cocaine produced made me wonder whether it was seductive specifically as a counter to the despair and desolation this reversal brought, the drug you took when you hit the wall built to keep you out. There were other walls, prison walls behind which some of the men in the neighborhood would go, and graves for yet others. The Western Addition was black, but realtors and others carved out spaces in part by renaming them, chipping away at the place’s identity, as the black community was pushed out of an increasingly expensive, elite city. (Later on I’d come to understand gentrification and the role that I likely played as a pale face making the neighborhood more palatable to other pale faces with more resources, but I had no sense at the start that things would change and how that worked.)
The beautiful wooden houses had been built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with all the era’s lavish ornamentation: bay windows, pillars, lathed railings, ornamental moldings, often with botanical motifs, fish-scale shingles, porches framed in arches, turrets, even the occasional onion dome. They were full of biomorphic curves and eccentric intricacies that made them seem organic, as though they had grown rather than been built. A Muir Woods park ranger once remarked to me that she saw in these structures the great redwood forests that had been cut down to build them, and so those tall groves up and down the coast were another ghostly presence.
The materials and craftsmanship of the original buildings were magnificent, but by the postwar era white flight was taking one population to the suburbs and letting other populations—nonwhite, immigrant, poor—into these places that were treated like slums by their absentee owners. The buildings had their ornamentation scraped off and stucco or plastic siding pasted over their wood, or they were divided up into smaller apartments, often built with shoddy materials and techniques, and many of them were allowed to grow shabby and rickety.
Blight was the code word used in the 1950s and 1960s to justify knocking down many of them to the east of our little neighborhood, leaving behind open wounds in the city’s skin of structures. In some of them, grim housing projects were built, some so alienating and oppressive that they were torn down a few decades after they were erected. Other lots in the heart of the Fillmore, which had once been the vibrant cultural zone Mr. Teal liked to reminisce about, were still sitting vacant through most of the 1980s, behind cyclone fencing. A place had been killed, and it never quite came back to life.
Change is the measure of time, my photographer friend Mark Klett likes to say, and little things shifted. When I had arrived, there was a Kodak photo booth on the corner a block west, back when film was how you got photographs, and a glass-walled phone booth on the corner across from my place, next to the liquor store. It became a pay phone bolted to the wooden wall, under a hood like a stove hood, and then disappeared altogether as mobile phones proliferated.
The texture of that bygone life seems hard to convey now: the solitude of a wanderer in the city who could wait for a bus or a taxi to come by or find a phone booth to call a taxi or a friend from a memorized number or by asking the operator or by looking it up in the ruffled tissue-thin pages of the phone book if there was one there, dangling in its black case from the metal cord; who’d look for what she wanted in many stores before the internet meant that you could pinpoint things without getting out of bed, back when there were fewer chain stores and more variety. We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairie before the waterfall of acceleration we would all tumble over. We were prepared for encounters with strangers in ways that the digital age would buffer a lot of us from later. It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.
In that less expensive era, eccentricity had many footholds. A lot of small businesses doubled as museums devoted to various things—there was a dry cleaner