Bobbi Hagen and her dog, Dancer.

BY VANESSA CARR AND NINA GOODBY

Originally published on Mission Loc@l. Click here for more photos .

It’s the first of the month, and Tree is sailing around in silk slips and high heels. She’s new to the 248-room Mission Hotel, the city’s biggest single room occupancy (SRO) hotel. It’s government check day, and spirits are high.

“What do you smoke?” residents ask the former hypnotherapist and mother of two adult children, half greeting, half sizing her up. Tree’s round blue eyes, blond pixie haircut, and taste for scarves, floppy hats and the occasional rabbit fur make her look younger than her 49 years. It’s an allure she learned to trade and sell during three months of homelessness before her arrival at the Mission Hotel, she says.

Though the Mission Hotel is a place where, according to Tree, “very little is normal,” an estimated 90 percent of residents have been there for more than a year, says general manager Sam Meki. Many were homeless, and the $493 flat rate rooms and access to supportive services make the hotel, run by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, a cut above sleeping on the street.

Peace, privacy and stability can be hard to come by in some of the city’s 530 residential hotels, particularly for women, who make up 38 percent of the citywide SRO population of more than 18,000, according to a 2009 Human Services Agency study. For many, a sense of permanence remains elusive, as they cycle through an institutional circuit of “shelters, SROs, the street, jail, and sometimes residential treatment…often repeating this pattern throughout the year,” says Kelly Knight, a medical anthropologist at University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).

For those women who manage to find a quieter residential hotel, there are still issues to manage: shared bathrooms, problem neighbors and unresponsive managers. Still, some eventually make the hotels a home that they’re unlikely to leave.

There’s Kym Meadows at the Graywood Hotel, a pretty 42-year-old with bright green eyes and iridescent eyeshadow. The recent influx of men with violent criminal records in her building rattles her sense of safety and revives memories of past abuse. But she’s grateful to have a second chance at stability after unexpectedly ending up on the streets in 2004.

And there’s 43-year-old Bobbi Hagen, Meadow’s neighbor, who has been in and out of hotels since she was 17. Her time at home consists of tending to her boyfriend’s health as he battles full-blown AIDS, and trying to keep her own HIV at bay to live another year, she says. The Graywood is the most stability she’s ever experienced, she says.

Like many women living in SROs, Hagen, Meadows and Tree are recovering from troubled pasts and battle drug addictions and mental illness. More than half the women in and out of SROs have used an illegal drug in the past year, 15 percent have engaged in sex work in the past year, and 25 percent have had psychiatric hospitalizations in their lifetime, according to a 2003 study by medical researchers at UCSF.

“It’s a hard challenge for people to stabilize in hotels when they’re dealing with so many things coming at them,” says Jennifer Plummer, a women’s therapist at Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, which serves primarily local homeless and residents of the 50 SRO hotels in the Mission District. “People are very prone to being victimized in similar ways as they have in the past.”

For Meadows, the men who harass her in the Graywood are a painful reminder of all that has come before—three rapes, menacing attention from men during a stint of homelessness, and an alleged stalker who recently threatened that he was going to “get her.”

In her hotel, one man regularly jiggles the doorknob and tries to push his way into the bathroom with her. Another wallpapered the bathroom she uses with especially hardcore pornography, a cruel joke that reminded her of a traumatic childhood incident.

Meadows has lived in the Graywood in the outer Mission since 2005. The problems only began, Meadows says, about eight months ago when the hotel owner began to rent city-subsidized rooms to No Violence Alliance (NOVA), a program that provides transitional housing for ex-felons, most of whom have committed at least one violent offense.

“Now I carry pepper spray in my robe when I go to the bathroom,” says Meadows. Though she hasn’t been assaulted at the Graywood, she has reason to be wary: More than 30 percent of marginally housed and homeless women in San Francisco reported physical or sexual assault in the past year, the 2003 study from UCSF found. But women may be particularly inclined to stay in hotels, even chaotic ones, as they are 18 percent less likely to be sexually assaulted and 11 percent less likely to be physically assaulted than women who have lived on the street for less than a year.

Living with a partner offers some sense of security. Meadow’s husband keeps a red aluminum baseball bat near their bed, and he’s offered to accompany her to the bathroom with it.

Hagen, her downstairs neighbor, doesn’t like the NOVA program either. It’s brought in a lot of “wackadoos,” she says. But she has found a semblance of community on her floor, where she’s on a first name basis with most people, and is close with Meadows.

Even if she’s regularly disgusted by the pee all over the bathroom and occasionally spooked by a neighbor, Hagen’s managed to eke out a quiet existence for herself and her partner, Matthew. On good days, they enjoy cooking together in the newly installed communal kitchen on their floor. But the fear of losing the government benefits that keep her housed, and her life-saving prescriptions filled, makes her permanently on edge.

“It’s hard to deal with the stress outside my door when it’s a battlefield in here,” says Hagen, whose white-blond hair and piercing blue, kohl-rimmed eyes contrast the somber gray of the room. She cradles a tiny, skittish dog in a green sweater against her puffy white ski coat.

For years, she dealt speed in the Tenderloin, ran an escort service and was herself a working girl who shot dope.

This all stopped when Hagen was diagnosed with HIV in 2005. She also suffers from pancreatitis and says that “if the one doesn’t kill me the other will.” Her health is stable for now, but the prognosis for Matthew is poor.

“Our own well-being is like a daily job, because you can get so depressed,” she says.

Today she’s not sure how she’s going to keep Matthew hydrated. He’s been vomiting from the flu for the last three days, and the only fluids they have on hand are Kool-Aid and coffee.

Hagen plans to get a $16 tree from Kohl’s to go on top of a red Christmas drum, but she’s worried she can’t afford a gift for her 11-year-old daughter, who’s visiting next week from her grandma’s house.

It’ll be three or four days before any money comes in—she’s arranged for her government checks to go directly to the Lutheran Social Services first to pay all her bills before she gets any of the money.

“I want to make sure that my home is stable,” she says. “But that’s why I’m always broke.”

The hope she has for her life at the Graywood is “just to get a grasp on my health, work on my relationship, [find] some contentment in my life.”

Meadows also finds that despite her discomfort with neighbors in the hallways, the Graywood offers a modicum of peace and privacy as she continues on her recovery from heroin.

A small whiteboard hangs to the side of their sink, listing their daily methadone dosage schedule in blue marker.

“I would be dead if it weren’t for methadone, and certainly not living indoors,” Meadows says, fidgeting with her heart-shaped necklace.

A former hairdresser who wears her bright, rust-colored hair pulled into a loose side ponytail, Meadows lives with two cats and the husband she met when both slept on the streets of the Castro. They pay $836.36 for a spacious corner room with a rounded bay window, which she affords with her social security and disability insurance for the bipolar disorder she’s in treatment for. After bills, Meadows has $56 left over.

Compared with what she experienced living on the streets and in other hotels around the city, the Graywood seems “like the Hilton,” she says.

But compared with the Graywood , the Mission Hotel where Tree lives is a raucous dormitory. With thin walls, narrow halls, and windows that overlook a central shaft littered with trash and hypodermic needles known as “crack alley,” privacy is hard to maintain.

People are constantly knocking on Tree’s door.

“Who?” she shouts.

It could be one of many boyfriends, someone asking for a cigarette or offering some kind of proposition. How about some speed for a 40-inch television, someone asks. If the mood is right and the offer is a rock and a pretty smile, the visitor will be ushered in, Tree admits.

But this time it’s Les, one of many on-and-off boyfriends who lives next door.

“Les, baby, I’m hungry,” says Tree in a girly voice. Her only breakfast was cigarettes and orange Gatorade sipped from a goblet.

She excuses herself to follow Les and returns minutes later with a banana, tower of Ritz crackers, rectangle of cheese and can of root beer.

In the seven months she’s been there, Tree has learned how to use the many types of currency that circulate—food, drugs, sex, companionship, cigarettes, TVs, laptops, food stamps—that get whatever she doesn’t have.

“People are trading sex for shelter, sex for diapers, sex for food, sex for whatever they don’t have,” says Carola Shepard, Business and Development Manager at San Francisco SafeHouse.

The supportive services available to Mission Hotel residents help her to get by. She receives $200 a month in food stamps and her subsidized rent is just $318 a month.

But when that money runs out or is stolen from her, Tree says, “I still have to live in this hotel. I still have to eat everyday.”

Because the Mission Hotel is a non-profit, Tree is less likely to face some of the problems that keep other women on the move, which include 21-day forced evictions and accrued debt, according to Knight. But she’s not immune to other factors Knight says force women into transience, such as violence and changes in financial circumstances and partnerships.

“Women here are a commodity,” says Tree. Their role in the underground economy puts them in competition with one another—and if Tree’s experience is representative, exposes them to greater violence.

“We hear women talk so much about not trusting other women and that deep sense of isolation and loneliness,” says Laura Sheckler, outreach program coordinator for the Women’s Community Clinic.

The woman across the hall from Tree has repeatedly told her she’ll leave the hotel “in a body bag,” and one of Tree’s boyfriends punched her in the eye—both because of jealousy issues, Tree says.

“But we also see women who have each other’s backs all the time,” Sheckler adds. Most women Sheckler sees during outreach in Mission District SROs have been living in hotels, though not necessarily in the same room, for over a year. What they have in common, she says, is “almost all of them have experienced such severe amounts of trauma throughout their lifetime.”

Shotwell softball team, Frank Peña kneeling on right in the early '80s. (Courtesy of Louis Lucero)

Their jerseys said “Shotwell” in bold letters and they posed making “S” shapes with their hands. They were the kids growing up on the 1000 block of Shotwell Street in the ’80s, and it wasn’t “Shotty Block,” like kids call it now. It was the “Shotwell family”—and according to them it wasn’t a gang.

“It was a street with a bunch of really tight families,” said Tony Lucero, who grew up on the block with eight siblings.

When Lucero first met Frank Peña—the new 11-year-old on the block who was a whiz at sports and spoke English with an accent—low-rider culture and the “cholo scene” were big in the neighborhood. Only Lucero’s spit-shine charm could coax Peña’s protective mother, Olga, into letting him out to play. She was from Nicaragua, but she knew that what happened on 24th Street—the guys with headbands, the cars cruising, the girls, the drugs and alcohol—could swallow a boy up, according to family friend Ricardo “Junior” Martinez.

Thirty years later, Peña was still living with her when he was shot at Papa Potrero’s restaurant on 24th Street alongside 26-year-old Francisco “Cisco” Cornejo in September. Police believe the brawl, which started with fists not guns, was Norteño-on-Norteño gang violence.

But Peña wasn’t active in a gang, neighbors and some close to him insist. He’d beaten his demons, they said, such as selling and using crack, which led to scattered county jail stints from 1991 to 2000. He’d created a new life with a full-time job, a newborn son and a girlfriend studying to be a nurse. Kids looked up to him, and neighbors saw him as a gregarious, magnetic family man who had learned to navigate the Mission’s many worlds.

But another close friend—and police reports—indicate that Peña’s involvement with gangs, at least through the 90s, was more significant than neighbors or friends knew or let on.

In recent years, however, friends say Peña’s message to kids was to stay off the street.

“Me and Frank were the ones who stayed on the corner. We were the ones who showed the younger kids how to come up,” said Tony Echevarria, one of Peña’s best friends from childhood, of being a 30-something on the block. “[We] saw it as a special responsibility to keep our way of doing things, our legacy.”

Their way of doing things meant not looking for trouble, and definitely not letting a small argument or fight escalate.

But escalation is just what may have led to the murder of three men that weekend in September, which began with the shooting of 21-year-old Michael Sanchez two days before Peña’s murder.

According to Sergeant Mario Molina, the San Francisco Police Department’s foremost expert on Latino gangs who arrested Peña several times over the years, these kinds of shootings often start over a “personal matter”—minor insults, arguments over girls.

“If there was a turf war, we’d see more bodies,” he said of the murders.

Unraveling exactly why Peña ended up a victim of alleged gang violence may not be clear until the 19-year-old charged with this murder stands trial, but the life and death of Peña, the 41-year-old 49ers fan, offers a glimpse of how difficult escaping one’s past can be.

Karaoke for crooners at Nap's on a Friday night.

BY VANESSA CARR

Originally published as part of the MISSION NIGHTS series on Mission Loc@l.

Angel stands in a tangle of string lights with a Christmas star in his hands in the back patio of Nap’s. More than just the mustache, he’s got that Burt Reynolds je ne sais quoi.

Angel has been working the weekends at Nap’s for the last seven years. But tonight he’s tired.

“I’m an organ courier,” he explains, flashing a wall of teeth so thick and straight they must be veneers. “I pick up organs and deliver them.”

“Like, human organs?” I ask, swirling the ice in my Red Bull.

He zips down his off-white jacket to reveal a blue full-body jumpsuit with a white courier decal sewn over his heart.

The job requires a police escort, a surgeon, and a gun, he says. I picture him strutting down the highway to the scene of an accident, gun in holster, Coleman’s cooler in hand, heroic 70s theme playing. Starring Burt Reynolds.

“How much is a heart worth on the black market?” I ask.

“Enough that someone would kill me for it,” he slurs. Angel is about as easy to understand as the Godfather at a loud party, his voice a cottony shout, except the patio is quiet tonight. We’re the only ones out there.

“They’d probably take your heart, too,” I say.

He hoots. Killing someone for a carved out heart is some twisted logic, he agrees.

At 65, Angel is ready to stop working two jobs, he tells me. He served in Vietnam, too.

“Was that the first time you saw organs?” I ask, half joking.

He laughs. “No, that was Brooklyn.”

In Williamsburg, he says, where he grew up. His family, originally from Puerto Rico, moved to the Bay Area when things got too violent there.

Inside, the same fearless karaoke singer is at it again. She’s pretty, with long dark hair and bangs, her eyes closed in concentration.

“I’ll always love you. For the rest of your days,” she croons.

This is not a beginner’s karaoke song. Her voice is terrible, and the mic is about ten times louder than the track beneath it. I like her immediately.

Leaning against the bar’s padded red leather edge patched with duct tape, I order a bottle of Budweiser for three bucks. A plastic James Brown figure sits across from me like a decorated Buddha, layered with Mardi Gras beads, amid rows of dream catchers and tinsel.

On the wall is a handwritten sign: “If you allow customers to do drugs, you will be arrested.”

I want to ask the bartender about this, but he’s been so friendly all night it seems rude.

Instead I turn to the guy sitting alone on the barstool next to mine. His head is shaved to cover the balding, he’s wearing a red turtleneck, and he’s three-quarters of the way through a pitcher of watery looking beer. I should’ve known better.

“Do you come here often?” I ask, forgetting that the questions of a journalist can sound like terribly unimaginative pickup lines.

“Yeah,” he says, “My father knows Nap. They were both in Vietnam.”

Nap, short for Napoleon, is the owner of the bar—and the karaoke DJ. His booth, sectioned off by a stack of TVs and speakers, is decorated in Vietnam memorabilia: uniformed photos, an honorable discharge certificate. Seven-inch records hang overhead.

He’s singing karaoke now, his fist clenched in emotion. Crusted with sparkles, the stucco ceiling glitters down on him like a disco ball.

“Where did you come from?” my new bald friend keeps asking, forgetting I’ve already answered. I bristle slightly and he bumbles an apology. Nap sings a few more verses and he asks again. It’s time to leave, I think.

Angel is swilling a shot glass filled with whiskey at the other end of the bar.

I down the rest of my beer, and Nap winks as I walk out into the cool of Mission Street.

Originally published on Mission Loc@l.

When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger cut the entire budget for all 94 of the domestic violence shelters run by the California Department of Public Health this July, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

More women seek help for intimate partner violence when the economy is bad, shelter officials said. Now six shelters have closed statewide with others in the Bay Area on the verge as a result of the cuts, according to Adam Keigwin, chief of staff to Senator Leland Yee, who failed to restore funding in the legislature in mid-September.

In the Mission District, shelters are eliminating beds, scaling back emergency services, and thinning their staff in response to losing as much as a third of their total funding, the providers said.

“The funding cuts create undue pressure on performing this vitally important work,” said Jill Zawisza, director of program services for WOMAN Inc, a non-profit with offices in the Mission District that doesn’t receive state funding but whose fundraising efforts have been decimated by the recession.

Women put their life in danger by seeking help, she added.  “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to tell them there’s no space in shelter, that a program is not taking on any new clients, or that it has folded altogether.”

But increasingly, that’s true.

The Riley Center has eliminated six of its 54 shelter beds because of cuts. Its two shelters operate at full capacity, meaning they now turn away six people every night, Mari Alaniz the director said.

The center, which lost 15 percent of its budget with the state cuts, also recently laid off three employees after already reducing its staff to 21 from 35 three years ago.

It served a third more clients in 2008—a total of 1,360—than it had in 2007.

Alaniz attributed most of this rising caseload to the recession.

The Asian Women’s Shelter, which has lost 13 percent of its budget, has experienced a 20 percent increase in crisis calls over the past year, said Vanessa Flores, their community resource coordinator.

And the Cooperative Restraining Order Clinic saw a 13 percent increase in its caseload over the last fiscal year, during which they served 1,038 clients. They have lost just over 10% of their funding due to state cuts.

Schwarzenegger cut the $16.3 million funding helping domestic violence in an effort to close the $24 billion state budget gap. California is alone in cutting all of its domestic violence spending, according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

Two-thirds of women trying to access shelter beds in San Francisco are turned away—and 50 percent of homeless women are on the streets because of domestic violence, said Emberly Cross, coordinating attorney at the Cooperative Restraining Order Clinic in the Women’s Building.

“The risk of homicide goes up dramatically when someone is leaving,” said Cross. “If we don’t have resources to help them leave, they are forced into being homeless or going back home to the batterer. When batterers say, “If you ever leave me, I’ll kill you,’ they mean that.”

Community United Against Violence, a Mission-based organization that works mostly with queer survivors of domestic violence, lost a third of its funding as a result of the state cuts.

That means they will turn away 50 people a year seeking in-person counseling, 175 callers to their 24-hour crisis line won’t receive follow-up resources, and the number of hotel vouchers—an alternative to shelters that better serves the queer community—will be reduced, said Shawna Virago, director of the domestic violence program.

The Cooperative Restraining Order Clinic doesn’t have enough funds to fill its bilingual legal assistant position, even after cutting it back to part time.

“It absolutely compromises our ability to provide prompt bilingual legal assistance. We’ve had to rely on volunteers and staff at other agencies to meet the needs, but not as quickly,” Cross said.

“It was complete shock. [The cut] was so big, I simply had to detach until it hit me a few minutes later,” said Virago, who hasn’t seen this severe of a cut in her 13 years at Community United Against Violence.

Senator Yee, who attempted to restore the funding, once worked as a child psychologist, and saw firsthand how a violent home hurts children.

He plans to reintroduce his legislation, which lost by three votes in the last session, to restore funding to the state’s Domestic Violence Program during the next session, which could open in as few as two weeks, said Keigwin, his chief of staff.

In the meantime, organizations are looking for creative ways to fundraise in order to maintain services. The Cooperative Restraining Order Clinic, for example, hosted their first-ever fundraiser at Martuni’s bar earlier this week.

“As much as the economy has weakened, we really want to communicate that there are still free services available 24-hours a day,” said Walesa Kanarek, the outreach coordinator of La Casa de las Madres, whose 12 percent budget cut has resulted in a $300,000 deficit.

“We want survivors to know that we aren’t going anywhere.”

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Free 24-Hour Crisis Lines

Asian Women’s Shelter: (877) 751-0800

La Casa de las Madres: Adult Line (877) 503-1850, Teen Line (877) 923-0700

Community United Against Violence: (415) 777-HELP (4357)

The Riley Center: (415) 255-0165

Woman Inc: (877) 384-3578 or (415) 864-4722

Originally published on Mission Loc@l.

Don’t be surprised if someone in a white t-shirt and green wristband approaches you this Sunday in Dolores Park with a trash bag—in case you’ve forgotten yours—and a smile. “Would you mind carrying out your 24-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and what’s left of that exploded piñata rather than leaving alongside an overflowed trashcan?” they might ask.

This Sunday will be the first cleanup effort of the newly created Dolores Park Stewards, the park advocacy group SafeCleanGreen decided Wednesday night at a 40-person meeting.

The Stewards don’t want to become the new custodians of the park. Rather, they want to set an example that will transform what co-founder Gideon Kramer described as the “nobody cares” attitude he sees as responsible for the weekend aftermath reminiscent of Woodstock.

“People take you more seriously when you put your money where your mouth is,” Kramer said, who painted over all the graffiti on the park’s trashcans this weekend in under three hours.

It’s not just trash that SafeCleanGreen are fed up with. It’s also the dead grass, the renegade DJs, the unrestrained drinking and carousing.  The list goes on, depending on who you ask. But more than anything, they appear tired of airing their grievances in “endless discussion that goes nowhere.”

So, for now, the group is focusing on what everyone—they hope—can get behind: less trash in the park.

But emotions about the park run deep, which makes debate difficult to avoid, even in a meeting with a “solutions-oriented” mandate.

“I look a the park and I’m heartbroken at how dead it looks,” said Deborah Bueti, who’s lived for 18 years at what neighbors call “ground zero” and taught at nearby Everett Middle School for ten. “I’ve watched her die.”

Kramer addressed another issue that has emotional flare: recent media coverage about the park that he found over-sensationalized.

He flapped the Sept. 4 issue of the San Francisco Examiner with a bold “Prohibition in Dolores Park” headline, which he criticized for overstating the policing issue. Examiner Staff Writer Katie Worth was present at the meeting.

Local blogger Kevin Montgomery appeared at the meeting to respond to criticism about a Mission Mission blog post he wrote in late August in which he called SafeCleanGreen a “mobilized minority trying to flip the script on a beloved national treasure behind everyone’s back.”

Kramer disagreed with the implication that the group had a nefarious plan to restrict people’s access to the park.

Montgomery, who says he likes how the park is right now except for the trash and lack of bathrooms, was the person who suggested handing out bags as a reminder not to litter.

His appearance, though not entirely conciliatory, restored some civility to what has become a contentious online debate.

“Kevin,” Kramer said, “This is totally open. I want maximum buy in.”

The Dolores Park Stewards will meet this Sunday at 2 p.m.

Originally published on Mission Loc@l.

When a police command van started showing up on weekends in Dolores Park this spring, some park goers saw it as a crackdown on fun. For others, it gave hope that their many concerns — from the carpet of cigarette butts to the dogs crashing their picnics, and sound systems rattling their cupboards — might finally be addressed.

If the tenor of online discussions is any indication, the park’s many territories seem to be embattled in some kind of culture war.

“They are down on dogs, big events, drinking and drugs — things that absolutely make Dolores Park the bastion of freedom and fun so many of us know and love,” the Mission Mission blog wrote this weekend about SafeCleanGreen, a neighborhood advocacy group that wants to change the “anything goes” attitude in the park.

One reader responded: “It doesn’t matter if it’s drunk hipsters trashing [Dolores Park] or drunk Latinos from El Trebol pissing up your street. When you’re invested in your neighborhood, it gets a little tiring seeing people trash it and the city not doing anything about it.”

But some residents wonder if the whole debate needs a reality check. What most residents want is simple: less trash, more green grass, less amplified noise, and more of a voice in what’s going on, said Robert Brust of the Dolores Park View blog.

“This is not scary, radical stuff,” said Brust, who lives a block away from the park and belongs to several neighborhood groups. Even the police are inclined to go easier than some would like, handing out warnings rather than tickets for breaking the rules.

At an Aug. 7 meeting in District 8 Supervisor Bevan Dufty’s office, two dozen residents — convened by SafeCleanGreen co-founder Gideon Kramer — met with Mission Police Captain Stephen Tacchini and Dolores Park Manager Bob Palacio.

Trash, noise and big events were among the group’s biggest concerns, according to Brust, who was present. But Dufty, Palacio and Tacchini came prepared with some answers.

Starting Aug. 31, Palacio said, a team of four additional gardeners will be assigned to Dolores for the next six weeks, tasked with planting two new flowerbeds, repairing broken sprinkler heads, and helping with general maintenance. The city will also add 16 concrete trashcans and a no-parking zone on the adjoining curb to make removal easier, as well as two signs clearly posting the park’s rules.

In addition, the city has revised its permit policy, restricting the number of large events to one per weekend and no more than two per month. According to neighbors, events with amplified sound have been happening nearly every weekend.

These are intended as short-term solutions, said Dufty’s legislative aide Nicolas King. The larger infrastructure problems will be addressed in the $15 million renovation of the park that will include a new playground, re-grading, a new irrigation system, and better bathrooms. Planning will begin Oct. 16 and construction will continue through the end of 2012, according to the most recent project status report.

Addressing residents’ concerns about law enforcement, Captain Tacchini detailed current efforts to station a command van with bicycle patrol officers on weekends — though some worried this sent too aggressive of a message.

The current enforcement plan is to emphasize education over citation, Mission Police Department’s street patrol sergeant Omar Bueno told Mission Loc@l. And according to what Captain Tacchini said at the meeting, limited resources and more pressing law enforcement priorities mean this isn’t going to change anytime soon, said King.

While the city is allocating more resources to park cleanup, it cannot take on the litter problem alone.

“[The city] could decide to pick up trash [at Dolores Park] every hour, but it would be really, really expensive,” said King.

Broke-Ass Stuart, the author of a blog and book about living cheaply in San Francisco, said that park users need to take the litter issue into their own hands.

“If it weren’t for all the trash,” Stuart said, “the cops wouldn’t be tripping.”

Indeed, many residents say they wouldn’t have a problem with people drinking if it didn’t result in so much garbage.

Stuart published a series on his website about Dolores Park etiquette that suggests a few basic rules: Clean up after yourself, watch and clean up after your dog, be careful with flying objects, watch your step, learn to share, and … don’t ask for sip.

“When we leave here today, the only trace will be ice,” said Stuart, as he helped friends set up a sangria competition table on a recent Sunday.

He suggested starting a positive “Love Your City, Love Your Park” campaign. It could be as simple as pointing out that empty beer bottles make the perfect ashtrays and brown drinking bags are their own mini trash receptacles, he said.

Stuart is not alone in thinking that addressing the litter problem should be at the core of citizen action in the park.

Paula Ginsberg, a loose SafeGreenClean member who teaches special education at Everett Middle School and who has lived in the Dolores Park area for more than 30 years, said that as an “aging hippie” and serious environmentalist, trash is one of her primary concerns.

Ginsberg wants to mobilize nearby students to help paint signs reminding park goers what it means to be a good citizen.

And she’s already had some experience. It’s her students at Everett who are responsible for the signs on napkin dispensers in cafes reminding that napkins come from trees, so take only what you need.

She and Kramer — who has been a longtime volunteer with local school garden programs — worked together with students at Everett to make the blue “Litter Me Not” signs, emblazoned with a forget-me-not flower, that are still posted around the neighborhood.

The biggest lesson the signs offer, she says, is to the kids, who “are litterbugs themselves when they start.”

Nancy Gonzalez Madynski, the chairperson for Friends of the Dolores Park Playground who has been coming to the park since she was young, loves the idea of creative signs made by kids.

Gonzalez Madynski said that just this week she collected two empty plastic bottles full of cigarette butts in the swing set area of the playground alone.

This makes her particularly enthusiastic about her fellow steering committee member’s idea for kids to decorate Altoid boxes for smokers as a reminder that they shouldn’t throw their butts in the sand. She also suggested having a volunteer “clean team” to hand out trash bags to picnickers.

There are already several groups who regularly clean up the park on a volunteer basis.

Dolores Park Dogs gets together once a month for coffee, donuts and communal dog poop cleanup, according to longtime member and 31-year Dolores Park neighbor Linsday Kefauver.

Broke-Ass Stuart say Curtis “the crème brûlée guy,” who operates a mobile crème brûlée cart, has also organized park cleanup days.

And if last Sunday was any indication, the city’s cleanup crews could use some help. The morning was chilly and gray, but it was clear from the amount of garbage still around that the day before had been a scorcher.

Brust stood in a circle of neighbors and their dogs including his pug, Cartman. Nearby, a Chihuahua fiendishly licked a discarded Starbucks cup.

Brust explained that he hopes a “permanent stewardship group” can emerge from the existing patchwork of park advocates.

Supervisor Dufty said he wants such a coalition to meet regularly so that he can address issues in a timely fashion rather than once a year when residents are in crisis.

“It was almost like he was calling us to the carpet,” said Brust.

A Guide to Dolores Park Neighborhood Groups
As it stands, there is no single umbrella organization representing a broad coalition of park advocacy groups. Instead, there is a loose collection of neighborhood groups based on geography and/or special interests. The short descriptions come from their websites:

Dolores Heights Improvement Club is a volunteer residential neighborhood association that works to maintain and enhance the neighborhood’s appearance, safety, communication, and value. Though Dolores Heights centers on the top of the hill at Sanchez and 21st streets, their official boundaries are Dolores, 22nd, 18th, and Castro streets. www.doloresheights.org
Contact: dhic123@gmail.com
Meets: Oct.17 block party, 1-3pm, Sanchez between Hill and 21st streets.

Dolores Park Dogs is a group of dog walkers at Dolores Park who advocate for off-leash dog recreation and host park cleanups on the first Saturday of the month. They are part of an umbrella group, San Francisco Dog Owners Groups (SFDOG). www.sfdogs.org
Contact: lkefauver@sbcglobal.net
Meets: Sept. 5 cleanup, 9:30-11am, Dolores Park.

Friends of Dolores Park Playground is a volunteer community organization that advocates for clean and safe playgrounds. The group has raised $3 million in private and city funds for a new playground that will start construction in spring 2010. They also sponsor social and educational events every other month at the playground. www.friendsofdolorespark.org
Contact: doloresparkplayground@gmail.com
Event: Music at the playground (social event), Sept. 12, 11 a.m.-Noon.

Liberty Hill Neighborhood Association welcomes members who live or own businesses in the neighborhood bounded by 20th and 22nd streets to the north and south, and Mission and Church Streets to the east and west. libertyhillsf.org
Meets: Sept. 14, 6pm.

Mission Dolores Neighborhood Association helps facilitate completion of the historic survey work of the Mission Dolores Neighborhood and then have appropriate areas registered as official historic districts. Their region is bounded by Valencia, 20th, Sanchez, and Market streets, including properties along the west side of Church between 18th and 20th streets and the south side of 20th Street between Church and Dolores streets. www.missiondna.org
Contact: missiondna@earthlink.net
Meets: Sept. 9, 6:30pm, Dolores Park Church (Dolores Park not on the agenda).

SafeCleanGreen is a group of renters, owners and merchants of the Dolores Park/Mission Dolores neighborhood, brought together in common concern about serious safety and health issues in the community, and the desire to improve the quality of life for all residents. They define their neighborhood area as bounded by Church, Dolores, Market, and 20th streets. www.safecleangreen.com
Contact: safecleangreen@bigfoot.com
Meets: Sept. 16, 7pm, 65 Dorland St., fourth fl. (Please RSVP to gykramer@earthlink.net as space is limited.)

Originally published on the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Noise Blog.

With feral vocals, shattering guitar riffs, and a collection of microtonal keyboards ordered off of a Lebanese Web site, Rainbow Arabia combines Middle Eastern beats and modes with the vibrant energy of Los Angeles’ experimental punk/dance scene. The result is a hypnotic neo-tribal, hipster-dub sound that falls somewhere in the vicinity of post-punk spiritualists Gang Gang Dance and These Are Powers. Rainbow Arabia plays at Cellspace on Aug. 16 before embarking on a cross-country tour with Gangi and Hecuba in October.

The band is composed of Danny and Tiffany Preston, both 36. The husband and wife duo were married for more than three years before they started playing music together and recording in their basement in early 2008. Before Rainbow Arabia, Danny played in punk-dub outfit Future Pigeon and Tiffany in Licorice Piglet.

“It’s definitely tested us, being in a band together. But the great thing is that when things are going really well, you get to share it together,” Tiffany told the Guardian.

Their interest in Middle Eastern music evolved separately. For Danny, it was the obscure Arabic songs from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that he heard via Seattle record label Sublime Frequencies – and later, the line of microtonal keyboards with Middle Eastern beat programming capabilities that he found online. For Tiffany, it was a Middle Eastern guitar class she took as part of a formal musical training. Their interests converged, and Rainbow Arabia was born.

For an American band so inspired by the musical traditions of the Middle East, Rainbow Arabia’s choice of artwork is curiously charged – and just flippant enough to risk allegations of hipster vacuity. Their main press photo, for example, showcases the duo in a mock-”terrorist” pose, with pseudo-desert garb, fake machine guns, and a rainbow bandoleer. The cover art for their new EP, The Basta (Tiny Man/Manimal Vinyl), due to be released Aug. 23, is a drawing of a man with strong features, a dark beard, and a rainbow-hued turban.

“Our desire to do Middle Eastern music really has nothing to do with politics, but the love of the music,” said Tiffany when asked about the intentions behind the artwork. “I’m drawn to these strong symbols that do have political charge. Sometimes with our music, we do like to push it, especially with our video,” she added, referring to the music video from which their press photo was drawn, which will be released on Pitchfork in the next few weeks.

“There were some things I wanted to do that were really crossing the line that we didn’t end up doing,” she continued. “It’s not meant to be offensive.”

The Prestons talk passionately about LA’s emerging “anti-scene scene,” as they call it jokingly, which consists of a loosely-knit group of musical peers – bands such as Lucky Dragons and Gangi, as well as Manimal Vinyl label-mates Hecuba, We Are the World, and Weave!.

“I’ve lived in LA forever and I really feel something happening down here that I’ve never felt, ever,” Danny said. “For LA, we get people to dance – because people do not dance here at all. They just stand. It’s a tough crowd here, actually. There seems to be an anti-scene of people who are freer to dance.”

One thing that stands out about their corner of the city’s music scene, the twosome said, is that each act has a unique sound and voice, and yet there is cohesion. “It’s the same message, but totally different music,” explained Tiffany.

“Everyone is being so themselves,” Danny observed. “Just pure what they are.”

From the magazine spread, photo by Greg Harris.

BY VANESSA CARR

Originally published in the Spring 2009 issue of 65 Degree Magazine.

It’s lunchtime and raining in downtown San Francisco, yet the white-clothed outdoor tables of Belden Place are filling quickly. With eight restaurants crowded beneath strings of lights and taut red awnings, this small alley feels more old-town Italy than Financial District hustle.

Like in any small town, there’s one man on Belden Place whom everyone seems to know: Pino Spinoso. He can’t walk two paces without shouting a greeting in English or Italian. And it’s no wonder—Spinoso owns three of the alley’s restaurants: Café Tiramisu, Brindisi Cucina di Mare, and Belden Taverna.

Spinoso is the classic Italian restaurateur: gregarious, dark-suited, broad, raised in kitchens, a wine lover. According to Spinoso, his staff are “friends,” he’s a “leader—not a boss,” and a 16-hour day is “a short one.”

“It’s hard work, but the party comes to you,” he says.

Just shy of 50, Spinoso grew up in Venosa, a land-locked town located on the ankle of Italy’s proverbial boot. With two parents in the restaurant business, he and his siblings grew up “with the culture of food and wine in their blood and DNA.”

But forget any romantic idea of sipping sauce from Grandma’s wooden spoon: Spinoso learned to cook working long hours alongside his parents in the family restaurant.

“They put a chain on me in the kitchen,” he jokes.

At 12, his family immigrated to Düsseldorf, Germany, where he encountered the truly wealthy for the first time in the restaurants where he cooked. Spinoso cultivated his culinary talent through his teenage years, and before long patrons started returning for his creations, specifically. By 18, he had started his own restaurant in partnership with an uncle.

Despite these early successes, Spinoso started to feel like a prisoner in Düsseldorf: “I’m going to die in this kitchen here,” he thought to himself.

His first step toward freedom, paradoxically, was reporting for mandatory military service in Italy as a paratrooper. For his last six months, he was stationed in North Carolina.

“That is where I fell in love with the American way of doing things,” Pino said.

After the military, Spinoso started working on cruise ships—as chef, bell captain, whatever was offered. For the next seven years, he traveled the world by sea—the Suez Canal, South Africa, New Zealand, the Black Sea—before returning to the U.S.

It was in San Francisco that Spinoso opened his first U.S. restaurant, Caffè Macaroni, a 13-seater “the size of a shoebox.” There he cooked an unconventional menu featuring horse meat and rabbit, rode his scooter daily to the market for fresh produce, and eventually hosted guests like Francis Ford Coppola, George H. W. Bush, and Pat Conroy.

Today Spinoso owns six restaurants; four in San Francisco and one in both Burlingame and Bangkok, Thailand. He lives in San Francisco with his wife of 20 years, Joelle—originally from the Monterey Bay Area—and his 13-year old daughter, Allegra.

Watching Spinoso greet champagne-sipping businessmen during lunch, it’s hard to imagine that just twenty years ago the alley was full of garbage and car parts, and was still open to traffic. He dragged the first table into the street on Café Tiramisu’s opening day in 1990 because the alley’s brick walls and quality of light reminded him of Rome. But the likeness between the two cities is greater than brick and light.

“An old Italian man once told me, ‘San Francisco is just like Italy,’” Spinoso recounts. “‘You throw a seed in the floor and it will grow—you don’t have to do anything. The seafood, the vegetables, the meat—no other city in the U.S. has done so well as San Francisco.”

Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle on 11/23/08.

Originally aired on PBS, “Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens” turns the camera on the famed photographer who has taken many of the defining celebrity portraits of the past 40 years. Filmed by her sister Barbara, this loving tribute to Leibovitz foregrounds her photographic work and exceptional career rather than the details of her personal life – which all too often dominate the stories of female artists.

The film weaves archival footage – including spectacular scenes at Rolling Stone magazine from the 1970s – and interviews with Leibovitz’s editors, art critics, family members and some of her celebrity subjects, including Hillary Clinton, Whoopi Goldberg, Demi Moore, Yoko Ono, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Patti Smith.

Leibovitz’s stunning photographs continuously click through the narrative, tracing her evolution from late-’60s San Francisco art student shooting protest photos in black and white to big-budget metteur en scene re-creating scenes from fairy tales in the most surreal Technicolor.

The greatest pleasure of this film is going with Leibovitz on some of her most spectacular shoots – including one at the Palace of Versailles – to witness the tremendous visual gap between the reality of her sets and the beauty that she commits to film. It is here that the depth of Leibovitz’s genius comes through most strikingly.

BY VANESSA CARR

Originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian 10/29/08 print edition.

The scene along a quiet, dead-end road in Lathrop — just 90 minutes east of San Francisco — is classically pastoral: a cloudless sky, a few small ranch houses scattered among small plots of farmland, a tractor humming in the distance.

But thanks to Olivera Egg Farm and its 700,000 chickens, country life is not all sunshine and butterflies. With a quick turn of the wind, the pleasant breeze suddenly sours to the sickening, fetid stench of ammonia from the nearby “lagoon” — a 16.5-acre cesspool of chicken manure that lies 370 feet from the nearest house.

“It takes your breath away,” said Janice Magaoay, who has lived in a house neighboring the egg farm since the early 1970s. Magaoay is one of 10 residents who filed a civil lawsuit against Olivera in US District Court last week. Led by a legal team from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the lawsuit alleges that Olivera has been emitting up to 18 times the lawful amount of toxic ammonia gas without reporting it — a violation that could cost the farm a maximum of $32,500 per day in penalties.

The lawsuit against Olivera — whose owner, Edward Olivera, did not return our calls for comment — is one of a constellation of HSUS-led claims against the egg industry that tie into California’s Proposition 2. If passed, Prop. 2 would ban the use of farm animal confinement methods that do not allow animals to stand up, lie down, turn around, and fully extend their limbs. Facilities like Olivera, which currently keeps only one of its 12 active hen houses cage-free, would have to thin their flocks significantly, said San Joaquin County Environmental Health Department program coordinator Robert McClellon.

Swarming with seagulls and flies, Olivera’s primary manure lagoon and adjacent overflow pond has a total volume equivalent to nearly 120 Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to company records filed with local environmental regulators. Despite its close proximity to a residential street with kids, the lagoon has no solid fence around it — perhaps because the unbearable stench acts as its own repellent.

Thirty-year resident Larry Yepez, 60, a retired firefighter and plaintiff in the case against Olivera, has passed by the lagoon on his jogging route for many years.

“I used to carry a towel around my face to keep the smell out of my nostrils,” Yepez told the Guardian. “There were times when there must have been massive kill-offs because there were carcasses of dead chickens everywhere. It got to a point where I said, ‘I don’t think this is very healthy,’ so I started running away from that area.”

Ten-year resident and plaintiff Gloria Avila, 60, often works outside growing produce for farmers markets in San Francisco. On some days, the ammonia is so strong she can barely open her eyes and has trouble breathing.

“It’s very, very bad,” she repeats, grimacing, an open palm pressed against her chest.

She is not alone; the plaintiffs allege that their numerous health conditions — upper-respiratory problems, nausea, chest pains, as well as sinus, throat, and eye irritations — could be the result of ammonia exposure.

Nearby, a box of a dark purple fruit sitting on Avila’s porch crawls with a thick blanket of flies — another major issue for Olivera’s neighbors, who say the flies bite.

“We are told that because we live in an agricultural farm community, we have to accept it,” Larry Yepez said.

Some local residents feel the odor comes with the territory. “The egg farm has been there a long time,” said Jerry West, a 15-year resident. “If you move out here, you should expect it.”

Olivera has contributed $12,000 to support the No on 2 campaign, Californians for Safe Food, which is primarily funded by The United Egg Producers, a trade association of 250-plus of the country’s big egg producers — Olivera among them. The campaign argues that Prop. 2 poses a threat to public health by making eggs less safe, but it declined comment on the lawsuit against Olivera.

“Prop. 2 opponents have as little concern for the neighbors whose lives they are destroying with their pollution as they do for human health and animal welfare,” Yes on Prop. 2 campaign manager Jennifer Fearing responds. She describes their claims about food safety as “scare tactics” and “the height of hypocrisy.”

But thanks to Olivera Egg Farm and its 700,000 chickens, country life is not all sunshine and butterflies. With a quick turn of the wind, the pleasant breeze suddenly sours to the sickening, fetid stench of ammonia from the nearby “lagoon” — a 16.5-acre cesspool of chicken manure that lies 370 feet from the nearest house. <!–more–>

“It takes your breath away,” said Janice Magaoay, who has lived in a house neighboring the egg farm since the early 1970s. Magaoay is one of 10 residents who filed a civil lawsuit against Olivera in US District Court last week. Led by a legal team from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the lawsuit alleges that Olivera has been emitting up to 18 times the lawful amount of toxic ammonia gas without reporting it — a violation that could cost the farm a maximum of $32,500 per day in penalties.

The lawsuit against Olivera — whose owner, Edward Olivera, did not return our calls for comment — is one of a constellation of HSUS-led claims against the egg industry that tie into California’s Proposition 2. If passed, Prop. 2 would ban the use of farm animal confinement methods that do not allow animals to stand up, lie down, turn around, and fully extend their limbs. Facilities like Olivera, which currently keeps only one of its 12 active hen houses cage-free, would have to thin their flocks significantly, said San Joaquin County Environmental Health Department program coordinator Robert McClellon.

Swarming with seagulls and flies, Olivera’s primary manure lagoon and adjacent overflow pond has a total volume equivalent to nearly 120 Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to company records filed with local environmental regulators.

Despite its close proximity to a residential street with kids, the lagoon has no solid fence around it — perhaps because the unbearable stench acts as its own repellent. Thirty-year resident Larry Yepez, 60, a retired firefighter and plaintiff in the case against Olivera, has passed by the lagoon on his jogging route for many years.

“I used to carry a towel around my face to keep the smell out of my nostrils,” Yepez told the <em>Guardian</em>. “There were times when there must have been massive kill-offs because there were carcasses of dead chickens everywhere. It got to a point where I said, ‘I don’t think this is very healthy,’ so I started running away from that area.”

Ten-year resident and plaintiff Gloria Avila, 60, often works outside growing produce for farmers markets in San Francisco. On some days, the ammonia is so strong she can barely open her eyes and has trouble breathing.

“It’s very, very bad,” she repeats, grimacing, an open palm pressed against her chest.

She is not alone; the plaintiffs allege that their numerous health conditions — upper-respiratory problems, nausea, chest pains, as well as sinus, throat, and eye irritations — could be the result of ammonia exposure.

Nearby, a box of a dark purple fruit sitting on Avila’s porch crawls with a thick blanket of flies — another major issue for Olivera’s neighbors, who say the flies bite.

“We are told that because we live in an agricultural farm community, we have to accept it,” Larry Yepez said.

Some local residents feel the odor comes with the territory.

“The egg farm has been there a long time,” said Jerry West, a 15-year resident. “If you move out here, you should expect it.”

Olivera has contributed $12,000 to support the No on 2 campaign, Californians for Safe Food, which is primarily funded by The United Egg Producers, a trade association of 250-plus of the country’s big egg producers — Olivera among them. The campaign argues that Prop. 2 poses a threat to public health by making eggs less safe, but it declined comment on the lawsuit against Olivera.

“Prop. 2 opponents have as little concern for the neighbors whose lives they are destroying with their pollution as they do for human health and animal welfare,” Yes on Prop. 2 campaign manager Jennifer Fearing responds. She describes their claims about food safety as “scare tactics” and “the height of hypocrisy.”