The Tenderloin National Forest
Part 1: Hmmmm…
Who knows what lurks in the links of the Internet’s Websites? I’m not the Shadow, but on weekends I can be an amateur space cadet and the rest of the week a pretty good part-time Professional Procrastinator—which is why it took me a month to proceed from seeing the Tenderloin National Forest (TNF) on-line (while surfing links linked to the Website of the literary arts Luggage Gallery storefront) to discovering it on the way home from mostly unsuccessful hunting for free 3 or 4XL donated clothing.
Humbly tucked in behind massive metal gates between another arts entity, 509 Ellis, and the Senator Hotel at Ellis and Leavenworth Streets, the TNF was not available for hanging out, zoning out, chilling out, or relaxing—for good reasons: It’s under reconstruction for a Grand Re-Opening in May, 2009.
I spoke with a young man half-buried in a huge pile of tile cubes being laid down for a throat lozenge-shaped border path. Santiago’s cellphone serendipitously chirped at him as I was about to leave—it was Darrell Smith, who agreed to meet me there the next Tuesday (March 17, 2009) at 10 a.m. No coffee and doughnut hour in the lobby of my SRO hotel. Sigh. What we give up for a good—no, a great story.
Have you ever heard of the Tenderloin National Forest? I hadn’t neither. The day I electronically stumbled across it after finishing off another day of volunteering at the Coalition on Homelessness, Bob Offer-Westort, editor of the Street Sheet gave me a funny look. He’d never heard of it either.
Not The Shadow, nor am I the noir private dick Mike Hammer (thank the ghods and ghoddesses, not sure I could handle getting beat up so much…), but I love a good, no—a great story. So here it is. I mean, I have to tell it to you—they gave me a patch to sew on a shirt (or something)!
Part 2: Mahvelous! Fabulous! Just Plain Wow
Even though I’d been inside once already, I didn’t really look at the TNF. One of Tiny’s (aka Lisa Gray-Garcia of Poor Magazine) favorite words is “fabulous;” there’s so much fabulosity happenin’ in this place you just have to see it, even after my poor attempt at mere description.
Darrell Smith and other artists started talking about Cohen Alley (aka the Tenderloin National Forest) in the 1980’s, when the Senator Hotel was still owned by the People’s Republic of China. Interesting stuff, like history, spills out of the most unexpected places—the Tenderloin is full of the kind of history you rarely hear about behind the drumbeat of, “…bad news, blah blah, arrest those aggressive panhandlers, blah blah…”
The alley was “throwaway space,” with thrown-away folks, drug addicts, etc., living while poor there. Amy Christian (of Wise Fools Puppet Intervention, now Wise Fool Community Arts), Moshe Cohen, Amara Tabor-Smith, Pearl Ubungun, Darrell Smith and others wanted to do something with the space, and talked with SLUG (San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners) about a mutual project that never got going—which led to the annual fall “Performance in the Gutter” that morphed into the “In the Street Festival.”
While looking for ways to do something, the 509 Club ceased to exist and the 509 Ellis arts cooperative was born in what Darrell Smith said might be Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp’s (TNDC) first building, the Aarti Hotel.
In the early ‘90s, metal artist Kevin Leeper built the gate, a six-piece, three-ton mass of metal fabulosity Santiago told me was a free-standing structure. Is it? Oh yes. It couldn’t be assembled until 1999, when a way was found to get around a law against blocking alleys. These folks may have pioneered (or helped to pioneer) the local application of efforts to transform abused alley and streetscapes into community-building/strengthening spaces.
The gate is connected to nothing but its own fab self, the concrete, and anyone who admires, likes, looks, and stares at it. Willie Brown’s administration leased the alley to the artist org for $1 a year.
There are five buildings bordering/creating Cohen Alley/TNF. One building owner put up a fence to defend against throw-away folks’ throw-away stuff. There was already art in the alley: the wall of 509 Ellis has a stunning mural on it from the 1994-95 Lives Project, the mural done by an artist calling himself Dizney.
The fence and Senator Hotel wall got “arted out” after that. Graffiti mural artists Cuba, Mobtown Coast2Coast and others got involved. Black American faces on 509 Ellis gaze at you, Latina and Asian American faces to the right, on wood, surrounded by swirls and other images.
In 1995-96 Johanna Poethig (she has a dot com website), a nationally known mural artist, designed the Senator Hotel wall art and mentored a group of young artists at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center, who helped with the tiles embedded in the wall. A series of images, separated by individual and groups of tiles, marches down the wall to the back wall of the Western Hotel (which has its own mural); a rainbow fusion of purple-oriented color rises a third-of-the-way up the wall, “walk-like-an-Egyptian”-like hieroglyphic figures frozen forever in mystery and beauty.
Andrew Schultz and Ricardo Richie are the artists responsible for the tornado throwing off swirly bits on the back of the Western Hotel, a tall thin drink of air (and terror if you’ve ever been threatened with the possibility one actually might visit your ‘hood) and whimsy.
There is so much too see, and there will be trees and other greenery—and goldfish swimming in ponds too—when the TNF re-opens in grand style from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on May 9th, 2009. Jose Fernando Cardoso the leading stone mason of Lisbon, Portugal and the man responsible for the materials you’ll walk on on that throat-lozenge-shaped path, will be there, as will artist and designer Rigo 23, who designed the “Cultural Geometry” images on the path, inspired by the art of the Ohlone People of California.
There will be music, poetry, dance, live art-making and painting, baking of bread, much festiveness, and fabulosity. After that, the Tenderloin National Forest will have open hours for people to enjoy this amazing chill-out space where none might be expected.
Almost a year ago I went to Ocean Beach (hadn’t set foot in the area for a while before that) to watch the waves and read a little bit. It was too windy for reading, but I did get a haiku poem out of the slow-moving cargo ship, the crow surfing the wind like the insane wind surfer dudes in the nasty waves.
Like a guy Darrell Smith told me about, who discovered the TNF after a hard night on the streets, I like knowing there’s a beautiful place to beat feet to quickly when the need for a dose of street art and peace and quiet makes its demands known.
I’m not sure about the fish. I once knew someone who kept a pair of piranha in a fish tank, and it was a running joke that nobody ever actually saw them eat their food—an emotional bond with a fish?
Art. Goldfish. Art. I can do it.
thorntonkimes