Visitors know all too well this pretty city’s sights, what with the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf and the clang-clang-clangy cable cars.
But now San Francisco’s civic boosters have decided they want to add a highly unlikely stop to the tourist itinerary: the Uptown Tenderloin, the ragged, druggy and determinedly dingy domain of the city’s most down and out.
Mr. Shaw’s plan has the backing of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who announced a city grant last month to help promote “a positive identity for the Tenderloin” and to draw tourism to the area, in part by posting hundreds of plaques on buildings throughout the neighborhood “to create great visual interest for those walking down the community’s streets.”
And oh, what streets those are. Wedged between tourist-friendly Union Square and its liberal-friendly City Hall, the Tenderloin is one of the mostly densely populated areas west of the Mississippi, officials say, with some 30,000 people in 60 square blocks, almost all of which have at least one residential hotel. The district’s drug trade is so widespread, and so wide open, that the police recently asked for special powers to disperse crowds on certain streets. Deranged residents are a constant presence, and after dark the neighborhood can seem downright sinister, with drunken people collapsed on streets and others furtively smoking pipes in doorways.
All of which, Tenderloin fans contend, is as much a part of San Francisco as flashier, decidedly less seedy attractions like Chinatown or Coit Tower.
Encouraging adventure-seeking San Franciscans to visit may be easier than selling the Tenderloin to tourists, city tourism officials say. Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, called the recent efforts “a step in the right direction,” but added that it was a “very, very long road” to make the neighborhood appealing.
But Mr. Shaw begs to differ, saying the area is chockablock with historical nuggets, like the Hotel Drake, where Frank Capra lived as a starving young director in the early 1920s, or the Cadillac Hotel, built a year after the great 1906 earthquake and fire and where Muhammad Ali later trained. Jerry Garcia also lived at the Cadillac, and he and the Grateful Dead recorded several albums in the area at what is now Hyde Street Studios, as did other Bay Area bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Jefferson Airplane.
Mr. Shaw, who plans to open a $3 million museum in the Cadillac, believes that baby boomer music fans — and particularly baby boomer Deadheads — will be a core demographic for the Tenderloin, as well as those interested in the neighborhood’s “rich vice history,” which includes gambling dens, speakeasies and pornographic-movie houses.
Experts agree that the neighborhood has historical value, in part because its entrenched poverty and the city’s own prohibitive zoning have prevented development.
And while battles over maintaining low-income housing derailed some past efforts to develop the neighborhood, even Mr. Falk, of the nonprofit housing development corporation, says a little new development would not be a bad thing.
In addition to tourism — visitors spent nearly $8 billion in San Francisco in 2009 — city officials are also trying more traditional approaches, including applying for a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for public art on the neighborhood’s western border and backing a proposed 250,000-square-foot retail project on its eastern flank.
Mr. Shaw hopes to break ground on his museum by next year and will start posting promotional placards — inviting visitors to “walk, dine, enjoy” the Uptown Tenderloin — this summer. And more plaques are to be mounted on more buildings soon.
Whether posters and plaques are enough to conquer poverty remains to be seen. Chris Patnode, a ruddy-faced self-described wanderer who is staying in a local SRO, said he liked the idea of Tenderloin tourism and seemed to be willing to welcome outsiders. Just as long, of course, as they know when to come knocking.
also see: trophies, custom pins and corporate awards
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