San Francisco, CALIFORNIA – Elijah Glasper knocks on his own door before pushing it open into a wide wedge, allowing light from the hallway to do what the late-morning sun couldn’t achieve through heavy curtains.
“Loretta? You still sleeping?”
Glasper peers into the dark room while beckoning a visitor behind him to follow into his apartment six floors above the alleys and sidewalks of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. “Come on in. She won’t mind.”
One step into Glasper and Loretta’s 120-square-foot apartment and it’s clear she’s not there.
Glasper turns with a practised pivot on one foot, lifting and spinning a quarter way around to a wall covered with diplomas. “I’m proud of these. I got clean. I’m helping others. End of story. But a lot of living in between then and now.”
The pivoting foot swings a fraction to the centre of the room where canned foods are stacked up to the ceiling over a shiny sink. “My kitchen,” he says before finishing his small circle pivot to the other wall where a small TV sits on a table. “That’s it.” Glasper concludes the tour of his home and then, as if remembering, he points up to the ceiling. “My roof.”
That roof is no minor thing for someone who has been homeless, Glasper tells his visitor.
This is not the kind of tour the travel guides talk about.
San Francisco has long been one of the world’s top tourism destinations, but the glow of the Golden Gate Bridge and the charm of cable cars are just one side of the city. Renewed effort is being put into the downtown’s historic Tenderloin district, a place travel brochures warn visitors to stay away from, citing the high crime rates and homeless population.
The neighbourhood’s rough reputation goes back nearly a century when construction and dock workers first settled here to rebuild the city after the earthquake of 1906. The name Tenderloin was given to the neighbourhood because police officers used to be bribed with choice cuts of meats to provide enforcement.
One of the first novels to depict the Tenderloin remains a California classic, still taught in schools in the Golden State. McTeague, published in 1899, is about a murderous dentist who desires to have a gold tooth sign hanging above his store-front.
More than a century ago, the Tenderloin neighbourhood was a place where the working people in butcher shops and produce markets served wealthy women who came to the area to do their daily shopping.
The hope of Glasper and other activists in the community is to make the 40 city blocks of residences and businesses a tourist stop in San Francisco for visitors who have only gone to Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Upon request, tours are available of the thousands of single-room-occupancy hotels like the tiny apartment where Glasper lives. Glasper, one of 30,000 residents in one of the most densely packed neighbourhoods of the United States, has lived in the Tenderloin for 30 years after becoming an addict and homeless. His building at 44 McAllister St. has been home for two years and, like many heritage buildings in the neighbourhood, construction crews are inside and out doing renovations and seismic upgrades, restoring elegant marble foyers and sandstone exteriors.
At an unveiling ceremony last spring, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said heritage listings on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places will help the Tenderloin.
“These plaques help give the community defined boundaries and a positive identity,” said Newsom at the ceremony. “By revitalizing a rare urban neighbourhood, we get more foot traffic, which means safer streets, more successful businesses and the Tenderloin receiving a greater share of the city’s tourist trade.”
Within a few blocks of the worst of the Tenderloin are some of San Francisco’s swankiest neighbourhoods, including Nob Hill, as well as art galleries, the theatre district and the shopping destination of Union Square. Hotel Monaco, one of the city’s premier hotels, is positioned within mere blocks of all the city’s biggest attractions and the Tenderloin.
In the past couple of years, major changes have transformed the neighbourhood; green space has been revived and more police patrols have been deployed, said Jenny Toomer, area director of sales and marketing for the Hotel Monaco. Within a few steps on either side of the Monaco are exclusive speakeasies, upscale restaurants and downscale ethnic hole-in-the-walls that locals swear serve some of the best Indian, Mexican and soul food in the city.
“It’s like any urban city. You need to be street smart,” says Toomer. “We’ve seen incredible changes over the last few years and there’s going to be even more changes.”
It says something about a neighbourhood where, in the span of a block or two, a line-up behind cordoned ropes can just as easily be for a free meal at the local church as the queue to get into one of the city’s boutique bars.
The Tenderloin Neighbourhood Development Corp. had its origins in the 1970s as an anti-gentrification organization trying to stave off major hotels like Hilton from razing the buildings. Over the years, TNDC has become one of the major landlords, managing thousands of units for low-income families and seniors in the area.
“This is a vibrant, diverse and fascinating place. It’s a social experiment, ever changing and evolving,” says the TNDC’s Julie Doherty during a tour of a family social housing building.
In what had once been an alleyway for addicts on Ellis Street, for example, local residents have created the Tenderloin National Forest, where three trees — a Japanese maple and redwoods — are babied and surrounded by plants, an outdoor oven and bushes. The garden is contained on three sides by brightly coloured walls and a dilapidated apartment building on the end.
“The tourists who would want to come to the Tenderloin are people who can walk around with confidence, have their wits about them and can walk down alleys and look at things,” says Doherty. “It’s not a bus tour.”
