San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Sign of the city’s times
Civic Center a microcosm of 2020 with voting tents, homeless camps
No part of San Francisco feels more timeless than Civic Center, with its classical granite buildings that frame a large green plaza.
The ensemble radiates stable selfassurance, even if reality hasn’t always followed suit.
But if you visit the historic setting as election day nears, the district’s highminded architecture
A pricey battle over a state Senate seat has emerged in the South Bay, where business and labor groups are pouring millions into the race between a pair of Democrats seeking to replace termedout Sen. Jim Beall, DSan Jose.
But while Dave Cortese and Ann Ravel have clashed on is no match for the turbulent grind of this calendar year, which is like none that we have ever encountered.
The reality of 2020 is anything but stable — and Civic Center is a place where fencedin tents for homeless people fill one block and a circusscale early voting center fills
another. Walk two short blocks to Hayes Valley, and elegant dining parklets are being constructed across from newly vacated storefronts.
This is the way we live now, weary and tense, with society’s underlying fissures on stark view for all to see. It’s an ad hoc, uncertain landscape, because nobody has any real idea of what’s coming next.
That uncertainty helps explain the largest structural intervention on the 4 ½ acre plaza bounded by Grove, Larkin and McAllister streets and the domed magnificence of City Hall.
That ornate landmark couldn’t be more different than the two tents that welcome the public through Nov. 3. City Hall enfolds a marble rotunda and ceremonial staircase. The 200 voting booths are on bare asphalt, while the closest thing to decorations are a few fake hedges helping to screen openings usually occupied by tent panels that were removed to allow ventilation.
But the tents aren’t trying to make a design statement.
They’re a response to the realization months ago that the traditional early voting site, the Department of Elections on the floor below City Hall’s rotunda, could not be adapted to mass use during a pandemic — the building itself is closed to the public, though some staffers still report for work. If the tents add a ceremonial look, that’s because they and other fixtures were lined up by Martha Cohen, longtime director of special events in the mayor’s office.
“We knew early on we’d have to have an outdoor voting center, so Martha put her planning skills to work,” said John Arntz, San Francisco’s director of elections. As for the election night ( and after) tabulations that require hundreds of temporary workers, scanners and review tables await on the floor of Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a much bigger and more open space.
As for the 200 booths — 50 more than a usual year — let’s just say there’s a lot of interest and a lot at stake.
You’re reminded of this on nearby Hayes Street — where the large space below an outdoor movie screen holds an interactive display in support of the U. S. Postal Service. That basic function of government feels under siege, given that the current president and his supporters are predicting widespread voter fraud while trying to cut back on the efficiency of mail delivery that this year is so crucial.
The billboardshaped installation is adorned with a stamplike grid and topped with “STAMP OUT” in eyecatching block letters. At the bottom is an explainer of sorts.
“Strengthen the Postal Service and our democracy,” it reads. “Buy stamps and place them in the area provided above.”
This landscape element would have been inconceivable 12 months ago. By next year, I hope, the fears that it taps will be old news.
Other elements we see aren’t totally new, but their pervasive urgency is very much part of the moment.
Hayes Street, for instance, has long had several parklets. Now, after efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus by limiting indoor dining, I counted 23 on or along the threeblock commercial stretch.
This being Hayes Street, many of them have a bit of style. This being 2020, many are topped by fiberglass canopies to protect diners from the coming rain ( we hope!). They’re also reserved for the establishments that installed them — unlike the prepandemic ones that are required by the city to be open for anyone passing by.
Stroll by in the late afternoon, and the scene can appear buoyant. Until you notice the empty storefronts, several of them vacated by small longtime retailers: Nancy Boy facial products on one block, Chantal Guillon with its Parisian macaroons on another, the clothing boutique Sean on the third.
Brickandmortar retail already was strained by online shopping. Once people were required to stay close to home, the bottom fell out.
Another perennial crisis confronts us back in Civic Center — where a “safe sleeping village” makes the human costs of a shredded social fabric all too vivid.
The popup refuge occupies the wide block of Fulton Street between the Main Library and the Asian Art Museum. A shrouded chain link fence only partly conceals what is inside: 108 tents occupied by otherwise homeless people, along with such necessities as portable toilets.
The homelessness crisis is nothing new in San Francisco, sadly — it has existed here since the late 1980s, as it has across the nation. But public shelters were thinned out at the beginning of the pandemic. Also, people who might have been sleeping on someone’s couch were told to leave because their hosts feared getting infected. The number of tents mushroomed in the neighboring Tenderloin, along with drug dealing and safety concerns.
Enter the Fulton Street refuge, one of six official tent gatherings in the city.
“It began as a response to the crisis at hand, and to shelter our unhoused neighbors,” said Abigail StewartKahn, acting director of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
The voting tents will be gone soon after election day. Fulton Street’s tents will remain. Like the restaurant owners on Hayes Street — and all of us, really — Kahn is bracing for whatever might lie ahead.
“We’ve already had to adapt to political protests and poor air quality,” Kahn said. “We now have to think about ways to winterize the block in ways that are COVIDsafe.”