The Out of Order Elevator at Hallidie Plaza
I would like Richard Barnes' photographs of the paupers' grave underneath the Palace of the Legion of Honor to be known and remembered. The link below leads you to his photographs but doesn't include his commentary, which I've tried to find online.
https://www.richardbarnes.net/stillrooms-excavations
I'm copying his commentary now from my copy of the book, which does include it.
Exhumations
In 1992, the fine arts museums of San Francisco began the renovation and expansion of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a museum dedicated in 1924 as a memorial to the California dead of World War I, and designed to exhibit and promote European art and culture in San Francisco. Part of the renovation included seismic upgrading, placing load-bearing steel support beams beneath the Corinthian and Ionic columns to reinforce the building. During excavation for the new subterranean galleries, workers began to dig up human bones and the remains of redwood caskets in the courtyard and throughout the museum grounds. What was first thought to be isolated bone scatter has yielded in excess of 750 intact burials from what had been Golden Gate Cemetery.
Along with the burials, the excavation brought to light questionable activity at the beginning of the century. In the late 1890s, the city of San Francisco, in response to rapid expansion and development, passed legislation prohibiting the burial of the dead within city limits. Funds were allocated to disinter the existing graves throughout the city and rebury them in the less-populated regions to the south. It is speculated that Golden Gate Cemetery was in face never relocated, but instead the headstones were simply removed, leaving the burials for future generations to deal with. The find is archaeologically significant, representing the largest post-Gold Rush community site ever excavated. The exhumations included Chinese, French and numerous others from various ethnic and religious backgrounds. An examination of the simple redwood coffins and the burial artifacts found with the dead revealed this cemetery to be a "potter's field," or the final resting place of the very poor. The collective history of many hundreds of people lay forgotten beneath the foundations of the museum for over 70 years.
My interest in the Palace of the Legion of Honor site developed out of work I have been doing over the past fiv years on archaeological excavations in Egypt and Beirut, Lebanon. These and other recent projects have led me to inquire into the relationship between archeology and modern development, between past cultures and the way they are preserved, analyzed, and interpreted in the present. While working in Egypt, excavating sites whose age is measured in millennia rather than decades, I experienced history as a succession of strata, put down layer by layer, with each level demarcating another historical period. There are few places on this planet where one can stand in an excavation trench and experience, with such clarity, this visual banding of time. I remain captivated by the idea of the existence of a past the refused to depart completely, but instead lies buried, quietly insisting, with the help of archaeologists, to interrupt the seeming continuum of our collective present.
Stemming largely from work done in the Cairo Museum, and more recently at the Legion of Honor, I have begun to reconsider museums as sites of collective memory and cultural heritage. As a witness to the excavation beneath the Legion of Honor, up to and including the reinstallation of the museum's collection, I began to question the museum as a neutral space sheltering an objective past. As a culture, we seldom doubt the museum's authority to define and establish criteria for selecting what goes into collections. We entrust the museum with the preservation and exhibition of those objects and artifacts deemed most significant and worthy of our attention. In a similar vein, the methodology of an archaeological excavation sheds light on the curatorial practice of assembling collections. Even while meticulously observing, recording, and interpreting the past, the act of excavating often obliterates the artifacts' original context. A mundane object, thorough the passage of time, is rendered precious, then collected and displaced--only to be re-placed and assigned new significance within a collection. While working at the Legion of Honor I was struck by the apparent contradiction of a museum that both preserves and erases. How does an institution determine what is to be saved and validated and what is to be discarded and forgotten? Whose past is worthy of collection and preservation and whose is expendable, and why?
Here, the museum functions as a mausoleum, housing not only the objects of the dead but the dead them-selves. And although my work at this site initially began as architectural documentation, with the ensuing exhumations it quickly included more. Mid-excavation photographs of the museum reveal above, a symmetrical facade, and below, a cavernous underworld, conjuring up images of the human psyche--the ordered, conscious ideal looking over the hidden, dark, unconscious realm below. Presiding over the excavation and construction rubble, the museum's classical facade assumes the mantle of rational order, harkening back to the Greek ideal of architecture as a civilizing force. By emulating the layout and design of ritual spaces--temples and cathedrals--museum architecture often takes on the solemnity of a place of worship. The museum goers partake of a predetermined narrative, performing a ritual of witnessing, observing, and paying homage to a history that has been carefully curated and ordered for them.
The Palace of the Legion of Honor is a site steeped in memory, and the excavation of the ground beneath is rich in it implications. Here the preserved heritage is an imported European art history that displaces an ambiguous, disregarded social history. If the museum can be understood as a ceremonial monument dedicated to the preservation of culture, any narrative presented here as history is open to interpretation, including my own. In the act of recording and presenting this information I utilize many of the same practices and methods in question. In the process, I am examining not only the roles of the museum and the archaeologist, but finally my own role as the photographer.
To my mind, these fragments of individual lives, whether included in a a sanctioned museum collection or not, are one more layer of thought and memory quietly insisting its way inot our time present.
Richard Barnes
Carter Lavin's talk was really stimulating and original, beginning with "Disability is the only minority group that you can become a member of at any given moment in life."
Shaya French also spoke, and so did Louis, who was the catalyst back in June. I said what I intended to say. The last person to speak (if we don't count the guy who told me he was running for mayor and didn't like my question, "Are you Lurie?") was Hillary Brown, who had a great red and white Muni scarf and "Ambassador" emblazoned on her back. She's with the BART Accessibility Task Force Advisory Group.
I met Roger Rudick, who writes for Street Blog and covered the event in an informative way. (I learned more from his write-up!)
https://sf.streetsblog.org/2023/09/27/transit-month-event-disability-access-is-for-everyone
Today I want to introduce myself as someone who's ridden Muni since 1966, when I was a student at SFState, going from an apartment in the Richmond to my classes five miles away and babysitting all over the city (for $1.00 an hour) and then as a mother with an infant and then a toddler. Now in my old age I'm riding Muni for recreational and political activities all over the city, and it's working for me. But I'm not in a wheelchair YET, and I want to emphasize that word YET. Muni does well in getting riders in wheel chairs on and off their buses and streetcars, but once people get off at 5th and Market, they can't get down to Hallidie Plaza without an elevator, and this elevator hasn't worked for years.
We've contacted departments, but no one has ever explained why this huge elevator has never been fixed.
Then I'll talk about Mayor Breed and Supervisor Peskin's mid-May announcement that they would pour $6 million into the three-block stretch between Union Square and Market Street. What about Hallidie Plaza itself? It was a Winter Wonderland this past December. What kind of wonderland is it for the people who can't get down to the plaza from Market Street? There's a small, badly-ventilated elevator on 4th Street, but why not have this much larger, conveniently located elevator in working order? Fix it, and we'd have a good symbol of San Francisco rising once again.
This is what I got just now in response to my email query to Parks and Recreation:
Hi Tina,
Thanks for your feedback.
Rec and Park understands change is hard, that’s why we’re offering a ton of city support to make sure the farmers’ market can succeed. The new Fulton Plaza site, just across the street from UN Plaza, will include things like dedicated vendor and staff parking and increased parking enforcement to ensure spots are not taken by non-vendors; overflow space at Civic Center Plaza; and monitored loading zone for restaurants picking up large orders. Also, security assistance will be provided through Civic Center Community Benefit District ambassadors, Urban Alchemy, SFPD, Sheriff’s Office and Park Rangers. Additionally, there will be free customer parking at Civic Center Garage—something that UN Plaza lacked.
The space at Fulton Plaza location is actually larger than the market’s footprint at UN Plaza. The UN Plaza location covered just 30,000 square feet, while the new Fulton Plaza space affords 40,000 square feet. At the height of the season, the Heart of the City Farmers Market has 70 stalls, and the new location across the street can accommodate all of them.
This move is not a last-minute plan. Rec and Park and the Civic Center Community Benefit District have been in conversation with farmers market stakeholders about a proposed move for the past four months, meeting more than a dozen times since April 10. The CCCBD team has spent countless hours ensuring the farmers market’s move to Fulton Plaza is a better experience for vendors and customers.
Best,
SF Rec and Park
A camera man/reporter from Channel 5 (KPIX?) was there, and when he asked to interview someone a woman volunteered. "Why are you against this move if it's just a block away?" he asked. Maybe she didn't understand English, or maybe she didn't understand the issue, but she replied, "I love this market, and they're closing it down."
Just as I was whispering to Barry Hermanson (a Green Peace activist I last saw this month at the rally against giving Waymo and Cruise driverless cars free reign before the vote by the California Public Utilities Commission) that she shouldn't say they're closing it because that gives less credence to the cause, the guy leading the rally, David Elliot Lewis said, "Let's be clear. They're not closing it down." Then he went on to say what they were doing that threatened the Farmers Market.
I want to support the Farmers Market at the Civic Center in San Francisco, and I plan to go to the rally today and then to City Hall for the press conference afterwards. But I wonder about the way it's being promoted with "City relocating and downsizing..." because this 42-year Heart of the City market is being moved one block west at Fulton Plaza, a location larger by 10,000 square feet, according to Daniel Montes, the spokesperson for Parks and Rec.
I don't think this is the kind of community-provided bench the SF Chronicle was talking about today in its article https://www.sfchronic...
