Market Street legends retold on bus shelters
Artist uses comic-book style to try to solve boulevard’s old ‘mysteries’
As legend has it, during the 1906 earthquake, a crack opened up on Market Street wide enough to swallow a dairy cow. When the aftershock hit and the street closed back up, the cow was entombed forever.
That’s the sworn truth as Kate Rhoades heard it all the way back in Toledo, Ohio, and her source was a good one — her great-great-grandmother, a San Franciscan who saw it with her own eyes. Or did she? “The Earthquake Cow” is one of three urban legends that Rhoades, an illustrator and investigator, sets out to solve in her latest public art installation titled “Market Street Mysteries,” which opened at bus shelters earlier this month. The installation is part of the Art on Market Street Poster Series, an annual competition overseen by the San Francisco Arts Commission.
In comic-book style, Rhoades lays to rest, once and for all, whether the cow was swallowed up. She also attacks the legends of the Gold Rush ships buried under Market Street, and the true origin of all the parrots that fly over the city.
“What interests me is that you cannot put your finger on what the empirical truth is in these stories,” says Rhoades, an adjunct instructor of new genres at the San Francisco Art Institute. “I like the idea that you can hold multiple versions of stories in your head and that things pass on from generation to generation, then snowball and get more bizarre.”
Her selection criteria were that all of the urban legends had to take place on, under or over Market Street. And she had plenty of candidates, like the ghost in the boardedup Market Street Cinema that would scream out at passersby and any number of instances of unsolved murder and mayhem. But anything that involved violence and sex was eliminated as these comic strips are displayed at public bus shelters and need to be G-rated.
Each of the three legends Rhoades explores is boiled down to a two-page graphic novel, on the front and back of a display case. All plausible theories to each mystery are discussed and either dismissed or perpetuated within 12 action-packed panels.
“We think of mythology as this historical thing, but we are making up new myths all the time,” Rhoades says. “Maybe this project will send some new ones out.”