Map Library

Historical Map: 1967 San Francisco Muni Rapid Transit Plan

I’m ever so slightly in love with this simple little map showing proposed rapid transit lines in San Francisco. There’s some lovely texture for the parkland, a nice vignetted effect for the coastline, and some great mid-century typography as well – all rather delightful! 

There’s a great information hierarchy as well, with buses being thin light blue lines, then trolley buses slightly thicker brown lines. Cable cars are shown by thin black lines that still appear visually stronger than trolley buses, and the proposed lines are unmissable thick black lines with stations clearly shown. 

There’s even a lovely little compass rose – it’s just a shame that this fold-out map wasn’t opened fully before being scanned, as a large section is hidden from view in the centre of the map.

Our rating: A great example of a map doing sterling work with a judicious use of just a few colours, combined with a good information hierarchy. Four stars!

Historical Map: BART System Map and Planned Extensions, March 1, 1989

Here’s a rather charming illustrated map showing the Bay Area’s BART commuter rail system as it looked in early 1989, plus a glimpse into the future as it was envisioned at the time. I particularly like the little details in this map – drawn by Art Richardson of BART’s “Documentation Division” back in 1983, it would seem – all the bridges are drawn accurately, and the skylines of San Francisco and Oakland are also well rendered. Look at the cute little Ferry Building and Transamerica Pyramid!

Some of it is quite familiar – the line to SFO (though San Bruno was named “Tanforan”) and the Warm Springs/Milpitas extension, for example – but some of it is far less so. A line from Walnut Creek directly down to West Dublin/Pleasanton? An extension past Richmond all the way to Crockett? Or continuing from Concord past Pittsburg out to East Antioch? BART were definitely dreaming big back in the late 1980s.

An in-progress primer on gayborhoods, gentrification and radical queer resistance. 

“Housing is a Queer Issue” Queer to the Left poster.  

Queer to the Left is a Chicago-based multi-racial group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people committed to working in coalition with queers and non-queers to promote economic, gender, racial, and sexual justice. Our current work focuses on building affordable housing and promoting fair community development that does not undermine important community institutions

“A Map of Polk Street Gentrification” Gay Shame SF poster. 

GAY SHAME is a Virus in the System. We are committed to a queer extravaganza that brings direct action to astounding levels of theatricality. We will not be satisfied with a commercialized gay identity that denies the intrinsic links between queer struggle and challenging power. 

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The End of San Francisco

150: A few months earlier, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal had approached Gay Shame to do an interview. He had seen some of our wheatpastes about gentrification on Polk Street. Of course we were skeptical, but we made a consensus decision to go through with it – it’s not like anyone else was going to be talking critically about gentrification in the Wall Street Journal, make we could at least get in a good quote or two. I volunteered to do the interview, since I was living on Polk Street myself and knew the most about it. I put together a modified business outfit complete with a frosted asymmetrical mullet and smeared lipstick, and gave a detailed description of the gentrification and its effects.

152…the end of San Francisco as a place where marginalized queers could try to figure out a way to cope. I was talking about Polk Street, one of the last remaining public spaces for homeless youth, hustlers, trans women, street queens, drug addicts, seniors on disability, and migrants of all types, but fast becoming a hot destination for fashionistas and office drones to sip green apple martinis. The Wall Street Journal didn’t exactly talk about this form of ethnic cleansing – they decided Gay Shame was fighting for the neighborhood’s “gritty ambience.” But the article did reveal that Larkin Street Youth Services hired out the kids in their shelter to plant palm trees in front of the architecture firm spearheading the gentrification, at the preposterous rate of six dollars a day. And it reprinted the WANTED poster we’d made for the head of that architecture firm.

Lower Polk Neighbors [Association] is allegedly an organization striving for neighborhood “beautification” and “cleanliness”, but is actually a pro-gentrification attack squad that works with the police to rid neighborhood streets and businesses of “undesirables,” i.e. hookers, hustlers, drug addicts, homeless people, trannies, needle exchange services, working class queers and other social deviants. Lower Polk Neighbors claims to be open to all, but primarily consists of wealthy property and business owners, slumlords, developers, bureaucrats, robber barons, police officers and vigilante social purists.

Christina B. Hanhardt’s 2004 Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence 

Since the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods. During the same time, policymakers and private developers declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for “safe space” have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines.

Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.

Flag Wars (2003) “is a poignant and very personal look at a community in Columbus, Ohio, undergoing gentrification. What happens when gay white homebuyers move into a working-class black neighborhood?”

Also recommending QUEER (IN)JUSTICE: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (2011) by Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, Kay Whitlock

A groundbreaking work that turns a “queer eye” on the criminal legal system

In March 2003-three decades after Stonewall-police stormed the Power Plant, a private Detroit club frequented by African American LGBT people. Over 350 people were handcuffed and subjected to homophobic slurs. Some were hit on the head and back; others were slammed into walls. Their supposed crime was later chalked up to a bizarre infraction: “loitering inside a building.” Three years earlier, Freddie Mason, a thirty-one-year-old Black gay man was arrested after a verbal altercation with his landlord, and then anally raped with a billy club covered in cleaning liquid by a Chicago police officer. Bernina Mata, a Latina, was sentenced to death on the theory that being a “hardcore lesbian” caused her to kill. A Tennessee police officer’s brutal beating of Duanna Johnson, a Black transgender woman, was even caught on camera. Within a year, she was dead-the third African American transgender woman in Memphis in three years whose murder remains unresolved. Events such as these illuminate a long shadow of criminalization of LGBT people in America.

Remember back in August when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) asked for the public’s input on where future subways in the city might run by means of an interactive “draw a subway map” tool? 

Well, thy’ve just released the collated results of that survey – wich had some 2,600 respondents – as a heat map, and the results are certainly definitive. It would seem that almost everyone wants a subway line along the length of Geary Boulevard, with another major “crosstown” connection running south along 19th Avenue. An extension of the Central Subway to Fort Mason also seems popular, as is – if you combined all the disparate routes into one – a second Transbay Tube. 

Though these corridors have been identified, there’s still a lot more planning and funding work to be done before any concrete plans start to take shape. Still, an interesting conclusion to this little public outreach exercise! There’s also an online GIS-based version of this map showing all of the submitted ideas, but it takes forever to load all 2,600 of them!