Today was the last day of operation for Muni’s 15-Third line, an unglamorous diesel which ran from one end of the city to the other, connecting Fisherman’s Wharf with City College via Columbus Avenue, the Financial District, 1st and Market, the CalTrain Station, Dogpatch, and Ocean Avenue.

The 15 was important to me early in my years in San Francisco, when I loved hanging out in North Beach but couldn’t afford to live anywhere near it. I also was a member of a dance collective (it was the early 80s, you know) with a studio out on Third and 20th Streets in a converted factory building. Sometimes, after performances, reluctant to go back to my little room in a flat shared with roommates I didn’t like very much, instead of catching the 22 back to the Fillmore I would catch the 15 to North Beach and go to City Lights Books and walk around. I was too broke to go into any of the bars and too shy to go into any of the strip clubs, but the funky action of North Beach still cheered me.

Read more

I read this headline in the Examiner: Thug Haven! It converged, in my mind, two really different things: our Broadway late night issues, and elegy rap songs. Call me crazy.

Quoted at interdepartmental meeting on the North Beach “issue”: “We want to make North Beach the vibrant place that it once was, not the thug haven it’s become.” That’s right: he said thug haven. Far be it from me to make fun of poetic musings at otherwise boring community meetings. I actually attended the Tel-Hi meeting on similar “issue.”

(warning: long bit on elegy rap lyrics)
Read more