Ferlinghetti Supports Grant Bldg. & S.F. Culture

CITY LIGHTS
Booksellers & Publishers
261 Columbus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94133


PRESS RELEASE For Immediate Release
Thursday, March 8, 2001 Contact: Nancy J. Peters 415-362-1901

or staff @citylights.com


LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI DECRIES LATEST WAVE OF GENTRIFICATION

When I was named the first Poet Laureate of this left coast City in 1998, I expressed my astonishment and outrage at how San Francisco was fast becoming a playground for the rich and the witless--a Disneyfied mall for SUV drivers and "sell" phone addicts.

Even so it was an honor to represent poetry in a City that had done so much for poets, writers, artists, musicians, and dancers. Now, however, the City seems hell bent on making it impossible for them to live here.

A recent book, Hollow City, shows how San Francisco is becoming a kind of set for TV shows like Nash Bridges. The cultural life of the City used to be emulated by the world- but now it's being evicted. Along with many others, one of the authors of that book, Susan Schwartzenberg, is about to lose her studio, an office in the historic Grant Building, down at Seventh and Market. How so?

A developer from Michigan, Scott Seligman, who runs Sterling Bank and Seligman Western Enterprises, wants to gentrify the Mid-Market zone. Not to make the City a better place but to make his bank account a little fatter. He wants a better class of tenant. No more photographers or poets or translators or editors or painters. No more small businesses serving the City. No more small nonprofits, like Streetside Stories, which publishes work by 650 middle school kids every year to foster a love of reading and writing.

Reclaiming San Francisco, a City Lights book that denounced the handing over of the City to the highest bidder, was edited, designed and typeset in the Grant Building. The editors of that book--Jim Brook and Chris Carlsson--are being evicted, too.

The Grant Building is not the only building in distress--but it is emblematic of the battle over space: who will control it--dollar-sign developers or the people who give something back to the City? The dot-com insanity has come and gone, and it's left wreckage in its wake. The pipe dreams of IPO junkies are nothing compared to the delirious visions of real estate speculators who can throw around real money--if not their own, then somebody else's. Will only the postcards and virtual reality museums be left?

It's long past time for San Francisco--the people who live here and care about the place, the politicians, the small businesses, the kids who will inherit either a theme park or an exciting, urbane City--to stand up and stop the development juggernaut.

Only developers who build for the City--and not against its people and values--should ever get a permit to do so much as change a screen door.

As Bertolt Brecht wrote in "Great Times, Wasted," one of his last poems:

I knew that cities were being built

I haven't been to any.

A matter for statistics, I thought

Not history.

What's the point of cities, built

Without the people's wisdom?



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