The city of San Francisco has concluded that if they’re going to unwind the doom loop, maybe they need to bring in some art to give Market Street visual appeal. Marco Cochrane’s 40-foot tall metal sculpture of a naked woman, R-Evolution, installed where Market meets the Embarcadero, was an excellent choice, aesthetically and symbolically. Flanked on both sides with massive, featureless big box (i.e. male) architecture, the female figure dominates the landscape. She has the power of beauty in an environment that is powerful only because of the size and coldness of the recent big box glut. The newer big boxes of the business world offer no delights whatsoever, but they don’t have to: theirs has been the power of money.
The corporate office buildings that sprang up like markers of male dominance on the cityscape have seen their day. The pandemic offered workers the chance to escape them, and not surprisingly, people just don’t want to go back. No one has ever stood at the foot of some massive, unadorned corporate tomb and said, “wow, that’s fabulous.” They do that every day at the foot of R-Evolution.
Naturally, not everyone loves R-Evolution. There are no doubt people who also find the Venus de Milo distasteful, lacking, as she does, in modesty. Whatever. The point is that art is worth looking at, and the local business associations are desperate to re-invigorate the city’s floundering main drag, so they are bringing in work worth seeing. I thoroughly support installing art in public places, but as I have pointed out repeatedly in recent weeks, if installing art was all it would take to draw people to a place, all the galleries and museums would be constantly packed. They aren’t.
What makes people want to be in a place isn’t the objects on display there, but the creative work that’s done there—or been done there so well that the whole world paid attention. Being in a place where artists offer a perpetual source of new stimulation appeals to the obsessive American craving for novelty.
The history of San Francisco is full of examples of how creative people changed neighborhoods. When my father arrived from Sicily in his youth, North Beach was a fishing village until the Beat poets arrived. Haight Street was a boarded up commercial area for a torn-down amusement park until the rock musician moved in. When all the founders of Burning Man lived in the inner city Western Addition, it suddenly became gentrified. South of Market was an abandoned industrial district, emptied by globalization, until the punks, machine artists, and performance artists gave it life again. A funky Filipino restaurant on Broadway became an international sensation as a center for punk musicians, and during my last trip to Berlin, I found a very expensive coffee table book about that place, the Mabuhay Gardens. How many times does it have to be repeated—if you want to revitalize a place, move in artists. Why do the people who run San Francisco traditionally pay no attention to the lessons of history?
Perhaps the doom loop was a blessing in disguise. Without the huge creative community that put San Francisco on the world map as a center of creative innovation, that abandoned the city when the cost of living escalated astronomically. the city stopped sparkling. What’s left is the invasive, unattractive architecture built for an obsolete function. The developers have lost their purpose, and now they build hideous, cold big box housing, for a city losing population—and with 61K uninhabited units—that are mostly empty. And our new mayor wants to invade pristine old neighborhoods like North Beach to build more of same. He also loves AI, so his policies are iffy at best, and the promise of a 5th generation local mayor is sadly diminished.
R-Evolution stands at the end of Market Street as the reminder that the future is female. It will not be brutal corporate competition, architecture that “pencils,” and exclusionary policies designed to eliminate low-rent tenants that make this city shine again. It will be the creators who made it extraordinary in the first place. In an article for Planetizen, a magazine for city planners, I explain exactly why artists are an underutilized asset for bringing cities back to life. I hope San Francisco’s planners read it and lead us, and the creative community, out of the doom loop at last.
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“But it is sometimes just at the moment when we
think everything is lost that the intimation arrives that may save us;
one has knocked at all the doors which lead
nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only
door through which once can enter… and it opens of its own accord.”
—Marcel Proust, Time Regained
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Proust Said That 