Journey to the Center of the World
The future is dark, but begin in the present, at the Pacific where it fronts my city, where western civilization comes to an end in a strip of sand and the realm of whales and sharks begins. Fish populations are plummeting in this and other oceans, but if you go down the coast a little you’ll come to where the sea otters hunted nearly into extinction have come back to the kelp beds, if you go either north or south, you’ll come to the beaches where the elephant seals who were likewise nearly exterminated return every winter to fight, mate, and nurse their young. Take a third Pacific species, though, the brown pelican, which also nearly disappeared, then came back, and imagine one pelican’s trajectory from Ocean Beach, the western edge of my city and our continent.
Imagine it soaring with the heavy prehistoric grace of a pterodactyl down Fulton Street, the long street that starts at the beach, parallels the north side of Golden Gate Park and carries on after the park ends to run east through the old African American neighborhood, past surviving gospel churches and extinct barbershops to the little formal garden between the War Memorial Building and the Opera House, then straight into City Hall, whose great gilded dome straddles the street (and where four thousand same-sex couples got married in early 2004). Let that pelican soar through the echoing central atrium, where in 1961 students who protested the anticommunist purges were washed down the marble stairs with firehoses, let the bird float out the other side, going on east, to United Nations Plaza, where Fulton dead-ends into Market Street, the city’s main artery. This is the place where I stand in the present to face past and future, the place where stories come together, one of the countless centers of the world.
Just before the plaza is the Lick Monument, a colossal Victorian confection of statuary, bas-reliefs, and patriotic inscriptions summing up California history as it looked then. From the west, California as a fierce goddess confronts you, at her feet stands the California Grizzly, extinct everywhere but art and the state flag. Dedicated on Thanksgiving 1894, the monument survived the 1906 earthquake while all the buildings around it crumbled and burned, and it was relocated when the new library opened almost a decade ago. During its relocation a few Native Americans denounced one of its life-size sculptural groupings, the one that shows a Mexican vaquero and padre looming ominously over a prone and apparently conquered Indian. They didn’t succeed in getting the statue removed, but they stirred up a furious public conversation about California history, and they won an addition, a bronze plaque below the sculptural group that speaks of genocide and colonialism, a small rewriting of history, a small measure of change.
To the south of the monument is the new public library, built on the site of the sandlot riots of 1877. The sandlot was a space for free speech, but in 1877 the speech turned sordid, incitation to assault and arson against the Chinese population, a degeneration of the great antirailroad riots that spread across the country that summer when the United States came as close as it ever would to a full-fledged class war. But immediately to the north, staring down the old sandlot, is the superb new Asian Art Museum, a kind of redress or at least an address of the changing status of Asians in this part of America.
Across the street in the plaza proper is a bronze Simón Bolívar, the liberator of South America, on his rearing horse, sometimes with seagulls on his head, one day a year with a group of South American men leaving flowers as tribute. The plaza over whose western end Bolivar presides commemorates the 1945 founding of the United Nations a few blocks away in the War Memorial Building. Huge gold letters in the pavement spell out the preamble of the founding charter. “We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . . to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,” it begins. Two colonnades of stone pillar streetlights are inscribed with the names of the member nations and the year they joined. There’s a sort of secret dialogue among these monuments, a conversation about liberation, about imperfect solutions and unfinished revolutions, but still, liberation. And there’s more literal sustenance here too.
Every Wednesday and Sunday the plaza hosts a farmers’ market, not one of the fancy boutique markets, but a big spread full of affordable food eagerly bought by the poor here in the supermarketless inner city, food grown and sold by Laotians, Latinos, old-time local whites, a small pragmatic United Nations of food production and urban–rural rendezvous. On those days the place is bustling, vibrant, full of the colors of roses, cherries, violet-and-lavender Chinese eggplant, honey, carrots, peppers, sunflowers, and many green things, full of people swinging bags of produce, haggling, hawking, greeting, walking over the words of the UN Charter.
The rest of the time it mostly belongs to the homeless, and so I go once a week to buy food from farmers and once a week to give it away to the destitute. Tuesdays I come here with a young monk from San Francisco Zen Center to feed the people who sit at Bolivar’s feet, on the edges of the raised plant beds here and in the grimy surrounding streets. Sometimes the grander political causes are so abstract, so removed, it seems right instead to cook hot food, box it up in Chinese takeout cartons, and give out meals to fifty or sixty people. It’s hard to say what difference we make, but we meet people who are hungry, people who bless us, and people who turn away because they’re busy shooting up, or crack has taken away their appetites, or suffering has driven them mad. Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan’s new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people.
Even from City Hall you can see the huge letters of the artist Rigo 23’s black, white, and silver mural across Market Street from UN Plaza, the letters that spell out TRUTH, and TRUTH is the far side of this constellation of histories. Rigo dedicated the mural to the Angola Three, the African American political prisoners in Louisiana’s Angola Prison. One of them was there for the dedication ceremony, Robert King Wilkerson, a soft-spoken man who spent twenty-nine years in solitary confinement for a murder he did not commit. He was framed for his political activism, then freed in 2001 thanks to the toil of volunteer lawyers who are still working on the cases of the other two.5 A lot of the marches and demonstrations in San Francisco begin or end here, and so I’ve been here again and again for peace and justice as well as to get food and to give it away. This is what the world looks like to me, like UN Plaza, full of half-forgotten victories and new catastrophes, of farmers and junkies, of mountains of apples and of people trying to change the world and tell the truth. Someday all this may be ruins over which pelicans will fly, but for now it is a place where history is still unfolding. Today is also the day of creation.
5. Herman Wallace was released in 2013, shortly before his death; Albert Woodfox has seen numerous appeals and a direct order for his immediate release on June 8, 2015, overturned. Robert King Wilkerson now goes by Robert Hillary King. The mural is still there.