Open Space

I follow the SFMOMA blog for all kinds of reasons—Suzanne Stein, Brandon Brown, Dodie Bellamy, and Kevin Killian are four of them—but one has nothing to do with the museum itself. It’s the history of San Francisco’s recession-proof gentrification that appears there between the lines of the various posts. Here’s Stella Lochman, SF native and the museum’s education & public programs assistant, from Wednesday:

“I always like to tell the story of my neighborhood before it became what it is today, because I grew up by the ballpark, and everyone thinks of it today as the sort of dot com center of the universe, but what I remember it as is, where the Safeway is was a trailer park and the ballpark was sort of these strange artists residencies that were sort of shady and weird and you never really saw anyone go in and out of them. And there was a gay club where a lot of the dot com offices are now that would leave really lewd fliers on our windshield and the methadone clinic was next door, so in ten short years the neighborhood has completely come around.”

She links to Rebecca Solnit’s recent San Francisco Atlas, one of many efforts the museum’s making to make art, not war, out of the changes going on outside its walls.