An Outsider Going Into the Tenderloin before Dave Egger's 826 Valencia

As an outsider dipping into the Tenderloin for years,  I read  "Writing a new chapter for dicey Tenderloin site."about the extension of the 826 Valencia at 172 Golden Gate,  with great interest. 

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Author-Dave-Eggers-nonprofit-heading-to-6250170.php

 At one time I went into the Tenderloin just to go to McDonald's--not the Fast Food Nation one but the "Dirty, Poorly-Lit Place for Books" that had Photoplay and Modern Screen Magazines not just from my childhood (my incentive to learn to read) but from my mother's.  I went to the Golden Gate Theatre, too, and occasionally to the Exit, but quickly--stepping over or around bodies that made me feel I didn't belong.  Between 1982 and 1994 I took substitute teaching assignments in the Tenderloin and even once shared a night class there, at 750 Eddy and even at John Adams, where I taught, I had to teach "peep show" to students drawing maps of their Tenderloin neighborhood.  Much more recently, when I took a course in comparative religions, I went to a mosque at 118 Jones near Golden Gate.  But I never connected the dots, never saw the blocks that connected one of these places with another.  

After  the accreditation of City College of San Francisco was threatened in 2012, I started going around the city as part of the enrollment campaign, to let people know the college was still open and accredited, and I started seeing the whole city in a new way.  I saw that the European Bookstore I used to go to had closed a couple of years earlier.  I also saw sings like "Living in the Ten/409 Historic Buildings in 33 Blocks.  Yeah.  We're PROUD."    

What were those 409 Historic Buildings?  I wrote to Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle.  He had never noticed the sign and didn't know.  

Most recently I saw the golden brick road indicating safe paths for families and met the people who are trying to assure "safe passage" to the children who live in the Tenderloin.  

I've read Gary Kamiy'a  San Francisco, Cool Gray City of Love:  49 Views of San Francisco, which has 14 pages on the Tenderloin, and the recent California Sunday Magazine inserted in the SF Chronicle, which featured "In the Tenderloin" with several first-person accounts--all good reads.  But I've nver seen a better write-up on the Civic Center Campus of City College than that written by Denise Selleck, a teacher at CCSF, before the doors at 750 Eddy were closed.

https://www.ccsf.edu/dam/Organizational_Assets/Our_Campuses/CivicCenter/images4cvc/civiccenterhistory.pdf

I hope that while  826 Valencia is "writing a new chapter " in the Tenderloin, City College will be written back in.