Hermann is a short little street, only four blocks long, that most cab drivers don’t even know by name. It dead ends into Duboce Park, but isn’t officially within the Duboce Triangle neighborhood. In fact as far as I know it isn’t officially within any named San Francisco neighborhood—a city made up very much of named neighborhoods. It’s an edge, an intersection, in between, an outlier with an identity problem. When asked where I live in the city, there are half a dozen potential answers, none accurate. The building itself sits on a hill that is topped by the US mint. There is actually a Mint Hill Neighborhood Association that no one ever heard of. The mint itself is a working mint with barbed wire and guards and the occasional strange delivery of liquid nitrogen that creates its own hissing fog bank on an otherwise residential street. They mint something there though just what I have never cared enough to find out. It was on the route of “federal targets” (words that had very different meanings in 1989) the night of the Oct 6th 1989 ACTUP protest. The night the police “swept” the Castro and beat some heads. The protesters (we) didn’t stay long at the mint. Shouting at a 12 foot fence on a residential street with no one but cops watching seemed pointless, also potentially dangerous. Later on Castro, it became dangerous.

Our apartment building on Hermann shares a triangular block with several other large apartment buildings of similar vintage. It’s a common pattern around San Francisco, six-story apartment buildings, usually on corners where a Victorian “corner mansion” may have stood but outlived its economic viability. It’s the vintage of these buildings though that tells the real whole story, because most of these large scale single buildings or collections of them have stood out as anomalies for decades, only now to be matched by new development of the same scale. Our building was built in 1928, and there’s the magic number, one year before the crash, two years before the start of the Great Depression (history repeats itself?). The release a few years back of the 1930 census on line gives a glimpse into who lived here, working class singles and couples, paying $15 a month rents (“clerk, dock worker, carpenter…”). Now the infamous Google bus stops across the street and I can’t help but wonder if this boom will last long enough to actually change the neighborhood before the next bust. Someone recently explained to me that the median SF rent of $3200 only represents the line between those oldsters with rent control and the newer renters who actually pay quite a lot more. Those of us who’ve stayed put eventually get trapped by the very system designed to protect us as renters. There’s a lot of room to debate the good and bad of rent control, but a city with no artists, actors or Radical Faeries isn’t much of a city—and who’s to say it will even last if SF keeps electing the likes of Mayor Lee, rent control isn’t exactly written into the constitution.

Income inequality defines SF these days here in the land of Google, Apple, Salesforce, UBER, Twitter, AirBnB and countless others. Just the other day I witnessed a strange traffic “accident” while walking the dog that brought the whole picture into focus. The driver of a big SUV laid on his horn and then slammed into the back of an old pickup truck carrying the tools of a carpenter. The driver not only didn’t stop, he raced (or should I say raged) around the pickup and sped through the intersection dragging the front corner panel and bumper of his expensive ride, spraying bits of debris all over the intersection of Duboce and Market. As I reached the intersection I saw that both cars had stopped in front of the new glitzy condo building designed by Architectonica’s Bernardo Fort-Brescia and both drivers were out of their cars. To me the scene was like a chapter from T.C. Boyle’s “Tortilla Curtain.” The SUV driver in designer eye-wear was busy taking pictures of his own car not even talking to the pickup driver—who was of course Latino. I gave the pickup driver my phone number, and found myself hoping he was not illegal. The designer prick in the SUV didn’t even acknowledge my presence. I hope I get called.

The brand new building the two drivers had stopped at on Buchanan Street is directly outside my apartment windows, less than 10 feet away, and while the front is a handsome enough all glass façade, the back I look at offers no such interest, just beige. We used to have a view over all of The Mission to Bernal and the hills south of that. The view wasn’t all good however, as looking straight down into the gas station parking lot might reveal any number of unsavory characters and acts at all hours—and it did over the years. The drug crazed guy who’d locked himself out of his van in the early morning with his Pit Bull inside, pounding on the widows and working the dog into a frenzy, countless tweaker domestic abuse incidents and bar brawls, but best of all was the lone man lying on his side in the ditch with one hand on a crack pipe and the other shoving a dildo up his ass. For all but the dildo guy I called the police—who rarely showed up. I would welcome all that back for the damn Architectonica building to fall down and let me see again. There is a cockeyed view from my kitchen of the old Armory building in The Mission now the Kink porn studios. At least I can keep track of various subculture holy days by the flags flying over the brick fortress.

The neighborhood, or lack thereof, has been the subject of local news and social media debate lately with the murder of 31 year old Brian “Feather” Higgins in August 2014, but it has not been a safe neighborhood for the 20 years that we have now lived here and before that. It was the site of a notorious serial murder in the 1970s described in grizzly detail in David Talbot’s “Season of the Witch,” and there was the random shooting of a gay couple on Octavia in the early 1990s where the LGBTQ Center now stands. There are many reasons for this, and as a designer of places the reasons fascinate me. It’s a public transportation crossroads, it’s where the hills meet the flats, it was bisected by an elevated freeway for decades and it has some very large blank blocks, a suburban style Safeway being the largest. A whole detailed study could, and should, be done into why these few blocks are so dangerous—and they are red on the SF crime maps. But, we didn’t know that when we moved here or particularly care at the time. We moved here for only one reason, to save money. The idea was to buy a place, and it worked, at least until the next great economic meltdown in 2008 forced us to give up our little cabin in the redwoods. The Hermann Street Apt served as home base for exploration and travel, and for ten years, the two-home lifestyle, and now thanks to rent control, survival.

Three recent events in the news have brought memories back into focus that relate to Hermann Street—one sort of silly the other two not at all. When hearing about the nude celebrity pictures leaked from the cloud (a very sexy name for big blank unsexy buildings full of hard drives) I was reminded of the house sitter who once had an entire film crew in our apartment to shoot a porn flick while we were away. We would never have known except for stumbling upon it on line and recognizing a very large one of a kind piece of art featured prominently in the background of all the scenes—as always our friend just looked bored. Then there was Robin, who lived just over The Bridge—Rikk’s Bridge. Most times that I shower I think about his yoga buddies climbing the fire escape and coming in the bathroom window where they stepped directly into the bathtub, leaving footprints as they tried to find him—no one knew yet where he was–or SF General not even acknowledging that he was there–pure helplessness, and for a long time after—and honestly before—that I would take deep breaths before opening the apartment door. Then Joan Rivers in a clip just yesterday talking about her husband and the moment she sat with a gun in her lap contemplating taking her life, until her little dog jumped into her lap and sat right on it. Ah Ripley, I’ll never forget the three simple words the shrink used to explain why Rikk should consider getting a dog: “because they work.”

As for SF, this week Tom Ammiano in an interview with the Bay Guardian, a local free paper that started life as an anti-Vietnam War paper and has managed to hold on to at least some of its leftist cred, summed up for me what has happened to our city in the last several years. He is considering another run for mayor, but doesn’t want to be the “opposition candidate” and isn’t sure SF is progressive enough any longer to want his brand of politics. I never voted for him before not because he was too progressive, but too nelly. There I admitted to a little of my own internal homo-hate. I don’t know if this city is progressive enough even for the very first art opening I attended when I arrived in 1989. It was at Theater Artaud entitled “Body Manipulations.” The live labia piercing seemed like a lot of faked screaming to me but the tanned human hide was something I couldn’t take my eyes off. Now it’s just all about rich people building robots in the desert. I hope Tom is wrong, but like all old timers, I’ve come to the inevitable feeling about SF that I’m glad I lived here when I lived here.

As for Hermann Street, home base, but never really home, a stepping stone to somewhere else or something else—next step unknown.