Mapping

Site Location:

The site we are working at is located at the crossroads of Turk and Taylor streets in the Tenderloin, an impoverished neighborhood in downtown San Francisco.

The Tenderloin comprises thirty blocks in an area of less than half a square mile with little open space other than streets and sidewalks. The elements that made up most of the urban fabric were residential hotels, a few apartment buildings, and tightly packed storefronts.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Tenderloin became the first stop for young gender and sexually nonconforming people who arrived in the city. They were often escaping oppressive social environments and harassment elsewhere. Many of them engaged in sex work as a means of survival and found shelter in rooming houses. These marginalized residents’ engagement with the Tenderloin’s physical environment contributed to beginning a new phase in gay, lesbian, and transgender politics and organizing.

The SROs, or single occupancy hotels, that housed many of the newcomers did not have kitchens or proper meeting spaces such as lobbies. Consequently, residents relied on other parts of the Tenderloin’s urban economy for food and socializing. This contributed to the “domestication” of the sidewalks as spaces for socializing and coming out in the sense of openly performing queer subject positions and creating kinship networks.

In 1911, politicians in San Francisco tried to circumvent the anti-sex-traffficking bill, the Mann Act that Congress had passed in 1910. San Francisco legalized prostitution with the condition that sex workers should be screened for disease.

A Trans Network

The Tenderloin and the Trans District

In 1913, however, California passed the Red Light Abatement Act, declaring brothels public nuisances granting citizens the right to sue the owner of any building housing prostitution. In San Francisco, sex work in the Barbary Coast went underground and moved to St. Ann’s Valley, which became known as the “New Uptown Tenderloin.”

Source: At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor

El Rosa

At the heart of the Tenderloin, an estimated 600 transgender residents lived in a dozen SROs known as queen’s hotels, including the El Rosa and the building at Turk and Taylor. Turk street was the main street where they would live, they had no other place to go.
Source: At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor
101-121 Taylor Street

The building at Turk and Taylor was a low-cost rooming house designed by Abram Edelman and opened in1908 as Hotel Young. It lacked a lobby and dining room and had 115 rooms and only 50 bathrooms. It catered primarily to working-class or generally marginalized groups, including a pronounced Jewish presence.
Source: At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor
Dahlia Hotel

In the early 20th century during Prohibition, covert drinking establishments proliferated there. The Amocrat Club, for example, was hidden behind a barbershop on the ground floor of the Dahlia Hotel at 70 Turk Street, half a block from the Taylor Street intersection. A steel door was hidden behind floor-to-ceiling mirrors.
Source: At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor
Chukker Club

Bars like the Chukker Clube catered to trans people and their customers. Gender-atypical behavior was nevertheless brutally targeted particularly where race-mixing and gender-crossing took place. This would mainly happen after hours in venues that facilitated sexual encounters. A 1965 article describes a raid at the Chukker Club on 66 Turk Street where police arrested 56 people “including 23 mascaraed men,” including the owner, 26-year-old Carla Lara, a Latinx queen. Lara then placed a sign outside the establishment “The Chukkers – Famous for its Unusual Entertainment – Now Presents Police Harassment! Every Fri. & Sat. from 8 pm to 6 am. For Reservations Call 474-7941.”
Source: At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor
Meat Rack

In the 1960s, transgender street sex work was policed into a nine-block area bounded by Turk, O’Farrel, Mason, and Leavenworth Streets. The Market Street corridor was off-limits. Powell had a tourist-friendly cable car line and was also of bounds. Transfeminine people would sometimes venture out to the “Meat Rack,” a male hustling zone north of Market, or down to the Doggie Diner at Powell and market.
Source: At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor
Tenderloin Panhandle

The Tenderloin became a place where people assigned male at birth and expressed themselves in feminine ways could walk on the streets, have cheap accommodation, and perform on its stages. During the early 20th century the San Francisco Police would keep track of people arrested for cross-dressing, including a photo of Geraldine Portica, apprehended in 1917. Portica had been a chambermaid on 6th street, what is known as the Tenderloin Panhandle. She had been arrested while walking on Market St, perhaps because she was venturing beyond the known boundaries of the New Uptown Tenderloin.
Source: At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor
Tenderloin Museum

The Tenderloin Museum was founded in 2009 as a nonprofit called Uptown Tenderloin, Inc. Uptown Tenderloin sponsored the application that created the national Uptown Tenderloin Historic District, which includes 409 buildings on the National Registry of Historic Places. Uptown Tenderloin also led the effort to install nearly 100 historic plaques on Tenderloin buildings, and nine “Lost Landmark” sidewalk plaques. The Tenderloin Museum opened its doors to the public in 2015. Its permanent collection explores the distinctive history of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District including its built environment, its entertainment scene, its political and social activism, and its diversity.
Glide Church

In the postwar years, the population in San Francisco grew exponentially due to wartime shipbuilding and military administrative operations. The population was predominantly poor and working-class, with a mixture of White, Black, and Mexican-American populations. Drawing from the 1949 Housing act that funded “slum clearance,” urban elites were interested in redesigning the city in their own interests. Their vision included banking, finance, arts, and tourism. To do this, port facilities and heavy manufacturing were moved to the East Bay, while freeways and the Bay Area Rapid system BART would transport white-collar industries.
Neighborhoods inhabited by racial and ethnic minorities were targeted for demolition. The rooming houses south of Market were torn down to make way for the Yerba Buena compound. Urban changes like this one united San Franciscans in grassroots movements.
The Johnson administration’s Great Society and War on Poverty programs also occasioned dissent. “Anti-poverty target areas” were established by understanding the links between poverty and structural racism. However, the indexing of poverty to the spatialization of racial minorities had unfortunate implications for the poorest neighborhood in San Francisco, the so-called “White Ghetto” of the Tenderloin. The Tenderloin remained 85% White as late as the 1970s. The neighborhood’s impoverishment reflected its history as a district for predominantly White people expressing gender variance, practicing same-sex sexuality, or engaging in sex work, becoming a discard zone for other mostly White San Franciscans stigmatized in other ways.
New forms of coalitional politics established new programs affiliated with the Tenderloin’s socially progressive Glide Memorial Methodist Church. Leaders of the “homophile” organizations like the Daughters of Bilits and the Mattachine Society supported Glide through the Council for Religion and the Homosexual, abstracting the model of racial minoritization that informed the War on Poverty and applying it to other sorts of “problem bodies.”
Glide’s “night ministers” would sometimes meet at Compton’s. With their support, sex-working street kids formed their own groups. Vanguard was one of those groups. Their first action was to picket the cafeteria in protest of its discriminatory treatment of transfeminine patrons.
Source: At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor