How Social Media Is and Is Not Bound by the First Amendment

by Jay Barmann
Originally appeared on Inside Social, November 19, 2018

When President Trump blocks his critics from following him on social media, is he violating the First Amendment? What about when Facebook bans someone like Alex Jones? Does Jones have a First Amendment right to spout whatever conspiracies he likes in what constitutes the modern public square? These are all questions being tackled by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and which resident scholar Jameel Jaffer discusses in a new Recode podcast with Kara Swisher.

The same questions have been bubbling up periodically — if not weekly — in op-ed pieces for several years. Conservative and alt-right figures who have embraced social media have often drawn public ire and have decried violations of their First Amendment rights when platforms like Twitter suspend their accounts for terms-of-use violations. The troubling question of "de-platforming" a platform like the social media site Gab — which is popular with alt-right figures and fans of Jones, and was the site of a final anti-Semitic post by Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers — arose two weeks ago, as GoDaddy shut down hosting services for Gab. Seattle-based Epik stepped in as a new host for Gab, and Epik's CEO Rob Monster issued a statement saying "de-platforming is digital censorship," and doing such a thing to a "haven of free speech is not about left or right."

But this is just one of many ways in which the scope of the First Amendment is being challenged as modern communications platforms make speech increasingly more public. Two decades ago, the average person who was not a journalist did not have the means to spread misinformation, incitements of violence, or hate speech across the globe with a few keystrokes. Now they do. 

Two decades ago, a President of the United States couldn't seamlessly transition from private to public life with the same Twitter account, using it both to comment on television news and conduct international diplomacy, all while trying to discredit, demean and silence his critics.

Jaffer says that the "privatization of the public square" is one issue that the Knight First Amendment Institute is actively seeking to address. The institute itself grew out of ten years of talks that Jaffer had with Columbia's president Lee Bollinger about the ways in which technology is increasingly complicating legal precedents that were set 50 and 60 years ago. As it stands, the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, and various ISPs have within their arsenals the power to silence virtually anyone they choose to silence. In discussing the de-platforming controversy over alt-right site The Daily Stormer, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote, "We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldn’t be what determines what should be online."

Another issue Jaffer cites, on which his colleague Tim Wu has just written a paper, is that the First Amendment is threatened by the online culture of harassment that social media has created. When someone wants to silence someone else's speech, social media has created a bevy of new virtual tools to make their lives miserable. As Jaffer puts it, "Instead of having your henchmen go to somebody’s door and threaten them, you just harass them on social media, right?"

Until the the courts begin wrapping their collective heads around social media's new role in society, many of these decisions are going to be up to CEOs — and when they get them wrong, they will face public outrage, media floggings, and potentially more federal regulation. 

Uncomfortable with having to make such decisions, Mark Zuckerberg recently reiterated an idea he floated earlier this year: a "Supreme Court" of Facebook that would be wholly independent, and would serve as an arbiter for all questions related to what constitutes censorship, free speech and violations of community standards. Given that our own, actual Supreme Court still struggles with these questions, I'd say he has his work cut out for him.

Update: As of January 28, 2019, Facebook announced it is moving forward to establish an “oversight board” that will act as a final say in content moderation disputes.

Fun Facts From San Francisco History That You've Probably Never Heard Before

Portsmouth Square ca. 1851

by Jay Barmann

Originally published on SFist, September 29, 2016

As we continue San Francisco Appreciation Week, we thought we could dig back into some of the lesser known fun facts about the city, a few of which are likely to surprise even the most dyed-in-the-hoodie, longtime residents who consider themselves well versed in local lore. 

The oldest public plaza in the city is Portsmouth Square, which did not originally have that name when it was a public square in the Mexican community that called itself Yerba Buena in the late 18th and early 19th Century. Then came the order for the USS Portsmouth to seize Yerba Buena for the United States in 1846, just ahead of the Gold Rush that would redefine the region and draw tens of thousands of new (mostly male) residents inside of a couple of years. It's now a public park on top of a parking garage in the heart of Chinatown, bounded by Kearny, Clay, and Washington Streets on three sides, but once upon a time it was home to the first public school in California at its southwest corner, at Clay and Walter U. Lum Place.

Demand for food during the Gold Rush led to the plundering of a number of native bird species (for their eggs), Tule elk, and mollusks like oysters. Native Pacific Oysters in San Francisco Bay were largely outnumbered within a few years by non-native species imported from elsewhere, like Eastern and Mexican oysters, as well as invasive species brought from the East Coast like Softshell Clam (Mya arenaria) and Eastern Mudsnail (Ilyanassa obsolete), causing the native mollusk population essentially to disappear from the Bay. (Source: California History, Summer 2014)

Historic photo of a prospector carrying a giant sea turtle via 'California History,' Summer 2014

A common sight in the streets of downtown San Francisco during the early Gold Rush years would have been sea turtle and Galapagos Island tortoise races, often sponsored by local restaurant owners. The turtles and tortoises were a huge import business for ship captains ferrying sailors from the eastern US up the Pacific coast, largely because they were fresh meat that could be kept alive in ships' holds for weeks without food or water, and meat was otherwise scarce. (Source: California History, Summer 2014)

Also, some of the most common items you'd see advertised in newspaper ads for local saloons in the early Gold Rush days would have been "green turtle steaks," "terrapin stew," and "turtle soup." Restaurants kept the turtles corralled behind their restaurants, but by 1896, the turtle and tortoise populations had become so decimated and imports so scarce that restaurants made fake "green turtle soup" and would pass a single live turtle back and forth to convince customers they still sold the real deal.

A cartoon by Edward Jump picturing Bummer and Lazarus begging scraps from Emperor Norton. public domain via wikimedia commons

San Francisco has always been obsessed with dogs. In the 1850s and 60s, stray dogs were rampant on the streets of the city, and among them, two stood out for their close bond to one another. Bummer and Lazarus, as they were called, were soon enshrined in city lore, becoming a fixture of local news writing and cartoons. According to the Alta California in 1861, the mutts met thusly: 

"Three or four days ago, a poor, lean, mangy cur was attacked in the street by a larger dog, and was getting unmercifully walloped, when BUMMER's ire being aroused at the unequal contest... He rushed in and gave the attacking canine such a rough handling that he was glad to quit the field. ... The poor cur had one of his legs half bitten through, and having limped upon the sidewalk, he proceeded to scrape an acquaintance with his deliverer, BUMMER, who thenceforth took him under his special protection. Every night since then, the 'twa dogs' have slept coiled up together close to some doorway - BUMMER always giving the lame cur the inside booth, and trying to keep him as warm as possible."

Bummer's companion became known as Lazarus, and together they took on the task of hunting rats for food, which won them praise in the rodent infested city. The San Francisco Bulletin claimed in 1863 that they'd once killed 400 in a single hunt at a fruit market. Bummer and Lazarus were inseparable to the end, known sometimes as the Damon and Pythias of San Francisco for the similarly devoted Greek philosophers. Their names appear together on a plaque in the Redwood Grove park next to the Transamerica Pyramid.

In the early 1860's, before formal plans for Golden Gate Park had been drawn up, the city contracted with famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of New York's Central Park (which had opened in 1858), seeking advice about its location and design. Olmstead's initial idea, outlined in a memo to the city, would have placed the park almost in the center of the city, incorporating the hills along Gough and Franklin Streets, extending west from Market Street starting where UN Plaza and Civic Center are now, and overtaking what's now the Western Addition. Olmstead also cautioned that he had no idea if a park as grand as New York's could really exist here, since there were so few mature trees on the San Francisco peninsula at the time, and he was not sure what could grow here. (Source: Frederick Law Olmsted: Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society)

Golden Gate Park would ultimately be the project of the city's field engineer William Hammond Hall and his assistant, John McLaren, and by 1875 it would be home to 60,000 trees, many of them the same Monterey pines you see there today.

Photo: GoldenGatePark.com

The northern windmill at the ocean side of Golden Gate Park, nicknamed the Dutch Windmill, was built in 1902 with the assistance of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, the grandmother of the Netherlands' current Queen Beatrix. Surrounding it is now a tulip garden added in 1980, named for Queen Wilhelmina, and to this day it is maintained by the Dutch consulate in San Francisco. The second windmill was added later, and both used to serve functional purposes pumping water.

The Richmond District was so nicknamed because of one of its early residents, an Australian art dealer named George Turner Marsh. He thought the area looked like a suburb of Melbourne called Richmond, and therefore named the home he built there Richmond House, which ended up getting adopted by others who settled nearby. In 1917, the city pushed to rename the area Park-Presidio, to avoid confusion with the East Bay city of Richmond, but the name never stuck.

And you know why Cow Hollow is called Cow Hollow? It was once the center of the local dairy industry with some 38 dairy farms in the area by the late 19th Century.

Burnham's plan for reimagining the city grid, ca. 1905.

Similar to Olmstead's ambitious plan for a central city park, famed Chicago architect Daniel Burnham would be called upon in the years before the Great Earthquake and Fire to imagine a new plan for the city. Burnham's subsequent 1905 plan for San Francisco included multiple new circular intersections and diagonal streets cutting through various parts of the city— the idea being that strict grids are too monotonous and great cities, like Paris, are shot through with diagonal promenades, creating more interesting architecture. The plan also included a grand Athenaeum on Twin Peaks including a 300-foot statue and a waterfall, but the cost of it all was totally infeasible, and the entire thing was scrapped after the earthquake.
 

Did you know that those fancy columns at the 19th Avenue entrance to Golden Gate Park is what remains of the Breon Gate? Designed and constructed by John D. McGilvray, it was a gift to SF from local philanthropist Christine Breon to memorialize her late husband Paul and their deceased son Charles. According to a January 15, 1898 article in the San Francisco Call, the gate was to have an elaborate design that included images of the Breon family, grizzly bears, eagles, angels, and more. Dedicated in 1923, significant portions of the gate were removed in 1938 to allow that intersection to become the major thoroughfare it's developed into today.

(Photo: CT Young)

San Francisco was once home to a lot of brothels, some more secretive than others. Take, for example, the Homestead. Unconfirmed rumor has it that a brothel used to be run out of the upstairs, and that the fireplace now hides what was once a secret staircase. The paintings of naked women on the walls of the bar are supposedly an homage to that history. Similarly, The Saloon in North Beach, when it was known as Wagner’s Beer Hall back in the late 1800s, was known to have an upstairs brothel as well, which may not have been so secret.

No one can say exactly when San Francisco became a gay mecca, and many pin it to the post-war years of the 1940's and 50's, when former sailors and soldiers stationed here or disembarking here by the thousands decided not to go home to middle America and to continue having sex with men. But we know there was a gay bar in North Beach in 1908 called The Dash, which may have only lived for about a year before being shut down by authorities, where men dressed in drag as waitresses and would reportedly perform various sex acts for a dollar.

Illustration via the Library of Congress

The Old Ship Saloon was just one of many saloon locations that were built, literally, out of abandoned ships that were once moored along the shore, and quickly became surrounded by land as San Francisco's Gold Rush settlers filled in the shallows of the former Yerba Buena Cove in and around the Financial District and North Beach. The illustration above shows a depiction of the Niantic Hotel and its neighbors — buildings built in a hurry directly atop hemmed in ship hulls.

There are so many abandoned ships buried under downtown that a Muni tunnel actually passes right through one.

A woman identified by at least one publication as Ah Toy.

One of America's first hugely famous prostitutes, Ah Toy, arrived in San Francisco from China in 1849. As SFist discussed in this list of infamous local legends, Ah Toy was said to have made a small fortune, to start, by charging men two bits for a "lookee" and four bits for a "feelee," and thereby earning hundreds of dollars without ever having intercourse. She later became a successful madam and sex trafficker before "retiring" to Santa Clara County.

There's significant evidence to suggest that multiple SoMa alleys were named for famous prostitutes of the Gold Rush era. Think Dore Alley, Cora Street, Jessie Street, Isis Street. Broke Ass Stuart did a deep dive into this topic last year, and helpfully informed us that Minna Street is believed to have been named for Minna Rae Simpson — a popular sex worker of the time. As was Cora Street, which was reportedly named after the famous madam Belle Cora.

A craze for ostrich feather accents in women's clothing caused a boom in ostrich farms all over Northern California in the early 1900s, but no CA location seems less friendly to the giant crabby beasts than the notoriously foggy and cold shores of Ocean Beach. And yet, that's where the Golden Gate Ostrich Farm was, opening in March of 1913 at 47th Avenue and Balboa Street. Its run was short-lived, however: When World War I broke out in 1914, fashion got a lot more conservative, and ostentatious female plumage was frowned upon. After a year and a half, the farm closed up shop and dumped their remaining ostriches at Golden Gate Park, an ignominious fate for the once-glorious birds.

The first epidemic of bubonic plague in the United States occurred in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1900, leading briefly to a quarantine of the entire neighborhood.

A single block of Chinatown between Jackson and Pacific in 1885 was thought to be home to a half dozen opium dens, three dozen houses of prostitution, and three gambling parlors, according to this map. Meanwhile, you would have found all the white prostitutes over at Sacramento and Stockton.

Murphy beds were invented because of San Francisco housing scarcity in 1918. Beds that fold into walls, often the stuff of slapstick comedy, have come in and out of vogue since their popularization by William Lawrence Murphy (1856-1957). Murphy created his brand of bed out of a particular urban necessity: He was living in a one-room San Francisco apartment lacking sorely for space while trying to woo his future wife, a local opera singer. Smithsonian.com recalls that fin-de-siècle customs would not permit a woman to enter a single gentleman's bedroom, but by folding his bed into a closet, they apparently felt the room constituted a parlor, allowing him to entertain her there. Murphy's design, patented in 1918 as Murphy In-A-Dor bed, was far from the first folding bed, yet his his name and rough design are still synonymous with the innovation, which retains its utility for certain cramped San Francisco living quarters.

Chinese food was introduced to America by San Francisco not once, but twice. First, with the first wave of Chinese immigration in the 1850's due to the Gold Rush, prospectors landing in SF came to find that Chinese restaurants here tended to be the best restaurants, distinguished typically with “long three-cornered flags of yellow silk”. As Time notes, "By the mid-19th century, the United States had what could be called a fledgling restaurant culture at best, while much of China had had many centuries worth of experience in hospitality," and thus Chinese immigrants had little trouble impressing diners. These gave way to chop suey joints which would proliferate around the country in the early 20th Century, but it wasn't until the 1960's, with the opening of Cecilia Chiang's The Mandarin — first on Polk Street, then in Ghirardelli Square — that the second wave of Chinese food's popularity would sweep the country, with Szechuan, Hunan, and so-called "Imperial" Chinese dishes America had never known before.

Cecilia Chiang's son Philip, who grew up in and around The Mandarin, became the co-founder of the P.F. Chang's restaurant chain in 1993 with partner Paul Fleming, the P.F. in the name.

Prohibition was barely a thing in San Francisco, by many accounts, but even though enforcement was lax by cops, bar owners got clever with how they got their patrons drinks, leading to two of SF's enduring drinks: Fernet Branca, a popular import by local Italian immigrants that passed muster as "medicinal" and was therefore legal; and Tosca Cafe's "house cappuccino," which probably never had any coffee in it all, and likely began being served in that era.

The original entrance and slide at Coffee Dan's at 430 Mason Street. Photo via SF CityGuides

During and after Prohibition one of the hottest nightspots downtown was Coffee Dan's, where a slide dating from 1917 delivered patrons from the street to the basement venue. The place had a famed custom of putting small wooden mallets on tables that customers could use to applaud by banging, and the place was known to attract great jazz acts. The place also figures in the early "talkie" film The Jazz Singer, from 1927, and its last location at 430 Mason Street is now home to Slide, which revived the slide entrance.

via the Western Neighborhoods Project, OpenSFHistory

When you hear "Sunset Tunnel" you likely think of a tunnel that isn't in the Sunset at all — the 1.2 mile long tunnel that Muni's N Judah line takes from Cole Valley to Duboce Park. But the Sunset was once home to some tunnels of its own: the Wawona, Taraval, and Judah Pedestrian Tunnels that ran beneath the Great Highway. Built in the 1920s, they were shut down in the '80s when the city laid a massive sewer line that runs along Great Highway to the Westside Sewage Plant by the zoo. Shifting Ocean Beach sands revealed some of their remains in February, as the dismantled concrete was used in an effort to keep the beach in place.

San Francisco's nickname "Baghdad by the Bay" was coined by SF Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in the 1940's, and became the title of a book of his columns in 1949. And while latter-day associations with the city of Baghdad are mostly about the Iraq War, Caen's associations were with a sophisticated, exotic, ancient multicultural center.

And even in Caen's day, in the 1940's, San Franciscans referred to the public transit system as "Muniserable."

Philo T. Farnsworth and his invention, the cathode ray tube. San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library

Before YouTube there was the cathode ray tube, invented in 1927 on Green Street by Philo Farnsworth. Though others had tried to create a similar effect with mechanical parts and moving mirrors, Farnsworth was the first to fashion an all-electronic television system. At the foot of Telegraph Hill, a 21-year-old Farnsworth projected a stream of electrons onto a screen creating a simple blue line, and soon his invention was emitting shapes and sending images as far as the Merchants' Exchange Building at Battery and Washington, eight blocks away. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) contested Farnsworth's status as the creator of TV, but he won the right to be known as the "Father of Television" after a decade-long legal battle. That was in part thanks to testimony from his high school teacher, for whom he had drawn his idea for an "image dissector tube" when he was just 14. Though perhaps less well-known than the Lumière brothers or Guglielmo Marconi, the radio inventor (who once visited Farnsworth at his Green Street Lab according to an entry on SF City Guides) Farnsworth's place in technological history is secure — as is his place at 202 Green Street, where his old lab bears a plaque as California Landmark #941.

You may not know that the bear on the California state flag is based on a famous grizzly bear kept in Golden Gate Park. You've seen the famous Golden Gate Park buffalo, docile in their paddock along JFK drive, but imagine instead a live grizzly. One could indeed be found for more than 20 years at the park's "Menagerie," a precursor to the San Francisco Zoo. In 1889, as Katherine Girlich writes in her book on the zoo's history , newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst challenged Examiner reporter Allen Kelly to find a live California grizzly as a publicity stunt. Kelly eventually did, near Los Angeles after six months of searching, capturing it by luring it into a pen with mutton and honey. The bear was named Monarch by Hearst after his newspaper tagline, "Monarch of the Dailies," and was thought to be the last of his kind, which was very nearly true. Monarch was brought to San Francisco on a train and greeted by a crowd of 20,000 at the Townsend Street Station. He was then kept in Woodward's Gardens for a year, and after that, put in a cage in Golden Gate Park, where he was heralded as a symbol of wildlife conservation. Monarch died in 1911, mostly forgotten and sad in pictures. His body, skinned and stuffed, is now an altogether different symbol at the California Academy of Science and on the state flag, which was finalized with him as a model for the brown grizzly at its center in 1955.

Dianne Feinstein at the SF Erotic Film Festival (1970) from Mike Stabile on Vimeo.

California Senator Dianne Feinstein began her political career as a San Francisco supervisor in the Marina district, largely campaigning against the proliferation of porn theaters. Her anti-porn crusade would later lead to the infamous Mitchell Brothers posting her home phone number on the marquee of the O'Farrell Theater with the words "Want a good time? Call Dianne."

Photo courtesy of Chez Panisse

The early days of Chez Panisse were not great ones from a financial perspective. As CNN noted in this recent profile of Alice Waters and the restaurant, the staff in the 1970's were all encouraged to taste all of the wines so they could better sell them, and they ended up costing the restaurant thousands of dollars on a regular basis in missing bottles. Also, as Jeremiah Tower noted in his memoir California Dish, cocaine flowed freely in that kitchen too.

Among his many accomplishments, local civil rights leader and newspaper publisher Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett won the right of African-American and non-white doctors to practice in SF's public hospitals, where they were barred from treating their own patients. In 1945, Goodlett was one of only three black doctors in the city. In 1999, two years after his death, the Board of Supervisors voted to change the official address of City Hall to 1 Carlton B. Goodlett Place. (Source: LA Sentinel)

According to an account by Willie Brown given in David Talbot's book Season of the Witch, he was in the office of Mayor George Moscone the morning Moscone was fatally shot by former Supervisor Dan White, and Brown says he passed White in the hallway on his way out. If Brown's account is true, Moscone's last conversation before his death was about going to a lingerie store later that day with Brown where young women would model the goods, in order to shop for the holidays.

The San Francisco 49ers' longtime head athletic trainer from the 1980's to 2004, Lindsy McLean, was openly gay. As of his retirement he was the only openly gay trainer in the NFL, and he may still be.

Famed SF music promoter and Fillmore Auditorium founder Bill Graham was a Holocaust survivor, born to Jewish parents in Germany with the name Wulf Wolodia Grajonca. His mother died at Auschwitz after placing him and his sister in an orphanage where they were part of an exchange with a French orphanage, and relocated to France. He was one of the One Thousand Children given safe passage to the United States without their parents, and in the 1980's he protested against President Reagan's decision to lay a wreath at the Bitburg World War II cemetery where SS soldiers were also buried. (Source: Wikipedia)

Bill Graham appears in several movie cameos, playing rock promoters, in both Apocalypse Now and The Doors. He also plays Lucky Luciano in the 1991 film Bugsy.

Photo via Matt Alavi/House of Legends

The big spooky-looking mansion by Alamo Square at Fulton and Scott, the Westerfeld House — which may be the subject of an upcoming documentary and was used as a shooting location for Season 2 of Sense 8 — served as a setting in the novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. It was also briefly home, in 1967, to famed Satanist Anton LaVey, who was said to have kept a lion cub in the tower for use in Satanic rituals. A door jamb leading up to the tower still shows the cub's scratch marks.

Eve Batey, Jack Morse, and Caleb Pershan also contributed to this piece.

A Guide to the Work of Stanley Saitowitz, San Francisco's Most Polarizing Designer

Saitowitz's Yerba Buena Lofts. Photo by Patricia Chang

by Jay Barmann

Originally published on Curbed SF, July 27, 2018

South African-born Stanley Saitowitz is one of the most respected, polarizing, and prolific designers in San Francisco, and yet outside of architecture circles his name is not well known.

His high-profile Yerba Buena Lofts on Folsom Street, one of the biggest and most recognizable local projects completed by his firm, Natoma Architects, is now 17 years old. Another Saitowitz endeavor that many San Franciscans will recognize, 8 Octavia, was completed in 2015 and featured on HBO’s Looking. These residential projects share an emphasis on exposed concrete, and an innovative approach to privacy—the former using columns of stacked channel glass to let light in, and the latter featuring a series of vertical louvers that residents can mechanically open and close from within, constantly changing the texture of the building’s facade.

READ the entire piece at Curbed SF.

Should One App Try to Be Everything to Everyone All the Time?

by Jay Barmann
Originally appeared on Inside Social, October 24, 2018

Once upon a time, MySpace was where you linked up with friends online, posted a funny GIF or the occasional song, and then went about your day consuming content, shopping, and living your life elsewhere. These days, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Google, and Twitter each want to be your go-to hub for communicating, news reading, video watching, augmented reality playing, photo sharing, shopping, sports, gaming, and umpteen other things, and it's starting to feel like these efforts to be everything to everyone are going to come back to bite them all when the tastes of a fickle populace change.

This week Facebook acknowledged some of this overreach in a small way with a simplified redesign for Facebook Messenger. The updated app loses a couple of the widgets that were cluttering up its bottom nav bar (namely "Games" and "Home"), and puts the focus back on the app's original purpose: chat. "We’ve built a lot of capabilities over the years, but [Messenger] is not as simple as the app was when we first began our journey,” says head of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky to The Verge. “We had a decision to make here: we can continue to pile on, or we can build a new foundation that would really enable us to build simplicity and powerful features on top of something that’s new and something that goes back to its roots." 

But take a look at the tabs on the Facebook mobile app's increasingly lengthy menu, and you'll find at least a handful of things you probably didn't even know were there like City Guides (still seemingly in beta form and devoid of much useful information), job listings, sports scores, weather, and a Town Hall section that shows you all your local, state, and federal representatives and how to follow or contact them. Facebook launched Watch, its bid to compete with YouTube, Netflix and Amazon in the original video space, in August 2017, but as of the middle of this year, 50 percent of Americans polled said they'd never heard of Facebook Watch, and another 24 percent said they'd heard of it but never looked at it. The company rolled it out globally in August 2018, but the question remains: With so much video content to keep up with on so many platforms, why does Facebook think it's going to succeed in this space? And just because they can afford to build a video platform and produce original content for it, does that meant they should?

Facebook is also going toe-to-toe with Google/Alphabet and Amazon with its Portal countertop devices, which are intended to facilitate more hands-free video chatting via Facebook Messenger with the help of an AI-enhanced camera. And there's apparently plans for a TV set-top version that will stream video, a la Apple TV and Roku, in addition to having a camera for video chat.

Meanwhile, Snapchat just unveiled a slate of new short-form, scripted video content for its Discover tab. And earlier this year Instagram launched IGTV with great fanfare, only to have virtually none of us watching or talking about it four months later. IGTV's own handpicked slate of video creators, many of whom already had established followings on YouTube, seemed to quickly bore of this second channel, which was essentially similar except for the vertical video format. New York Magazine's Intelligencer blog surveyed some teens about IGTV who said things like, "I’m still confused as to what the purpose is," and "I just think it’s really unnecessary and it’s a YouTube knockoff."

Snapchat has also sought to be a source for sports content for the youth market, particularly via ESPN's "SportsCenter on Snap." And ESPN is also going to be rolling out sports content for Twitter, which announced its own video content push in April featuring the likes of Disney, Viacom and Vice News.

But what if users really only ever wanted to use Snapchat to send ephemeral video and augmented photos of themselves to friends? And what if Instagram users really only want to look at and share pretty photos (and Snap-like "Stories"), and find their streaming video content where they've always found it, on Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube? And what if Facebook users would prefer to keep their cameras in their pockets where they belong, and would prefer to get reliable city guides from Lonely Planet and keep using their Apple TV to stream movies?

And on the subject of news, neither Facebook nor Twitter want to take responsibility for being arbiters of truth in the news sphere, and yet they have each become primary portals through which people across the world find their news. They can't have it both ways.

We all instinctively balk at monopolies, because we all instinctively understand that no one company can ever be great at everything — not to mention our traditionally American love of competition in the marketplace. Facebook has already raised eyebrows by copying the essential format of Snapchat with Stories on both Instagram and Facebook, and Snapchat is feeling the heat. And the launch of Portal couldn't have come at a worse time for the company — an op-ed in USA Today reflects the common, knee-jerk reaction that Facebook should not be trying to put cameras and microphones in our homes right now.

Taking paranoid arguments about privacy even further, Apple CEO Tim Cook just gave a speech in Europe railing against the "data industrial complex" of Google and Facebook, though he didn't name names. "Our own information — from the everyday to the deeply personal — is being weaponized against us with military efficiency," Cook said. "Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm. We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance." The backlash, he suggests, needs to come first in the form of government regulation.

It's understandable that companies as huge and rich as Facebook and Alphabet would try to expand into as many spaces as they can, but it seems like only a matter of time before a majority of these experiments fail (ahem, see Google+). And with each failure, the companies risk losing the trust and brand recognition they built with their signature products.

More urgently, it calls to question whether the money that a company like Facebook is throwing at arguably ill-fated experiments like Portal and Watch wouldn't be better spent on security measures and content moderation to address the grave global impacts that its platform has created.

SFist Curation and Daily Strategy

SFist

Project: Daily curation, editorial strategy, and content creation for nationally syndicated news and culture site.

Role: Editor-in-chief, responsible for hiring staff and freelancers, creating the editorial calendar, producing a range of daily content on various subjects, and maintaining the overall tone and style of an irreverent and trustworthy news source. 

Why You Should Care: Before a sudden shutdown by a new owner of the Gothamist network in late 2017, SFist was a beloved and valued source of hour-by-hour breaking news about San Francisco, as well as a trusted resource for food and culture recommendations. We averaged 2.5 to 3 million page views per month, and had a Twitter following of 289,000. In addition to curating a daily newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers, I worked to market the site on social media and through reader events. 

Getting to Know the Delta, One Weird Bar at a Time

The Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta is a vast and complex labyrinth that would take years to explore—or you could just hit the bars. Here, the Delta's five most fascinating watering holes.

Photo: Gary W./Yelp

by Jay Barmann

Originally published in San Francisco Magazine, April 2014

Al the Wop’s
The 80-year-old biker bar and restaurant was the first business opened by a non-Chinese person (yes, an Italian guy named Al) in a long-ago-bustling, middle-of-nowhere Chinatown called Locke. For lunch, you want steak, served with toast, wax peppers, and peanut butter on the side—a custom introduced by Depression-era farmers who would bring in their own condiments. Ask the bartender to teach you the drinking game that has led to untold dollar bills being tossed and tacked onto the ceiling. Then walk Locke: It was built in 1915 to house 600 Chinese farmworkers and is now a half-abandoned, chipped paint–shingled time capsule, a Chinese-inflected Old West ghost town. 
13943 Main St., Locke; locketown.com/als.htm

Foster’s Bighorn
An explosion of animal heads stares back at you at this bar and restaurant, which doubles as the personal museum of one crazy taxidermy enthusiast. Late owner Bill Foster went on a 25-year hunting spree starting in the 1930s and brought home some 300 specimens, including an enormous, very rare African elephant that dominates the rear dining room. Foster’s also serves as the clubhouse for residents of Rio Vista, one of the Delta’s biggest towns—a stroll down its main drag, untouched since the 1950s, is very Back to the Future.
143 Main St., Rio Vista; fostersbighorn.com

Giusti ’s
One of the only Delta bars that’s actually worth trekking to solely for the food, this ramshackle roadhouse just outside Walnut Grove is still owned and run by the family that opened it four generations and 100 years ago. The ceiling of the front bar is lined with trucker caps that, allegedly, piled up over the years after being left behind by farmers who drank too many lunchtime beers. Guy Fieri once touted the minestrone soup on his show, but we prefer the weekend prime rib or linguine with clams on Thursday’s Italian Night. 
14743 Walnut Grove–Thornton Rd., Walnut Grove; giustis.com

The Lighthouse Restaurant and Bar
Located on the Delta Loop, a collection of trailer and RV park “resorts” and marinas on low-key Brannan Island, the Lighthouse is a rollicking, boat-up booze stop in the summer and a mellow hangout for chummy retirees in the winter. It’s the kind of place where one of those machines dispenses Fireball shots—and where you should probably just stick to tequila and french fries. Nonetheless, it’s an airy spot with a water view, a small dance floor, outdoor seating, and the vibe of a low-rent country club where everybody knows your name (and your karaoke song). 
151 Brannan Island Rd., Isleton; thedeltalighthouse.com

Rogelio’s Dine and Sleep Inn
With its dark-stained siding and overhanging upper-level porch, Rogelio’s looks from the outside like an old-timey saloon—but inside it gets way weirder. The front of the building is split between a basement rec room–style dive bar and a windowless Chinese restaurant. At the back of the building is a casino and card room that livens up with poker games on weekend nights, and upstairs is a small inn. The restaurant menu is, in fact, three-quarters Mexican and one-quarter Chinese, with one off-menu favorite being the carnitas chow mein—it’s odd, for sure, but better than it sounds. Rogelio’s sits in the middle of downtown Isleton (population 804), which plays host to a big crawdad festival every June.
34 Main St., Isleton, rogelios.net

Neon dreams: 16 old movie theater marquees around the Bay Area

Retro signage breathes life into repurposed movie houses and still-operating cinemas

Photo: Eugene Kim

See the full piece from February 28, 2018 at Curbed SF.

BlueLight.com Product Content Strategy

Role: Managed builds for entire front-end creative staff; worked with UX and front-end design to create clear user journey and product categories; helped establish all taxonomy and editorial protocols with Editor-in-Chief.

Original site now defunct.

When Did We Start Calling It 'Brunch,' And When Did It Become A Thing?

Photo: Erica Firment/Flickr

by Jay Barmann
Originally published on SFist, April 1, 2016

Brunch. It's the essential meal at which many urban twenty- and thirtysomethings love to get tanked after a long weekend of getting doing the same, before settling in for a long Sunday's nap. It's also the meal that many love to hate due to all the waitlists and hangriness and prix-fixe mediocrity that it often entails. As Gothamist's Lauren Evans put it a couple years ago, "Everyone hates brunch, just like everyone hated 'Call Me Maybe' after its 3,000th rotation around the airwaves." Nevertheless, and under the right circumstances, brunch can be a perfectly lovely thing, especially when not too hungover, and when there's no wait for a table. Today we take a dive into the history of when this decadent meal became the capital-B Brunch that is an indispensable weekly touchstone for the chattier classes.

Origin of the word: The portmanteau of "breakfast" and "lunch" is much older than you probably think. The Oxford English Dictionary pegs it to 1895, and an article titled "Brunch: A Plea" by British author Guy Beringer that appeared in Hunter's Weekly. Beringer wrote that, unlike the heavy, traditional, post-church Sunday dinners, "Brunch is cheerful, sociable and inciting. It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week." Pointing to brunch as the traditional hangover helper, Beringer also wrote, "By eliminating the need to get up early on Sunday, brunch would make life brighter for Saturday night carousers." Shortly thereafter, in 1896, the word "brunch" popped up in a Pennsylvania paper called The New Oxford, according to the Washington Post, marking its first mention in the US. There it was referred to as a "fad" that is "a repast at 11 o'clock a.m."

There is also another early source for the term's American usage, as Gothamist earlier noted: New York newspaperman Frank Ward O'Malley, who wrote for The Sun between 1906 and 1919, and was known to use the term referring to "the typical mid-day eating habits of a newspaper reporter."

Origins of the concept: Given that the word first appeared in a hunting magazine, and given that the components of the meal, and in particular the occasional buffet aspect, are similar to English hunt breakfasts (set up outdoors, à la Downtown Abbey), Smithsonian Mag notes that some food historians think that urban hotel and restaurant brunches evolved out of these "lavish multi-course meals that featured a smorgasbord of goodies such as chicken livers, eggs, meats, bacon, fresh fruit, and sweets." Also: plenty of wine and Champagne.

Still others suggest that the meal evolved out of post-church Sunday meals for Catholics, who would fast until mass and then combine breakfast and lunch items in one family feast.

Carole Lombard and Clark Gable photographed dining "between trains" at the Pump Room in Chicago, possibly in 1941. Photo via Cruising the Past

How brunch came to the US: While nice hotels in bigger US cities probably took some cues from London in the early part of the 20th Century, the boom in American brunching appears to have happened a bit later. The concept of combining breakfast and lunch items on weekend menus, though, likely began first in hotels because traditionally restaurants in most US cities would have been closed on Sundays.

One of a couple of conflicting accounts of the origin of Eggs Benedict, for instance, derives from a hungover guest at the Waldorf Hotel in New York in 1894 (the year before Beringer wrote his "plea" about brunch), who ordered "buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and a hooker of hollandaise" for breakfast, and the maitre d' was supposedly so impressed by the artery-hardening combination he added the dish, substituting in English muffins and ham, to the breakfast and lunch menus.

Brunch entered the broader American public consciousness in the 1930s around the end of Prohibition. As noted in a 1983 New York Times piece, food historian Evan Jones, author of American Food: The Gastronomic Story, points to media coverage of the brunch at the famed Pump Room in Chicago's Ambassador Hotel, ca. 1933. The place became popular with movie stars like Clark Gable and Helen Hayes taking cross-country train trips between New York and Los Angeles, who would stop between trains in Chicago on Sunday mornings to dine at the Pump Room.

When, exactly, brunch became a thing: Jones describes how Sundays came to be known for different social habits following World War II, as America became more of a secular place. "We like to sleep in Sundays, read the newspapers and loll in bed," he said. "After the World War II generation went away from church altogether, Sunday became a day to enjoy doing nothing and brunch just grew like topsy." In the 1940s, according to a Times piece from the era, the Fifth Avenue Hotel featured a "Sunday Strollers’ Brunch" which "consisted of sauerkraut juice, clam cocktails, and calf’s liver with hash browns." Sounds like solid hangover food, no?

While American food icon James Beard wrote of his distaste for brunch in the early 1960s ("If I'm going to have sausage and eggs I want them in the morning. I think I'd banish brunch and ask people for late breakfast, between 11:30 and 12, or I'd ask them for lunch at one.''), it was in that decade that brunch began its swing into trendiness in New York especially. Brunch was a notable meal at the chic Tower Suite a.k.a. The Hemisphere Club, the Eames-chair-filled restaurant that opened on the 48th Floor of the Time-Life Building from restaurateur Joe Baum in late 1960, as featured on Mad Men.

The Hemisphere Club at the Time-Life Building in the early 1960s. Photos: Library of Congress

Celebrities would have found brunch served at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel in this era too — and this is to say nothing of Jewish delis on both coasts, like LA's Canter's and New York's Katz's, where pastrami and herring have long sat side by side with bagels and eggs on eclectic all-day menus.

But it wasn't until 1980 that Sunday brunch as a middle-class pastime started spreading like wildfire on both the East and West Coasts, as discussed in the 1983 Times piece. The Chicago Tribune had its own piece about the rise of brunch culture in 1980, which noted how the meal gained traction also because there were more married women in the workforce who "needed a relief on Sunday, too." Growing up in New Hampshire, I can recall a hard-to-get-into, upscale brunch that my parents went to weekly at one trendy, rustic spot called The Country Gourmet beginning around 1982, with plenty of mimosas, Dutch apple pancakes, and a lavish buffet.

This is also around the time that people started saying "Let's do brunch."

[Addendum: I reached out to Jeremiah Tower for his take on brunch in San Francisco in the '80's and 90's, and he said, "I never understood brunch and tried it at Stars and then gave up. The decor just was not right, let alone my not knowing how to make pancakes, and hating waffles. As for fried chicken on top of them, well, beyond the pale then. One needed a view, garden, hotel buffet..."]

How brunch morphed into the monster it is today: You could blame Sex & The City. You could blame the rise of bottomless mimosas. You could blame everyone's alcohol problems in general. Whatever it is, between the late 1990's and early 2000's brunch became the worst. For those in their early 20's who still think getting drunk during the daytime is a new and exciting game, and who never dine in packs smaller than five, brunch has always been awesome. But for everyone else, it can be a necessity and/or a chore, a contact sport we'd rather avoid, or just a bitter obligation because some old friend is in town for the weekend and it's all she had time for and OMG she really wants to try this poutine Benedict she read about on Eater.

In a 1998 piece in the Times, writer William Grimes discusses how the name of the game in New York brunches at the time was "the more bizarre, the better," from a sardine-potato tart topped with an egg to a Thai-influenced shrimp frittata. The late 1990's in San Francisco, also, saw a boom in brunch experimentation along with the dot-com boom, from Boogaloo's vegetarian herb gravy over biscuits to the Pork Store Cafe's "Two Eggs in a Tasty Nest," the nest being made of bacon, crispy potatoes, peppers, and onions.

Much like everyone started ordering Cosmopolitans post-1998 because of 'Sex & The City,' gal pals and gays in every city wanted to do weekly brunch just like these ladies.

As for drinks, "hair of the dog" was likely an option at every brunch since brunch began. The Bloody Mary, for one, originated at a bar in Paris under a different name in 1920's (following the introduction of vodka to the bar scene by Russian émigrés, and one bartender's confusion over how to give it some flavor), and the drink rose in popularity in 1930's New York via the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis, as Esquire tells us, under the name Red Snapper.

It should be noted, in as notorious a drinking town as San Francisco has always been, one of the city's longtime signature beverages, Fernet-Branca, was first invented as a hangover cure, according to Smithsonian Mag, and the original formula contained opiates.

Where brunch stands in the food culture of 2016: First of all, it's now pretty much universally understood that brunch is served both on Saturday and Sunday, which was not always the case — and in New York it's usually until 3 or 4 p.m., while on the West Coast, where last call is 2 a.m. and therefore people don't tend to sleep as late, the cutoff is almost always 2 p.m. In the last few years there's been plenty of loud backlash against brunch in general, not only from Gothamist and the Times, but all across the foodinista sphere, which then spawned a backlash against the backlash in pieces like this one from Grub Street in 2014. ("Brunch has done nothing wrong. Brunch just wants to be there for you, should you choose to partake... It's an excuse to be lazy right in the middle of the day.")

There is some reason for all this harping back and forth, as every year brings a new round of young singletons to every city to overhype a new round of brunch spots and newly mashed up brunch foods — burrata French toast anyone? Now there's an actual BrunchCon coming LA this summer, as LAist reported this week — which is just nuts.

But as the Washington Post shows us via some handy graphs based on Google searches, brunch remains in the last decade still an urban and coastal phenomenon, with its popularity directly correlated, interestingly, with the size of a state's Jewish population.

While brunch has become a guaranteed money-maker for many big restaurants, it's also become a notorious amateur hour for both front- and back-of-house staffs at these places, because the experienced, Class A personnel all work Saturday nights and wouldn't be caught dead at a brunch shift unless they're covering for someone. Also, executive chefs are most definitely sleeping in and letting the place run on auto-pilot.

That said, no matter where you live, Brunch as a thing shows no signs of slowing down or going away, and every city in the nation (besides those in Nebraska, Arkansas, and the Dakotas) has more than its share of brunch faithful. And that's cool! Especially if there isn't a line. As the lists linked below show, there's also still plenty of unique deliciousness to be found around the country at this oft-derided weekend meal.

But can we all agree that a Bloody Mary doesn't need to be stacked with an entire meal's worth of garnishes? Thanks.

Laptops In Restaurants: Nuisance, Or Menace?

by Jay Barmann
Originally published on SFist, February 21, 2017

I was recently sitting in a restaurant in the Castro where bar seating is available for dinner, and I watched as a man walked in, ordered an entree, asked advice on wine, and whipped out his laptop to get down to work. This was about 8 p.m. on a Thursday, and the guy appeared fresh from the office, perhaps by way of Muni, tech shuttle, or Caltrain, with no shame about doing his business while others were trying to enjoy dinner in close proximity. This conduct, I fear, is a result of the fact that there has not been enough public shaming around this very important issue. Allow me.

Now, I hesitate to single you out here if you know you're guilty of this, seeing as we live in such a tech-fueled, tech-positive, laissez-faire city. But this is something that really needs to stop in the name of all that is decent, and really for all of our sakes. Let us try, for a moment, at dinner, in public, to eat in a manner that's respectful of our neighbors and ourselves.
We all have to get work done, friends, and sure, many of us are saddled with jobs that do not go quiet when the sun goes down and we physically leave the office. But greater San Francisco is not your corporate cafeteria. Zuni Cafe is not your conference room, and neither is Delfina, Octavia, nor Michael Mina.

Setting aside the visual nuisance of the LED glow of a screen (polluting a thoughtfully designed lighting scheme, no less) why, in the name of all that's holy, can't your slide deck or spreadsheet or email wait until morning, or at least until after you've enjoyed a bite to eat, giving that bite the attention it might deserve rather than scarfing it down like it might as well be a hot pocket or instant ramen or Soylent while you're typing away and chewing mindlessly.

Exceptions may maybe be made in some downtown restaurants when it's lunchtime, because business lunches must exist, and oftentimes they require these visual aids — also, the etiquette around lunch is looser, because: lunch.

But good lord. Setting up shop in a restaurant with your fingers tapping on the keyboard and the aforementioned visual pollution, distracting people from having a refined dining experience with civilized conversation and perhaps some wines... well that's just crass, and if the restaurant's management is too generous and/or in need of your revenue to say so, I will do it for them. Put. The. Effing. Laptop. Away. A large tablet is not really any better — and nor, really, should your cellphone be ever-present at a polite dinner, but if you're among friends and things need to be looked up or urgently responded to, I understand, it's 2017, go with god.

San Francisco is hardly alone in this epidemic of laptops invading the dining room. About a year ago, I was feeling superior about our fair city when, on a trip to Portland, I watched a man walk into an upscale bar/restaurant, sit at a high table in the bar by himself, order up dinner and a glass of wine, and proceed to put on noise-canceling headphones and watch a movie on his laptop, in the middle of a busy Friday night crowd. Let's afford him a one-time pity pass — perhaps he's not quite right — but honestly, if you need to watch a movie with dinner, allow me to suggest takeout or delivery. Similarly, I've seen a man sitting in a restaurant in New Orleans, in the midst of carnival season in the French Quarter, happily responding to emails on a laptop, while waiting for his meal. Clearly he too has his priorities all wrong.

I encourage you, especially all you outspoken types with no qualms about talking to strangers, to call attention to this social atrocity the next time you witness it. Ask the woman or gentleman, "Do you really think this is an appropriate place or time to be using your computer sir/ma'am? We're trying to eat and enjoy life over here."

This ends today's public service op-ed.

Here's Why Everyone Needs To Stop Bemoaning A Vanishing San Francisco And Move On

The penny-farthing guy, for one, still gives me hope. Photo: Bhautik Joshi

by Jay Barmann

Originally published on SFist, March 10, 2015

When you first fall in love with someone, during that first dizzying, marvelous honeymoon phase, however long it lasts, you and your new love feel like you're always on the same page. You have sex at random times of day. You want to tell them everything, show them everything, explore every inch of them and memorize all their habits. But eventually that excitement fades a bit. Circumstances shift. Maybe you get a new job and decide to move, or maybe they just stop feeling the same way about you after you get this new job and make a few new friends. You might be able to grow with each other and work out each shift in your personal landscape, or you might not. And if you don't, you'll break up. Those of us who have been through a few breakups know that as miserable and unique as each one may feel, this is a universal experience, and you are not unique. You can write a song about it, or a poem, but you should not expect too many people will want to listen unless it rises to the level of great art, because this is pretty well worn territory, artistically speaking. You also might not want to exhaust your closest friends for too long with tales of your lonely woe, or why your particular breakup is the worst there ever was.

This is how I've come to feel about peoples' various laments about the changing face of San Francisco, its tech wealth, high rents, unfair income distribution, craft cocktail temples, corporate shuttles, and rapidly increasing density and development. I hear you, buddy. Change can suck, and she isn't exactly the city I married either.

But just like I wouldn't expect my significant other to be exactly the same person two decades in, or expect him to take up tennis with me just because it's my new obsession even if he has a bad knee — or expect him to be completely unfazed and cheerful if we had a new baby who didn't let us sleep, or expect him to support me if I decided to take up a debilitating drug habit— I do not expect San Francisco to remain exactly the same place I first set foot in in 1997, when I immediately went to Clothes Contact because I didn't bring a jacket in July.

And just like you shouldn't embarrass yourself by sending 300 texts to your ex in 24 hours or stalking her outside her building a month after she's broken up with you, you should perhaps refrain from lengthy diatribes about why San Francisco will never be cool again because of any of the following: four-dollar toast, Google buses, valet on Valencia (Slanted Door started that in the '90s), twelve-dollar cocktails, high rents.

That's how I feel about this LCD Soundsystem ripoff that's making the rounds (see below) by the duo of Kelly Niland and Chris von Sneidern. It's like, guys, we get it. The Mission isn't as "scrappy" as it was in 1998. But at some point stuff like this just makes you sound old, and stuck, and bitter. Just like James Murphy funneled his sadness about the changing and ever-gentrifying face of New York, you are free to do the same for your beloved Mission — but maybe writing an original song that didn't have a forced reference to the proximity of 280 in it could have done more to sell your point.

San Francisco is objectively getting more crowded. Many parts of the city are a lot bougier than they were 15 years ago. But we're a long way from completely losing our edge, or "becoming Manhattan" as everyone since 1975 has feared — also, bring on the tall buildings, please! As has been said a hundred thousand times, cities change, and if they don't change, they die. Expecting you can preserve every last relic of retail, or believing that rents should never rise is neither economically realistic nor wise. And New York sure ain't what it was 30 years ago, or even 10 years ago, but I think even James Murphy has moved on, and the ladies of Broad Cityseem to be making a go of it just fine.

I am not arguing that gentrification is always good, or that the wealthy deserve to kick out poor families, or that unjust evictions shouldn't be protested and fought. But when it comes to the laments, and Facebook groups like Vanishing SF that exist solely to spread the news that everything is terrible and tech wealth has ruined the city, don't you just kind of want to shrug and be like, "Sorry, friend. She had a change of heart. What are you gonna do? Maybe it's time to move on."

If I am ever pushed out of San Francisco by circumstance, or the inhumane forces of the market, I will be incredibly sad. I'll want to write a song about it too, maybe. Or a lengthy, angry essay. But there's a time to protest, and to wail about what's been taken away from you, and there's a time to buck up, be strong, and work with what you've got. We still get to share this beautiful place, and I wouldn't go without a fight. But I'd like to think I'll keep my dignity either way, and accept that the world will keep spinning whether Clothes Contact stays open or not.

Op-Ed: Facebook Wouldn't Be As Big Of A Problem For The News If People Actually Clicked And Read Stories

by Jay Barmann

Originally published on SFist, October 26, 2017

The ongoing villainizing of Facebook for its role as a disseminator of fake news and Russian-fed propaganda in the 2016 election necessarily leads to a discussion of another very significant villain: the laziness of an enormous segment of Facebook's user base who consume and share news only insofar as they read a headline and decide if they agree or disagree. If more people took the time to actually read the news they choose to share or comment on, perhaps more of us would feel informed rather than enraged — able to discuss an issue from several sides and reach a nuanced conclusion, and able to share that story with a comment that went beyond "LOL" or "told you so." So long as Facebook is more and more a primary portal to the day's news, Facebook users have to take some responsibility for what they share and comment upon, even if it is entirely trustworthy, because we are quickly becoming a nation of headline spewers, and less one of actual consumers of the news.

It's been widely discussed since long before the 2016 election cycle that we all create our own echo chambers on social media and tend to either ignore, hide, or block all those opinions that don't conform with ours. With the huge success of Facebook and its significant reach across the literate American populace, there arrives a trend that is larger and more dangerous than the sharing of opinions, and the desire or lack thereof to engage in debates with friends and family, whether it's about Obamacare or the relative talents of Katy Perry. As you surely know from your own feed, we are, more often than we're sharing our own original thoughts or photos, sharing news stories and links to funny things we see. Facebook is less and less becoming a way to be in touch with friends and family than it is a scrolling bulletin board of news, jokes, and clips from late-night TV, with a few kitten, puppy, and baby pics thrown in here and there.

The Information discussed this trend in April 2016, and how Facebook was going to have a problem going forward if users were using the platform less and less to share personal stories, pictures, or random thoughts. At the time, a full seven months before the election, Facebook was reportedly seeing a 21 percent drop in "original sharing." Fortune pegged this to a common trend over the last two decades, writing, "Facebook’s decline in personal updates reflects a common growing pain for online communities. What starts out as special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform." Places like Reddit have flourished because they encourage originality, open discussion, and discourage recycling and repeating old news — but Reddit's free-for-all structure has caused some growing pains for it as well.

The threat to Facebook at the time was painted as being one of a loss of "intimacy" on the platform, when it becomes filled with too much professionally produced content and not enough of the personal stuff we most want to see from people we care about.

But there's a bigger problem that comes back to Facebook's reluctant — some would say completely-in-denial-about — role as a functioning media company. Instead of turning to a trusted blog or news organization to curate your day's headlines based on relevance, urgency, newsworthiness, and truth, more and more of you are trusting your friends (some very educated, perhaps, some not), coworkers, former classmates, and jackass relatives to curate your News Feed for you. The more incendiary a headline, the more likes it gets, the higher it rises in your personal algorithm and the more you're likely to see and possibly share it yourself.

That would be all well and good if a) the internet were not littered with poorly reported and/or baldly false bullshit, and b) more people took the time to read full articles and assess their quality before sharing or commenting on them, thereby possibly applying their own skepticism to the article's worth.

Is everyone going to be as shrewd of a newshound or curator as, say, your favorite history professor in college or your cousin who's clerking for a Supreme Court justice? Of course not. But a study out of Columbia University earlier this year found that 59% of links that get shared on social media are never clicked upon, meaning well over half of the stories being disseminated in your feed aren't showing up there for any reason beyond their headlines. And this means that, on average, you are more than 50% likely to blindly share a headline without taking the time to read the article supporting it.

Similarly, there have been stunts like this one in the Science Times, where they put up a headline saying "70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting." The story itself was all "lorem ipsum" placeholder text, and yet it got over 57,000 shares, and who knows how many comments on those shares.

What this means is that Facebook can hire a million more unfortunate souls to sort through fake news and moderate content, and it may not even matter. A story that might be 20% untrustworthy and 80% fact-based is certainly going to pass muster, and it will be shared far and wide based on its headline alone. As PBS reported in June, a recent study also found that humans are far better judges of truth from fiction when the volume of information — or the number of news stories in their feeds — is lower. Obviously, we're overwhelmed by news now, and no one has time to read it all, but we'd better get better at reading some of it, and learn to be less quick to hit the share button when we don't.

The implications of this for the journalism industry itself are also huge, and being felt daily. If a majority of people are only reading and sharing headlines, and doing so on Facebook or another aggregator like Apple News, none of that traffic — and its incumbent ad revenue — is coming to the news organizations themselves.

I also should not discount the role the smartphone has played in these habits. More and more people consume news in miniature, as an efficient swipe of a finger, and there is a satisfaction to feeling like you have just gotten a lowdown of the state of the world in a few quick seconds. But this makes the job of any journalist a frustrating one, knowing that the majority of eyeballs are going to land on and decide to click upon the sensational, the happy, or the cute, and that hard news is almost always going to be scrolled past with a sigh.

Then there are those who do click on stories but only read their lead paragraphs before moving on. As the editor of a news blog for several years, and a writer on the internet for well over a decade, I can't count the number of times I've stared in frustration as a commenter complained about something that was based on some assumption about the story in question, but in the comment's substance betrayed the fact that they had not read past the first paragraph before expressing their thoughts.

Just yesterday, commenting on Facebook on my headline about San Francisco's new Michelin star recipients, and the fact that Coi just received its third Michelin star, someone wrote, "Unless it's changed since I was there about five years ago, a Coi meal is more interesting than delicious." Had that person taken even seconds to click the link first and read only the opening paragraph, he would have learned that Coi has had a new executive chef for nearly two years, and the menu has, in fact, completely changed, rendering this comment moot and useless.

But let's say this were a news story about something much more urgent and important to human lives in this country. And let's say the commenter and several people he knows commented upon the post and shared it, with several more people in their networks reading only the headline and the comment, believing the comment to be trustworthy because it came from someone they love or trust, when in fact no one in the chain of sharing had even read the story, and they were all simply using their personal echo chambers to vet and re-share something useless, and/or entirely false.

The subject of "fake news," and questions about the relative biases or trustworthiness of various news organizations, are likely to persist for as long we have our current president, and perhaps longer. But everyone who now uses Facebook (or Twitter for that matter) to consume their news headlines and occasionally share them needs to better understand their complicity and participation in a vast new machine that has no editor-in-chief, no scruples, and very often, no authority to speak on the topic at hand. We are now each others' editors and news anchors, whether we realize it or not. We should be taking a few seconds, when necessary, to call out a friend's choice to share or comment on something that has been debunked by Snopes. We should be taking a few more minutes on the long-reads that seem important, rather than scrolling endlessly through Apple News or Facebook or Twitter, getting the briefest, shallowest overview of our present world, when the complexities of this world demand a far deeper understanding, and a much better informed populace.

Americans are getting far more information every day than they have time to sort through, and Zuckerberg can only do so much to save us from ourselves. We are going to need to be each others' news police, at least until our current epoch's information tsunami gains a few more worthy gatekeepers, curators, and editors.

And we're going to need to start reading more, and doing less scanning, blind sharing, and chattering on about things we have not read from start to finish. This is no time to find out too late that you've been made a fool.

Taylor Mac: A Joyfully Liberal Carnival Barker To Get Us Through These Terrible Times

by Jay Barmann

Originally published on SFist, September 18, 2017

I've been thinking how best to talk about what I experienced Sunday at Chapter II of Taylor Mac's irreverently epic, hard-to-describe, "performance art concert" called A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music. It is neither a careful history lesson, nor a thorough 24-decade survey of music, popular or otherwise — and it is also not a drag show in any traditional sense, nor a concert piece, nor a theater production like anything else any of us have likely seen (though anyone who saw Mac perform his five-hour The Lily's Revenge a few years ago, or something from the troupe of cabaret stylists and assorted freaks in his Tingel Tangel Club days, when multi-hour performances notoriously went on well into the early morning with no planned stopping point, have at least had a taste of Mac's love for "durational theater"). It is, above all else, a lengthy communal experience curated by a mad and hilarious genius of the stage, with the help of some extremely talented collaborators and musicians, that is like a window into a politically conscious, gender-bending, Radical Faerie-loving, liberal and academic thought-celebrating universe of joy and creativity that many of us feel desperately starved for right now. And it's a time-twisting, durational good time that serves as a balm and a call to action to tortured liberal souls and lovers of music and great drag alike.

As he (I apologize for not using Mac's preferred pronoun, which is "judy," only because it gets confusing in sentences, and Mac does identify as male) has in previous performances both here (in January 2016), and in New York — where he performed the complete 24 hours all at once, with no breaks, last fall — there are a number of rallying cries, raisons d'etre, and house rules that apply to each six-hour show he's performing at The Curran — Chapter I was performed Friday night, and Chapter II was on Sunday from 2 to 8 p.m., with Chapters III and IV, covering 1896 to 2016, coming this Friday and Sunday. First of all, there are no intermissions, though there are brief transitions between the approximately hour-long decade sections, only a few of which he uses to step off stage, with some costume changes happening right at center stage, underwear and all. The audience is free to get up and go to the lobby or bathroom whenever they like, within reason, with some food available in the lobby, though Mac asks that entire sections not all leave at once, because even during the transitions there is typically someone singing or playing music on stage. And like it or not, audience participation is an essential component to this entire work, and you'll be participating if you're there.

For each decade transition there will be a new, equally extraordinary gown by costume designer Machine Dazzle, who is an ersatz character on stage throughout. And each costume somehow references that historical moment — for instance, the Reconstruction era dress features a huge QWERTY "keyboard" across the bust, in recognition of the invention of the typewriter.

As for the rallying cries, there's "Perfection is for assholes," by which he means to excuse any mistakes or missteps that occur — though, remarkably, Mac has approximately 240 songs memorized, including about a dozen Walt Whitman poems that he rattles off as part of the 1846-1856 "smackdown" between Whitman and "father of American music" Stephen Foster, and I only saw him forget one lyric in all of Sunday's five and a half hours. There's also "nostalgia is the last refuge of the racist," which applies to a great number of songs in the Great American Songbook, like "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Dixie." And there's Mac's mantra about performance art itself: no matter what it does to the audience, be it anger, amuse, delight, bore, or annoy them, he has succeeded. "In performance art, there is no failure," he says.

Thus there are going to be moments in all of the decades that are more lull-you-to-sleep ones, or what-the-hell-am-I-watching ones, or holy-wow-this-is-incredible ones. That said, five and a half hours practically breezed by, and I'll let you trust Pete Kane's review of Chapter I for SF Weekly since I sat that one out (having seen half of it last year).

I'm all in for Chapters III and IV, because Mac has structured this lengthy piece partly in the style of a variety show where it's hard to know what's coming next. Some of the structural conceits, like the aforementioned Whitman-v-Foster smackdown, work incredibly well at keeping one's attention, as does his entire section on the Civil War in which he sings various songs to segments of the audience designated as pro-Union and pro-Confederate, and then stages what he's called "the queerest Civil War reenactment in history," which involves ping pong balls flying all over the audience.

For those who got called on stage — I'm looking at you local novelist Andrew Sean Greer and Chronicle critic Lily Janiak! — and there were dozens of them, the experience I'm sure became all the more surreal. Everyone who took part in the bizarro "family dinner" that's used to define the Reconstruction of 1866-1876 was then stuck up on stage for an extra hour as they became Martian extras in Mac's insane version of The Mikado set on Mars (meant to be a comment on Orientalism in general), which went on for another sometimes painful hour, mostly with the use of vocal filters that made everyone sound like The Chipmunks.

As for the history, and being a balm for liberals, this is the ineffable part. Rarely does one encounter a drag performer or theater artist as intelligent, quick witted, insightful, and charismatic as Taylor Mac. When he turns to briefly narrating various points in our nation's history, or gives his hilarious raised-eyebrow asides in reaction to variously offensive lyrics in the songs that are now the vernacular accounting of that history, he embodies the whip-smart, drag-painted queer history professor most of us never had. He doesn't claim or want to present all sides or hyper-accurate details of that history, and he says from the outset this is all going to be subjective. "We are all living with all this history on our backs," he says, "and we all need to figure out how to deal with that to move forward."

Yes, it's a "Radical Faerie realness ritual sacrifice," as he's said before, and the audience is both the sacrifice and the rapt congregation, and Mac is both the sacrifice and the all-knowing leader, as capable of cutting remarks as he is of great pathos and earnestness. He is trying to change the world, one six-hour (or 24-hour) performance at a time, and that is no joke.

The 13 Worst Wildfires In California History

by Jay Barmann

Originally published on SFist, October 13, 2017

The grim comparisons continue to be made to fires of yesteryear, and as the death toll continues to rise in Northern California's staggeringly devastating swarm of October wildfires, it's eye-opening to understand — especially for those who don't know a lot of the history of our state's fire season — in perspective, exactly how bad these fires are. The final number of deaths, particularly in the Tubbs Fire, which took several parts of northern Santa Rosa by surprise in the overnight hours of Sunday and Monday with little to no warning issued by county authorities, won't be known for days, and the toll from the other 15 (or so) fires still burning may rise as well. Fire is part of nature and part of our dry and rugged coast, but when it emerges, fed by strong October winds, from the wilds and uninhabited mountains and into towns and cities, it becomes a far different and more tragic thing. The fires below, not really ranked, reflect some of the worst ever to hit the state, many in just the past few years. Some are "worst" because they lasted so long and scorched so much land, some because they destroyed so many homes, and a few because they took so many lives.

Rim Fire (Tuolumne County, 2013)
The at-the-time terribly sad, destructive, and lengthy wildfire burning at the edge of Yosemite National Park in the fall of 2013, the Rim Fire ended up being the third largest in California history, burning 257,314 acres or 402 square miles. It burned from August 17 to October 24, but destroyed only 11 homes. At the interior of the fire, per Wikipedia, because this was in the middle of the drought, some logs were smoldering well into the unusually dry winter of 2013-2014. Charges against the hunter who was believed to have sparked the blaze, Keith Matthew Emerald, were ultimately dropped in 2015 after two witnesses who fingered him as the culprit died. 10 people were injured as a result of the Rim Fire, but no deaths were reported. The cost associated with the fire: $127 million. — Jay Barmann

Basin Complex Fire (Monterey County, 2008)
Over the course of six days, the Basin Complex Fire consumed over 162,818 acres of land in rugged terrain near Carmel and Big Sur. According to the Big Sur Volunteer Fire Brigade's report, the Basin Complex Fire was composed of two different fires, the Basin Fire and the Indians Fire. The former started due to a lightning strike, while the latter started because of an unattended campfire in the Los Padres National Forest. At the time, it was the most expensive fire in California history, with $120 million spent fighting it. It was also the second most expensive in U.S. history. The fire famously threatened the historic Tassajara meditation retreat, tucked in an otherwise mostly uninhabited canyon due east of Big Sur (which was again threatened by last year's Soberanes Fire), and inspired this book about the efforts of four Buddhist monks who stayed behind to battle the blaze and save the majority of the Tassajara compound. 

Wine Country Fires of 1964
The Chronicle noted this week that the current fires of October 2017 have some eery similarity in location to a swarm of fires that burned almost identical areas of Napa and Sonoma counties in September of 1964, 53 years ago. The Hanley Fire, which began with a discarded cigarette on Hanley Ranch on Mt. St. Helena, went on to burn 53,000 acres and spawn multiple other brush fires, destroying 84 homes (some in Santa Rosa), along with 24 summer cabins and countless farm buildings. Like the Tubbs Fire, it also entered Calistoga, where it burned 84 buildings and displaced 2,500 residents. It spawned the Nun's Canyon Fire, which burned 7,000 acres in the same canyon where the current Nuns Fire began, as well as two other fires, the Mt. George Fire and Green Valley Fire. Despite burning tens of thousands of acres, these fires did not cost any lives, partly because the area was less inhabited than it is now. 

The Laguna Fire (San Diego County, 1970) 
The worst of the wildfires that burned across California from September 22 - October 4, 1970, the Laguna Fire ignited on the morning of September 26, 1970 in the Kitchen Creek area of San Diego County's Laguna Mountains. Caused by a downed power line and fed by the Santa Ana winds, within 24 hours it had spread 30 miles — and the winds also stymied firefighting efforts, as they were so brutal firefighting aircraft couldn't leave the ground. In the end, eight people were killed, 382 buildings were destroyed, and 175,425 acres were left charred. 

Painted Cave Fire (Santa Barbara County, 1990)
The Painted Cave Fire, also sometimes called the Paint Fire, determined to be the result of arson, started on June 27, 1990 with a brush fire along Highway 154 and Painted Cave Road. It would go on to spread extremely quickly, jumping Highway 101 and entering residential areas of Santa Barbara, killing one person and burning hundreds of homes. By one estimate, 427 structures were burned, but by the Weather Channel's count, 642 structures were destroyed in the fire. Allegedly, a man named Leonard Ross confessed to a girlfriend that he had started the fire to "burn out" a neighbor, and the girlfriend then told her minister, which led to charges being filed and then dropped against Ross for lack of evidence. 

Valley Fire (Lake County, 2015)
To this day, Lake County is still dealing with the depressing aftermath of the September 2015 Valley Fire — and their hands are full yet again with the current Sulphur Fire, burning an estimated 2,500 acres and 55 percent contained according to the latest reports from Cal Fire. Many of us in the Bay Area remember the Valley Fire for its destruction of Harbin Hot Springs (which still continues to rebuild) and record-setting rate of ignition which led to several dramatic escape videos. The Valley Fire still remains the third most destructive wildfire in state history in terms of structures burned (1,955), though the fatality count was relatively quite low at four victims.

Old Fire (San Bernardino, 2003)
A second harrowing specimen from the southern California “Fire Siege of 2003,” after the Cedar Fire, the Old Fire took six lives and consumed more than 90,000 acres in the San Bernardino mountains. More than 80,000 people were evacuated from their homes before the first rains and snows of the year fortunately arrived to help extinguish the blaze. You may remember the name Rickie Lee Fowler, who was charged with the arson that caused the fire and whose bizarre, four-year legal proceedings eventually resulted in a death penalty verdict on felony murder-arson charges. Fowler still remains alive and on death row — but more significantly, authorities believe that fire caused the Waterman Canyon mudslide two months later in which 14 people died.

Photo Station Fire smoke "as seen from the desert to the north" by Rennett Stowe [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The Station Fire (Los Angeles County, 2009)
Two firefighters were killed fighting the Station Fire, which burned from August 26 to October 16 of 2009 across the Angeles National Forest. All told, the fire destroyed 160,577 acres, 89 homes, and 120 other structures. According to officials, the fire was started by an unknown substance found near the point of origin. Though a $150,000 reward was offered for information that would uncover a suspect, the focus of their investigation, a man named Babatunsin Olukunle who was later convicted for starting a small fire days before the Station blaze, could not be tied to the case. While "new clues" reportedly surfaced in 2014, the alleged arsonist remains at large.

Witch Fire (San Diego, 2007) 
At 197,990 acres of land consumed, the Witch Fire was the second largest wildfire of California's 2007 wildfire season, but it became the fifth most destructive in state history, burning 1,650 structures and causing two deaths. Similar to many wildfires, including the 22 currently burning throughout the state, wind played a major role in how quickly the fire spread, with many primarily blaming the Santa Ana winds, which clocked in at about 100 mph during the fire. It would be revealed later that a downed power line was to blame for the start of the fire, with SDG&E conceding "that it was their equipment that sparked some of the blazes and has already paid out roughly $2 billion in damages," though they never admitted liability for the fire, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. 

Cedar Fire (San Diego, 2003)
San Diego is entirely consumed in smoke in the above image of 2003’s Cedar fire, the largest of the red fire dots seen right at the U.S.-Mexico border. Pending the outcome of the current North Bay fires’ investigation, the Cedar fire remains the largest wildfire in California history caused by human activity. In circumstances depressingly familiar to today’s fires, eleven other active wildfires were already burning in the region when lost hunter Sergio Martinez started a small fire in hopes that rescuers would find him. The Santa Ana winds blew that fire way out of control, incinerating 62,000 acres in the first 12 hours alone, ultimately taking 15 lives, destroying more than 2,000 homes and nearly 600 other buildings, and causing an estimated $1.24 billion in damage.

Griffith Park Fire (Los Angeles, 1933)
Angelenos and tourists alike know Griffith Park for the Griffith Observatory (above) and the famous view it provides of the Hollywood sign. That observatory has a tragic footnote, as the Griffith Park Fire that broke out in the early months of its construction is still the deadliest fire in Los Angeles history. New Deal-era workers making an (at the time) sweet 40 cents an hour had signed up by the thousands to work on roads in the park, and when a small fire broke out they were instructed to bat it back with shovels. This just made the fire larger, winds kicked in, and an estimated 29 of the workers perished in the fire that day, despite the fire only spanning 47 acres. It remained the deadliest single wildfire in California until this week.

The Tunnel Fire a.k.a. the Oakland Hills Firestorm (1991) 
Locals older than 30 likely recall this deadly fire, which ripped through the hills of North Oakland and southeastern Berkeley the weekend of October 19-20 in 1991. It all began as a small (5-acre) Berkeley grass fire that firefighters failed to completely extinguish. By the morning of October 20th, it had reignited and blazed southwest, fed by the 65 mph Diablo winds in the area. It wasn't until 9 p.m. that the wind died down, allowing officials to get control of the blaze. By then, 25 people were dead, 150 were injured, and 2,843 single-family homes and 437 apartments and condos were destroyed. The total area was only 1,520 acres, but the damage was a jaw-dropping $1.5 billion. LeVar Burton fans might recall the 1993 TV movie on the blaze, titled Firestorm: 72 Hours in Oakland. 

The Current Northern California Fires (Tubbs, Nuns, Atlas, Mendocino Lake Complex, Cascade, etc.)

The count of the dead stands at 35 as of Friday, October 13. Victims are still being identified, and stories of survival and tragedy are going to be told for weeks. What's clear, however, especially as common causes are potentially revealed in this swarm of fires, all of which broke out within hours of each other on Sunday, October 8 and Monday, October 9, 2017, will, all combined, go down in state history as the deadliest and one of the largest wildfire events to occur. The total acreage burned is sure to be over 200,000, putting the combined fires on par with some of the largest on record — but to put it in perspective, the Rush Fire, which burned for over two weeks in Lassen County in August 2012, burned 315,560 acres (490 square miles), but it was in such remote land that there were no fatalities and zero structures burned. The Tubbs Fire alone, in the course of just a few hours, likely killed dozens and destroyed over 3,500 homes, or 5 percent of Santa Rosa's housing stock. At the risk of being overly pessimistic, this group of fires will likely top lists such as this one for some time to come — and let's hope the fires are contained as soon as possible with as little further destruction as possible to the towns still in their paths, and that this is not a harbinger of fire seasons to come.

Eve Batey, Joe Kukura, and Jessica Lachenal also contributed to this piece.

San Francisco Has Always Been A Pretty Expensive Place To Live

By Jay Barmann

Originally published on SFist, October 7, 2015

Lots of people have lots of memories of cheap apartments and cheap burrito dinners in the Mission of the 1990's. And while there have been eras of relative stability in San Francisco when it didn't feel like there was a well heeled horde of transplants vying for every last charming garden studio and every table at Tosca Café, there have been multiple times in SF's past when people from without were clamoring to get a foothold here, and driving up the price of everything in the process.

Being a relatively small city with specific geographic constraints and development patterns that has been historically prone to boom-and-bust cycles, one can trace SF's economic tensions and sky-high prices well beyond five or even fifteen years ago. At the risk of drawing the wrath of those who believe SF has long been more affordable than it is now — which, in some ways and in some neighborhoods like the Mission, it was in our recent history, at least if you go back 20 years — SFist is going to explore some facts and figures from the city's past, anecdotal and otherwise, that may offer a smidgeon of comfort to everyone who feels like they've arrived at the worst possible moment, when everything is more insanely expensive than it ever has been here. In truth, it has been both better and worse, due to many factors, not the least of which has been supply and demand.

The Gold Rush and the 19th Century

If you think land values and food prices are crazy in the city now, it's educational to glance back at the chaos of real estate and the scarcity of goods in the early years of San Francisco. The Smithsonian Magazine just published an excellent piece on this topic, finding written records of the ways that miners and other early arrivers to town were being gouged for the simplest food items like bread and eggs. There have been many accounts of eggs being sold for a dollar apiece, with a dozen eggs costing roughly $90 in today's dollars in 1849 SF. Canteens reportedly would charge a dollar for a slice of bread too, $2 if it was buttered, which would be $56 in today's terms. Edward Gould Buffum writes in Six Months in the Gold Mines(1850) of a breakfast for two consisting of bread, cheese, butter, sardines and two bottles of beer for which he was charged $43, the equivalent of a $1,200 restaurant bill today.

It's often been said that most of San Francisco's early millionaires were not the prospectors but the people who sold things to them, like German-Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss who figured out that everyone needed tough, rugged pants in the gold fields.

And when it came to real estate, prices were way more insane in the years just after the Gold Rush. As writer Bayard Taylor, who penned dispatches about the Gold Rush economy for the New York Tribune, tells it:

[One] citizen of San Francisco died insolvent to the amount of forty-one thousand dollars the previous autumn. His administrators were delayed in settling his affairs and his real estate advanced so rapidly in value meantime that after his debts were paid, his heirs had a yearly income of $40,000 [$1.2 million today]

That means his property alone sold for the equivalent of several million dollars, even though the man himself believed he died in great debt.

A recent history of Alamo Square on Hoodline describes the land-grabbing and real estate squabbles that were going on in the area between the 1860s and the 1890s, when Alamo Square Park would finally start to take shape, alluding to the high value of land in the period. And by 1897, millionaires were building mansions like this one by the park.

And does this sound familiar? The excerpt below is from a 1930's history book about the Gold Rush years.

San Francisco described in a 1930s history book pic.twitter.com/8Ss7r3yOnf

— Gaurav Ragtah (@gragtah) March 7, 2014

1906, Post Earthquake and Fire

Yet again, as the city recovered from the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire, those whose homes were luckily not completely burned down found that their landlords weren't going to let them back in from the refugee camps where they found themselves without paying higher rent — in some cases double.

As the San Francisco Call reported in July 1906, "These persons say they are not paupers; that they are earning as good wages as ever they did, but they are unable to pay the increased rent. As a result they resort to the camps."

The War and Post-War Years: 1940s and 1950s

Housing became much more expensive and harder to come by in the years during and after the Second World War, due to an abundance of job opportunities, and it's clear from census datathat the city's population was largely middle and upper class. The population boomed in these years while the city was a lot less dense in terms of building heights and in-fill development than it is now, leading to high demand.

The population rose a staggering 22 percent between 1940 and 1950, from 634,536 to over 775,000 — a level it would not reach again until the dot-com boom in 2000, following out-migration in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

And the people of San Francisco in 1950 weren't poor, on average. The median family income for the city was almost $4,000, 21 percent higher than the national average. While only 8 percent were college educated at the time, 22 percent listed themselves as professionals, executives, or managers, while another 22 percent worked in clerical or administrative jobs.

Median rents in the city hovered at $41/mo in 1950, which is the equivalent of $405/mo today, but that was way above the national average, which was $260/mo in today's terms.

Writing in his San Francisco Book in 1948, longtime Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote of the booming city that its "two great problems" were "housing and traffic," (see the photo above from 1946) complaining of landlords gouging people for substandard housing. "Even a couple of rooms in a basement bring seventy-five dollars a month," he wrote.

Sound familiar?

And as for the newly built areas filled with shiny offices and such, he wrote, "the dyed-in-the-fog San Franciscan isn’t at all sure he is happy about the newer sections of town."

1980's

Dips in the population, urban flight, and a decaying Edwardian housing stock — much of which was built between 1907 and 1910 and was in great disrepair by 1970, when areas like Alamo Square were extremely "low-rent" and dilapidated — may have made life cheaper for the hippies, but that all began to change by the early 1980s. It was then that you saw the preservation movement and savvy investors fixing up many of the Victorians into the multi-million-dollar properties they've become today.

Also, the industrial areas of SoMa, beginning to be redeveloped as Yerba Buena Gardens and the Moscone Center, started to become less desolate and more desirable as arts and living space. You can look no further than this photo caption from a recent exhibit about SoMa in the late 70s and early 80s by photographer Janet Delaney. It describes a couple of artists, Perry Lancaster and Jill Scott, who in 1981 are talking about the precariousness of their living situation on Langton Street.

via Imgur/deYoung Museum

First Dot-Com Boom: The Mission Changes The First (Or Second) Time

The Mission, as you likely know, was once an Irish and Italian neighborhood, and during and after World War II it gave way to a wave of Latino immigration from across Latin America, some of whom moved families here to become shipbuilders and others just to profit from the city's booming economy. The 1960's and 70's also saw a wave of immigration to the 'hood from El Salvador following political oppression in that country.

Local architect Joelle Colliard, who was arguably part of the "first wave" of gentrification in the Mission circa 1995, remembers the huge, 1500-square-foot, three-bedroom flat at 24th and York that she shared with two friends that cost them $1200 total. "We each paid $400. That was how the world used to turn," she says. That all ended with an ownership change and spurious owner move-in eviction during the boom in 2000, and the rent for that unit was allegedly hiked to over $3000.

Local nurse Jason Overcash remembers a huge studio facing Alamo Square going for $650/mo in 1995, which was $50 more than he could afford.

It should be noted that median household income in San Francisco more than doubled between 1990 and 2010, from $33,000 to $71,000.

I, myself, moved to the Bay Area from New York just as the last boom was winding down, in late 2000, with no savings and no parental support. An initially easy-to-get job led to my first layoff, funemployment, and learning the ropes of the unemployment insurance system, but luckily I was sharing a loft in Oakland where we'd had to build out all our own rooms, paying $700 a month to share one bathroom with three other people. I can recall around 2002 visiting a friend's Nob Hill studio that was going for $1,575 a month, and that felt well beyond reach.

I wouldn't decide to move into San Francisco until 2005, at which point I couldn't afford to live anywhere decent on my own, and tired of roommates I settled into a spiffed up SRO on Market Street that was being marketed to students at the Art Institute and elsewhere, where I paid $625 a month to share a bathroom with an entire hallway and live in less than 300 square feet. My neighbors were non-profit workers and artists, many of them pretty young. At the time, even that was an unheard-of deal.

Still, having visited New York regularly, the $9 cocktails you could get here were already going for $12 or $14 there, and people had lovely, rambling, big apartments in historic buildings for way less than anyone paid for the equivalent amount of space back east, so SF still felt a bit like a deal.

All that has changed, of course, and there are pretty much no more deals.

I know one person who managed to find a nice big room this year for $1500 in a four-bedroom place in the Castro, and I know that I also just saw a room being advertised in Corona Heights in a beautiful, remodeled four-bedroom, with a view, for $3350.

But, the point is, while we are in a crazy moment, it might feel less crazy soon, or in a few years. Maybe something terrible will happen and everyone will leave, and it'll be like 1967 again with tons of empty space to rent — but even then, a lot of those under-employed hippies lived in communes.

Looking at the long view, it has been crazy before, and it will be again. Because San Francisco is a place that people flock to, and want to be, and it's going to take more than just a big earthquake to change that.

Cleve Jones: We Have To Preserve Gayborhoods Because They Save Lives

by Jay Barmann

Originally published on SFist, February 9, 2016

Outspoken human rights activist Cleve Jones has been on the front lines of LGBT liberation and equality fights since the early 1970s, when he arrived in San Francisco as a young man and quickly became an acolyte of burgeoning local politician Harvey Milk. Later, he would experience first-hand the horrors of the HIV/AIDS epidemic here, become infected himself, lose virtually all of his friends to the disease, and become a co-founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and the creator of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Jones turned 61 in October, and never having imagined he would live this long — he believes he was infected with HIV around the winter of 1978/79, and remarkably lived with the virus for a full 10 years before any treatment options were even available — he's facing another potential battle that's becoming a tragically common one in San Francisco, the fight to stay in a rental apartment near the community to which he played a pivotal role in giving a voice, and which he and friends helped create.

The forces of gentrification weigh heavily on many San Franciscans as a real estate frenzy and a tech-fueled economic boom are causing properties to change hands all over the city, and causing new owners to find ways to oust rent-controlled tenants. But Jones worries specifically about the people who are in his cohort — aging gay men and LGBT seniors — for whom decamping to the suburbs could mean a far more tragic fate than for their heterosexual counterparts. And he's equally worried about the young and often disenfranchised gay and trans people who come to the Castro District knowing it to be a legendary safe haven where they might be able to start their lives.

"There's this weird notion among young gay people that all of our problems are solved and the war was won," Jones says. "But HIV infections are still increasing among young people ages 18 to 24, and they're still killing themselves either with drinking or drugs or with bullets."

He gave an interview, parts of which were published in the British-owned Guardian last week, in which he gave a quote about being horrified one night to find a bunch of straight "tech bros" taking over the pool table and patio at one of his longtime neighborhood gay bars, The Mix, on the 18th Street. The internet reacted loudly, both on the side of Jones and those who might be worried that the Castro is becoming less gay, and from conservative outlets like Breitbart who mocked Jones's distaste for straight people on his turf. Here at SFist I called him out on the quote because not only did it seem like an isolated incident (The Mix is in no danger of becoming straight), but it also seemed like an arguable, anecdotal point — were these "bros" definitely straight? Were they not there with any gay friends?

But Jones responded by saying I was right to call bullshit, and his quote had been taken out of context within a much larger and more important conversation.

"Fucking Breitbart..." he said in a telephone interview with SFist last week. "That's enough to ruin anyone's day, getting quoted on Breitbart."

"This isn't about straight people in gay bars, or the Castro being ruined," he clarified. "This has to do with the extraordinary, profound change in what cities are today compared to what they were before. Cities were once refuges for immigrants, bohemians, and gay people where affordable, sometimes sub-standard housing was plentiful. Gayborhoods like the Castro tend to spring up in marginalized areas — and gay people didn't force out the early inhabitants of the Castro as a lot people have it. The population in the neighborhood had been steadily declining throughout the 1960s, and when I got to the Castro there was an abundance of affordable housing because the Scandinavians and Irish and Italians who had all built the neighborhood were all moving out to the suburbs and just scrambling to find tenants to fill these buildings. That was happening all over the country, White flight as it's called."

Jones says that he arrived just as Polk Street — which was then the center of the gay universe and home to many bars, businesses, and hustlers, catering to the gay community — was beginning to wane, and there was momentum among gays to move to the Castro where a few bars had sprung up, where the microclimate's weather tended to be a bit nicer, and where by the mid-70s there was underground mass transit (Muni) connecting it to downtown. "The same thing happened in New York around the same time and into the 80's. You heard people who'd been living the Village talking about moving to Chelsea, and then later it was Hell's Kitchen."

The problem now is that these gay neighborhoods that were once the only safe places to be openly gay are becoming more like tourist attractions than they are lifelines. And while wealthier gay property owners may still hold a stake in each of these places — whether it's Boys' Town in Chicago, West Hollywood, Chelsea, or Lavender Heights in Sacramento — changes in the broader culture are causing apathy among both LGBT and liberal straight allies alike as parts of the community become, increasingly, dispersed and these neighborhoods increasingly mixed.

Gayborhoods, though, still play a vital role in the lives of people like himself, especially, and the lives of anyone who can't afford to own property and therefore protect their place nearby the institutions that make contemporary life for LGBT people so much better, and easier, than it was two or three decades ago.

"It's really not about bars," Jones insists. "It's about people living in close proximity to each other. When you look at the things we in the LGBT community have created for ourselves — the singing groups, film festivals, health care clinics, social organizations — the gayborhoods of this country, especially the Castro, were incubators for this stuff. We don't have a situation where we're asking where is the scene moving to, we have a situation where people are being dispersed at a really rapid rate. And I'm talking about this issue because it's an issue that hurts people."

Jones gets teary as he says he's lost multiple friends — "too many" — in the last year to suicide, and he's alarmed at the number of people he's heard talking about suicide, and he says this has been directly a result of their losing housing or their longtime homes being potentially threatened.

"I'm a renter, and I'm not a wealthy man," Jones says. "When the inevitable eviction comes, I'll have to leave, and I don't know where I'll go. I'm getting old, and I hear horror stories about seniors ending up in senior facilities where they aren't treated with any dignity and may even suffer special abuse for being LGBT. I know someone who was one of the first people to transition from female to male, and he's being abused in one of these homes. It's awful."

Supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents the Castro and has lived there almost 20 years, says he's been extremely aware of the issue of struggling LGBT seniors for a number of years. "This isn’t a recent phenomenon," he says. "As long as I can recall, and going back to the 90s, gay men have struggled with housing in the Castro, and there’s been too much displacement." He says that while young gay and trans people continue to move into the area, older LGBT people, especially older gay male renters and a significant number of long-term HIV survivors on private disability insurance are dealing with widespread housing instability, especially as they hit age 65. "At that age, they will transition to social security, and many will see a drop in income."

Wiener says he has helped author legislation to streamline the development of affordable housing, and allow for people to give neighborhood preference in applying for it, and aided in the construction of 55 Laguna — a purportedly LGBT-focused senior housing complex where it remains to be seen whether LGBT seniors will be able to get any preference — but, "We need more affordable housing in the Castro and surrounding neighborhoods, and we need it yesterday." He adds, "There’s no silver bullet to ending the displacement of our older LGBT renters, but there are steps we are taking and need to take to slow and reduce this trend."

But Jones points to a broader-reaching issue than just what's affecting his cohort, who are aging, HIV-positive gay men. "I'm happy that gay people feel like they can live nearly anywhere, and among communities where they didn't used to be welcomed. But what happens when these geographic concentrations of LGBT people get dispersed? The first thing we lose is political power. You lose votes and you lose gay politicians. But perhaps less obvious is the loss of cultural vitality. There's no replacement for what happens when a bunch of artists and photographers and performers and like-minded people all congregate in one place."

"I got a lot of comments and backlash after that Guardian piece went up," he says. "One of the dumbest responses I heard was 'Cities change, things change.' What a deep response! But let's talk about what those changes mean. What does it mean to the transgender individual, or a single mother, or anyone who relies on the support system they might have in their immediate neighborhood? What about the men in their 60s who have HIV and are being forced not only to leave our friends and support systems, but also the sensitive and knowledgable medical care that they've known. Do you know how hard it is to find HIV specialists out in the suburbs? What about trans people — how are they going to get the medical and emotional support they need if they're living in Benecia? No offense to Benecia."

Jones says that, though perhaps to a lesser extent, the situation facing the Castro and other gay ghettos around the country is not unlike what happened to the African-American community in San Francisco. Due to the forces of "urban renewal" and the actions of San Francisco's redevelopment agency in the 60's and 70's, what was a vibrant and large African-American community in the Fillmore district was systematically destroyed, "dispersing them to the winds, and they never came back."

"This is not part of some natural cycle — it's an upending of the role that cities play in the lives of many, many people," Jones says, acknowledging that more and more wealthier people want to live and work in urban centers, driving up the price of real estate, and acknowledging that social media has completely transformed the way LGBT people find each other and interact.

But, naturally, this is personal for Jones, and the personal is political. There are plenty of wealthy gay men and lesbians who will lay claim to their corners of the gayborhood because they could afford to buy them. "Older gay men like me were the ones who came here and created the places and social organizations that the next generations of LGBT people now have to enjoy. Most of us spent the years when we should have been amassing wealth and building our 401Ks on the front lines of a war for our freedoms, and then for our lives during the AIDS crisis. So there went a good decade and a half."

"And we're not talking about 'safe space'," he says. "That conversation is weird to me and comes from politically correct college campuses. But I do think we need places where we can go and be ourselves, and there are still plenty of places in San Francisco where you could get beat up for touching your significant other, or for being trans." (By way of example, you could just note yesterday's story about a gay bashing that did not occur in the Castro.)

In conclusion, too, Jones wanted to apologize for singling out The Mix. Jones says that as long as he can remember, going back decades, that bar has always been a place where an eclectic mixture of young and old, racially diverse gay people have hung out together. "But I will also say that that night it felt like the Marina took over. And on nights when I walk by Twin Peaks — which in my impertinent youth I too called the Glass Coffin — and I see a bunch of young heterosexuals sitting at the tables, I feel a pang. There are so few places in the world where old gay men are welcome, and those people, they can hang out anywhere they want."

Much like members of the Latino community who have long laid claim to the streets of the Mission District and now are loudly protesting development happening there, perhaps the LGBT community would do well to raise some alarm bells as Jones is trying to do, before the essential elements of the Castro that everyone take for granted are lost — whether to Airbnb, as Jones claims he's seen happen to several buildings on 18th Street that are now full-time tourist rentals, or just to apathy and trite conversations among people privileged enough not to have to worry about the problem themselves. At least not yet.

"I'm worried about maintaining and building these institutions we've created, and our political power," he says, noting that he doesn't want to see the Castro go the way of New York's Little Italy, or even North Beach in SF, where there are barely any Italian-Americans left and it's just like a living museum to something that once existed.

"As dispersal begins," he says, "I wonder what happens next."

Previously: Cleve Jones Found A Bunch Of Straight 'Tech Bros' In A Castro Bar And Now Everyone Is Flipping Out

North Bay Wildfires Destroy Countless Homes & Businesses; Power Lines & High Winds Could Be To Blame

#BREAKING: At least one dead, two seriously injured as a result of fire burning in Mendocino County, per Cal Fire. https://t.co/YnkUjDgi2h pic.twitter.com/lVoBAzORn8

— NBC Bay Area (@nbcbayarea) October 9, 2017

by Jay Barmann
Originally published on SFist, October 9, 2017

Updates will continue to arrive slowly in the multiple fires that broke out overnight in Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino counties, but as morning arrived, we know that the largest of the fires, the still growing Tubbs Fire which spans northern Santa Rosa and appears to have crossed the Sonoma-Napa county line into Calistoga grew from 20,000 acres at 7:30 Monday morning to 25,000 acres as of 11:30 a.m. It still appears to be 0% contained according to CalFire and we do not yet have an official count of structures damaged or destroyed — though ABC 7 has an early reported of 1,500 structures burned in total across the three counties.

The Nuns Fire, which seems to have broken out simultaneous with or shortly after that fire, along Highway 12 in Glen Ellen, quickly consumed thousands of acres and has already damaged or destroyed multiple farms, businesses, vineyards, and homes in the area. (See photos above from Glen Ellen.) ABC 7 has a report from a resident on Sylvia Drive, between Glen Ellen and Kenwood, where he reports at least a dozen homes have been destroyed. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat says that that fire merged with another fire this morning, originally called the Adobe Fire, and is now between 15,000 and 20,000 acres in size, despite reports at 7:30 a.m. that it was only 300 acres.

Another fire burning west of Napa, the Patrick Fire, off of Patrick Road, has consumed at least 3,000 acres. A faster moving fire in Napa County, the Atlas Fire, grew from 5,000 acres to 25,000 in just the last few hours.

PG&E power lines are already being pointed to as potential culprits in the fires, which broke out in some cases many miles apart. As the Chronicle reports, "Electric lines can start wildfires even when they don’t fall, if they become tangled with tree branches being blown by the wind and give off sparks. Utility companies are responsible for trimming trees close to their lines." And conditions Sunday night into Monday morning were ripe for fire due to dry conditions and high winds.

The only positive news is that fire officials have said that the high winds of last night have died down for the time being, but they are expected to kick up again around sundown, meaning that fast containment is vital.

#BREAKING: Unbelievable wildfires in NorCal are wiping out homes. Alyssa O'Gorman shot this in Calistoga. Evacuations also in Santa Rosa. pic.twitter.com/DpOuYITLsM

— Brandi Hitt (@ABC7Brandi) October 9, 2017

In total, SFGate reports there are now 14 fires burning across eight counties in Northern California, including other fires that were sparked in Butte, Yuba, and Nevada counties. One fire-related death has been reported in Mendocino County, but the speed of these blazes suggests there are more to come.

Cell service in parts of the North Bay remains effected, and power outages are spread across the region.

In recent memory, there hasn't been anything like the wildfires currently burning in these relatively densely populated areas of the North Bay, and several cities and towns are likely to be assessing damages for weeks to come, and rebuilding for years to come, including Santa Rosa and Glen Ellen. The most similar event was the 2015 Valley Fire, which was centered in and around the Lake County town of Middletown, which killed four people and destroyed nearly 2,000 structures. But due to the high wind conditions and rapid expansion of the Tubbs Fire, and the conflagrations in multiple localities, today's fires are being compared to the Oakland Hills firestorm of 1991, which also broke out in October — and the full extent of the damages won't be known for days, at least.

The CHP reports they have had to rescue 42 people via helicopter so far because of the fires.

Major structures and businesses damaged or destroyed include the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country and Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, and the Silverado Country Club in Napa.

Update: Governor Jerry Brown gave a news conference Monday morning declaring states of emergency in Napa, Sonoma, and Yuba counties. "This is really serious. It’s moving fast. The heat, the lack of humidity and the winds are all driving a very dangerous situation and making it worse,” Brown said, per the NYT. “It’s not under control by any means. But we’re on it in the best way we know how.”

A map below shows all of the fires burning across the state, and below is a list of evacuation orders. A full list of evacuation centers and road closures is here.

The Santa Rosa Hilton. Destroyed pic.twitter.com/GhR44xJDVx

— Damian Trujillo (@newsdamian) October 9, 2017

#AtlasPeak fire ravages #Silverado County Club hours after the #PGA Safeway Open ends. https://t.co/yrA9mKlBn7 pic.twitter.com/oqhf3WwCxt

— KPIX 5 (@CBSSF) October 9, 2017

WATCH LIVE: Crews battling wildfires burning in #NorthBay. https://t.co/DTbZB1jgUl So far, fire chars at least 60,000 acres. #napafires pic.twitter.com/yrFFcKZk8i

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) October 9, 2017

CHP has rescued 42 people so far from the North Bay Fires... https://t.co/SIf3bjS4Bo pic.twitter.com/46mEmrBmr2

— CHP Golden Gate (@CHP_GoldenGate) October 9, 2017

Evacuation orders, via ABC 7:

Fires in Mendocino County have triggered the closure of Redwood Valley and School Way from Hwy 101. Evacuations have been ordered along East Road, West Road, Tomki Road to Canyon Road in Willits, Golden Rule subdivision and Reeves Canyon.

The fire has crossed Highway 101 in Santa Rosa and ignited structures west of the freeway in the area of Kohl's Department Store on Hopper Avenue. Highway 101 has been shut down at Bicentennial. Residents and businesses should evacuate immediately in the areas of Cross Creek Road, Sky Farm Drive, Saint Andrews Drive, all residences north Fountaingrove Parkway and Montecito Heights. The fire is believed to have begun late Sunday night near Highway 128 in Napa County and progressed towards Santa Rosa city limits.

Mandatory evacuations are in place for Partrick Rd in Napa County. They have also been ordered in the North Bay for Porter Creek, Petrified Forest, Franz Valley and Mountain Home Ranch Rd.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Formula Retail

A Target store in a historic building in Massachusetts. Courtesy of Target corporate

by Jay Barmann
Originally published on SFist, June 19, 2013

Formula retail. You know: chains. They're a hot topic in SF right now, especially in The Mission where a beloved used bookstore is becoming a Jack Spade, and in the Castro where Planning has already tried to head off moves by Starbucks and Chipotle to expand in the neighborhood. The Planning Department and the Board of Supervisors are working to rewrite the very complicated rulebook around chains, which are totally forbidden in a couple of neighborhoods, but only vaguely frowned upon in others. And as the Legislative Affairs manager in Planning, AnMarie Rodgers, tells SFist, "There are currently 10 proposals on the table to revise the formula retail rules in different districts, only three of which are public."

What exactly is the problem with chain stores and chain food, you ask? Well, plenty, if you ask neighborhood merchants and a certain anti-corporate segment of our city's population. And given that our neighborhood restrictions on chains are part of what give San Francisco its own distinct character, we should probably be glad that such restrictions are in place.

San Francisco defines formula retail as "a retail sales establishment which, along with eleven or more other retail sales establishments located in the United States, maintains two or more of the following features: a standardized array of merchandise, a standardized facade, a standardized decor and color scheme, a uniform apparel, standardized signage, a trademark or a servicemark." Basically, any chain that already has 11 locations. Rodgers tells us, though, that a new rule being proposed states that Planning must reject an application by a chain if they have 11 locations including any leases signed, requiring them to research whether the company has signed leases on eventual but but not-yet-opened locations across the country.

Some argue that the whole system is too confusing, even for planners, and there's a need for a clearer citywide policy to streamline this. Also, some argue that this process leaves storefronts vacant for far too long in the hopes of finding mom-and-pop retailers who are not likely to be as financially viable in the long run, leading to further vacancies. The Castro location of Home restaurant, vacant for two years now as Chipotle has tried to move in, is a good example of a space that is too financially encumbered to work for a small business, but is highly desirable to a national chain.

For his part, Supervisor Scott Wiener has not weighed in on the Chipotle controversy yet as it is very likely to end up on the docket for the Board of Supervisors on appeal. Chipotle goes before the Planning Commission tomorrow with their Conditional Use application, and as we reported last week, it's been recommended for rejection by city planners.

A couple of areas of town, like downtown and Union Square, Stonestown, and Potrero Center, permit formula retail for obvious reasons. Meanwhile, only three districts — Hayes Valley, the Chinatown tourist corridor, and North Beach — ban chains outright. Elsewhere in town, every potential retailer or chain food operation is subject to a conditional use process, and it will likely be rejected if there are other chains in the vicinity. See Planning's full definition of formula retail and the process here.

As the Institute for Local Self-Reliance notes:

The restrictions have helped San Francisco maintain a relatively vibrant independent retail sector. The city has twice as many independent bookstores per capita as New York. It is home to some 80 local hardware stores. It also boasts more than 900 independent retailers selling fresh food, including more than 50 locally owned grocery stores of at least 5,000 square feet.

The rules are getting revised as demand from developers increases to put formula retailers in their projects. That potential pressure, and the vagaries around the existing rules, prompted Wiener to pen some legislation earlier this year (approved a few months ago by the Planning Commission) that will restrict formula retail uses on the Upper Market corridor to a 20 percent concentration within a 300 foot radius. This effort, Rodgers explains, is a test case and the first one in the city in which the rules were made this specific. So far the rule has been used to reject Starbuck's bid to move to Sanchez and Market, but to allow a CVS to move into the Market-Noe Center, prompting some confusion in the neighborhood given the number of other pharmacies around. "We're going to wait and see how it goes," Rodgers says, saying that other neighborhoods' formula retail rules may get similarly rewritten.

Also, Supervisor London Breed has two proposals in to restrict formula retail on Divisadero and on Lower Fillmore; and Supervisor Malia Cohen is looking to rewrite the rules for Third Street as well.

The need for change is this: A voter-approved ballot measure in 2006 made it necessary for every formula retail use to go through a Conditional Use process and get approval from the Planning Commission unless it was already prohibited in a neighborhood; the new rule was written to avoid over-concentrations of formula retail in neighborhoods, however it did not define what that concentration should be.

Also, there's currently no zoning regulations that specifically deal with fast food, however there are arcane rules surrounding cafes and quick-service operations, and confusing regulations for specific retail districts regarding the combination of chain fast food alongside other formula retail.

Rodgers says that the Planning Department is working on crafting some citywide rules on formula retail, defining what it is, for a start, and creating a more specific guideline about concentrations in neighborhood commercial districts. "The Commissioners themselves are confused and asking for this," she says. The new rules may go up for a vote as soon as July.

With so many cranes in the sky building more high-rise residential, and the population of San Francisco set to rise in the coming years, what kind of city do we want to be? That remains the essential question, and it's certainly a sensitive one at a time when evictions are on the rise, and small businesses all over town are feeling squeezed by rising rents.

Sure, we all want idiosyncratic antique shops and cool local clothing makers in our shopping districts, but sometimes we want a few basic needs met within a few steps of our building, too. In areas that haven't known as much residential population in the past, like SoMa and parts of Mid- and Upper Market, going out to buy Vitamin Water and Tylenol can be a pain in the ass. Those who might reject the idea of any and all corporate stores have to consider that rents in the ground floor spaces of new buildings aren't going to be cheap, likely unaffordable to small operators, and you might rather have a 7-11 down there than nothing at all.

Twitter Says Trump's North Korea Threat Tweet Is 'Newsworthy,' Not A Violation

Photo: realDonaldTrump/Twitter

by Jay Barmann
Originally published on SFist, September 26, 2017

Twitter's Public Policy Department has made a judgement call about a tweet from President Trump that has been called a "declaration of war" by North Korea, marking perhaps the first time that a social media company has made such a call with potentially wide ranging casualty implications involving two nuclear powers.

As I discussed here yesterday, it's not that much of a stretch to see Trump's tweeted threat of Saturday, saying of "Rocket Man" Kim Jong Un and North Korea "they won't be around much longer!" as a violation of Twitter's policy against threats and harassment — especially when they are one-sided (you don't see Kim Jong Un on Twitter!).

But, no. Twitter Public Policy issued a statement late Monday — echoed on Medium by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone suggesting he may have helped craft it — responding to the public outcry, saying that internally there have always been exceptions made for tweets that are newsworthy.

THREAD: Some of you have been asking why we haven't taken down the Tweet mentioned here: https://t.co/CecwG0qHmq 1/6

— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

We hold all accounts to the same Rules, and consider a number of factors when assessing whether Tweets violate our Rules 2/6

— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

Among the considerations is "newsworthiness" and whether a Tweet is of public interest 3/6

— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

This has long been internal policy and we'll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it. We need to do better on this, and will 4/6

— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

Twitter is committed to transparency and keeping people informed about what's happening in the world 5/6

— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

We’ll continue to be guided by these fundamental principles 6/6

— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

There has been public outcry, obviously mostly concentrated on the left, about whether Trump's Twitter account should be suspended or banned, given that he so often uses it for purposes that could be construed as bullying by any other user. As the Verge notes, the above statement confirms what we've suspected all along: "Twitter’s answer... basically implies that Trump’s account will never be censored. Anything the President tweets is newsworthy, which means that none of his tweets can be pulled from the platform."

And this presents a conundrum for Twitter going forward, now that they've declared this policy. Per the Verge, "It’ll have to start deciding who else’s tweets qualify as newsworthy. It’ll also have to take this into consideration when a private individual’s tweet blows up — is that tweet suddenly newsworthy too?"

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey referred to his feelings about Trump's Twitter use last December as "complicated."

And yes, it is going to become a chicken-or-egg situation determining what is a "threat of violence" that is against policy, and what is a "newsworthy" threat of violence because the threat is coming from our President and may lead to actual, world-changing violence.

Previously: 
Is Trump's 'Declaration Of War' Tweet About North Korea Grounds For Getting His Twitter Account Suspended?

'Free Speech Week' Likely Cancelled, Milo To Give Theatrical Press Conference Blaming Berkeley

by Jay Barmann
Originally published on SFist

As we've pretty much assumed all along, the grand gesture that has been Milo Yiannopoulos's Free Speech Week appears to be little more than a gesture intended to incite a media frenzy — and if it ever was intended to be a real event, it appears to have fallen apart. One scheduled speaker Lucian Wintrich, the D.C. correspondent for far-right website Gateway Pundit, posted a live video on Twitter Thursday night (see below) in which he said that Milo and members of his staff were being "weird" and "shifty" about the entire event, and were saying as early as last week that the event would likely not happen. Wintrich publicly withdrew from the event Thursday, and as Mediaite reports, according to a source with knowledge of Milo's plans, Milo plans to hold "a theatrical press conference on Saturday in which he intends to call it off — and blame UC-Berkeley for its ‘forced cancellation.’" Sounds about right.

KQED confirms with a rep for Milo, Zachary Locompte-Gobel, that there will indeed be a press conference tomorrow. UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof tells the Chronicle that he's aware of these media reports, however the university has not heard directly from Milo or the student organization ostensibly hosting the event, the Berkeley Patriot, that Free Speech Week has been canceled.

Wintrich says he and friends were "praying" that the event was real and that it would take place, and he was looking forward to joining Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, and InfoWars crank Mike Cernovich on the stage at Free Speech Week. But he says it became clear to him that Milo, Inc. wasn't being totally forthcoming, and he says "it was made clear to me this week that this event definitely wasn’t happening, and I had to drop out — I saw no reason to lie to the public and mislead people into thinking it was happening."

WINTRICH REPORT: Berkeley Is Not Happening & Other Drama - W/ @ALI! #FreeSpeechWeek https://t.co/ozjO1JR4M3

— Lucian B. Wintrich (@lucianwintrich) September 22, 2017

As we saw this week, the big names on Yiannopoulos's alleged schedule for the four-day event, Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon, both dropped off the schedule, and then we learned that ex-Googler James Damore had never even been asked to speak, and he publicly announced he'd be sitting this out too. The Washington Post reported that commentator Heather MacDonald also hadn't been asked, though she was put on the schedule, and the same goes for conservative political scientist Charles Murray, who told the Chronicle of Higher Educationthat Milo is "a despicable asshole" and he wanted no part of this event.

Add to that the various reports about disorganization on the part of the Berkeley Patriot — an organization that essentially formed over the summer, has about 10 members according to university administrators, and some have suggested could have been created by Milo himself as means to get entry to a campus event. (The Daily Cal pointed out that, as a publication, the Berkeley Patriot has only published a handful of stories on their nascent website, and I've already wondered aloud why the Berkeley College Republicans didn't want to be a party to this, after they were the group to originally invite Milo to campus back in February.) And now Vanity Fair is calling this a "Fyre Festival for the Right" — and they report, tellingly, that "Milo Inc. would not even tell the speakers what flights it had booked, or what hotels they would be staying at, until 48 hours before the day they were scheduled to speak," claiming they wanted to avoid "sabotage" by the university.

Yiannopoulos knows well how to play the media game, and as many have thought all along, his greatest triumph here would be promoting the narrative that's already in place: The birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley, has been so corrupted by liberal thought and "social justice warriors" that they no longer support free speech, and, in fact, do everything they can to thwart it.

The real narrative is likely that Yiannopoulos has far fewer convictions than he lets on, and he's being paid — most likely by activist billionaire family the Mercers, as the Daily Cal discussedthis week and as BuzzFeed reported over the summer — to stir the pot and influence a new generation of conservatives by making these provocative gestures. Left-wing activists in Berkeley played right into his hand in February, creating a scene of chaos and destruction that led to his speaking engagement there being cancelled, and he's been thirsting for more ever since — images of antifa doing battle with flag-waving "patriots," or just vandalizing private property, being the bread and butter of the alt-right.

Let's just hope that if this thing is getting canceled, 24 hours before it was set to start, UC Berkeley sends Milo the bill for whatever preparations they've already paid for — just like SF Mayor Ed Lee recently did to the group Patriot Prayer, who single-handedly sowed chaos in San Francisco several weeks ago and made their own last-minute cancellation of a right-wing rally.

Previously: UC Kicking Down $300K For Free Speech Week, And The Schedule Chaos Continues