On Haight Street near Fillmore stands a mysterious business named the Peacock Lounge and Gold Room, which turns out to be owned and operated by the Unity Mutual Social Club, a group of black Masons that dates from the 1960s.
On Saturday afternoon, there was a free public gathering there to rally volunteers for an SF District Five Supervisor candidate, Dean Preston, and it was a surprisingly smart, hopeful and inspiring occasion.
The Peacock Lounge is a tiny bar, where people were meeting and greeting, including political activists David Talbot and David Salaverry above.
Behind the bar is the "Gold Room," a large multi-purpose area which looked a bit like a church basement, where music and speeches were being given.
The first speaker was San Francisco author David Talbot, who wrote the recently published, brilliant muckracking history of Allen Dulles and the CIA, The Devil's Chessboard. Talbot helped form a group last year called Vision SF that is attempting to wrest control from the tech billionaires like Ron Conway who openly brag about owning City Hall and Mayor Ed Lee. Talbot apologized for reading from a prepared statement called Home, a moving essay about the necessity for a roof over one's head and the indignities associated with being homeless.
District 9 Supervisor David Campos gave a speech talking about how consistently effective Dean Preston has already been in his work as a lawyer and statewide tenant activist. "Dean came to me and asked, can't we come up with legislation to protect San Francisco schoolteachers from being evicted from their homes in the middle of a school year?" Campos related. "It's a simple enough idea, which just about everyone can agree with, and the legislation is being brought to the Board of Supervisors this week."
Former District 5 Supervisors Christina Olague and Matt Gonzalez followed with their heartfelt endorsements. Gonzalez mentioned that current District 5 Supervisor London Breed was a bad fit for the district, which has historically been one of the most liberal voting blocs in the city and the country. "That's a strange thing to say because Breed was born and raised in the district and she's smart and capable, but her constituents deserve someone who isn't twisting themselves into compromises with Airbnb and others ravaging this city."
Finally, the candidate himself gave a smart speech acknowledging that he was facing an uphill battle in trying to unseat an incumbent, but that the effort was worth it. "This wouldn't be possible without district elections, but there are only 35,000 people to reach and we plan on meeting almost all of them."
"This is a completely ground-up campaign, with meetings in every neighborhood to discover their individual issues and how they can organize themselves to make a difference at City Hall. It's amazing how different each neighborhood is, from the Inner Sunset to the Fillmore to the Haight, none of which really talk to each other. Part of what we're trying to do is organize these groups so they have some collective power going forward, whether we win this race or not." The candidate managed to steer away from the usual political posturing cliches, and his positive message was refreshing. He certainly has my vote this November.
San Francisco History Days was held for free last weekend at the Old Mint building on 5th Street, with dozens of local organizations and neighborhood historical groups setting up displays and giving lectures.
The event was sponsored by the SF Mayor's Office after kicking out the previous stewards of the 1874 National Historic Landmark, the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, supposedly because they had not raised enough money towards the $60 million required for retrofitting and rehabbing.
The Old Mint stopped creating money in 1937 when the new Mint on Buchanan near Market Street opened. Visitors were allowed into the old building until 1993, and in 2003 the federal government sold the decaying building to the city of San Francisco for a silver dollar. Since then, a few rooms have been renovated but essentially the place has been neglected.
Last December, the Mayor's Office of Workforce and Economic Development tapped a group called Activate San Francisco Events, Inc. to take over the site with the $25,000 monthly rent waived in exchange for maintenance and upkeep.
Activate SF Events doesn't even have a website, so the handoff feels suspiciously like another insider crony deal out of Mayor Lee's office in an attempt to monetize more public facilities.
The basement, with its long hallways of steel vaults and thick brick walls, has still not been rehabbed, and the place felt like the spooky set for a Silence of the Lambs remake. There were some interesting looking set-ups in the small vaults, but claustrophobia got the better of us, so we fled into the rain.
Super Bowl 50 is being played in Santa Clara this year while San Francisco pretends it is being played here.
With no public input of any sort, the Ed Lee administration and various Bay Area leaders managed to win the bid to host America's Annual Big Game and San Francisco proceeded to give away the public treasury while they were at it.
The San Francisco expenditures mostly centered on Super Bowl City, a huge, outdoor pedestrian mall at the end of Market Street which wraps around the Embarcadero Center.
To create this free fan fantasia, streets downtown have been blocked for the last 10 days and will continue to be blocked until sometime later next week.
I had heard the San Francisco Police Department and Homeland Security were a heavy-handed presence around the event, but still wasn't quite prepared for the overwhelming militaristic bromance between the two groups.
Besides big trucks with big men bringing out big dogs to sniff for bombs...
...there was one scary tableaux after another which would not have looked out of place in a Central American country owned by the United Fruit Company 50 years ago.
The silliest part of all this police overtime was that the crowd was mellow, and the intrusive, airport-style security entrances ensured there were no weapons on any bad actors.
What is most strange about the event is that there is essentially nothing to do...
...except take selfies.
On Friday afternoon, there was nobody performing on the City Stage, so people wandered around aimlessly among the corporate booths...
...drinking $8 cups of Bud Light, the official brew of Super Bowl 50, which was responsible for one of the ugliest sculptures ever created.
Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst better look to their laurels.
There was an announcement late this morning from the San Francisco District Attorney's Office that a press conference was being held at the Hall of Justice this afternoon concerning imminent public corruption charges.
A small scrum of reporters, including Luke Thomas and Tim Redmond above, waited near the third floor elevators before being ushered down a long hallway to the DA's Library for a photo op, and to find out who was being charged with what amid such fanfare.
Former Human Rights Commissioner Nazly Mohajer, former HRC employee Zula Jones, and former City College Comissioner Keith Jackson were being charged with felony bribery, money laundering, grand theft and campaign finance fraud. The charges were part of an ongoing three-pronged investigation by (left to right) SF City Attorney Dennis Herrera, SF District Attorney George Gascon, and FBI Agent in Charge David Johnson.
How long the investigation has been going on or how much longer it will continue were questions that everyone refused to answer, citing federal and state protective orders. Gascon did mention that it was "more than months." A press release offered the following inspirational words: "For public law offices like the ones George and I lead, we have no more important duty than to punish betrayals of the public trust aggressively and to the law's fullest extent," said City Attorney Herrera. "To do anything less would diminish San Franciscans' faith in the integrity of their local government, and send a terrible message to would-be scofflaws in similar positions of trust." That last sentence is a bit of a giggle, since I have only met a handful of San Franciscans in 40-plus years who had faith in the integrity of their local government.
Jones and Mohajer and Jackson were all friends of Willie Brown, Jr., the former SF Mayor and continuing political fixer. During the federal corruption investigation that ended with the ensnarement of State Assemblyman Leland Yee and Shrimp Boy, among others, the lawyer Tony Serra managed to extract some very embarrassing transcripts from the FBI. In one of them, Zula Jones explains to an undercover agent how pay-to-play works in what is still Willie's City Hall as she prepares to break down an illegal contribution amount for Ed Lee's first mayoral race into separate bundles. Still, the three indictees are small minnows in the sea of institutional corruption that is old-fashioned San Francisco city government. If Mayor Ed Lee or any of his handlers were to be indicted, it might be easier to take the prosecutors' high-minded rhetoric about public corruption a little more seriously.
For the moment, what we have are a trio of fall guys/gals who were sloppy, publicly exposed, and since somebody needs to be the sacrificial lambs for an increasingly disgusted public, it might as well be them. Joshua Sabatini at the San Francisco Examiner has been the best reporter on this story. Click here for his front-page story yesterday which may have hastened today's particular press conference.
San Francisco City Hall was lit up this weekend in an aquamarine blue for a couple of days, for reasons unknown. Though local government spends millions on press spokespersons and elaborate websites for every department, good luck trying to find out any current or useful information from either source. So it was a Mystery Blue Weekend in Civic Center, a good color for newly re-elected Mayor Ed Lee who can't seem to show up for a public event these days without being booed by protesters. It's going to be a long four years for our deeply unpopular "caretaker" mayor. Update: Eve Batey at SFist finally tracked down the answer. The blue lighting was for a Fitbit late-holiday party and they requested the color as part of their rental.
A sculpture trumpeting the 50th Super Bowl has gone up in Civic Center. It is at the long end of the sandy waste which used to be a lawn before Mayor Gavin Newsom had it torn out in 2008 for a bogus Victory Garden for Chez Panisse's Alice Waters.
Mayor Ed Lee's administration has been coming up with similarly misguided ideas in anticipation of Super Bowl 50 (the NFL ditched the Roman numerals this year) to be played February 7th at the new Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara. Lee clumsily announced last August that the homeless "are going to have to leave San Francisco" for two weeks, and there was also a plan to tear down all the overhead Muni wires on Market Street leading to the Embarcadero so the proposed Super Bowl Entertainment Village would be more aesthetically pleasing. Thankfully, that multimillion dollar fiasco was averted when public outcry was strong and immediate.
The last time the Super Bowl was played in the Bay Area was Version XIX in 1985. It was held at Stanford Stadium because the NFL considered Candlestick Park too much of a shithole to host the high rollers. At least the game was good, with the San Francisco 49ers led by coach Bill Walsh and quarterback Joe Montana winning their second Super Bowl together over the Miami Dolphins of the Don Shula/Dan Marino era.
Currently, the 49ers have an idiot owner who recently fired an eccentric, winning coach who was doing amusing things with a charismatic backup quarterback, and the present team is woeful. They also moved out of town to a cursed stadium next to San Jose, which has not particularly endeared them to longstanding San Franciscans. Like Cassandra, I am feeling imminent disaster here, with the recent America's Cup mess as a template. If most of the weather forecasters are correct, February 7th should be smack in the middle of the El Niño storms which are expected to wallop us soon. This could be interesting.
The annual Castro Street Fair has turned into one of the sweetest little street festivals in San Francisco.
For decades, it was a huge, claustrophic scene like the Haight Street or Folsom Street Fair, but it has somehow managed to downscale into a manageable crowd where you can run into old friends you haven't bumped into for years.
It probably helps that the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival absorbs tens of thousands of free concertgoers in Golden Gate Park on the same Sunday, and that most gay sex tourists have literally come and gone the weekend before at Folsom Street.
There are a few nods to the gay, nudist, hippie-ish beginnings of the event in the 1970s such as a body painting tent in front of the Castro Theatre, but that particular bacchanalian energy no longer seems to exist on San Francisco's public streets, for better or worse.
What did stand out at the fair was how many people were politicking for various politicians and propositions in advance of next month's elections.
The handsome young man with the megaphone above looked like he could have fit seamlessly into the Castro of the 1970s, and he was busking for a pie-throw-at-the-politician fundraiser for the Harvey Milk Democratic Club.
District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim was one of the victims, but nobody seemed to want to throw a pie at her, possibly because violence towards women is a current topic of awareness.
A cute young heterosexual couple asked me why Kim was at the Castro pie-throwing booth since this wasn't her supervisorial district. "That's because this is for the leftie Harvey Milk Democratic Club, and she's friends and sometimes allies with them, while the right-wing real estate lesbians and gays are at the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club booth up the street, and they're BFFs with Scott Weiner, who is the supervisor for this district and who is thankfully nowhere in sight."
I continued, "Most of this is just sectarian schisms, though. It's all about being an insider and having a piece of power, which unfortunately flows directly from the old-time criminal cabal which actually runs San Francisco, badly. There's no way they become one of the insiders without being co-opted."
Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi (above right) was campaigning personally for reelection on Sunday, while his opponent Vicky Hennessy was represented by a pair of odd looking sign carriers. Mirkarimi used to be a part of the City Family when he was on the Board of Supervisors, but he crossed the cabal by running for Sheriff against an approved candidate and narrowly winning. His subsequent vilification for domestic violence by the DA, SFPD, San Francisco Chronicle, Mayor Ed Lee, the SF Ethics Commission, every city-sponsored domestic violence nonprofit in the Bay Area, and various Supervisors was strangely over-the-top and revealed more about how San Francisco is governed than was probably intended.
Up the street, the gay-focused Bay Area Reporter weekly newspaper, which has always had a capitalist, politically conservative slant, was offering a raffle for tickets to the San Francisco Opera House appearance of the ultimate current public distraction.
