Years before a Tenderloin Museum was ever proposed, Randy Shaw wanted to create a national historic district to protect the neighborhood's eclectic mix of prewar hotels, bustling nightlife, and gorgeous Art Deco parking garages.
It was only after hiring an architectural historian that Shaw and his team discovered the depth of the neighborhood's social history prior to becoming San Francisco's Skid Row.
"I had no idea the Tenderloin was the Paris of the West, an elite neighborhood with people all wearing suits and coming to the finest places," Shaw said. "I had no idea it was so prosperous."
The Executive Director of the low income-focused Tenderloin Housing Clinic and the Director of Uptown Tenderloin (the nonprofit of which the Tenderloin Museum is a part), Shaw decided that that this unsung history needed recognition. The museum opened at 399 Eddy Street this July after six years of planning. While it rightly acknowledges the TL's contributions to culture via music, from the Black Hawk nightclub to the album the Grateful Dead recorded there, it emphasizes more obscure facets like labor radicalism and the "independent women" who so irritated the city fathers a century ago by drinking in public and dancing the Turkey Trot.
That missing 60-year chunk of history isn't due to the neighborhood archives getting accidentally deleted, or locked in a safe deposit box in the Cayman Islands. For decades, the Tenderloin faced suppression from all sides, from anti-vice politicians looking to clean up the gambling parlors to civic boosters who preferred to pretend the TL didn't exist at all. Historians wrote books on San Francisco without a single reference to the Tenderloin in the index, Shaw noted, while photo exhibits about SRO residents displaced by urban renewal focused on SOMA.
Yet through all this, the Tenderloin remained politically active.
"Contrary to the popular view of the Tenderloin as primarily composed of formerly homeless or currently homeless drug users or people who are kind of out it, we've actually been the most activist neighborhood in San Francisco over the last 100 years," Shaw told me during an interview in his second-floor office on Hyde Street one warm afternoon.
That political potency is why, apart from the Hilton and other developments at the neighborhood's eastern edge, the neighborhood looks much as it did in the 1930s. The Barbary Coast disappeared after crackdowns in 1913. Even when Mayor George Christopher brought the gambling industry to a halt in 1956, the energized Tenderloin soldiered on, fighting off the convention hall that eventually became the Moscone Center and beating back a proposed state ballot initiative meant to target gay bars.
This is not to say that the Tenderloin doesn't have obstacles in its way, something Shaw is forthright about.
The neighborhood's general safety level "isn't what our residents deserve," he said. "I've been saying that forever. But it is getting better."
While it may be hard to isolate one aspect of the Tenderloin and call it neighborhood's main challenge, the struggle to get non-residents to come to the neighborhood has been a serious issue for decades.
"In my book, I quote a stakeholders' meeting in 1991 saying, 'We have a real crisis, we can't get capital, we can't get tourists,'" Shaw said. "All neighborhoods rely on outside people coming in."
It wasn't always that way. When the museum screened KQED's seldom-seen 1966 documentary Drugs in the Tenderloin, two things leapt out. One was all the neon signs that once adorned Market Street. The other was all the people.
"It looks like Times Square," Shaw said. "So many cars, so many people at night."
The scenes were shot around the intersection of Turk and Taylor, not far from Aunt Charlie's Lounge and only a few yards from where the Compton's Cafeteria Riot (the pre-Stonewall LGBT protest) took place that year.
"Now it's a little desolate," Shaw said. "People say it's scarier. We think that PianoFight, CounterPULSE are good. And you have to go with what its strengths are. We don't have office buildings. [Bars are] what we are."
Still, the if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach has limits, as Shaw admits.
"Bars are great, but you do have people who take their Uber to Bourbon and Branch, go to a restaurant, and leave," he said. "So they're not really connecting to the neighborhood. If we can get them to the museum, then they'll have to walk a bit."
I mention that this strategy has risks. When the Castro, a world-famous nightlife district with a large number of vacant storefronts, revealed the findings of its multi-year Retail Strategy Report in July, it only gave tepid support to the idea of more bars (and no support to more adult stores). Shaw is undeterred.
"There's people who live in the Castro who don't want it to be a nightlife district. In the Tenderloin, we don't have that problem," he said.
It's very refreshing to hear a power broker extol the virtues of nightlife. But aren't the Tenderloin's days as a working-class enclave numbered?
Shaw doesn't think so, citing 826 Valencia, PianoFight, CounterPULSE and other nonprofits as evidence that the neighborhood might finally solve its long-lasting problem of attracting outsiders. I press him, mentioning Downtown L.A.'s Skid Row, which is probably urban America's closest approximation to the Tenderloin, and which has been on fire with new redevelopment since the recession ended.
Again, Shaw demurs. Few people cared about Skid Row because of its peripheral location, he claims, and the Tenderloin is nothing if not central. And since most people who harbor skepticism about the Tenderloin have never been there (or so Shaw claims), greater exposure will necessarily yield results. Already, he no longer has to correct as many misleading crime reports.
"The media's gotten a lot better," he said. "It used to be, if something good happens on O'Farrell, it's Lower Nob Hill, but if it's a murder on Sutter, it's the Tenderloin."
But what really justifies his optimism is that he's heard it all before.
"Even now, people say 'Oh, it's just a matter of time before the Tenderloin's been gentrified.' People were saying that in the 80s! And it's almost like, 'You mean you can prevail?' I think there's a lesson here, and people coming to the museum will have a new appreciation for it."
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