Dennis Claxton
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All true, but it had a moment when there was a thin space between grittiness, rundown warehouses, some flats over an old machine shop and its transition to turning a second story warehouse space into a dance studio--clubs and small theater groups wedged into old store fronts.
(Sidenote. I was sitting in my delivery van at 14th and Valencia, when I looked over to my left and saw The Socialist Bookstore. I think this is a place where Mike Perelman did a new book signing and Chuck_0 must visit on his occasional west coast trips. Well I thought of both before the light changed... The Mission is still mostly in that in between state.)
Moments and places like that are so fleeting. When I was a kid in LA, my stepfather had a positive knack for finding these kinds of neighborhoods and settling in for a year or so and then moving on. The LA art crew has spent at least fifty years on the look out for exactly that right mix---and the same up here. The late 50s-80s were really the hey day for that. One step ahead of the city planning department and the developers.
(Another side note. I gather the old Village in NYC was something like this, a rundown sweatshop district and ethnic neighborhood of some sort where most of the AE crew of the 40s-50s had studios. Then in the mid fifties, there was a big re-development plan by the city and they all left. You can see bits and pieces of this mix in Franz Klein's non-abstract work. You even get similar scenes described in Stephan Crane's short stories and bits and pieces of journalism from the 1890s---something about the new Cooper Union.)
I would even go so far as to say that much of the architectural movement known as deconstruction or postmodern came from architects and allied arts studios that started off in these kinds of places because the rent was cheap, the floor space plentiful, and the space itself interesting, fun to be in, look at, play with. These are exciting places to remodel and play with space, build walls or open ceilings just to experiment with their effects. Of course it got way out of hand and lost its edge long ago. But for a few years there that was the kind of space that created the essence of postmodernity---the odd asethetic of modernity meets machine shop, meets the Bauhaus. Phillip Johnson's AT&T cabinet trim skyscraper was sort of faux modern, not really postmodern. To really get into the spirit of postmodernity, you have to discover something that already exists and re-construct it, re-model it into something else, leaving traces of both worlds intact.
If you think on it a little longer, you will see that the best of these spaces were already deeply informed by movements like the Bauhaus, which specialized in modernizing 19thC brick-London-dreary into industrial space to make it interesting. Dot, dot, dot, fifty or sixty years later long after the plaster Art Deco facade has been battered to peices or covered over with 50s modern aluminum siding, along comes a few architects or art students and they rediscover it all over again, re-enscribing modernity on itself, with those humanistic touchs like sand basted brick walls, old steel or wood ceiling trusses, opening old skylights and tiling over grease stained concrete floors.
As a matter of fact, the climbing gym I go to in west Berkeley, is built in exactly one of these old sheet steel and fabrication plants on Sixth Street and Asby. Just about as trendy and upscale as it gets. Parking lot full of SUV's, All the now greying yuppie professionals in business, bio-science-pharma, dot coms, ad agencies---all show up after work. I am loathed to admit it, but I've met some damned interesting people there.
Another interesting note about this gym is that it is mostly staffed by real climbers, who are an entirely different sort of crew. Now and then one or more of them live in their vans in the parking lot, then take off for a month or so for a climbing trip. There is a whole kind of urban sport training scene here---running the frontage roads along the bay, cycling up to the hills, or working out at the gym. In effect you make the urban landscape into a wilderness area of exciting spaces.
The cycling crew in SF are something else, dodging in and out of traffic like it was all a criterion---high tech cycles---sort of track bikes re-worked for traffic---real similar moves.
CG