#emmawatt

The current exhibit at the Frye Art Museum - a collection of late 19th century graphic prints from the journal Pan, in particular a series of realist illustrations of the urban poor during of the Industrial Revolution.

Emma Watt

Emma Watt

Choosing Pioneer Square might have been cheating a little bit.   After all, Pioneer Square is right under the Central District, what you find if you try to walk along a busy road past businesses with bars on the windows to reach the mountains and the sky.  They are both traditionally alternative cultural spaces, the CD sometimes subtitled "Africatown", Pioneer Square blending into the ID, with its crowded dim sum places and its totem pole, quietly carrying an urban legend about American Indians getting a little bit of revenge, just once.   I noticed that the stretch along 3rd leading to the tunnel has patches of pee smell, and some of the cheapest food and coffee places in the city.   It's just blocks away from some of the swankiest art galleries, all in the shadow of city's stadiums.  It's one of the few places where you must see our city's homeless population, gathered outside of bus stops and on patches of grass.  Predominantly male, predominantly people of color.  Wrapped in layers, waiting. It feels like their neighborhood, waiting outside the Mission food bank.   And as I sit in my apartment, and I hear children playing in the park, I wonder: is Pioneer Square really anybody's home?

I grew up in small town New Hampshire, just a little too far from Boston to be considered the suburbs.  For me, gentrification isn't something I've watched my whole life.  It's something new, something I've stepped into with my move to the big city, slipped into my pocket along with my Orca card.  But what I do bring with me, what is deeply rooted, is a sense of the value of place, and of continuity.  Looking out the window when I drive home, seeing the neighbors' barn window, decorated and re-decorated for each and every minor holiday, the graveyard by my best friend's house where we played as children, or the tree that changes color on October 1, just so - those continuities give me peace.  Home should be a human right.  And gentrification, at its worst, is the taking of home for some people, to create a new kind of home for more privileged others.