Being Painted Over

What, besides the epidemic of similar business plans, signaled the beginning of the end? Well, the true mark of the beast, my friend Spencer Ante told me, became visible the day Foreign Cinema, a upscale, themed restaurant, opened on Mission Street in San Francisco, and offered… VALET PARKING!

Foreign Cinema is located right in the corazon of the Mission, a working/middle class neighborhood that has for generations been a first stop for new San Franciscans – and new U.S. citizens – from far-flung ports of call, especially Ireland, and more recently Mexico, Central and South America. As Spencer pointed out, the valet parking indicated that Foreign Cinema wasn’t catering to those who lived in the Mission: the immigrants, the families, nor even us fauxhemians who, thanks to the Web, now had salaries. No, Foreign Cinema was for those who went "slumming" in the Mission. It was for the much-maligned Bridge and Tunnel crowd in search of some cultural relief, and now they only had to make it from the curb to the maitre d’. These weren’t our people, we said in mock class war overtones. These were people who believed in the Brand of Me. These were Category Killers – in the B2B space.

Seen from one set of eyes, the eclipse of the Digital Revolution is really a story about real estate and civic or regional boosterism, à la Rebecca Solnit’s excellent new book, Hollow City (Verso) and Paulina Borsook’s notorious rant on Salon.com, "How The Internet Ruined San Francisco." Or my friend John, who led a campaign to save the Doggie Diner’s huge, fun, iconic dog’s head signage from urban renewal. (Campaign slogan: "Keep it whole, on the pole!") I sent his call-to-arms along to my cyber death watch friends. Could the decapitation of this obscure San Francisco institution be the talisman we’ve been searching for?

Sometimes TEOTWAWKI struck closer to home, as when my friends Ethan and Po had to relocate their 15- to 20-person writer and filmmaker studio because their South of Market rent was set to quadruple. Other times, TEOTWAWKI struck just around the corner.

My friend Melanie Warner wrote about the dotcomification of the Mission in April. In a building at the corner of 22nd and Mission Streets, she reported, Bigstep.com, a company that markets e-commerce solutions to small businesses, was putting pressure on previous tenants to move on out. These included the San Francisco Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Children’s Council of San Francisco, Accion Latina, a Telemundo station, and, ironically, the Mission Economic Development Association. "Some of these tenants will be moving out to make room for Bigstep, which is taking over two floors," Melanie wrote in the Fortune.com column, "Valley Talk."

RedCart, a "universal shopping cart company," also moved into the Mission, at 20th and Folsom. This is why Todd, who lives two blocks from there, sent Melanie’s column to me a day later under the heading APOCALYPSE NOW!. Then, not a few days later, President Clinton dined with his daughter Chelsea at The Slanted Door, another tony Mission District restaurant with valet parking. But this was nothing compared to the sale of the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco’s oldest music club, to online music purveyor Riffage.com. (Subject line on email bearing this news: STOP THE MADNESS!) No sooner had that news broken then another friend posted to a list that she’d seen a Riffage exec passed out at 7 a.m. on the couch of the Bellagio, in Vegas, bleeding from the nose. (Now there’s a New Economy scene the good doctor Thompson could grok).

Every now and then a story pierces our well-developed sense of irony. Like the story of Lola Mckay, an elderly woman who fought to remain in her apartment in the Mission District. She refused to leave when evicted, and her Rosa-Parks-in-her-own-home maneuver eventually helped get a California state law passed requiring new owners to give the elderly a year to relocate. Mckay, in her eighties, recently passed away, but her story has legs.

"You have a lot of old people worried that they’re going to be evicted from the apartment they’ve lived in for 30 years," Ricardo Hernandez, a San Francisco public administrator told the New York Times recently of old folks in the Mission. Frightened by stories of the stock-option crazed real estate market, Hernandez says he thinks the stress of losing their homes "is shortening people’s lives."