organization in the U.S. in 1966 Vanguard; and Mark Forrester, a gay
man living in the Tenderloin, who was heavily involved with gay civil
rights work and advocating for queer youth and the abandoned elderly.
Other key employees were Genie Bowie and Peggy Galvez, two concerned
housewives (African American and Filipino, respectively) determined
to make a difference in their neighborhoods. Lucas also went on in 1967
to hire Herb Donaldson to be the first head of the newly formed Central
City Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation (Donaldson had been arrested
at California Hall and went on in 1978 to be named the first openly
gay male judge in California).
