Category Archives: redevelopment

The Stanes Of Auld Reekie

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JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.

“…Old Edinburgh, so long the most overcrowded and deteriorated of all the world’s cities — yet with its past never wholly submerged, [is] thus one of the most richly instructive, most suggestive to the fresh-eyed observer, to the historic student. [It is] the natural center of the earliest of British endeavors towards the initiation of a school of sociology, with its theories, and a school of civics, with its surveys and interpretations.”

— Patrick Geddes; from CITIES IN EVOLUTION, 1915. The contrast, or the connection, between Edinburgh’s organically rich past, and its stupefyingly subdivided squalor, inspired modern urban studies.

From October, 1984 until July, 1985, my home was in:

Patrick Geddes Hall
Milne’s Court
The Lawnmarket, High Street at the West Bow, just below Castlehill
Edinburgh
Scotland

Milne’s Court, from the Bowhead, across the Lawnmarket. The white frontage is Ensign Ewart’s Pub.

The Court, and the neighborhood of which it is an integral unit, have played an outsized part in British history, considering its modest obscurity. When Milne built his Court, it was simultaneously an innovation in civilization — urban redevelopment — and an innovation in lifestyle — the apartment house. The six-floor walk-up became copied from Birmingham to Brooklyn to Boyle Heights. 250 years later, when the neighborhood once more had become foul, the Court was saved from a state of near-collapse, becoming a landmark all over again, this time for historic preservation.

“In my visits to these localities, I was much aided by our admirable City Missionaries, whose familiarity with all the corners and crevices of these destitute localities surprised me, and whose well known presence secured me a welcome admission into almost every house. Some of them have furnished me with valuable notes of the condition of the houses in their districts…Mr. Hancock, who visits the north side of the High Street, from North Bridge to Leith Wayund writes: “My district contains about 600 families, of whom only 150 to 200 have decent habitations. In these are included Ashley Buildings, the new building in Chalmer’s Close and Milne’s Court.” [from nearby Carruber’s Close:] “The land is in a ruinous condition, and is at present shored up; and the former entrance has been closed, in consequence of its unsafe state. Rent, 7 pounds 15 shillings; one small room rent, 3 pounds 15 shillings — 12 feet by 6 1/2 occupied just now, by husband and wife; lately occupied by a widow, her two sons, and one daughter, ages from 12 to 16. Several small rooms, where families of from two to four — sometimes taking a lodger besides — live; rents, from 5 pounds to 6 pounds ten shillings.In Elphinstone Ct., one small room, so dark that gas is burned night and day; family of seven; rent one shilling, one penny per week. One small room here, inhabited by a widow, with a grown-up son and daughter, rent, one shilling 3 1/2 pence per week. In the same Court, a family of a widow, with three sons, ages from 21 to nine, and two daughters, ages 18 and ten, sleep and live all in one room. Rent, one shilling 9 1/2 pence per week. In another room and closet, at the same rent, a father, mother and five children — two grown up — live; eldest and youngest sons sleep in a closet without light or air, all the others, in the room. There are about 30 families in this land, nearly all, occupying just one room. Many are shoemakers, using the room also as a workshop. In North Gray’s Close, is a wretched garret, occupied by a father, mother, and five children, paying for it and a light closet, two shillings per week.”

— Report on the Conditions of the Poorer Classes of Edinburgh, and of their Dwellings, Neighborhoods and Families. Prepared by Order of a Public Meeting of the Inhabitants, held in the Council Chamber under the presidency of The Right Honorable The Lord Provost, on the 15th April, 1867. 

The Victorian city fathers studied and evaluated and wrung their hands and collected tithes and prayed for the puir, but it took pioneering town planning genius Patrick Geddes to see that Edinburgh, with all its problems, was the ideal laboratory for social study of the dynamic, living city. He understood that the wrench and displacement of slum clearance — uprooting people’s lives, work and families was its own disease, often as bad as the cough that ran round the tenements.

The Hall that got named for Patrick Geddes is the central pavilion of Milne’s Court, here shown at left, with the entrance stairs. Right, the ramp down to the Pend. Note there are no dormers in the roof.
Geddes strove for an understanding of the
organic city, rising from men’s needs and dreams.

Throughout the neighborhood there are plaques that mark the Patrick Geddes Trail; you can visit many of the sites of his labor and interest. His spirit certainly walks his trail today — in the 36 years since I was there, much more of the neighborhood has been renovated. Today the crowds in the High Street prove his once-crazy theories: that if you improve the physical fabric of the city, you improve the citizens’ health and happiness, which attracts more healthy citizens, and more wealth to the city.

For instance, the reek-blackened old kirk across the street, which I knew as the derelict Tolbooth St. John, has been refurbished to play once more a leading role in the city, as “the Hub”, or HQ, of the spectacular Edinburgh Festival.

Built by Pugin near the site of the old Butter Tron as Victoria Hall, its spire is the highest point in Edinburgh. The building has a bewildering history that tracks closely with the fortunes, with the schisms and divisions, and with the reconciliations and retrenchments, of the Scottish Kirk. Once the General Assembly Hall, it became the parish church for the progressive-schismatic “West Bow” set of the ancient but dwindling Tolbooth congregation, when they were displaced by the re-unification of St. Giles. After they waned, the church got re-dedicated to St. John and a new congregation moved in. But people, homes, were leaving the High Street.

When I arrived in Edinburgh it had
been abandoned for about a year and
was a sad presence. Now look at ‘er!

THE BOWHEAD SAINTS:

In 1690, within its narrow walls, the medieval city had been so subdivided and compacted that the elite families were packing to leave. Even the Palace of Marie de Guise, Queen of Scots, had been chopped up for slums. Milne offered healthy and luxurious urban living, near all the action, but set back from the High Street — though he cannily included the lucrative High Street frontage for “mixed use.” In 1745 this wing was seized for a billet of the Highlander bodyguard of Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Young Pretender’s attempt to besiege the Castle. He had taken the “Butter Tron”, or Weigh House, at the top of West Bow, as his base. (Cromwell had done the same thing.)

“The first floor of the large stone land in front of Milne’s Court…was the residence and guardroom of the officers commanding the neighboring post [the Butter Tron]; and the dislodged occupant — a zealous Whig — took his revenge on them after their departure by advertising for the recovery of missing articles abstracted by his compulsory guests.

The court immediately behind appears to have been one of the earliest attempts to substitute an open square for the narrow closes that had so long afforded the sole places of town residence for the Scottish gentry. The main access is adorned with a Doric entablature bearing the date 1690. The principal house adorning the north side of the court [Patrick Geddes Hall] has a handsome entrance, with neat moldings that rise to a peak in the center like a very flat ogee arch. This style of ornament, which frequently appears in buildings of the same period, seems to mark the handiwork of Robert Milne, the builder of the most recent portions of Holyrood Palace, and seventh Royal Master Mason, whose uncle’s tomb, erected by him in the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, records in quaint rhymes these hereditary honors: “Reader, John Milne, who maketh the fourth John, And, by descent from father unto son, Sixth Master Mason to a royal race, Of seven successive kings, sleeps in this place.”

— Sir Daniel Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time, 1848.

Milne’s plain facades sketch out a rough form of the Neo-Classical. His Court is a rude, but definite, 17th-century pointer towards the Georgian and Regency complexes of Adam and Playfair over in the New Town. But his idea was not to escape from the Toun, but to make the Toun newly attractive to wealthy sophisticates. Milne and Geddes were brothers across the gulf of Edinburgh’s ages. And the Lawnmarket they both loved was a hurly-burly thing, indeed, in any age:

In the latter part of the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of the West Bow enjoyed a peculiar fame for their piety and zeal in the Covenanting cause. The wits of the opposite faction are full of allusions to them as ‘the Bowhead Saints,’ ‘the godly plants of the Bowhead,’ and so forth…It was in those days [1735] a custom to patrol the streets during the time of divine service, and take into captivity all persons found walking abroad; and indeed make seizure of whatever could be regarded as guilty of Sabbath-breaking. ‘The people about that time,’ says Arnot, ‘were in use to teach their birds to chant the songs of their party. It happened that the blackbird of an honest Jacobitical barber, which from his cage on the outside of the window gave offence to the zealous Whigs by his songs, was neglected, on a Saturday evening, to be brought within the house. Next morning he tuned his pipe to the usual air, “The King Shall Enjoy His Own Again.” One of the seizers, in his holy zeal, was enraged at this manifestation of impiety and treason in one of the feathered tribe. He went up to the house, seized the bird and the cage, and with much solemnity lodged them in the Tolbooth.’ Pennycook, a burgess bard of the time, represents the officer as addressing the bird: ‘ Had ye been taught by me, a Bowhead saint, You’d sung the Solemn League and Covenant, Bessy of Lanark, or the Last Good-night; But you’re a bird prelatic—that’s not right….Oh could my baton reach the laverocks* too, They’re chirping Jamie, Jamie, just like you: I hate vain birds that lead malignant lives, But love the chanters to the Bowhead wives.’

*an archaic and dialectical form of ‘larks’

— Robert Chambers, TRADITIONS OF EDINBURGH

UNESCO: In 1995 the Old Town and the New Town, together, were declared an UNESCO World Heritage Site. The registration specifically cites the city’s importance to the history of urban planning and historic preservation:

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/728/ “The remarkable juxtaposition of two clearly articulated urban planning phenomena. The contrast between the organic medieval Old Town and the planned Georgian New Town of Edinburgh, Scotland, provides a clarity of urban structure unrivalled in Europe. The juxtaposition of these two distinctive townscapes, each of exceptional historic and architectural interest, which are linked across the landscape divide, the “great arena” of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Valley, by the urban viaduct, North Bridge, and by the Mound, creates the outstanding urban landscape.” — From UNESCO’S page on Edinburgh.

Robert Milne, Master Mason and entrepreneurial landlaird. The Milnes were one seam that stitched up Scottish Rite Freemasonry, the mystical medieval philosophy that eventually seduced America’s Founding Fathers. In fact the family includes the 19th century Alexander Milne Calder, who emigrated from Stirling to Philadelphia, to sculpt William Penn atop City Hall; and his son Alexander Stirling Calder, who sculpted Eakins Oval; and even the superstar grandson, the one with all the mobiles. Talk about family tradition.

The south-facing apartment windows, six storeys tall, get whatever sun Edinburgh affords; while on the other side, maybe eight storeys of windows channeled fresh air right into the corridors off the Firth of Forth. From the point of View of hygiene in the face of respiratory illness (consumption, coronavirus) the fresh air and sunlight made this a new model tenement. High-ceilinged, warmly paneled and gaily painted inside, it was one of the first modern apartment houses.

ten’i-ment, n. a holding, by any tenure: anything held, or that may be held, by a tenant: a dwelling or habitation, or part of it, used by one family: one of a set of apartments in one building, each occupied by a separate family: one of a set of apartments in one building, each occupied by one family: a building divided into dwellings for a number of families (Scot.)

Chambers English Dictionary; 1988. (First published 1901, as ‘Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary’)

Milne’s development was right on the cusp of events. The eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment was just dawning; indeed, since it gave them all apartments to live in, Milne and his imitators helped kick it off. James’s Court, built next door to Milne’s in 1735, ended up housing David Hume, who wrote about how he loved living in the Lawnmarket; and when he left, James Boswell took over his flat, and there hosted Dr. Johnson. Capital was the future, common builders were becoming as important to the urban plan as royal architects had been, and feudalism was dead. Some say the stanes in Milne’s Court were cannibalized from the walls of the crumbling Palace of Marie de Guise, Queen and Queen Regent of the Scots, which had stood next door.
“Lawnmarket” is part of the Edinburgh High Street, aka, the Royal Mile between the Catle and Holyroodhouse Palace. “Lawn” is derived from French “lin,” pronounced nasally, like “lahn.” This was the cloth-market, the linen market. I surmise that the French troops of Marie de Guise, stationed in the Castle — a result of the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France against England — added the faint whiff of garlic to ‘Embro’ dialect.

My house
is granite
it fronts
North,

Where the Firth flows,
East the sea.
My room
Holds the first

Blow from the North
The first from the East,
Salt upon
The pane.

In the dark,
I, a child,
Did not know
The consuming Night

And heard
The wind,
Unworried and
Warm — secure.

— George Bruce (1909 – 2002)
The 39 Steps. Our window cut off, middle left.

That’s how I felt, bub. And if Jeremy, my roommate, and I went to class and left the windie open and it rained, the North Wind would blow straight from Granton Harbor up the Mound, and shoot through the Pend, and spray into the room with force; and the cleaners would scold us for leavin’ gritty puddles on their nice clean flairs. The cleaners’ moral geo-microclimate — their prime goal, to live, by God, warm and dry on that bare rock exposed to the North Sea — seems central to the Edinburgh experience.


Perilously steep and long, the Pend was both romantic and handy — but also smoky and loud to live above. I myself could never stop from whistling when I tripped it. After a rain, late at night, gritty footsteps echo up and down those 39 steps. (It is a Milne’s Court tradition that these are ‘The 39 Steps.’)

Right at the tunnel, directly under our windie-sool, was a popular spot for drunken lads to sing football songs, or shout curses at their enemies — them bloody wankerrs! When lads stopped to smoke and talk trash, Jeremy and I would fantasize about the old Edinburgh tradition: emptying chamber pots onto the steps, shouting “Gardee-Loo, Gardee-Loo!” (‘gardez – l’eau). But then we would’ae ben rreel bloody wankerrs.

Click for a perfectly mesmerizing 8-minute video of a rainy-day walk around my old World Heritage neighborhood. It starts just outside the Castle gates, then goes down the Castlehill, with Pugin’s Tolbooth St. John’s (now “The Hub) on the right. Then down the Lawnmarket, past Mylne’s Court passage at 1:29, on the left. At 1:35, you’ll spot my pillar box; at 2:35 the phone booth I used to call home; at 2:36 the Old Scottish Parliament; at 3:08 the National Library of Scotland, and from then on down into the charming Grassmarket, where I ate and drank, to take a stunning View back up to the Castle at 8:00. This is how I remember the place — rainy, and cozy, and braw.

‘Henry George — Printer To Author’ — Ex Libris VVV

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VIRAL LIBRARY DEPT.

I planned to write an introduction on the proud tradition of art presses and printing in the Bay Area. But I’ve decided I don’t want to dim the lustre of Henry George, the subject of this fine book. Just note, that this book is part of a craft-printing tradition, and a labor of love from a husband and wife in the Oakland hills in the 70’s.

The volume is slim, elegant and traditional, like Henry George himself, but it is wrapped in a cover of the wildest exoticism, as were his (revolutionary) theories. Dig that sock-it-to-me Bill Graham-Fillmore Theatre color: the nauseating “pop” psychedelics of chartreuse against burgundy.

At least I dug it, when I pulled it off the thrift store shelf. Hand-printed, manually bound, made of plummy paper, I flipped through it for 20 seconds or more before I realized it was a biography of Henry George. Well, heavens. $4.99? I had five dollars; I was in good condition. How on Earth, could this rare book possibly have fallen in my hands, of all people?

I first “met” Mr. George years ago, walking around Philadelphia.

Ordinary, modest little row-house on hard-working 10th Street. The man was a genius, taking an anthropological and sociological, rather than a financialized, View of the constantly vexing problem of why societies routinely, regularly as clockwork, trip, stumble and fall.

I was immediately intrigued by the (new, then) marker. I’d never heard of George. None of my history, business or economics professors at Penn had dared mention his name or ideas. I looked up Progress and Poverty, and I read it by scrolling through an e-book online.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/george-progress-and-poverty

Golden honey drips from George’s pen; he is one of those authors whose e-leaves flip by quickly. The scales fell from my eyes, and I understood why “econ” had made my head hurt and heart ache, and why it didn’t make sense, and why it was “dismal.” (Hint: because classical economics is bunk.) His work is the firm theoretical foundation for the radical idea that “the rent is too damn high.”

Patient Reader, he is an intellectual hero of mine, and he started feet-on-the-cobbles in Philadelphia, and made his great career Franklin-style, as a printer and newspaperman, out in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. [“A dashing place; rather faster than Philadelphia.”]

As a famous author, economist and speechifier, he moved to New York and ran for reform Mayor, losing ONLY to (the most famous reform mayor in history) Teddy Roosevelt.

This man loved, and walked, the cities I’ve loved and walked. The notion of urbanity, of the human city, is central to his ideas. He was a founding member of the Bohemian Club, thus San Francisco royalty; and — get this — he was Agnes de Mille’s uncle. Thus, consider the geniuses one American family has given us: Henry George, Agnes de Mille, William de Mille, Cecil B. de Mille, and Hollywood actor Anthony Quinn. Only in the View, dearies, only in the View.

Downtown L.A. Forecast: Rain, Coronavirus, More Tear-Downs

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TRIGGER ALERT: ‘#CYNICAL’ SKIP TO VIEWING PHOTOS FOR THE CAKE AND ICE CREAM

It may be only a short time yet before riding Metro becomes foolhardy. (If quarantines get like they are in Europe, it might become impossible.) Plus, we’ve got storms coming this week… winter storms reliably increase local infections, and turn the whole of Metro into a hobo jungle. Who could give the homeless a shred of blame for their squalor? With society trapped in an abysmal spiral of human catastrophe, run by billion-airheads and ignored by checked-out consumers, Metro and the public libraries are the only sick-room/shelter the folks living rough have got. Noting their lack of proper health care (easy to note, since I share it) I imagine that if the weather doesn’t warm up soon, there must be a crushing, Medieval death toll among the hapless, sitting-duck homeless population of Los Angeles — and anyone who has to ride Metro with them.

SO, Patient Reader, since I might not be able to venture Downtown again for a while, I took advantage of the already relatively deserted City today. I hadn’t even realized the LA Marathon had just ended, until I met crowds of flushed, panting athletes getting ON the subway at Pershing Square just as I was getting off!

LEAVING NORTH HOLLYWOOD: NoHo Park lies adjacent to NoHo Station. Distant looms Mt. Cahuenga, at the foot of which is the NEXT subway stop, Universal City. That’s how long the distances are between Metro stops. It’s another dozen stops or more to Downtown, through Hollywood, Los Feliz, Koreatown, and Westlake.

  • I’m not deterred…under the mountain we go! Destination, Angels’ Flight at Pershing Square.
  • Grand Central Market

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Grand Central Market, by giving itself over to high-priced hipster food, kicking out the farmers, attracting white kids and raising the rents on Broadway, killed the entire historic district. Only five years ago it was the bustling, throbbing, Mexican/Chinese shopping and entertainment (movies) district. It was ‘polyglot’ but it was exciting and colorful and certainly made plenty of money; there were fabulous Beaux-Arts shopping arcades and cafeterias, and there was mariachi music playing everywhere and fascinating old legacy businesses, like music shops and expert Italian-import tailors selling ridiculously cheap fine haberdashery. It now appears every building along Broadway, except the market, is vacant on spec of “redevelopment”. Even the homeless seem to stay away now.

  • The rear of the Bradbury Bldg. gives on Biddy Mason Plaza and Monument
  • Historic Downtown. They’ve ALMOST completely destroyed it. Murals are the artists’ last resistance.
  • St. Vibiana’s, the old Catholic cathedral of an old archdiocese
  • Now it’s a private banqueting hall and occasional club space. Seriously.
  • But it’s still here!

FLETCHER BOWRON SQUARE: Alta California’s provincial capital and archives, Government House, once stood here in a fine adobe. So did El Palacio, Abel and Arcadia Stearns’s huge casa adobe; also the city’s first hotel the Bella Union, where the Butterfield Stage stopped. So too, the first LA County buildings. Also the first big commercial “blocks” in the 1870s, Temple Block, Baker Block, etc., London or New York-style Victorian emporia. They grew out of ground-floor adobe saloons which still retained the original dirt floors. These buildings all grew up together and were more or less knocked into each other for 100 years, with floors and wings that served as publishers, wineries, importers, flophouses, opium dens, artist studios. You know, the City. Then it was all torn down — surviving opium dens, Raymond Chandler-esque Victorian boarding-houses and all — in the 1970s….for THIS.

  • The Triforium. Shudder.

I guess it was appropriate to honor Mayor Fletcher Bowron by tearing down the City’s central core, since he was the man who had torn down almost everything else. Progress Bowron, LAX Bowron, Freeway Bowron, Bunker Hill Bowron. I reflect, that great men are drawn to civic office because they are awed by the living City and wish to increase her health and beauty; and small men are drawn to city leadership because they hate and fear the City, which belittles them. They have to prove how high THEY have risen, by pissing on the past and killing what they never could understand. LA has had both kinds of leadership; and it shows. For 150 years, it’s looked like a Promise of Paradise that has been bombed by its own citizens. Okay! We’re walking, we’re walking…

  • Main Street crosses Aliso over the gully that used to hold El Camino Real, but now holds the 101.
  • Yangna was here. Still is, it seems.
  • The Merced Theatre — 1871. Joining San Francisco, the Merced created a circuit, “the Coast”, and the Western branch of the U.S. entertainment industry was born. In the early 20th century it was a drag ball resort.
  • Pico House, the hotel Pio Pico built on the Plaza in 1870 with the proceeds of selling the Valley.
  • A coral tree, LA’s official city tree, blooms in the Plaza.

For years I wondered what they did to the Pico House in the early 80’s that was so damned embarrassing it had to be closed to the pubic forever. Since today the lights had been left on in the abandoned building for some reason, I finally got a chance to take a look. This is what all the best, and best-paid, minds in civic planning, historic preservation, and commercial design, came up in 1981 with when their task was: “preserve LA’s most historic luxury grand hotel and restaurant complex, located on a highly-touristed corner, in the middle of a National Park, on a spot that marks the very center of the City.”

Avila Adobe, in the heart of Olvera Street:

  • View Union Station from the rear garden of Avila Adobe.
  • Turkish rugs and Chinese silks, smuggled through San Pedro to evade the Monterey customs.
  • The ‘new’ Cathedral
  • Robert Graham’s Queen of the Angels
  • Saint Andrew, detail from the Ezcary Altar, completed in Spain in 1678. For years this was the main altar at San Fernando Mission. Note the wonderful vines!
Before heading back down into the bowels of Metro, I paused at one of the fountain courtyards at Union Station.

555 Fulton — How Phantom Wealth Kills Civilization

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PHANTOM WEALTH MUST RUN TO GROUND. The race to build unaffordable luxury buildings on spec is driving out urban working people, and poisoning the productive economy.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Chinese-developer-in-Mohammed-Nuru-allegations-is-15014321.php

Click above for information on 555 Fulton. I can’t understand much of the “inside-SF” skullduggery involved, only that it involves City building-permit corruption. There’s even a Foodie angle: implicated is Nick Bovis, the innkeeper of Lefty O’Doul’s, the landmark Geary Street dive bar just opposite the side-door of the St. Francis Hotel. But the real failure here is the huge price the City is paying for ill-conceived developments like this one.

555 Fulton Street is a “location location location” in San Francisco. It’s only a few blocks from the bustling Civic Center in one direction, and from chic Hayes Valley in the other. It’s just a short stroll up to the Alamo Square dog park; or into Japantown. It’s just a quick jog down to Market Street, where you can catch the “F” trolley down into the Castro.

In the Old Economy (pre-Tech) none of these neighborhoods were very fancy at all, with the exception of the block of “Painted Ladies” trimming the view from Alamo Square. BUT — Fulton Street itself is (was?) mostly lined with huge Section 8 housing projects, housing a large percentage of the City’s working-class African Americans. “The Western Addition” has many tough blocks, but also, of course, as proud and diverse a community history as any.

Right in the middle of all this was 555 — a block-square gated industrial compound, with a modest Modernist two-story front-office type building attached. The ground floor was open entirely on one side as a covered loading dock, surrounded by a yard spacious enough to park thirty cars or trucks. It was one of the very few mixed-use buildings in that part of town, and the tenants it attracted made it fascinating and exciting to visit. One unit held a small-batch artisanal sausage factory (Clio loved that one). One office held a group of geeky but well-heeled Tech Pioneers, who sat all day from 8 until 6 in a white room snaked with black, humming cables. They were very friendly about the dogs galloping up and down the plywood floors of the hallways, but they were preter-naturally silent themselves: no banter, no guffawing, no blaring talk-radio, no slam-dunked beer bottles thunking into the corner trash bucket. God knows what they were doing with all that humming equipment, but it seemed Very San Francisco. Other units held indie filmmakers, artists, lesbian bartenders, and an ice-cream vendor with his push-carts corralled in the yard. One part of the yard was wired off with thirty-foot high chain link, a cage-cube filled with what looked like rusting scrap metal.

It was a homely post-Industrial eyesore. But it was cheap and central and a quirky landlord encouraged the spontaneous adaption by citizen-local-residents. It made 555 a simulacrum of the diverse, creative, hard-working, entrepreneurial, un-pretentious, gastronomically-adventurous City of yore.

The architect’s original vision — I mean, the vision he saw first.

When the building was bought ten years ago by a Chinese hotelier, Zhang Li, he tore it down, and paid relocation fees to get the tenants out quickly — most had to leave the City, and many ended up in the East Bay. The gleaming, expensive new building he planned and built on spec was touted — with apparently no irony at all — as one of those trendy new urban-planning Barbie dolls, a “mixed-use building.” But unlike the old one, this new kind was fantastically modern and expensive, and would attract only one kind of user — the branded hot young up-and-coming trust-fundy hipster-striver of the New San Francisco.

Another version of what the site was supposed to be, with a grocery store downstairs.

Sadly, the site has so far missed even that sad fate, for the building sits empty, not ever quite finished, not ever quite abandoned. I understand many of San Francisco’s famous bars and restaurants have closed recently. None of the locals can afford to go, and none of the locals is even local, anymore, so that’s that. Phantom wealth must run to ground, after all.