The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble in Unusual Clothing:
Notes on the Streets of San Francisco
(first published in Harvard Design Magazine, 1998)
By Rebecca Solnit

It was Halloween, and around the corner from my house a lone man in a grass skirt was juggling firesticks. Because he had put himself on display, we bantered freely with him, and he carried on noncholantly with the flaming brands as he replied. We were still nearly ten blocks from the Castro, but the people in costume were already appearing in ever-increasing quantities, and when we came down the last slope from Sixteenth Street we saw a solid mass of costumed bodies filling the intersection of Castro and Market and spreading up the street , a crowd of thousands. At a distance, all that swarming looked like a beehive or an anthill. During the day, this is one of the major traffic arteries in the city, but Castro Street is particularly prone to being shut off for revellers. Or revellers and demonstrators, for here more than anywhere else the distinction between the two blurs. Asserting a queer identity is something of a political act in itself, and asserting it festively subverts the long tradition of queers being furtive, marginal, and miserable. Which makes hedonism revolutionary, in its own peculiar way. But other streets have their political and cultural life too; the Mission with its Latino communities and hipster invaders, the Haight with its white slackers and deadheads, Folsom Street and the leather scene; while political protest has a set of itineraries seldom broken: from the Castro or from Dolores Park in the Mission or from Fifth and Market downtown to the Civic Center midway between all these points. And this is what I'm most interested in here: in how the mere act of occupying the streets as pedestrians is already a great political act. Whether for peace and justice or for trick or treat, it's also for public space, democratic encounters and unmediated communication--the things that have always made cities exciting political and cultural zones.

Halloween of '97 seemed particularly jubilant because two years ago so many onlookers and fag-bashers showed up that it was something of an audience in search of a circus; drag queens made themselves scarce in the face of all the frat boys ( in '97, the city set up a decoy outdoor Halloween at Civic Center, with an admission charge, live bands, beer sales and lots of security guards, leaving the Castro to the lowkey and the local). This year, though the thousands of people in the crowd were far from universally gay, it was harmonious: at least half of the people were in costume and everyone was here merely to display and to mill. A century ago displaying and milling were regular streetside activities; local heiress and art patron Harriet Lane Levy wrote in her memoirs about promenading down Market Street, San Francisco's main artery, with her father every Sunday to look for friends and at strangers late in the last century (and writes, too, about the shocking thrill she had when she strayed off Market to one of the Barbary Coast streets of brothels so much part of the city's brutal festivity then).(1) In 1997, the high heels and satin gowns were all on men, but there were women dressed as Alice in Wonderland, Medusa, various sci-fi creatures, two separate Tippi Hedrons in Hitchcock's The Birds complete with fake birds attached to their blood-daubed cocktail suits, three teams of the Cat in the Hat with Thing One and Thing Two, to say nothing of the gargoyle with spring-action wings and rust-tinted flesh, two gentlemen of Verona, at least half a dozen Pippi Longstockings of all genders, some silver sci-fi teams, a crew guarding a dead Elvis in a coffin, a grouchy-looking older man with a cannonical foam-rubber phallus, and a bunch of neat Asian guys in togas with ivy wreaths.

A lot of the people looked as though they started working on their costumes months ago, and the exhilaration of displaying and inspecting was contagious in the crowd. What made this particular gathering outstanding was the complete lack of commerce: not even AIDS organizations handed out condoms, no comestibles were sold nor t-shirts hawked, no political literature was purveyed--only a satanic figure handed me a contract for my soul, written in exquisitely dull legal language that gave a hint of his day job. Or the complete lack of authority: without organizers, there was no one to define parameters, just a few police lounging on their motorcycles by the barriers to keep cars out. No outside forces shaped this event; it was genuinely a production of individuals revelling for sake of revelry. Coming home this summer after a semester in a state virtually without public space, I was moved and thrilled by this amateur theater of the street and its free interchanges. It seemed to be what cities were supposed to offer, this unregulated exchange of glances, ideas and possibilities in the semianonymous space of street and crowd, though few do anymore. But in San Francisco the streets have remained a popular political and cultural arena.

When Joseph Beuys talked about everyone being an artist, he may have had something like himself in mind, something rigorous and avant-garde, but this is a more likely scenario, and a more Californian one: everyone is an artist, but their masterpiece is their identity inscribed on their body and displayed in public with pride, whether it's a leatherman wrapped in gym-generated muscle mass and cowhide or a slacker so covered in tattoos she looks like the Sunday funnies or the various neo-tribals with their dreadlocks and baggies or the bicyclist wearing a "One Less Car" t-shirt or, for that matter, the street preachers holding their corner at Sixteenth and Mission or Fifth and Market (where a man with a "no unlawful sex" sandwich-board has been preaching his own peculiar gospel for more than a decade). There's a sense in which being out in this conglomeration of neighborhoods centered on the Castro and Mission is being inside, in a mutual understanding of culture, irony, and politics. This is the best part of San Francisco, and though it's easy to make fun of a revolution that often finds its greatest expression in tattoos and lattes, it is significant for maintaining an open, street- and pedestrian-based culture, one that can transform into uprisings as easily as festivals--and it must be remembered that this sometimes solipsistic personal-is-political display exists on a continuum extending into the lively peace and justice community concerned about the lives of others, elsewhere. Which is to say it is, for all its self-absorbed white middle-class center, maintaining something of the kind of democratic life that is vanishing elsewhere (and the Castro, is, after all, where the White Night riots came from; having built a community for pleasure, these gay men were able to use it for resistance of the farciacal verdict in the trial of Harvey Milk assassin Dan White; the event rivaled the local Rodney King uprisings for fierceness). This is the fragile, silly utopia people move to San Francisco for or make fun of from elsewhere--as when, for example, the head of the World Bank wryly remarked in a recent speech at the Commonwealth Club here, "San Franciscans aren't exactly reticent about their opinions," in apparent reference to demonstrators denouncing him outside. And though most subculturalists have their own communities, streets are a big part of what makes San Francisco so appealing to this convergence of divergence.

Streets, I hasten to add, as places in themselves rather than as mere traffic arteries, neutral links between other places. San Francisco has long been called the most European of American cities, a comment more often made than explained. What I think its speakers mean is that San Francisco is, in its scale and its street life, something like the original idea of a city as a place of unmediated encounters, while most of the rest of the cities of the American West are more like enlarged suburbs, scrupulously controlled and segregated, designed for the noninteractions of motorists shuttling between private places rather than the interactions of pedestrians in public ones. So while this cult of self-invention and self-exploration, or rather myriad cults, is squarely in the American tradition of health nuts and utopian communities, its arena comes from a continental tradition of boulevardiers, flaneurs, grisettes and clochards. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, writing of the mid-nineteenth-century "remodeling of Paris to allow for flowing traffic, with the construction of streets 'which have no significance in themselves but are essentially means of connection,'" declares: "The streets that Haussmann created served only traffic, a fact that distinguished them from the medieval streets and lanes that they destroyed, whose function was not so much to serve traffic as to be a forum for neighborhood life; it also distinguished them from the boulevards and avenues of the Baroque, whose linearity and width was designed more for pomp and ceremony than for mere traffic."(2) When the spectrum of street actions is surveyed as a whole, San Francisco does indeed seem like some mutated descendant of these older versions of the city, with its plethora of public festivities: there is Carneval, Cinco de Mayo, the Bay to Breakers (a seven-mile cross-city run famous for its costumes and its masses--about a hundred thousand last time) in May, then in June the largest event of the year, the Gay Pride Parade, along with the Tenderloin Street Theater Festival, September's Folsom Street Fair for S & M practitioners and voyeurs, the massive Halloween party in the Castro every year, Dia de los Muertes on November 2 in the Mission district with its many satellite art shows, to say nothing of the more conventional parades for Chinese New Year, St. Patrick's, Columbus and Veterans' Days. Given San Francisco's population of circa 800,000, events such as the Bay to Breakers and Gay Pride Day which attract upwards of 100,000 locals and visitors represent a massive turnout.

Fred Dewey writes, in The Architecture of Fear, "The problem in Los Angeles, and increasingly elsewhere, is not simply that people do not participate, that they lack a civic sense. The problem is that the places necessary for people to participate, where people might appear to each other as political creatures, have been eliminated."(3) Los Angeles is often viewed as the creepy future waiting for all cities; San Francisco, in which the spaces Dewey speaks of remain relatively intact, as their past. Los Angeles and the Bay Area do, however, have one thing in common: they are ranked, respectively, first and second in traffic congestion nationwide. San Franciscans have the option of retreating from the automobile, given their city's scale and its existing and potential transit alternatives. They haven't, however, and instead ever-angrier drivers move ever more dangerously through the city in a rampage of impatience. So the right to this public space is currently being fought over, insidiously by the rising number of vehicles barrelling into or barely missing bicyclists and pedestrians, overtly by last summer's furious debate over the monthly Critical Mass bicycle ride (itself a street protest about the right of bicyclists to safety and equal access)(4), and the decade-old debate about whether the homeless have a right to coexist in the city's public places. It is, to some extent, a first-amendment battle: "the right of the people freely to assemble" is appropriately listed with freedom of the press and of religion as primary to a democracy. While the other rights are easily recognized, the elimination of the possibility of such assemblies through urban design and other factors is hard to trace and more seldom framed as a civil-rights issue.(5) But the privatization of the public eliminates the possibility of unmediated political action--uprisings and protests which have been a part of urban life since before the storming of the Bastille in 1789.

When streets belong entirely to cars, they have ceased to be places and become merely connections between places--and the places they will connect are likely to be more controlled and more segregated: offices, homes, malls, gyms. The unexpected is largely imagined as the dangerous in modern cities, and so the elimination of the possibility of encounters between strangers is framed as being about safety. When public spaces are eliminated, however, so ultimately is the public; the wholly private person is no longer a citizen, capable of experiencing and acting in common with her fellow citizens or of having any familiarity with the people who have not been sorted into her categories of work and leisure. Citizenship is predicated on the sense of having something in common with strangers, just as democracy is built upon trust in strangers. Though San Francisco's street actions largely represent modern subgroups of shared belief, those members do not necessarily know each other in private life. So moving into the streets builds a kind of bridge, as well as articulating the strength and style of that group to the larger public which may be its audience--either as immediate spectators or as consumers of media reports on said march or parade. And it demonstrates that both authoritarian control of the streets and the privatizing of public space are not always needed, by creating spaces in which people act as the public directly. For sheer quantity of direct-action politics and guerrilla protests, San Francisco probably leads the nation, and though we citizens like to congratulate ourselves on this as though it were entirely a matter of morale, I have long suspected it is partly a matter of urban design and benign weather (during the tremendous Gulf War uprisings here, I was amazed that Chicagoans came out at all in that January weather and bemused about where Angelenos might gather and march).

Two days after Halloween I walked across town to the Mission as dusk arrived, down the scuzzy bustle of the lower Haight and then down Fillmore toward mid-Market Street, where I ran into David Bonetti, the art critic for the San Francisco Examiner, walking back home with a book under his arm. Something I said set him off, and he held forth marvelously on the charms of his native Boston, on Olmsted's parks therein, on its accessibility for pedestrians, and on the way San Francisco's hills and overall dispersal, outside the trio of the Haight, the Castro, and the Mission, doesn't lend itself to the same kind of pedestrian life. But there we were at the point where those three neighborhoods run into each other in the no-man's land of midMarket, and it was a good enough walking city for me, and on this night a sociable one. Halfway to my destination in the Mission I ran into another acquaintance, an artist unrecognizable for the black and white greasepaint that made his face into a skull. Finally I got to Twenty-Fourth Street which is, with Mission Street itself, the heart of this Latino district and which was, like Castro, sealed off by cops and portable barricades.

There were so many people packed in and around the intersection that the procession had trouble getting through at first, but there wasn't really a clear distinction between audience and parade anyway. A lot of people waited to see friends go by and then lit their candles and joined in. Dia de los Muertes, the Day of the Dead, is a major holiday in Mexico born out of the mingling of Catholicism with the festive attitude towards death of earlier cultures there. Dia de los Muertes in San Francisco is a hybridized holiday, instigated by the Latino arts centers but attended mostly by white aficianados. Ten years ago the crowd seemed dominated by punks who liked the iconography of death because it was cool, but most of the people this year seemed to recognize the event as a remembrance of the recently deceased and promenaded with more tender, subdued jubilance. Within a few years, Halloween and Dia de los Muertes may have evolved and merged into a major, distinctive three-day local holiday like Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Carneval in Rio. The two holidays are already hybrids emerging from the encounter of Christianity with Celtic and then Aztec-Mayan cultures; this new festival of transition and transgression will be about the encounter of those results with drag-queen, modern primitive and slacker culture.

Like Halloween, this holiday had inspired a lot of self-decoration, from the people with painted faces to the more elaborate mechanical skeletons and the flotilla of huge crosses adorned in complex tissue-paper cutouts, to say nothing of the contingents of drummers and other musicians. I ran into friends in the procession and, walking back towards my neighborhood with some of them, bumped into Juliet and Dean McCannell on Mission Street waiting to go into the Mission Cultural Center. After I'd parted with my friends to complete the journey home, I ran into several homeless men sitting quietly in the night and an innovation, one sleeping in a hammock strung between a utility pole and a tree. Almost home, I found myself walking the same way along Scott Street as a girl in fishnet stockings and a leopardskin swing coat, carrying a couple of shopping bags. I could see her looking hesitant as she heard my footsteps behind her on streets that, because they were no longer crowded were no longer so safe, so I said "It's only a girl." She turned around happily and we struck up a conversation. She was dressed up for a late Halloween party, she said, and she was moving back to Massachussetts in a few weeks, since she missed the seasons David Bonetti told me he could do without very happily.

Eight days later I was back in the streets--and I should say that there is, for whatever reason, something extraordinary satisfying about pedestrians walking down the middle of the street. These formal gatherings compensate for the vulnerability of lone pedestrians to both crime and traffic. Whatever else they achieve, they are already victorious in having seized the streets for culture and politics and communication. This time it was Market Street at midday, in the sporadic first showers of the season. It was a demonstration to commemorate the second anniversary of the assassination of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni environmental/human rights activists in Nigeria on November 10, 1995, and to protest Shell Oil's continued involvement in repression and environmental devastation in Nigeria. My brother and his partner were among the main organizers, so this protest was also a family visit and show of support. The demonstration, made up of a majority of white countercultural types and a minority of cheery-looking Nigerian exiles, was led by a huge, exuberant-faced puppet of Saro-Wiwa clad in African fabric, followed by other puppets, drummers, sign-carriers, and stilt-walkers, a protest worth looking at for the office workers on their break. It was a legal demonstration and so the police parted the traffic for us and we marched down the middle of the street to Shell Corner (at Battery and Bush, where the Shell Building stands), where a little street theater took place. The occasional driver honked and shouted in support. Perhaps a hundred people were there.

The Nigerians had told my brother a few days before that Oakland's decision to divest from Nigeria hadn't even made the news here but it had been big headlines at home, and this demo too would no doubt be noted there. So we were out in public for the passersby on the streets here, but also for the media public of Nigerians, their government and the oil corporation on the other side of the world, as well as the Nigerians who couldn't protest at home. In this sense, the demonstration took place in both the literal public space of San Francisco streets and the virtual public spaces of information bounced around the globe (it's not a coincidence that media and mediate have the same root; direct political action in real public space may be the only way to engage in direct, unmediated communication with strangers, as well as being a way to reach the media by literally making news). It felt surprisingly like the events in the streets for Halloween and Dia de los Muertes, not only because it was a particularly festive procession as demonstrations go, but because it was also about occupying the street for communication and community rather than for transportation--that is, the street itself became a place rather than the means by which places are reached. It was about engaging with public ideas rather than the private production and consumption that overwhelm most modern lives. And it was about relative strangers finding a common purpose in public, communicating their beliefs to passersby, and most of all, making use of civic space to act as citizens--to engage in political and cultural dialogue with each other and with strangers.

2: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey

3: Fred Dewey in The Architecture of Fear [quoted by Richard Misrach in a talk on Sunday, full cite to come]

4: Critical Mass, as many readers know, began more than five years ago in cities across the country as a way for bicyclists to ride without fear through the usually car-dominated streets by taking them over en masse. In San Francisco the Critical Mass ride on the last Friday of every month was aided by police who held up cross traffic at intersections so the hundreds or thousands could efficiently pass at once. In July of 1997, however, Mayor Willie Brown decided that the city should no longer tacitly endorse this monthly event; his words raised the stakes and inspired more riders to join in; it was declared an illegal assembly, and many fracases and arrests resulted. The language used to describe the bicyclists was somewhat comic, implying as it did that they were the crazed hordes who made urban traffic unsafe and congested. Motorists were outraged that their freedom of movement was hindered by mere bicyclists, though traffic congestion is a daily problem and Critical Mass comes but once a month. Two bicyclists were killed by cars around that time in accidents that became major news stories, as did pedestrian injuries and fatalities from cars that usually go unremarked. So despite the framing of bicylists as desperados, the events ultimately drew attention to the dangers of motor vehicles. And Critical Mass continues.

5: As long ago as 1966, J. B. Jackson wrote, "We must change the existing public landscape if we are once more to have a political identity.... The Federal government...is everywhere destroying public gathering places near or around federal buildings. The very term 'public building' has become a contradiction: no one in his right mind now goes into a public building except on business. The question is, of course, what form the public gathering place should assume. The Communist countries seem to be devising their own versions. One thing can be said: there must be many more such places, large and small, scattered throughout our communities."1. J. B. Jackson, "The Public Landscape" in Landscapes (Boston: Univ. of Mass. Press, 1970), p. 157-158. Although San Francisco has ideal public spaces for such activity (even though its federal building looks like the black obelisk in 2001), the right to use them is often squelched. San Francisco has a local ordinance whereby "obstructing a public thoroughfare" is a misdemeanor crime. Created as a measure for arresting streetwalkers, it has since been used to arrest homeless people and, most spectacularly, activists. On many occasions, hundreds or thousands of protestors have been arrested, often without the legally required order to disperse being given first. Like many harrassment laws, this one seldom holds up in court, even as it allows the police to continue removing people from public spaces in violation of their first-amendment rights. Another charge, invoked most recently in the July Critical Mass ride, was "illegal assembly." At stake is whether the daily uses of public space for production and consumption or the occasional uses for citizenship and celebration should take precedence.