Looking for the Invisible
Joanna Haigood
So what is a ghost anyway?
I have spent the best of twenty-five years examining places for details that would lead to some sort of story or memory of past lives, a clear picture of the distinct forces that I feel still resonate in the present state of things. I am attracted to and truly enjoy the investigation and reading all the physical evidence or traces left behind by people and events. Although seemingly abstract, those curious marks and the relentless wear found in the landscape or in architecture, are in fact a tangible and beautifully poetic map of time. Sometimes, when I am lucky, I can sit before my evidence and I can imagine time unrestrained by order or limits and all the events begin to exist simultaneously. I can move fluidly, in my mind, in this open dimension, passing from one era to the next without hindrance. But it only lasts for a moment and then I am back in the here and now.
In our early conversations about the potential direction for this project, Wayne and I spoke frequently about our mutual intrigue with time. What if we really had the capacity of trans-temporal perception? What would it be like to view the intersection of different events separated only in time but not in space. We spoke about how to express this with architecture, using the coordinate system to establish the exact positions of vanished buildings. Maybe by identifying the spot in empty space that was once occupied by a building from the past, we could generate the conditions needed to perceive that open dimension.
With the help of Ann Berman, we then went on our investigation. We soon discovered that four buildings converged in the location of the Forum just prior to its construction, The Peerless Movie Theater, The West Hotel, and two apartment buildings. They were built soon after the 1906 earthquake and directly on top of the earthquake debris.
Located at 148 Third Street, the Peerless was built circa 1912 as a Nickelodeon and continued operating as a movie theater until it closed in 1970. In 1929, it was among the four movie theaters in San Francisco and the estimated four hundred and sixty-one theaters throughout the United States that catered exclusively to "colored" audiences. From 1958-70, it was known as the Peerless Girlesque, the Nudeorama and Ding Dong Dollies and screened only X rated adult films.
The West Hotel was located at 156 Third Street, next door to the Peerless, and was built circa 1908. The one hundred and twenty-two room hotel was originally intended to provide lodging to transient male laborers. Known as one the finer resident hotels in the area, the West Hotel was sought after by single men working locally and at sea. By 1970 most of the residents in the hotel were over 50 and living on modest pensions. In 1974 all the residents were evicted and the building was demolished to make way for the Yerba Buena Center complex.
I have always felt that people provide the soul to architecture. They give the architecture a sort of consciousness that imbues it with meaning far beyond its essential functions. When I thought about the West Hotel it struck me that it was filled with one hundred and twenty-two 8ft by 10ft rooms, private rooms invested with private activities. In a way they were sacred places, even in their most chaotic condition; private surveys of emotions and their various manifestations.
For most of us, our rooms are places where we feel the safest. They are places where we gather the courage to confront the outside and the place where we recover and recharge for the next round. Perhaps most importantly, they are the places we store our memories. We put our memories in our collection of objects, in little pieces of paper that we hang on the walls -- reminders. We catalogue our memories in our habits, in our posture, in our conversations with ourselves. Sometimes we share in our rooms our private thoughts, our hopes and our fears. And we use our rooms to relax and to escape our "real lives" by any means we have available.
I wondered what kind of people lived in the West Hotel?
Anyone who knows anything about the redevelopment of the South of Market area knows something about the battle between the hotel tenants, along with local business owners, and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency during the late 1960's and early 1970's. It was such a bitter fight that the mere mention of it can still, thirty years later, conjure such high-pitched emotions that it is clear the necessary healing has yet to be completed. It's a sad and unfortunate story, one that reflects our ongoing lack of humane and socially just methods of urban renewal.
When we first met Ira Nowinski in January of 2003 he showed us his extraordinary series from No Vacancy. His photographs offered a view of the intimate lives of the hotel residents, their rooms, their clothes, their possessions, their lifestyle and ultimately their demise.
One photograph stood out during that visit; it was the Last Resident of the West Hotel. Ira explained that this man had come to the building a few days before the demolition in order to pay his last respects to a place that held profound meaning to him. He was wandering in the halls looking into rooms, perhaps even his own room, and remembering a past that was quickly slipping away. I imagined from time to time he picked up a piece of clothing or a picture or maybe just a match book that, to an outsider, could appear as a worthless object. But in the instant of his contact these objects fill, like the rooms around them, with thousands of moments, creating a resounding chorus of the lives that once passed through them.
For months after that initial visit I spent many hours speaking to Ira about his No Vacancy project. And when he spoke about Pete Mendelson or George Woolf or Eddie Heider or George Hasselbeck or the cat lady Hope Woodward, or Mr. Bream or any of his acquaintances in the T.O.O.R. group, it was as if they were alive. I watched him closely as he was transported back in time while he remembered. I could almost hear their voices, I could almost see them in some common dimension and always, as he spoke the last words of the story, his love for these old friends would rise and we would be suspended all together in a timeless moment. Eventually I realized that these people were still alive in their legacy.
So what is a ghost, anyway? Maybe it has something to do with the reconstitution of light from the past, as my friend Pete Richards suggested one day. Or maybe it has something to do with our memory, that invisible vessel that carries us back in time while we're still surely planted in the present. Maybe it is simply the potential of our own curiosity and our willingness to follow it. I can't really say that I know for sure, at least not yet.
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Modeling the Past
Wayne Campbell
In April of 2000 Joanna Haigood and I conceived the idea of recreating parts of the demolished building which stood on the site now occupied by the YBCA Forum performance space. We had little specific idea about what had been there before. I remember South of Market San Francisco in the Sixties as being a skid-row area with lots of single room occupancy hotels, mostly inhabited by older men. There were bars, second hand stores and pawn shops, along with some light industry remaining from a more vigorous era. Kerouac wrote of getting cheap haircuts at a South of Market barber college with Gary Snyder in Dharma Bums.
We hoped that an interesting historical structure was located where the Forum space now stands, and we agreed we would stick to the actual architectural coordinates of the last existing building, whatever it was. We were intrigued by the idea of those coordinates existing still, preserved in the architectural record, recoverable by simple field measurement, and representing tangible evidence of an honorable, but vanished human subjectivity.
We searched, with the able assistance of Ann Berman, through archival materials and records to discover that two very interesting buildings, the West Hotel, and the Peerless Theater were partially located on the site, as well as two apartment buildings on Minna Street, and the alleyway between them. We then used field measurements along with an AutoCad file of the existing YBCA Forum to locate the plan coordinates of the superimposed buildings. I then drew the new and old buildings using a new 3D Solid Modelling CAD system called Ashlar Cobalt.
Then a fantastically serendipitous event occurred. Several people had suggested we talk with Ira Nowinski, a photographer who had been interested in the South of Market area during the era we were investigating. Amazingly to us, he had a remarkably beautiful photographic record of the West Hotel, its inhabitants and its demolition. Many of these photos can be seen in his photographic series No Vacancy, and similar images may be seen in his book of the same name. I gleaned architectural information from the demolition photos and authentic detail from his interior shots of the Hotel. Mr. Nowinski has been a valuable source of information and inspiration for this project.
I then mapped out in detail the plan of both buildings in order to discover which parts of the old buildings show up in the Forum space. Fortunately for us they are very interesting parts. The Peerless Theater movie screen is there, and so are rooms and the rear stair of the hotel. Also the rear rooms of the apartments on Minna are there. I discovered that the floor heights of the buildings did not match the Forum finish floor elevation. For example, the ground floor of the West Hotel, built about 1908, was near street level, and had the fourteen foot high ceiling common to commercial spaces built at that time. The Forum floor is about six feet above current street level. Allowing for street level raising during re-development, I was able to locate the floor heights of the hotel and apartment buildings, and by scaling the demolition photos I was able to refine those dimensions.
I wanted to express the location of the old structures in an abstract way, and not simply try to reproduce with period detail an historical simulation of the sort seen in museums or theme parks. This installation is intended to be a full scale model that marks the various locations of objects, floors and walls.
I reviewed my own experience as a sculptor, builder and designer to develop a method of construction to realize all this. The structural support was custom built in my shop and designed for rapid installation by the YBCA crew. The furniture and furnishings are models and maquettes made from inexpensive industrial materials, and the smaller objects are cast from resin and plaster. All of these objects have been created sculpturally, from scratch, as a way of trying to limit the psychic history of the installation to that of the two superimposed spaces.
I placed the fragments of the old buildings in a discontinuous way, rather like the partial re-assembly of a crashed airplane during an accident investigation. The materials vocabulary is frankly contemporary, a choice meant to express the idea that we really can't completely know the past. The placement of the fragments allows for a transparency that is both practical and metaphoric. An atmospheric and poetic lighting scheme by Jack Carpenter, and an integrated soundscape by Greg Kuhn helps create an evocative and ghostly scenic environment, and the viewer will be able to read the intersection of of the existing with the historical era.
When the artist Gordon Matta-Clark was cutting through solid walls with his chain saw in the Seventies, he was forcing our projections and associations normally contained within buildings to drain away, leaving a depersonalized, objective form.
The particular yielded to the general; house became object. The intense subjective experience of its space is rendered inert.
A room or building will accumulate subjective history in relation to the occupancy of by the particular people it shelters, and is wholly owned by them, except at the moment immediately before its final demolition.
In the end, the history is owned only by the empty room itself, and this is the most poignant moment of its existence.
Caught in the walls, in the cracks of the floor, in the molecules of dust, is the forensic evidence, physical and psychic, of the sum total of all the events that occurred in that room. All those subjective emotions and dreams and thoughts are briefly freed from any particularity or ownership during the instant before the wrecking ball strikes.
It has been an enlightening experience for me to try to reverse Matta-Clarks equation by partial assembling a building exactly where it once stood in order to retrieve delicate traces of vanished subjectivity. Perhaps this is a way of combining architectural detective work with performance art that will allow us to perceive a superimposition of past and present.
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George Woolf
My name is George Woolf, I'm 83 years old, and have lived in and around San Franciso for the last 70 years. I have been a labor man all my life, working on the waterfront and organizing the Cannery Workers union in the thirties.
I live in the Milner Hotel, which is situated on Fourth and Mission, just one block south of the Main stem, Market Street.
I came down to the Milner because I liked the neighborhood. It was close to business, banks, groceries and restaurants. Nobody invited me down here and nobody is going to invite me out. I don't want anyone to come in and tell me that I have to move to some undesirable place where I wouldn't have the facilities that I enjoy, or did enjoy, here.
Today I can sit in my room looking out the window and for four city blocks all I can see is where demolition has taken place, nothing but vacant lots with fences around them to protect people from falling in. Thousands of automobiles are parked where buildings and business formerly prospered.
I and some of my friends and associates formed what we then called Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment. Since that time it has been known as TOOR.
Milner Hotel, San Francisco, 1971
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Peter Mendelsohn
In the sixties, redevelopment began and they started kicking people out. At the time, I was a volunteer for the C.I.O., and I met George Woolf. George was living in the Milner Hotel, and was fighting the Redevelopment Agency. He asked me to help him -- he was very sick. The people were fighting the Redevelopment Agency, which was taking over the hotels south of Market, and providing no place to live for the people who were kicked out. They were trying to clear out the area so that they could build skyscrapers.
George was holding meetings and explaining everything. He had three lawyers from Neighborhood Legal Assistance. There were always 50 or 60 people at every monthly meeting -- sometimes we had people standing all around the walls. We discussed the problems we were having, information from our lawyers, the legal case, and what actions to take to fight back. My job was to get the people to come, let them know what it was all about, and run the meeting. George very rarely left the hotel, he was so sick, he was a chain smoker and never slept. I became co-chairman of TOOR (Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment) in 1971.
They started forcing us out, kicking us out at night and kicking doors in. Our lawyers sued the City to stop it. People started to die during the fight -- the fight had a lot to do with the dying. People can't live with that kind of tension. Being drunk killed many -- they wouldn't pay rent, or eat or anything. Judge Weigel issued an injunction to keep the city from forcing us out. We went to court and we won. George Woolf passed away just before we were to sign the settlement. I became president of TOOR. TOOR became TODCO -- non-profit -- Tenants and Owners Development Corporation.
Redevelopment destroyed 4,000 rooms. They were supposed to build 2,500 new and remodeled rooms. The judge allowed TODCO to build 600 rooms. TODCO is now building Woolf House, in commemoration of George Woolf. Not many people involved in the struggle are going to move into Woolf House -- most are dead. George Hasselbeck is 98 years old -- he's going to move into Woolf House. Of course, he needs furniture.
I think it was the struggle that got the people together. It¹s ironic. But things have started to change. Some cities are doing things different. I've always been an activist, and I've always organized. Now I get letters from all over the country. It's done a lot of good.
Peter Patrick Mendelsohn
San Francisco, 1979
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The Joyce Hotel was located on the NE corner of 6th and Harrison. In the Spring of 1970, I was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, and while reading the S.F. Chronicle over a cafe latte, in the Trieste cafe, an article caught my attention. The headline read "96 Senior Citizens thrown out of hotel". I had been looking for a documentary project that would incorporate photographs in the South of Market section of San Francisco with a political statement about the relationship of poverty to society. The newspaper article went on to explain that the current owners were evicting the men and women of the hotel, many of them longtime residents, so that the hotel could be demolished and sold to the Shell Oil Company, as a site for a gas station.
I went down to the Joyce but the door was locked and there wasn't anyone answering the buzzer. I waited for awhile and then this old man walked down 6th St., stopped right next to me and took out a key from his old fashioned vest and proceeded to open the front door. I interrupted him and introduced myself saying that I was interested in photographing residents and wanted to get into the hotel to meet people. He didn't answer but opened up the door and gestured for me to come inside with him. We walked up the stairs slowly, his body hunched over and each step took an eternity. The walls of the hotel were grime covered and dirty from years of neglect. We walked down a long corridor and came to his room. He turned to me and invited me in. I had been photographing all this time and he paid no attention. He turned to me and said ³They broke my back, those dirty bastards. They got me around a corner in the alley and I only had 4 cents, which they took. My son's supposed to come in an hour and take me back to Eureka. I've lived in the Joyce for 17 years and I'll be gone in an hour.² He packed his threadbare clothes and his middle aged son arrived. He took Joe Marsh with him.
That's how my project got started. I met Pete Mendelsohn later at the Joyce, and he asked me to join T.O.O.R., and photograph the members, their meetings, and their struggle with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.
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The West Hotel
Now its 1974, and there are big changes in the Yerba Buena project area. T.O.O.R. won the lawsuit, against the agency, getting some replacement housing, the remaining guys got $5,000 relocation money, and they were leaving the hotels. Frank Hagen, Walter Knox, and Eddie Heider moved to the new Clemintina Towers. George died, and so did other guys. Some moved to Sacramento, or Stockton. Hasselbeck moved to the Seneca on Sixth Street, and Bream was living in the Chronicle Hotel on Mission.
The Milner Hotel was demolished, and Pete moved the T.O.O.R. office to the Jessie Hotel. He had a steady stream of guys signing forms and picking up checks. The Agency stared to demolish the other hotels in the project area. Pete had a set of passkeys and he and some guys went into the empty hotels, and took furniture, for the members to use, just before the hotels came down. I went with Pete to photograph the empty rooms, some of them still had clothes hanging, and personal items lying around. They were evocative images, and as the interiors were further stripped of doors, and almost any usable thing, the rooms and hallways took on a look of a battle zone.
The West Hotel was one of the last hotels torn down. Pete would walk over from the Jessie, and let me in. There was a silence in the hallways, some of the doors were ripped off their hinges, and there were layers of dust. Some rooms on the first floor had mattresses piled high, on spring beds. The light was ghostly, no curtains on the windows, no doors. One room had a bed and the wallpaper was worn from heads lying against it for years. I photographed this room each visit to the West. One morning I was reading Herb Caen in the morning Chronicle and he had a paragraph about some wreckers who went through the West and found my favorite room. They pulled the mattresses off the bed, and found a steel strong box, broke it open and there were 4 gold coins inside. I rushed downtown, Pete let me in, and we went straight to the room. The bed was pulled apart and ripped open, the strong box was in the corner, lying under the sink.
The hotel was being torn down; bulldozers were ripping the back off the hotel on my last visit. I was near the office, when suddenly I heard someone walking in the hallway. It was an elderly gentleman, we started to talk, and he explained that he kept a room in the West, but did not want me to photograph him. He explained why. There was a theatre next to the West called the Peerless, he was homosexual, and like other men, picked men up in the theater and brought them to his room. He did let me photograph him, from the back, and that is how Last Resident of the West Hotel was made.
A few days later I went down to the West to photograph the demolition of the front of the Hotel. It was eerie, I could see through the building, all the way to Clemintina Towers on 4th street. Looking up, Hope Woodward's window was still intact. I thought back to meeting her, one of the only women living in the hotels, and a member of T.O.O.R. She was known as the cat lady, and she lived with over 20 cats in her room. She was evicted and moved to the Garland Apartments in the Mission district and died in the fire a year later.
The West is gone, just a pile of rubble; the only thing remaining from all that happened are my photographs, and stories. Pete kept all the newspaper clippings, and the meeting notes. I published No Vacancy in 1979, keeping a promise to George, that their story, and the story of T.O.O.R., would always be part of the photographs. I have kept my word.
Ira Nowinski
2004
Over the years, the land where the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts now stands has been home to a wide variety of businesses including: The Manhattan Bakery, Melsing¹s Bakery, a millinery store, a cabinet maker, a furniture dealer, multiple tailors, a dry goods merchant, the Doscher and Company Grocery, Howard Presbyterian Church, Mission Street Hotel, many laundries, the Ixora Dancing Hall, an undertaker, a candy shop, a tin shop, a coal yard, St. Patrick's School, Thomas Day and Co. Gas Fixtures, a pork shop, many restaurants, a stable, a wire and iron works factory, a drugstore, the Peerless Movie Theater, the West Hotel, a machine shop, a lithography shop, St. Patrick's Shelter Annex with reading room, St. Vincent du Paul Center for Servicemen, an engraving shop, and a number of pawn shops.
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FUNDING
Ghost Architecture is supported in part by generous support from Creative Capital, The Cultural Equity Grants Program of the San Francisco Arts Commission, W.A. Gerbode Foundation, Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund, the San Francisco Foundation and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.
SPECIAL THANKS
Ira Nowinski, Ann Berman, Dillon Paul, TODCO, Dan Kanights, Jo Locke, Lawrence LaBianca, Brenda Way, our production interns, Christopher Bigalow, José María Francos, Shirley Bierley, Sarah Kornfeld Ciabittari, Esther Fjellhaug, Dick Wilson, Jennifer Clary, Gimmy Park Li, Nina Haft, Kathleen Haigood, Eva Lee, Deborah Slater, Sara Shelton Mann, Ken Porter, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, Catherine Pickering, the Bancroft Library, San Francisco Planning Department, John Killacky, Loris Bradley, Renny Pritikin, and the staff of YBCA, Peter Richards, Susan Schwartzenberg, the Exploratorium Museum, San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Historical Society, and the gifted performers who were instrumental in realizing this
project.
Zaccho Dance Theatre
1777 Yosemite Avenue, #330
San Francisco, California, 94124
office@zaccho.org www.zaccho.org
Bibliography
Olmsted, Roger R. and Nancy L. ³Yerba Buena Center Report on Historical Cultural Resources" prepared for the SF Redevelopment Agency, August 1979 --- Hartman, Chester. Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco, San Francisco: Glide Publications, 1974 --- Nowinski, Ira. No Vacancy, San Francisco: Carolyn Bean Associates, 1979 --- Yerba Buena Center Redevelopment: Miscellaneous Documents, San Francisco Redevelopment Agency 1965-1973 --- Sanborn Insurance Maps, The Sanborn Map Company --- California Historical Society Walking Tour
For more information San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, P.O. Box 420569, San Francisco, CA 94142 www.sfhistory.org --- California Historical Society 678 Mission Street, San Francisco CA 94105 www.californiahistoricalsociety.org --- TODCO Group 230 Fourth Street San Francisco, CA 94103 www.todco.org --- San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, www.ci.sf.ca.us/site/sfra_index.asp
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