99% Invisible - 366- Model City

Episode Date: August 14, 2019

During the depths of the Depression in the late 1930s, 300 craftspeople came together for two years to build an enormous scale model of the City of San Francisco. This Works Progress Administration (WPA) project was conceived as a way of putting artists to work while also creating a planning tool for the city to imagine its future. The massive work was meant to remain on public view for all to see, but World War II broke out and the 6,000 piece, hand-carved and painted wooden model was put into storage for almost 80 years. Model City This episode was produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Mixed by Jim McKee Subscribe to Kitchen Sisters Present

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I don't trust anyone who doesn't love a good map. Even something as everyday and basic as a Rand McNally road atlas could occupy me for hours in the backseat of a hot car. But if you want my eyes to literally dilate with excitement, show me a 3D physical scale model of a city. There's one of these in San Francisco, a 41 by 37-foot scale model of a city that was created in the late 1930s and then lost for decades. It was recently unearthed, refurbished and distributed in pieces to neighborhood libraries. I had heard about this crazy model years ago. Some cryptic allusion to it, maybe in the Chronicle,

they'd just said there was this enormous scale model of San Francisco that once was on display briefly and then vanished, the idea that there was a miniature world. It's something just so irresistible to your childlike brain. This model of the city is a tangible 3D roadmap through time and space. Triggering stories from San Francisco's past, realities of the present, and visions of the future. These stories were collected by the kitchen sisters,

Davian Nelson and Nikki Silva, and produced into the gorgeous audio collage we're going to play for you today. Here's Nikki Silva. Our story begins with this gigantic handmade model made up of over 6,000 tiny carved buildings and bridges forgotten for almost 80 years. It involves artists, curators, poets, planners, and a mega collaboration between SF-MOMA and 29 branches of the San Francisco Public Library. This object has become the catalyst for over 100 public programs throughout San Francisco. It's activated bicycle tours.

It's lured in thousands of locals and tourists and historians, triggered people's memories, and generated questions and ideas about how we can go forward as a city, keeping it dynamic and diverse and just and hospitable, protecting the environment, a pretty tall order for an object. Welcome to San Francisco, stories from the model city. Oh, okay, the 1938 model was made to the scale of 1 inch to 100 feet. Where considerable carving was required, popular and sugar pine were the woods used. Shrebery growing on the map is made of wire wool, pieces of sponge, and beat seeds. I'm Stella Lachman, associate for public dialogue at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the current keeper of the model.

Three-quarters of a century of different keepers for this thing. It's a very big object to keep. The entire model, when it's reassembassembled is almost 40 by 40 feet, absolutely colossal. I'm Dr. Gray-Brecchan, Geographer of ETC Berkeley. I was alerted that this model existed by some of the custodians at the UC warehouse. Fortunately, they didn't dumpster it. The reason for building it was to put a lot of people to work during depression.

1200 man months of labor according to the WPA records, about 35 people working every week for two years. The other thing was to create this model as a planning and educational tool that would always be on public display. This took place during the 1930s when the city was being completely transformed by the New Deal Public Works projects. The two bridges, the East Shore Freeway, the airports, Treasure Island, this model, it's a three-dimensional freeze frame of what the city was like at the time of the Treasure Island World's Fair just before Pearl Harbor. At the time of the World's Fair,

the model city, featuring every single structure in every single neighborhood, was still under construction. But there's a photograph of 11 women wearing Ingrid Bergman-style hats and capes lined up along a finished portion of the model, on display for the first time in 1939 on Treasure Island. Here is a green come true, the Golden Gate International Exposition on Manmade Treasure Island. Treasure Island is an artificial island, named after the Robert Louis Stevenson Island, made by piling up sand and rocks in the bay, created for the great international exposition, the world's fair of 1939-1940,

sort of a UN-like feeling, the brotherhood of Pacific nations. I'm Gary Camea, author of Cool Gray, City of Love, 49 Views of San Francisco. It shimmering reflections bring beauty from the sky. The whole world's fair concepts were kind of psychedelic, fantastic, made up architecture, an enormous courts and incredible lighting, and the model would be a perfect fit for Treasure Island, the whole city in one room. Angel Island. At the same time that there was this exuberant world's fair, probably less than a mile away as the

crow flies, Angel Island, the largest island in the bay, was being used as an immigration and quarantine point. A place where Chinese immigrants were detained and often deported and not allowed into the country. My name is Jenny Lim. I'm a poet, playwright, second generation Chinese-American born and raised in San Francisco. My father was detained on Angel Island. And the play I wrote, Paper Angels, one of the characters Lomb, was kind of like a romanticized depiction of my father. They're in this jail-like barrack. They looked out the window.

You can see the water, the lights, within grasp, and it's unreachable. LUM talks about wanting to go to the expo and where his panima had. Walking down the streets, his best suit, and you know all the women ogling him because he looks so desirable. He's going to make his mark in this new country. He can imagine this exposition fare that shows all the best that this country has to offer an immigrant. The other guys are just saying, I'll go on, you know, big talker.

You're never gonna achieve all those things. And in the story, he actually is the one that escapes. We never find out whether he makes it to sure or not. Some things we haven't found are these little ships that are going under the bay bridge. The model city was built in 1938 to 1940, on view at City Hall till 1942. At that point it was boxed up. Planning department would occasionally take pieces out to do studies on and when they no longer wanted it.

It was given to UC Berkeley as a teaching tool. But most of it was in these 17 wooden crates, sort of put in Higgledy Piglety. The model was hidden away until an artist duo based in Rotterdam heard about it. They'd been invited by SFMOMA to create an art project, engaging community and civic imagination. These Dutch artists, this couple called Big Van der Pol, had this great idea. Like, let's get that map, they heard about it, and let's get it out of storage and let's see if we can bring it back to life and make it part of the city's experience again.

My name is Liesbett Bigg, I'm an artist, I live in Rotterdam, and I work with Yos van der Polg. I'm a Yos van der Polg Ik ben de jost van de Paul, een paar van de Paul. 30 peels gaan naar 30 gebieden van de brandstrijden. We willen organiseren discussie over de model. Not only nostalgia. Maar voor example, voor de huizen, sea level rising. Omlusneus. Issues van public space, citizenship.

Hoe maak je deze issues discussiebalen, while looking at where you are? The model is really triggered to the whole project. Everything fell together. There is an historic layering, fantasy opens up, imagination opens up,

other stories in that model start to sort of move around. Lawrence, brilliant daddy. It's an old myth going all the way back several centuries of San Francisco, Lauren Spirlinggetti. It's an old myth going all the way back several centuries of San Francisco as an island. We're surrounded by water on three sides and with the melting of the icebergs, the water will rise just a few feet or even a foot or two and it'll flood over the very low lying landmass between San Francisco and the San Francisco Peninsula. And then San Francisco will be an island again.

There was always an island mentality and when I arrived in San Francisco, by ferry from Oakland having come on the train across the continent. San Francisco was like a Mediterranean city, small white buildings. No skyscrapers, just a few higher rises, maybe only 12, 14 stories. In 1950, I felt. San Francisco felt they were San Francisco's first and then only secondarily members of the United States.

Alright, I think we're all here now. Welcome to our historic shoreline bicycle tour visiting the library branches in town all of them actually have pieces of the San Francisco scale wooden model built what swash behind do they the model is the main subject today in Chris Carlson and myself Lisa Ruth Elliott we direct shaping San Francisco we try to get people together in real time to talk about history how things have have changed in the city, how we can imagine our city going forward. We're gonna hug the shoreline and go along the tree. But stick together in a group, the more we can congeal as a group, the more fun we're gonna have is a ride and safer we'll all be.

So that's what we learned that a long time ago on Critical Mass, density's the key. The city front. At the time of the 1938 model, San Francisco was completely oriented to the bay. The Embarcadero was known as the city front, the vast majority of people came in by ferry. And that was what you saw. That was San Francisco. The ferry building was one of the most bustling transportation hubs anywhere in the world.

It handled millions of people a year, and every single form of transportation, San Francisco came to it. The cable cars, street cars, trains, and omnibuses. And the whole waterfront was at the height of its working powers then. Just four years earlier, there had been the infamous Bloody Thursday and the great waterfront strike in 1934, which was a significant victory for organized labor. Open warfare rages through the streets of the city as 3,000 Union pickets, Battle 700 Police, guns, tear gas, cups and fists. Longshoremen were one of the main occupations in San Francisco. It was blue collar, it was muscular and hard drinking,

and it was a whole different town. There was a great romance to it. Those finger pierces that stick out into the bay handled different types of cargos. Cobra, which is like dried coconut meat, coffee, you could smell the coffee bananas. The last block is a little bit of a climate. By the way, this building over here,

the China Basin Building, which was once upon a time a place for offloading bananas from Central America, was turned in 1974 into a food distribution center by the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. The ransom demands of the Symbianese Liberation Army was that the Hearst family give away food to poor people. And that had a big impact on San Francisco quality. The Munchucks create six for C4. Color graph hill. Cleaning the model city.

Where the Quake Tower is right here, they call it Signal Hill, like 38 I guess it was. So this is like Chinatown here. Jim Boyer, volunteer at Moment. I'm a commercial artist. I worked in the advertising district over there on the C4 area. We aren't doing a cleaning of downtown and tenderloin today. First of all, we start off a little brush, get the dust off a lot of dust. So that's why I'm wearing masks, because I don't know where this dust has been.

50 people cleaning? Yeah. I think this cleaning process is really important. You don't only get to know the model, but there's a different relationship. So that's the model. Onview at City Hall till January 1942, when they needed the room for war purposes. The thing is that it's kind of just so huge that keeping track of all the different stories that come out of it is just, it's a lot. And where's the ferry building? and that everyone knew that that was like the end of their youth.

The Shadow of War II was descending over the world. That was this Halcyon period that was never going to come again. The US entered the war soon after that, and there was no more going out, having frivolous days wandering around on artificial islands in the bay. San Francisco Bay became a huge arsenal wring by guns and anti-aircraft, submarine nets under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a massive transformation of the whole way of life

that happened right after this fair. Women have invaded another field, usually reserve all men. 35 women butchered started training today in San Francisco in a step to relieve the shortage caused by the departure of 1,000 male butchers for the armed services. That's the news tonight. It was like every night was Saturday night. The hours were 24 hours a day. Not only three shifts at the shipyards, but they had three shifts for the movie theaters, the restaurants, the bowling alleys.

I mean, those boys spent money 24 hours a day until they were called back to the bases and had to shove out. My name is Tammy Takahashi. I'm a native of San Francisco. I lived my whole life here except for the four years of World War II when the Japanese American population was removed from the Pacific coast. When World War II began, there was a call out for anybody who could read and write Japanese. I volunteered. There was a makeshift, a radio station on the top floor of the palace hotel on Market Street. I was working as a translator in the office of Secret Service.

We would have these headphones on our heads translating taped radio messages from Japanese battleships on the Pacific. Full of static. Then they said, everybody, if they had a drop of Japanese blood, one-sixteenth, we were all gathered up and taken to assembly centers. The one we were locked up in is called Tampuran, a racing field, where one Kentucky thoroughbred horse was stable, five adults were put in. We lost everything. Our civil rights. We were in camp almost four years. That's a very long time to suffer deprivation and miserable food. I had to imagine things that I was fond of, an enchilada, or a tamale, some Chinese food. The Western edition.

The Western edition in the 1920s and 30s and 40s was known as the Little United Nations that had Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. Filipinos had a very big Jewish component and robust Japan town centered around post. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were all mustard, rounded up at Jackson and Van Ness, mostly Japanese in San Francisco went to a camp called Tophaz in Utah. Right at this time comes the great African-American influx into San Francisco. Mostly from Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, we needed to build ships and tanks. US government sent recruiters that brought African Americans in particular to shipyard towns.

All of the housing that had just been vacated by the Japanese and Japanese Americans, all of that housing became available suddenly. Maya Ashley. In the early months of World War II, San Francisco's Fillmore District, all the Western Edition, experienced a visible revolution. The Yatamoto seafood market, flatly became Sam's Shushanpana and Smoke Shop. Yoshigira's hardware met a marfus into Lesolone de Bouté owned by Miss Clarenza Jackson. The Japanese shops, which sold products to Nisei customers, were taken over by Enterprising Negro businessmen and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived southern blacks.

The Asian population blundled before my eyes. As the Japanese disappeared soundlessly and without protest, the Negroes entered with their loud jukeboxes, their just released animocities, and the relief of escape from southern bonds. The Japanese area became San Francisco's Harlem in a matter of months. During World War II, women replaced men on the street cars in San Francisco as conductors and motormen. Maya Angelou wrote, the idea of sailing up and down the hills of San Francisco in a dark

blue uniform with a money changer at my belt caught my fancy. She applied for the job, was not well received, but she persisted. I would have the job. I would be a conductor and sling a full money changer from my belt. I would. I was given blood tests, aptitude tests, physical coerity nation tests, and raw shots.

Then, on a blissful day, I was hired as the first Negro on the San Francisco Street Talks. Welcome to the San Francisco Public Library. The model is inspiring conversations all over the city. There's three other events happening right now. Our hope is that it can serve as a metaphor for the city at large to help us take a deeper look. We have had hundreds of conversations with themes came up over and over again. I'm sure you could probably guess housing, technology, toxic gentrification, climate change, displaced community.

Hello, I'm Jarelle Phillips, San Francisco native, born and raised in the field more. My grandparents all came here from the south when that migration was happening. I perform my teach a couple of ways throughout the city. I've been doing a project called I Am San Francisco Black Pass in the Presence. The African diaspora and its influence and impact. Growing up in San Francisco, I grew up in a very black world, which is probably hard to even imagine. In a city that I went to all black private school, predominantly black church, and I went to Bayview Hunters Point a lot.

So I was bouncing between two very well-known black neighborhoods. We, African-Americans specifically have been, in some ways, wandering and going from place to place trying to create home and community for a long time now. As a people, we moved out of the South, and we came over here. James Baldwin said, we came as far west as we could go. Now we're at a point where African Americans have been going back,

like Boomerang going back to the South, and dispersing further out into places like Modesto, and we moved out of the city when I was 17. I didn't want to, I had to. I came back a year later as soon as I was old enough. But my parents come back into the city every day. My grandma's house is still the house that everybody's mail goes to.

For a lot of families, their community center, whether it's the church or whatever space site is, is still where people come to on the weekends and whatnot. I feel like that connection is still there. We have to be very mindful. The gentrification of the change that happened and the film work can happen as far as I'm concerned anywhere because I saw that change. After the war ended, when the shipyard jobs dried up,

this large group of people were suddenly unemployed. Facing racism in the hiring practices of unions and couldn't get other kinds of jobs. Western Edition, the housing stock is really run down. I mean, the eyes of city fathers, it's seen as a blighted neighborhood. They came up with this plan to redevelop the whole Western Edition. They ended up smashing down the Korean houses, hundreds of black owned businesses.

This is a very dark period of urban planning history in the 60s and 70s. Whole neighborhoods were demolished in favor of planned communities and high-rise developments. What happened in Japan town in Filmora's a perfect example of that. My name is Allison Ariaf. I'm the editorial director of the Urban Planning

and Policy Think Tank Spur. What that had the effect of doing is it put people in, frankly, some really bad architecture, destroyed local businesses, erased the connections for the people who lived there in a way that, I don't think people have really gotten over. And I think it was also really damaging to urban planning. Certain communities will never have trust in the process.

I think we're at a really crucial moment of figuring out how best to involve respect and inform communities as new buildings and neighborhoods and communities are being built. I think that there's a big paradigm shift in the way that we think about these issues, but it's slow and coming. China's Hound and North Beach are sharing a piece of the model. Right now it's at North Beach, which is great because it's an extra hill. We don't have to climb. The libraries.

San Francisco has a very long history with libraries. As the gold rush boomed, the first library opened in 1852 in a room in a men's temperance hotel. In 1877, a free library for all was established, spearheaded by Andrew S. Halliday, who also invented the cable car. From the start, the library's success was astounding, and it remained so today, with its 29 branches

throughout the city, where 29 corresponding neighborhood sections of the model were put on display. So each one of these can be lifted out, so that we can see the street that we've wiped out. Yes, I'm used to seeing this in Google Maps, but seeing it 3D is saying you really got a sense of the scale. Oh my house is there. Your house is there. When they had it made, they sent people out to look at the color of every house. So the color of your house

here is the color it was. One of the questions actually is we were writing was what was the point of making this model. Some pieces were used for these planning exercises where the shadows would fall for larger buildings as redevelopment happened in South of Market in the 1970s and they started raising the hotels, barber shops and cafes and put in things like the Moscone Center and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They started playing around with what's possible.

One of the questions when we found it was, is there room for San Francisco and San Francisco? At the museum, we tried to find a place to put it all, but I realized it's so large. So we worked with the library to get as many pieces as we could into the branches, and that ended up being about 70 of the 140 pieces. What do we have here?

GPA. That's Glen Park. Yeah, Glen Park has these two pieces here. The Glen Park Freeway Revolt. We took my 13 year old daughter to go look at the model at the Glen Park Library, which is in the middle of our little quote unquote downtown, where I live on a big hill. Everything above me was dairy farms and there were lots of earthquake shacks. There was a developer who wanted to build a zoo

in Glen Park. As a way to attract people to buy homes in the neighborhood. In 1948, the California Highway Department decided they wanted to crisscross the city with freeways. And a bunch of moms and housewives stopped that from happening. The Glen Park outdoor art league and the San Francisco women's club managed to stop this freeway effort. Glen Park freeway revolt. Women and moms have actually led quite a number of revolts like this around

the Bay area including helping to overturn a really bizarre plan to pave over the Bay, the save the Bay movement where this trio of women challenged companies, wealthy landowners, politicians, and reverse this idea that you should pave over the Bay to do more development. I'm so glad to see this model come back today because it presents a really fascinating history, sometimes positive, lots of times negative of how this city has grown and developed. The Western Edition branch. A lot of people came to see the model.

You'll notice a big red line going through. People who would never have a conversation with one another suddenly just talk about the red lining and people trying to figure out why is there a big red line here and people saying because that's red lining and no, but like what is it because it's red lining? The red lining basically delineated where people of color would live. It's segregation on a map. My name is Naima Dean and I am the manager of the Western Edition Branch Library of San Francisco Public Library System. My dad had a jazz club in this neighborhood in the 60s and 70s at the same time as Bill

Graham doing his stuff at the film more. And they did a lot of projects together. Big Mama Thornton, George Duke, Bobby Hutchison, Miles Davis. I grew up in this neighborhood, and it was all African-American in the 80s. Still, this was the mo, this was the film mo, and now it's Alamo Square and Hayes Valley and Nopa and Lodi and all these nicknames. I mean, they're real estate names, they're sale names. We had made a map to accompany the project. People could write a memory on a post-it and someone said, my Japanese American family came

often to the Western Edition Library. My husband checked out the novels of Yamamoto Shiguro in Japanese. So many times that the library eventually gave these to him. That's great. Oh, I like this one. Harvey Milk's wide lens camera store. I remember my dad telling me that like he really liked Harvey Milk at the time because Harvey Milk was willing to integrate and not segregate. He worked hard because the Western edition is adjacent to the Castro. Let's see what we can find right in the Western edition. I live in a big building. I live in the film O. I love my Mo.

June Bug and Naya, 2019. 1133 machine street. The night of the red branch was a place where the Irish mesh, it wasn't a fancy hall, it was just, it it was the greatest. And when they were every Saturday night dancing, we met all the Irish there. And we had Johnny Hallahan from Oakland, nice big band. And we dance all night. From further dark until five o'clock in the morning, we go to Mrs. Pickett's house.

She was Irish, her husband was a police officer, I believe. He got to bed and she stayed up with us all night long. She was so sweet. She used to give her her basement for us young Irish people. Five o'clock we take a bus and we go up to St. Ignatius, we had to get to Mass, come home and go to bed for three or four hours and then actually be jelly to the Irish football. If you just look to your right you'll see the last little stump of Irish Hill still there. Once upon a time there was a third peak at the Treo Hill called Irish Hill which was all filled up this entire airspace we're about to go hurtling down through.

Had 98 steps to get in the top of it. The hills. In the early days, rich people didn't live on the hills. They were completely inaccessible. You couldn't even get a horse to go up them. Either cover with sand dunes and scrub brush. But after the cable car, that opened up knob hill. And all of a sudden knob hill became where the rich people lived.

Nob, telegraph of a sudden Nob Hill became where the rich people lived. Nob telegraph Russian, the main downtown hills, prevented the expansion of the city for decades. That was one of the reasons that there was this mania that went on in San Francisco and tell the early 20th century for filling in every single bit of water that they could fill in. What is now the financial district? That was all underwater. That was filled in using ships, scuttled. There's sunken ships that formed part of the bay bottom

in the financial district. What interests me as a geographer is these buildings were built after the 1906 earthquake and fire to replace buildings that were leveled, but they're built on the same property lines that were left over from the gold rush with no regard for the hills and the wetlands which it shouldn't have been built on because they look for an earthquake. Simone de Beauvoir when she visited San Francisco remarked that it looked like the city had been laid out by somebody who would never been here before.

like the city had been laid out by somebody who had never been here before. We're going to head down until we get to beach streets. Aquatic Park. The Bay is much shallower today because of how much mining debris coating the bottom of the Bay. We had washed away the equivalent of six Panama canals worth of debris to get the gold out of the hills and mountains of California into the waterways and into the bay And it's full of methyl mercury So if don't eat fish out of the bay unless they're very short-term visitors like herring her safe

Stripe bass or not Fishman's work Just passing the aquatic park just passing the aquatic park and all the tall ships. Big blue and white building to my right, the dolphin club. I get the flock tied, right? My tie. You might start going out on you. You know what I mean?

Might. And number one thing, about swimming in this stuff. Look at any eye and go. You don't have to swim in all the trash. It's just got up to here. My name is Lume Marselli. This club is what he says, 1887. And it's a swimming and boarding club.

We swim in a bay all year round. We know what suits. I started a fish when I was 12 or 13 years old. Lume Marselli. Lue the glue. He's sort of the custodian of the dolphin club. And he lives in a little attic there. And he's one of the custodian of the dolphin club and he lives in a little attic there. And he's one of the old stoves of North Beach. At the dolphin club there are a lot of old Italian men,

like firemen, policemen, and waiters, and exercise a little swim a little. And then they cook for each other. And they have a lot of wine. they just sit around and talk about the old days and talk about sex and what's going to happen to somebody if he has testicular cancer. And you've got to give him a certain kind of liver. And they have all these theories based on what their mothers told them. And they cook food for each other. And I think it really keeps them going. It's really a problem for old people because where can they cook if they're relegated to smaller and smaller spaces and then they're given terrible food and I wonder they die. North Beach. The area known as North Beach was once an actual beach. It was filled in around the late 19th century and warehouses, fishing roars and docks were built on the newly formed

shoreline. This is the piece of the model that has quite tower on it and St. Peter and Paul's church. Here's Peggy Nicarbacher at Porchlight. I'm Peggy Nicarbacher, I'm a native saffron ciscan for three generations. I grew up over on Pacific Avenue, but at about eight or nine, I had an aunt, eat a baronio, and she'd bring me over on the bus to North Beach. We'd come for pickled pigs feet, basil, no stores had anything like that in those days,

and we'd have a date with some of her older friends. They'd have little cotton house dresses on with their nylons kind of rolled down, and they'd come out in their house shoes. And I knew there was something happening here. And the day that we left, we were waiting for the bus. It looked like there was blood coming down, Fulbert Street. And it was a garage wine making set up of, you know, some old Italian guys. And then when I was in high school, I'd come over with my

two best friends. Weed where our mothers, print coats, put on black tights, and we'd set in cafes and read poetry, and think we were beatnets, little shiny face beatnets. And then I came when I was in college, and we went to see Carol Dota and to the jazz workshop. And we hung out at a bar called Mooney's. I wish pop up on Grand Avenue. The barkeeper was Sean Mooney and he never ate.

And we'd come and we'd bring him sandwiches. He said, well, if you guys want to feed me so much, why don't you take over the kitchen? So we decided we'd start the next day. And we had leotards on no-bodies, two or three skirts, lots of necklaces. We had no idea of what we were doing. We went down to the butcher, Miss Bruno Yackepie, who was half a block away and said,

we've run out of everything, and it was about 11 o'clock, and we were open till two. We need help. What are we gonna do? He said, we'll always have sausages, make Portuguese beans stew. The bakery was right next door,

get nice hot bread. As a matter of fact, go over to the bakery and get a roll. And he'd cut some telemaid cheese that had a special taste because it was May. The cows had been eating some special clover. And he'd hold, he was huge, and he had blood all over his apron. And he'd hold a sandwich to his ample breast. And by the time you got it, it was a grilled cheese sandwich.

LAUGHTER MUSIC We continue the Kitchen Sisters' tour of San Francisco through the WPA Model City. After this. We rejoin the Kitchen sisters in North Beach. The olive tree, that's what we need. Peas and poe tree.

Having an olive tree? I mean, it's a symbol of life. Good morning and thank you for coming out here today on this beautiful Monday morning. My name is Carla Short on the superintendent of the Bureau of Urban Forestry in San Francisco. For the last 15 years we have honored people with a signature tree. Ruth Asawa was an honoree. Montgomery, Mathai, Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Irene Precios, and activists in the Portola District.

We are in Norse Beach neighborhood, not far from City Lights bookstore. This neighborhood would not look like this neighborhood at the Lawrence Firling Deadby not actively championed as thriving writers and artists community. The bookstore was always in the same location, 261 Columbus Avenue. We had this anarchist slant right from the beginning, and at that time North Beach was populated by, well, like, 90 percent Italians. Some of the first publications we sold were two Italian anarchist newspapers in Italian, and among the people who would buy the

newspaper were the scavengers on the garbage truck. I remember one guy wearing a derby and baggy pants would rush in off the garbage truck and get his copy of you man of the Nova or a Ladunat that was the other one. My father bought a little house. We lived in an alley called Winterplace, in North Beach, one of the first Chinese families living in that neighborhood in the 50s. And it was all little Sicily,

the smell of coffee, the bread, ravioli, fat tree, powered Mason Street car runs down, could hear it every day. I would listen to it like my music box, the fog horns and the cable cars. Then I would secure and I could go to sleep. I'm Jenny Lim, poet, playwright.

My father was a working class immigrant. Took on jobs, working at the Fairmont Hotel as a janitor and then became a bus boy. My mother was a sewing woman and worked all day and all night at a sewing machine. We children, there were seven of us, and we were just on the loose, running the streets, Chinatown and North Beach.

Chinatown. This is Herb Canes from San Francisco, the magic city that's a sight to behold. We're walking down the narrow, shop line, main street of San Francisco's Chinatown. We call it Grand Avenue, but to the Chinese it's still Dupont Guy. A block away is Port Smith Square. The scene of a San Francisco tradition, the Chinese Goon Festival. The Chinese were not allowed to live west of power until as late as the 40s or 50s.

Those covenants, it's incredible how long they remained on the books. My mother sang wooden fish songs, the Ichineret, folk songs of the peasants, and I remember the old folks singing these songs in Chinatown. This one is when that my mother sang whenever she mended our clothes, whenever there's a hole in a piece of cloth that's at Portalfour, negative spirits to enter. Before the earthquake, Chinatown looked more like the rest of San Francisco, mostly western-style architecture. After the earthquake, in response to this concerted movement on the part of the White Estals,

to move Chinatown out of downtown San Francisco, down to Hunter's Point, the Chinese managed to start rebuilding right away. Chinese merchants working with white architects came up with an idea where they would take elements of traditional Chinese architecture, goadahs and corbels, rot iron, those all have structural function. In Chinatown, they're just tacked on to conventional buildings to make it look wild and exotic and Chinese and enticing. They put a lot of neon and a lot of electric lights, so it became this kind of fairyland environment, and that was very successful.

We hired a marching band funeral procession for my father, Adam March, from the mortuary to winter place. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. We go back to the original grass roots at the first marching band in Chinatown. My name is Clifford, last name is Yee, people come out to look to see if they know the person.

Many people out of respect will bow, people will take their cats off, because out of being respected to a leader of the disease. My name is John Copolo, I'm with the Green Street March worry man. Come down claim and make a left on grant. This is where we do our heavy things you know. It's the biggest audience. So what we do is we slow down like going to this one particular dirge march. St. Jude funeral march. Orange, Firling, Getty, at City Light's bookstore. Green Street, Marchberry, Marching Man just passed by. The back door of City Light's is in Chinatown. The front door is in the Western world. Green Street, Marchway, Marching Man marches right down Green Street and turns into Columbus

Avenue where all the cafe sitters at the sidewalk cafe tables sit talking and laughing and looking right through it as if it happened every day in little old wooden North Beach San Francisco. But at the same time, feeling thrilled by the stirring sound of the gallant marching band, as if it were celebrating life and never heard of death. We're going to use the model today as a catalyst for a conversation around the controversial topic of the impact of tech capital on the city of San Francisco. We'll open with a panelist and this hyper growth of tech has brought with it both extraordinary wealth and an influx of people. This boom is phenomenal. There's a most prosperous place in the world in this decade.

This prosperity has also led to growing inequality, gentrification, demographic changes. More billionaires per square year. And some would say a really unsustainable and unhealthy impact on housing cost, infrastructure, and the environment. One thing that we need to do is break up some of these big companies.

It's always much higher. When did we have mass housing for the working people? After World War II, the collapse of the 20s plus the taxes of the New Deal plus we've got to have this conversation at a national level about income inequality and about a living wage about guaranteed national housing. One more question, I guess the general in the back of the glasses. If you want to talk of the homeless prompt for a second, the reason isn't because of tech lords

and stem lords who are destroying the city. It's because old people who moved here in 1975 never wanted to build a single house. You can't build a homeless shelter, you can't do anything, and you're wondering, oh, I'm gonna blame the newcomers, but really maybe just kind of basically agree with you. I wouldn't think they're probably, oh, I'm gonna blame the newcomers, but really maybe just I Basically agree with you and that we need well, I don't right. We're talking about class and race

As a fellow young person Take one step further and like look at the reasons. I'm going to put another half a billion dollars into immediate funding for navigation centers. So we need to work together as a whole. This is a rapid rehousing, mental health, together as one San Francisco. The mission. I can remember my mom taking me to all India Maria movies at the Mission Theater. I can remember Valencia Street, when it was nothing for the long stretch of appliance stores, leather tongue video in the chameleon bar.

I can remember the payphone. My name is Josiah Lise Alderete, full-blooded, bocho, indio, Spanish-speaking poet, raised here in La Ria Bahia, bread and spread throughout the mission. My mom and papa met at the famous Cinelloan Mexican Spanish nightclub, which was at the time in the middle of the Mexican barrio, the Mexican neighborhood, which is, you know, north beach. My dad was working at the Cinelloan nightclub and you know, they were those high-waisted, wader jackets back there, tight like, got a yellow pants you know,

and live music, big orchestra. I can remember George Dirado. I can remember Daniel Alacón. I can remember that Sonia Sanchez has walked these streets. I can remember the Nancy Modejón has walked these streets. I can remember Alfonso Textador's limp. People associate the comm waves of gentrification. It's been going on since before the 2000s.

You know, I remember first seeing that wave, there was the oxygen bar opened up on Valencia Street. And you know, also we started seeing these big puffy SUV vehicles around it. I remember so that I can get out of the way of the ubers and the lifts and the Google buses that are not driving me anywhere someplace. The changes that have been the most startling and physical and painful to see in the neighborhood have definitely come from the .com changes in Google. But, you know, on the flip side of that, the Guugula is really dug in, you know.

I mean, giving the 24-scree declared a Latino heritage corridor, that protects like a huge amount of those areas. There's amazing transformations in the mission with the Coyote de Cuatro Association reaching out. So a lot of the older generation, a lot of the older ones are really, sort of, recommitted to staying. It's actually a beautiful thing. When people move here and they come here and they think of the city,

what they're thinking of is the contributions of the poets and the working people have made to this city. Well, I'd like to see happen some sacred space opening up for people to move back in and raise their families. As much as the city does change, those roots are gonna stay, they're way deep in the concrete. That's the bones of this place.

I live where you make a shine. Moving through the city. Here's Justin Vivian Bond, 2012. My name's Justin Vivian Bond. I sing, I write and perform. A trans genre artist. I used to live in San Francisco, I lived there from 88 to 94. And the two things that drove me crazy about San Francisco were the weather, which many people love, but which I hate.

Let me preface all of it by saying, I adore San Francisco. I love living there. If there's any city where I would feel like there are more people that I would have Thanksgiving or Christmas with, San Francisco is the one. But having said that, I don't like the weather and I always got very, very frustrated by transportation because I was at the mercy of the taxi cabs of San Francisco and they're notoriously unreliable. So, I came back to San Francisco. I guess it was for my record release. I was getting my hair blown out,

the Dina's glamorama on Valencia. My friend said, Lini Breedlove has started homeobile. Call if you need a ride. And so I told them where I was and I needed a car. They said, I think it was Musty Shafan. Yes, it was Musty Shafan.

She showed up and was my driver. So all of a sudden this person who I had known in clubs, we were driving in a car and talking with each other. They asked for a suggested donation and of course you just want to give them the entire contents of your pocketbook because they're so lovely. See what I tell you. Trapack. My name is Leningrad Love.

I run Homebills, a community ride service for the LGBTQL and the WPQST community and at Dallas and San Francisco. You do not have to be a big back queer to get a ride from home bills, but it does help. No, just kidding. But you need to understand that the real reason that we are here is for people that don't get rides normally from anyone else. And so, if you're putting on all this padding, high heels, a wig, and three sets of fall-style lashes, and a bunch of glitter, you are high priority at whole bills. If we're thinking about the most effective way to get people through cities, we should look at how different systems move people. Transit, you can move up to 25,000 people per hour through a city if they're on public transit. Walking actually comes after that and you could move approximately 9,000 people per hour through a city on foot.

Biking, moving about 7,500 people per hour. Cars can only move about 600 to 1600 people per hour. 1600 people per hour. At a very young age, we took the bussus all over town, to get a municipal card with 10 rides. It was five cents a ride, and they would punch a hole to use it up. We used that to get to go downtown, to Market Street, and we used it to go to Plainland. Plainland in the beach, it was just a classic ocean,

front, prominent playground, wonderfully dangerous physical attractions. Running through this barrel that kept turning. The barrel of joy. You walked into the barrel of joy, and it rotated, and it was padded, and it would drop you on your head. A laughing soul, she really freaked me out. I had a lot of nightmares about her freckled face and red hair.

Confusing mirrors. You'd be fat, you'd be tall, you'd be squished. Jets of compressed air. That they would release under the skirts of women and girls as they came in. The wheel of joy was a huge wooden platter that spun. They blow the whistle and everyone would crowd and get their butts as close as possible to the center, the centrifugal force, to pick them off. They go sailing off.

It fell on hard times and they tore it down and put up these got-offal condos that stand there now. I got to clean the Strobaz and Playland much to the consternation of other people cleaning the model those days. It's such a coveted place to clean and it was definitely fun to run the Q-tip down the shoots of Playland. I also got to clean the Laurel Hill Cemetery, which no longer exists along Geary. This big expanse of multiple blocks with trees and pathways, and that tells the story of the removal of the Cemetery from San Francisco to Colma and down the peninsula where all of our bodies go now. BEEP.

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BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. library. And I look at this model, so you can see all the different green houses. This was a major center of flower growing, carnations and roses. Since we're the garden district, people they would love it to be kind of a hub for green activity like gardening, community garden, bicycles, walking, trolleys, the air would be so light. I'm curious what this looks like in 800 years. Will the third great quake scare us away? Now we're going to be here till the bitter end. So what's the plan? I would like to see more emphasis on the greenery.

I would envision building up rather than out and raise the density. I don't want my rises. No, my rises. The roads are ridiculously wide. There's a good amount of wasted space in the sunset. Space that's more fresh as now and could be used. We're in college and like. Would this be before or after the sun up? Yeah, right there.

It would be really great to see this San Francisco model. There's a whole and to do ongoing programming, hearing people's stories. I'd like to see it under Plexi class that you could just walk on top of and just lay down and look at like protected, but free so that you could really get in. The city's all changed and have to change

and anyone who wants to keep it frozen and wax so that if forever looks like 1930 at model is the illusion all in is going to be disappointed. This is the issue that everyone's trying to grapple with for this city is how do we preserve it in all of its glory but at the same time make places dynamic as possible and have make it as hospitable as possible. It won't look exactly like the 1938 model. It won't even look like the 2019 version. And I think that there's a way of achieving it without losing what makes it special. Hopefully we can make a start. Well, it seems there are the beginnings of a new consciousness in a new generation of activists in San Francisco. And it seems to be a kind of wave of a future with a new coalition of young progressives.

That includes not only the Green Movement but also groups like the Bicycle Coalition with its vision of a carless city, alternative cultural institutions. There are also poetic rappers, seniors for peace, and performance artists, farmers market selling local produce, raising the possibility of a self-sustaining ecoregent, free from ecologically disastrous angry business. It's a vision of a possible future society in America, but of course, it's yet to be realized,

but it does exist in our consciousness. San Francisco's stories from the model city was produced by the kitchen sisters Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson with Nathan Dalton and Brandy Howell mixed by Jim McKee. The kitchen sisters presents is their podcast from radio toopia. Please go subscribe, download all the old episodes. You will love them. Soundscapes and archival audio from Jim McKee and Andrew Roth, additional recordings by Noah Landis, Grant MacAmir, and from SFLOMA's Public Knowledge Program take part, in which the

museum partnered with the San Francisco Public Library and artist's Big Fender Pull to engage the community in a series of talks and events around the model of San Francisco. Thanks to Tomoko Konomietsu's Stella Lachman, Aaron Fleming, Valerie Wainwright, Kevin Carr, Erica Gancy, and the entire take part in raw material project teams. [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in Deep thanks to author Gary Camea, keeper of the model Stella Lachman, Dr. Gray Brecken, UC Berkeley and the Living New Deal, poet Lawrence Firlingettie, poet Jenny Lim. Our bicycle historians and activists Lisa Ruth Elliott and Chris Carlson of Shaping San Francisco, artist's Big Vendor Pull, excerpts Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Cage Bird

sings read by the author used by permission of Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. Teacher and historian Jarelle Phillips, Ellison Arieth, Spur Think Tank, Naima Dean, Western Edition Branch Library, Food Rider Peggy Nicarbocker, courtesy of Porchlight Storytelling Series. Poet, Chazaya Luis Alderready, Nicole, Termini, Germtelling series. Poet, Chazaya Luis Alderready. Nicole, Termini, Germaine, Portola Branch Library. Peggy Millett, courtesy of the Irish American Crossroads Oral History Archive, performer Justin Vivian Bond.

Lenny Breedlove, founder of Home Obieos, and thanks to the Internet Archive and the Kitchen Sisters Archive. For our music we thank Blue Dot Sessions, SoulTrend from San Francisco's Mission District, Ted Severese, Richard Feno, John Zhang, Nathan Dalton, B.S.W. Polgagelski, and Jim McKee. And to all the citizens, librarians, and keepers who took part in the model project throughout San Francisco, we thank you. And yes, you can see the model online. Go to takepartsf.net, zoom in and find your favorite spots.

And while you're up there, sign the petition to find a permanent home for San Francisco in San Francisco. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRXF, the Independent Collective of Ground Breaking Podcast. Find them all at radtopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook, you can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI or run Instagram and read it too. But our forever home on the web is 99PI.org. Radio tapio.

From PRX.