Researching the circumstances around Patty’s murder brought me back to our old stomping grounds. The Marina District was Patty’s neighborhood, but neither one of us felt comfortable there. The people were too snooty, parents and kids alike. They were wealthy and we were, in comparison, poor. I high tailed it out of there every day after the school bell rang, preferring to slum around Russian Hill, the working class neighborhood where my mother had landed and where our apartment served as an unsupervised playground.
Don’t get me wrong, the Marina District had its charms. The Palace of Fine Arts housed the Exploratorium, an interactive museum where you could goof off all day, batting a beach ball balanced on a blast of air, or stumbling around a house with slanted floors painted to appear flat. You felt history tapping your shoulder walking its streets. Catty corner to our junior high sat Original Joe’s, a legendary Italian eatery. DiMaggio and Sinatra were regulars in its heyday in the 50s. Black and white glossies of movie stars lined the walls, just above eye line, so you had to tilt your head up to see them. You might have been in church gazing up at the crucifix.
Patty and I used to start each school day in the Marina district, and if we didn’t end up in the Fillmore district, we’d inevitably land in the spot where city government resided. Once there we happily puttered around, everything we needed within a mile radius, its circle point being the Strand Theater. Three movies for a dollar. Need I say more?
The Civic Center from the aughts on was a picture in contrasts. It gave me whiplash walking past. Back in 1975 it was far from the sparkling gentrified center of all things high culture. Sure, it was home to the opera house. But it, like the rest of the major buildings, appeared grungy after more than forty years of neglect. Civic Center Plaza — the golden pate of city hall’s rotunda at its center — looked nothing like it did back in the day. Sure it was now as then flanked by rows of chugging fountains in a pool gleaming with pennies. And City Hall had a few more coats of paints. Otherwise it looked completely different. At my last visit in 2017 the turf surrounding the pool was a spotless vision of green; nothing like it was in the 70s, no longer covered in litter, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, take-out cups, the odd hypodermic. Back then the homeless camped out — vets mostly — and were lumped together with the hippies as undesirables. It has clearly cleaned up since Patty and I slummed around in the 70s. Little by little the homeless have gotten shunted further up Larkin Street and away from Market, farther from the tech start ups and hipster cafes.
These days on the south side of Larkin a psychedelic dragon shod in high top sneakers guards the door to the Asian Art Museum. On the other side, a row of tents hugs an abandoned building. Three years back I was headed to the library when I made a sidewards glance through a slit in a blue tarp functioning as a simple lean to edged against a wall. A woman was fumbling to inject herself in the crook of her arm. The odor of urine was strong enough to burn your eyes, and make you slam shut your mouth, to persuade you to hold your breathe. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or more accurately, move up the street. Still, I think about Patty every time I go through that area. She haunts it.
