Photo exhibit reminds us of S.F.’s unembellished, unnoticed spots
Janet Delaney’s photographs at San Francisco’s de Young Museum show with humble clarity how the physical and cultural landscape south of Market Street has been remade since the early 1980s. The simplest filter through which to view the show is gentrification, one world upended for another, an interpretation encouraged by the displays of newspaper articles and antidevelopment paraphernalia that accompany the photographs. [...] make no mistake, the land where Moscone Center and its neighbors now stand was cleared in the city’s last act of scorched-earth urban renewal, with thousands of low-income rooms in residential hotels bulldozed to make way for downtown’s expansion. [...] while there are shots in the exhibition of construction and abrupt transitions — what photographer could resist? — more intriguing are the snippets of everyday life on the margins. Kids play on the sidewalks or in the street, and two men sleep in a weary park. Women work at a casket company, an elderly barber waits for customers, artists lounge with chic defiance in their lofts. The Ambush Bar on Harrison Street has peanuts and cigarettes spread out on the bar for customers yet to arrive, along with framed artwork of winged men wearing leather chaps and not much else. Except that close by to the south, you see a crane above the rising wood frame of a 468-unit apartment complex that will include a 1-acre public park on land that had been vacant since who knows when. Behind I-280’s concrete sit bulky glass biotech buildings, with a new entrance to the fast-growing Mission Bay district marked by a circular plant-filled rotary not 100 yards from where a golf driving range did business in virtual isolation from 1993 until 2006. Seventh Street wasn’t purged by economic power brokers, as was the case with Moscone Center, but it was a void nonetheless — low-budget emptiness beyond the Mission and below Potrero Hill, bordered by a freight yard that lost its reason for being when downtown’s working waterfront faded away. If Walt’s still existed, it would share the intersection with software behemoths Advent and Adobe. A poignant glimpse of long-gone SoMa at the de Young show is Delaney’s shot from 1980 of a mustachioed man in jeans and leather jacket striding past a closed natural-foods grocery, a battered masonry industrial building across the way.