Post Script: Encounters and Stories

Up from the Deep, while mainly an exploration of architecture and history, is very much an expression of my love for San Francisco’s central city, and as such must include some of the people whose paths have crossed mine. Each of them has, in one way or another, added depth and meaning to my life. They, and many others like them, have been my source of inspiration for this project. Through them shines the soul of the central city.

Still Bill

^{LOCATION: FIFTH and BRYANT}

The shadows had grown long and fog was starting to blow in from the ocean as I walked down Sixth Street, on my way home after a day of taking pictures in my old neighborhood. Passing by the rotting hulk of the Hugo Hotel, I overtook another pedestrian, a man in his fifties or sixties with a backpack, carrying a duffel bag. A few seconds later, I heard him calling out, “Hello? Hello?”

I turned and walked back to see what he wanted. After inquiring about my well-being, he said, “I’m still Bill.”

“Still Bill?” I didn’t know what else to say. The ghost of a sad, little smile crinkled the corners of his eyes.

I’m still Bill, always was, always will.
Had a wife named Lucille, had us a home down in Mobile.
Come the war in Vietnam, they sent me off and made me kill.
Come back a broke-up man, weren’t no more home, no more Lucille.
She’d gone and left me, but I’m still Bill.

His words were like a window to his soul. Fascinated, wanting to know more, I offered to carry his bag while we walked. He was looking for a shelter someone had told him was nearby, and I said I would show him the way there. Bill had been drinking and was unsteady on his feet, obliging us to stop several times as I helped him regain his balance. I put his arm through mine when we crossed the street, for traffic was heavy and I feared he would stumble into the path of a speeding car. As we walked, sharing our stories along the way, I was touched by Bill’s inner light and faith, undimmed despite all that had happened to him.

Upon arriving at the shelter, I got Bill’s permission to photograph him. As I was setting up the shot, we were approached by a smiling woman, a Native American, who greeted us with an unaffected ebullience and goodwill so contagious that the three of us were soon talking and laughing together like old friends. When I asked if she would like to be photographed with Bill, she answered by putting her arm around him in such a familiar, loving way that I had to wipe my eyes to see through the camera’s viewfinder. This photograph is the best of several that I took.

Painting the Town

^{LOCATION: SEVENTH and MISSION}

On a late winter afternoon in 2005, while on one of my South of Market rambles, I ran into Anthony Holdsworth, who was working on his painting of the new Federal Office Building and the historic Federal Courthouse on Seventh Street. I had seen him working there before, but never had time to stop, so I was pleased to at last have the opportunity to meet him. Anthony was kind enough to let me photograph him as we chatted. I will let his own words speak for what he does:

I generally work on location in the city. The urban landscape is an accurate and disquieting testament to our common condition. I encounter it first-hand in the hope of conveying its original intensity. Though sometimes devoid of people these ‘cityscapes’ emerge from my interaction with passersby and inhabitants at each site.

To learn more about this man and his remarkable work, I highly recommend a visit to his website, Anthony Holdsworth: Dispatches from the Street.

In Praise of a Hero*

^{JIM AYERS – LAWRENCE HOTEL}

I could talk for a long time about Jim Ayers. His life story is not only remarkable, it is truly inspiring and could have been written by John Steinbeck, or Mark Twain. H.L. Mencken would have loved him. As I have only two minutes to speak, I’ll give you instead the simple, unadorned reasons that Jim is so highly deserving of this award, which I am enormously pleased to be presenting to him.

Integrity: Jim is the living, breathing definition. He is, without question, the most trusted person in his community. Jim may be a man of few words, but you can be certain that what he says will always be the truth. Blunt, gruff and unpolished, Jim is also one of the most lovable persons I have ever known, and he has a heart to match. A more compassionate man you will not find. Best of all, Jim shares these virtues with his community.

During the eleven years that he worked there, Jim made Grady’s a comfortable and safe haven for the many seniors who live on Sixth Street. It was, in fact, the only place in the neighborhood where they could escape from their lonely, cramped hotel rooms to socialize, have their morning coffee and read the paper. For Jim, tending bar was entirely secondary to providing for the social needs of Sixth Street’s seniors.

Jim has fought tirelessly and single-handedly for the rights and welfare of the tenants of the Lawrence Hotel, where he has lived for the past fourteen years.

Finally, after years of thankless, solitary struggle at City Hall and in court, and in the face of intimidation, property damage and physical threats, Jim is winning the battle to force Club Six, the bane of Sixth Street residents since it opened, to comply with noise and public nuisance laws.

No one has done more for his community than Jim Ayers, a man I am proud to call my friend.

*The text is a speech that I gave when presenting Jim with a Community Leadership Award in May 2007.

What is Important, What is Not

^{LOCATION: UNITED NATIONS PLAZA, CIVIC CENTER}

Sunsets in San Francisco are often splendorous, even under cloudless skies. I photographed this one on a cold October evening, on my way to visit a friend. Most people had already returned from work to their homes. The UN Plaza, normally bustling with activity, was a barren red-brick plain, windswept and unwelcoming. The sun’s coronal fire had made the air luminous, bathing the surrounding architecture in a soft lambency and casting into stark relief the equestrian statue of a triumphant Simon Bolivar. Swallowed up by this grandeur were two figures at the statue’s base, a man and a woman, homeless, heedless of one another, preparing for the long, dark night ahead.

The man moved quickly, clothing himself against the cold. As he stalked away toward the Tenderloin, I watched the woman, who sat motionless, her eyes fixed on something I could not see. I wondered where she would go after nightfall; she seemed so utterly isolated and alone, a mote in the sunset. Before moving on, I approached her and asked if she was all right. My query must have startled her, for when she looked up to see who I was, I saw fear and confusion in her eyes. I apologized for intruding, but as I started to walk away, I heard a little voice say, “I’m okay.”

When I stopped to look back at her, she averted her eyes. I caught the glimmer of a fleeting smile as she said, very quietly, “Thank you for asking.”

I left her then, for there was nothing more I could do, but I left with the memory of her smile.

Temple of the Heart’s Imagination

^{SERGE ECHEVERRIA – SPAULDING HOTEL}

I occasionally meet with Serge, my remarkable South American friend, to catch up on what’s happened in his life. It has been our habit to meet at a coffee house so that we can imbibe hot chocolate as we talk, a ritual we have shared since the beginning of our friendship. We first met in the Tenderloin at a campaign kickoff party for our district supervisor in 2002. Refreshments at the party included several huge chocolate flat cakes, of which I had two large pieces. A tall, slender gentleman in his sixties or seventies, with bright, deep-set eyes and aristocratic features, helped himself to some cake and sat down next to me. I made some comment about my love of chocolate, to which he replied that the sharing of a hot cacao beverage, while seated under a cacao tree, was central to the Toltecs’ concept of friendship. I remembered reading something about the Toltecs in one of my boyhood books, Indians of the Americas, but whatever I learned had been lost in time. Serge shared his extensive knowledge with me, revealing that he had even translated some of the Toltecs’ poetry. The party receded into background noise as we conversed, and thus our friendship was begun.

Seated outside at a little coffee house on Geary Street, waiting for Serge and watching the flow of humanity on the sidewalks before me, I began to reflect on the transient nature of life and was inspired to take the following photograph. The title of the photograph is “Just Passing Through.” The verse is a Toltec poem, translated through the Spanish by Serge.

We have come to dream.
Suddenly we come out of the dream. . . .
And we have only come to dream.
It is not true, it is not true that we have come
to live upon this earth.
Our lives are as the grass in spring.
Our hearts give birth to flowers from our flesh
and make them germinate.
Some open their corollas, others fade.
You have lived your songs, opened your flowers,
lived your lives!

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