This Manifest Place

The Barbary Coaster is a contemporary survey of San Francisco's Jackson Square. The district is both well-known and overlooked. Lately, it has quickened its pulse along with the City around it after a quiet, though decidedly not down & out period. Since the Gold Rush Era it has been the site of renown, infamy, wealth and despair, addicts and dreamers, the industrious and the shady. Words like 'hoodlum' and 'shanghaied' are said to have originated on these streets. It was and still is a truly International Settlement and today it is becoming something else yet again.

Of any place in San Francisco, it stands out as the oldest and most unique, being a downtown commercial district that survived the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, while all the rest of downtown burned to the ground. Its evolution has been spasmodic, its recent past hushed by money and a stillness like Snow White's sleep, and now it feels reawakened to me. I can only speak as a neighbor, an admirer who lives a few blocks up the hill casting a lovers eye on the brick district spread between Chinatown, Telegraph Hill, The Financial District and The Embarcadero.

This is a view of Pacific Avenue, the original bawdy corridor that led from the piers of the waterfront to Columbus where the district turns entirely Chinese. In the distance, just before the trees you can see the remaining posts of an arch that read, International Settlement, a marketing monicker put on the district in the mid-20th Century to try to recapture its past glory. There is some effort lately, driven by the Jackson Square Historic District Association, to restore the arch.

I hope to use this site as a place to survey it, to sort my thoughts and examine the history and legends of this most storied neighborhood; a brick enclave where the whiff of intrigue and possibilities has never really gone away.