#9 Haunted
Friends! Raise your voices and sing with me a song of the city’s salvation, and join us as the silent speak once more and walk again down yesterday’s forgotten streets. For today we have found a kindred soul, and she has given my beloved tenderloin the gift of a grand work of exquisite beauty.
She has also given me the chance to say that SHE is one of US! That THIS is Last Call, San Francisco, that THIS is what I ‘m talking about! She…she..
…She feels me, yo!
Her Mural On the corner of Golden Gate and Jones sublimely invites the ghosts of those very streets to shine once more and forever, to slough off their opulent decay and let forgotten elegance be restored to the crumbling ruins of their faded facades.
The granite heart of the Hibernia, hard and cold like a banker’s, has all but rotted away from the inside. But now she is lifted once more, freed from a sink of disrepair by the call of the spirits of San Francisco’s former splendor. The memory of her imposing walls is captured forever in golden light, made immortal at the hands of the preserving angel, Mona Caron.
Her work, rich in detail and history, is a true masterpiece of technique that brilliantly encapsulates the tenderloin within its self, a tongue- in-cheek picture in a picture, a reflection of the many faces and people that make this neighborhood what it is.
Each one of the characters that line her painted streets seems entirely unique and familiar, as though they actually were portraits of the local fixtures, painstakingly rendered in miniature. Deceptively simple outlines convey volumes, while each understated stroke of the brush gives a subtle sense of ease to their movement.
I also would like to point out that she painted this mural with all of its clean, fine lines on a bumpy-ass rough stucco wall. Go ahead and try that if you think it’s easy. It’s not. The Dead don’t have hands that steady.
The sky above mid market is a mirror of hers, down to the deep velvet quality of the ethereal dusk light,
where throughout it all our favorite little landmarks are hiding in plain sight, waiting for us like old friends until we thrill in their discovery and can be brought together by the unifying recognition of the famously familiar.
From the little known…
to the infamous…
to the historic…
They let us know this is Home.
This is Home forever. Regardless of development’s haste and the invasive monolithic towers that spring up to leave us in shadow, regardless of the ongoing urban renewal projects that displace the poor and leave our once colorful neighborhoods sterile and homogeneous, and regardless of the burgeoning temperance movement that will soon herald the REAL Last Call for San Francisco, we will remain here through it all.
And beneath the trendy heaps of glass and corrugated sheet metal that dot the skyline, the soul of the city rests her bones of brick and masonry, her tired flesh of bedrock and steel, while she waits for the day the fault line beneath her decides to crank up the heat and clear out the kitchen once more.
But until that day we need not be despairing of our loneliness, for the ghosts of old San Francisco will always offer reassurance, a reminder, a promise they tell us “We will never be strangers here.”
So say the ghosts who thank you, Mona Caron, for a such a joyous memorial,
… and such a fitting tribute.
