Mat

William De Avila Elementary School
Haight Street
Wednesday morning

***

I hate this place. It stinks and it's dirty and there's piss everywhere and needles and garbage and yesterday when I went for a run in the park I had to traverse a trail that had been completely covered in used toilet paper. I've been robbed at gunpoint here, just down the street from my apartment. San Francisco is expensive, and I'll never be able to afford to buy a home. The city government is corrupt, there's nowhere to park, the people are all fucking crazy, and don't even get me started about MUNI.

I'm never leaving, motherfuckers.

I moved here about a dozen years ago. My plan was to stick around for a year and then head for the brighter lights of New York, and a glamorous career in publishing. Instead I've been here ever since. Because as much as I hate this place--and I do, I really, really do--I love it even more. I'm originally from Alabama. I spent my late teens and early 20s in Georgia. I've also lived in Colorado, Virginia, South Carolina, Iran and Kuwait. But if you ask, I'll tell you I'm a San Franciscan.

I adore this never-ending freakshow of a city. It's a place that taught me to be comfortable and confident with who I am. I love moving between its various scenes, from hipsters to hippies to house kids to old school punk rockers, political activists, futurists, artists, scientists, students, burners, bohemians, surfers, cyclists, and tech-addled transplants who dream of changing the world. (Or at least: making a lot of money.) I love its Victorian charm, the grit of its industrial zones, the beauty of its Bay and ocean. The hills and the way the fog comes tumbling across the sides of Sutro, gliding across the valleys into the heart of the city.

I love going to parties and striking up conversations with people who've come from other places--Arizona and Nebraska and Oklahoma and Mississippi and Massachusetts and Paris and Peru and Senegal and points beyond--to make a new life here next to the ocean, on the farthest edge of the American experiment. And I love that experimentation. I love the gay boys and the butch dykes and those with many myriad variations of self-defined gender roles that illustrate so well why it's a plane, and not a polar construct. We're not afraid of something new. Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. We'll take it, we'll try it, we'll embrace that which you fear and show you that it's not so bad. That it's good. That it's better, even.

I love running through Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, and across coastal trails that look down on the crashing Pacific. Riding my bike across the brilliant red bridge into sunny Marin county, and looking back on the city hidden below fog, like cake beneath a layer of perfect white frosting. I love watching the sun crash into the Pacific to die another day, and the moon rise big and yellow over the hills of the East Bay, floating softly above our low slung skyline.

And I love that it's the city where I fell in love. Where I met my beautiful, kind, and caring wife, whose heart is as big as California itself. Who took me in not despite but because of eccentricities. It was in this landscape where we first looked deeply into each others eyes and saw the future spread out fifty years before us. And it was always here. Right here.

I'm never leaving. I just want to make it better. My dear friend and sometimes mentor Patrick Hughes, the Baron of Haight Street, told me that this is a city that rewards those who give to it. "Give to San Francisco, and San Francisco will give back to you." And I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't change it. I'll live with that I hate, because it's worth it all for that I love.

***

You can see the rest of Mat's photo shoot here.

Mat's website is http://honan.net

You can find him on twitter: http://twitter.com/mat

Mariana

On Haight Street
Lower Haight
Friday afternoon

***

My husband wishes I wouldn’t tell people we had an “arranged” marriage. He’d rather say we were “introduced” by family. I suppose he thinks it sounds as though I was forced to marry him. I think “arranged” has a nice ring to it because I know no other way the universe could have connected our paths and then bestowed upon us this alive, eclectic, bursting-at-its-seams city to grow in love and make our first home.

I lived on the East coast, and he called San Francisco home. We met in a splendidly random way after an aunt suggested we might get along. He called. I picked up and was hooked… Fast forward and three months later, he asked me to marry him during my first trip to the city. I gasped a resounding “YES”, got hitched and moved out West for love.

Moving for love, especially to a city as intimidating as it is glorious, isn’t always easy. Change isn’t always easy, and there were plenty of changes.

Big ones: Steep, rich neighborhoods, packed so tightly with incredible, inexplicable poverty. My ten round, knock-down, drag-out, bare-knuckled brawl with unemployment. A teeny 600sq. ft apartment. No friends. MUNI. And totally insane rent prices.

There were plenty of changes all right, but that was one year ago, and things eventually “arranged” themselves.

I now have a job I fought to get. I am lucky to call some of the most fantastic ladies in this city my friends. I love the smell of the Eucalyptus nestled secretly in a sprawling city. I know where to taste the crisp freshness of a cheap Vietnamese Sandwich. I’m beginning to realize MUNI is incredible, and all the craziness on board is part of the fun.

Things aren’t perfect, and there will be big hurdles ahead, but they’ll work themselves out. They have so far.

Call me naïve, but I can think of no logical explanation of how two people so far away could cross paths, fall in love and then learn to grow in love in this beautifully accepting and challenging city. You can call it God, the universe, family, fate, or just sheer luck. I’m content to believe things arranged themselves for us here in San Francisco.

Last month we moved to the Lower Haight. We live in a wonderful, graffiti-colored neighborhood. We live in a gorgeously old apartment. We live in this place we are proud to call our first home together. We live here in SF.

***

Mariana Jacob is a journalist. In October she will run her first half-marathon and is currently raising money to fund cancer research. You can help her in her mission to wipe out blood cancer by donating here:

http://pages.teamintraining.org/sf/nikesf09/mariana

You can see the rest of Mariana's photo shoot here.

Stuart

Tuesday afternoon
On Fillmore Street
Hayes Valley

***

Often times you don’t choose San Francisco, she chooses you. For some it happens the first time they come to The City, while for others it’s the 51st time. Regardless, there’s always a point when suddenly you realize, “I’m going to live here”, and then you go about making that a reality. I’ve spent the past seven years (with a lot of on and a lot of off) in this fine, fine city that I’m lucky enough to say chose me.

Growing up in San Diego, I visited SF a few times as a kid, but it wasn’t until I was in college, in Santa Cruz, that I first felt seduced. I had come up in the summer of 2002 to do an internship at Bill Graham Presents. It was the summer between my junior and senior year, and my friend Mani and I were sharing a room (a converted living room with no actual door) in a building at the corner of Haight and Central. We were both freshly 21, with very little money, a whole lotta heart, and a willingness to give ourselves to the City so she could do with us what she wanted. And she certainly did.

A lot happened that summer. I saw scores of great shows and I read a lot of books. I explored thoroughfares and alleyways, learning the difference between avenues and streets. I made a few true friends and a hell of a lot of acquaintances. I fell in love for the first time and I saw a dead body up close and personal for the first time too. I thought I found a career path and later learned I was wrong. I also thought I’d forever stay the person I was then. I was wrong about that as well. But more than anything else, the most significant thing that happened to me that summer was that San Francisco chose me.

By the end of that summer I knew I’d end up living here again. It also helped that the girl who I’d fallen for was here, so I’d have ample reason to come up and visit my future home. Not that I really needed any reason.

Sometimes it feels like a lifetime has passed since I first felt San Francisco’s pull. Various women and friends have come in and out of my life and I’ve spent much of my time over the past few years living out of a bag, sometimes half way around the world. Plus I’ve fallen in love once again; San Francisco is a wonderful city in which to be in love. But of all the things that have within me and without me, one thing has remained constant; my affection and admiration for this city. No matter where I am in the world, I’m always proudest when I say San Francisco is my home and I see someone’s eyes light up. It’s then that I know The City has chosen that person too.

***

Stuart is the author of Broke-Ass Stuart's Guide to Living in San Francisco. He has also written a NYC version. If you enjoy shit talking and cheap stuff, make sure to visit him at www.brokeassstuart.com.

The rest of Stuart's photo shoot can be seen here.

Megan

East Portal MUNI stop
Lower Haight
Saturday morning

***

I was born at Mt. Zion hospital, in the old wing at Post and Scott, before San Francisco was a "knowledge center" full of "thought leaders," in the dead zone between the counterculture revolutions and the technology boom. They don't have a birth wing any more. It's a cancer research center now. Which you know, I might be grateful for someday too.

In 1986, my bedroom window at Vermont & Mariposa looked at the sunset over Sutro tower. The other side of it seemed like a foreign land, like on the other side might be the other side of the world, where someone had told me their sun comes up when ours goes down and they start their day as we are going to bed. It didn't occur to me that on the other side of it was just the Sunset, where we had moved to Potrero Hill from a house at 2206 39th Avenue. A Chinese family had bought it in probate and wanted to sell it to my parents. They had it appraised around $108,000. My dad couldn't really see the value in it, and neither was really ready for the commitment.

During the day I went to Katherine Michiels' School at 1335 Guerrero, where we made our own vegetarian lunches and made up rap songs about farm animals and social justice. After school, I played in Dolores Park or ate quesadillas from La Cumbre at 515 Valencia. I still do both of those things on a fairly regular basis. My mom bought duck sausage at a butcher on Mission Street and made things that tasted like New Orleans, where she had lived briefly before moving to San Francisco.

From our house on Vermont Street, we walked to Goat Hill Pizza and Farley's. There used to be a make-your-own teddy bear factory near the Anchor Steam brewery somewhere, and mine was a fat one named Farley. They only TV channel I was permitted to watch (on a black & white set with an antenna) was KQED, which I knew was where Sesame Street lived, a few blocks away at the bottom of the hill. But it was a big hill to a small girl, and the few short blocks seemed an enormous distance from the Slovenian Hall to McKinley Square.

I believe early childhood in Potrero Hill was, spatially, one of the most positive impacts on my cognitive development. The relationship of the industrial flats to the neighborhood ascending the hill, the freeway as a visual and psychological border, and the mix of residential and commercial uses all worked together to subvert the conventions that are taught to American children as the "proper" kind of neighborhood to live in, while being exactly the most salutary kind of neighborhood to live in. The city in the eighties was a real, live Sesame Street; presenting the languages of plurality and urbanism at the most formative time, so that homogeneous single use residential areas would always seem wrong and foreign.

Of course, I couldn't articulate any of that until one day in college, when I worked for my dad in the dispatch center at Luxor Cab Co. In my downtime, I pored compulsively over the reverse phone directory and made indexes on a map of callers' old telephone exchanges, addresses, and real estate listings. I was obsessed with the movement of people, where they lived and worked, where they went, and what of the city was leftover from before. The young dispatcher I worked with on Sunday mornings told me I should consider urban planning as a vocation, and lent me a copy of Jane Jacobs' The Death & Life of Great American Cities. He's a MUNI driver now, and I see him occasionally on the system around town. There's never time to thank him for illuminating my purpose, and I keep meaning to return his copy of the book.

It was the most incredible revelation; here was the lens through which I see the world, perfectly articulated and preceding me by forty years. To this day, it informs so much of what I think and talk about. I went on to study most of the rest of Jacobs' body of work, but even now I keep a copy of The Death & Life next to my bed for quick-reference, finding it as prescient and useful as ever on an almost daily basis. I can hardly speak about anything without relating it back to the built environment or transit infrastructure or demographics or history; it bores the snot out of my friends but frankly, I don't care to think about things any other way.

I love the idea of continuing Jacobs' legacy in the information age, and feel oddly lucky that I just happen to be indigenous to a city and region on the forefront of information technology and dissemination. I see such incredible potential there, and I love thinking about what she would say about Streetsblog and the Livable Streets movement, and the creation of virtual neighborhoods through localized blogs and social networking sites. And I'm so excited to be an active participant in furthering the urban literacy ethic in as many ways as I can; I'm currently working with two really talented urbanists to put together a Jane's Walk for early May, in the neighborhood I call home. So many people see the upper Haight through a narrow lens, whether because of its history or aesthetic or street life, and I can't wait to illustrate the specific aspects of the environment that make it a wonderfully livable, pluralistic, self-sustaining neighborhood.

I'll never be cured of this.

***

Megan's blog is goodurb.com

The rest of Megan's photo shoot is here.