Almost every weekday, I travel down San Francisco’s Market Street. If you haven’t been down it, almost half of it is given over to flop houses, boarded-up shops, strip clubs, low-rent clothing stores, liquor and crappy convenience stores. Every time I take the bus down this main thoroughfare, I wonder, how can it remain like this? Real estate in San Francisco is outrageously expensive, and Market Street is tourist central. It’s always shocking to me, a resident. I can only imagine how it appears to Midwestern Suburban Family on Vacation.
I suppose it is one thing to read Kevin Lynch’s seminal book The Image of the City
In The Image of the City, Lynch celebrates the empty lot as a place of possibility. In the same way, not every neighborhood in a city can be clean, yuppie, gentrified Pacific Heights, or even the nice but funky Haight Ashbury where I live. Sometimes you need the edge, the grit, the humanity. Sometimes (and for some, often) you need to grab a 40 or have some raunchy fun, and if everywhere is sanitized, where are you going to do that? The urge for such thrills isn’t going to disappear, no matter how many laws are passed or how many city clean-ups are enacted. The stuff just moves elsewhere; it doesn’t go away.
It’s the same with products. No matter how heavily engineered and controlled your design is, someone somewhere is going to tamper with it and push it to do something you didn’t think could be done with it. Things get hacked, whether we like it or not.
There are edges in both cities and products. We either live in denial or we acknowledge their necessity. The edges are places where unusual things live, things outside the mainstream. Things we often need, even if we don’t know it. New ideas. Forgotten ideas. Artists. Musicians. And, yes, junkies, sex workers, the homeless, grifters, the person who smashed your car window. The edges often teeter on chaos, and this can be dangerous and exciting.
So while I may never like Market Street, I do understand it, and its place in the city. Supposedly, the light and darkness are both alike to God.
Wow, I was just thinking about a recent trip to SF and how I stumbled onto Market Street rather accidentally and found myself feeling pretty uncomfortable walking through the area. Maybe it’s different travelling by bus, and if I had my choice I would have been on a bike zipping by at 15mph.
I agree that part of city life includes the aspects that make us a bit uncomfortable or put us in touch with a world that we might not choose to be a part of. It’s good because I think it gives you a realistic and balanced view of society and the world. In the suburbs, it’s easy to lose touch with how others struggle through life, and I think some folks might shift their political views if they weren’t so sheltered from the realities of poverty, homelessness, etc. (I’m originally from Richmond, Virginia and there is plenty of that there).
That said, next time I have to go through Market Street, I’m riding my bike!