Life on the Dirtiest Block in San Francisco

NYT ^ | Oct 8, 2018 | Thomas Fuller

[upchuck]

SAN FRANCISCO — The heroin needles, the pile of excrement between parked cars, the yellow soup oozing out of a large plastic bag by the curb and the stained, faux Persian carpet dumped on the corner.

It’s a scene of detritus that might bring to mind any variety of developing-world squalor. But this is San Francisco, the capital of the nation’s technology industry, where a single span of Hyde street hosts an open-air narcotics market by day and at night is occupied by the unsheltered and drug-addled slumped on the sidewalk.

There are many other streets like it, but by one measure it’s the dirtiest block in the city.

Just a 15-minute walk away are the offices of Twitter and Uber, two companies that along with other nameplate technology giants have helped push the median price of a home in San Francisco well beyond a million dollars.

This dichotomy of street crime and world-changing technology, of luxury condominiums and grinding, persistent homelessness, and the dehumanizing effects for those forced to live on the streets provoke outrage among the city’s residents. For many who live here it’s difficult to reconcile San Francisco’s liberal politics with the misery that surrounds them.

According to city statisticians, the 300 block of Hyde Street, a span about the length of a football field in the heart of the Tenderloin neighborhood, received 2,227 complaints about street and sidewalk cleanliness over the past decade, more than any other. It’s an imperfect measurement — some blocks might be dirtier but have fewer calls — but residents on the 300 block say that they are not surprised by their ranking.

[KyCats]

There’s a pretty cool car chase scene through the streets of San Francisco in this otherwise really lousy movie called “Jade”:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113451/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_14

[jimtorr]

I saw nothing like this when I visited San Francisco in the 1990s. Things have gone downhill there since then.

I took my mother to see Riverdance at a theater in San Francisco one Friday night in 1991. After the show, we had to step over people sleeping in doorways and on the sidewalk all down the block to the parking garage.

I said then that I would never return to SF unless I had to. I've kept my word. I've only returned once, to the passport office.

[fieldmarshaldj]

It was still a Republican, family-friendly city in 1958 when “Vertigo” was made. 10 years later, it went insane.

[HereInTheHeartland]

And of course Bullitt.
Best car chase scene, plus Steve McQueen was a real cool guy.

[wally_bert]

Gee, Mr. Rush.