San Francisco's Civic Center is a very strange place these days, with luxury apartments going up everywhere while neighborhood drug addicts and street people increasingly act out their dramas in more aggressively public fashion.
During the recent New Music Gathering at the nearby SF Conservatory of Music, one of the Brooklyn organizers wrote on Facebook, "Honestly? When it comes to crazy people harassing you on the street? NYC is like Mayberry compared to San Francisco."
One would think that the expensively appointed San Francisco Superior Courthouse at the corner of Polk and McAllister, across the street from City Hall, would be somewhat immune, but that isn't the case.
The junkie kit above discarded on one of the courthouse's spiked window sills feels like a fitting symbol for this particular time and place.
Well said. As I think you might know, I work in the Civic Center area, and while I'm now completely immune to the smell of marijuana smoke, the sight of people either smoking crack or meth, or injecting into various sites on the body, LITERALLY in the shadow of City Hall still has not lost its power to shock, or at least surprise. I'm sure the cops would say "Why arrest 'em? They'll be back on the streets tomorrow" and, for that matter, I don't think arresting them is the answer anyway. But seeing sights like this (along with the omnipresent public urination and shitting) in the putative seat of city government is jarring, to say the least. Oh well.
ReplyDeleteThe city that knows how?
ReplyDeleteDear TK: I've been working for the last nine months in the Financial District, Sansome and Pine, near where I used to work for decades. What's interesting is that there is a whole population of feral, hoarding street people who've taken over that area since I last worked there a decade ago, and they sometimes shock me in ways that the Civic Center street people no longer do.
ReplyDeleteAgree very much about the downtown set. Drumm, just off Market, is a gauntlet of misery, or at least it was a year or so ago.
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