The Unofficial GentryFication Museum!!

Is it Public?!? Is it Private!?!
The Unofficial GenryFication Museum
(Located on the corner of 3rd and Mission)
By the Museums Curators

Walking through South of Market these days feels like a walk through a living Urbanistics Museum if there was one. What once was is no longer. The abandoned buildings covered with plywood have now been rehabbed extensively. Dangerous alleyways are now spectacles of light that compete with Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade. Homelessness is banished but can be witnessed covertly in the Yerba Buena Gardens, an exhibition like Penal Colony for the displaced.

Right in the heart of all this is a sidewalk that cuts into a building that is currently being revamped. At the intersection of 3rd and Mission lies The Unofficial GentryFication Museum. What once was a sidewalk is now a pedestrian access way that meanders within a building that is being Milleniumized. Vestiges of the old building can be soon slowly taken over by new materials. To the left and right of the visitor, the Museums lobby is a skeleton waiting for its imminent flesh. Walking through the building is an unnerving experience. As a visitor you can physically experience the process of Gentrification in the South of Market (SoMa is it?).

Visitors who use the pedestrian access are aware of the surreal nature of walking through a gutted building. Watching men rehabbing the building, the machines that deconstruct/construct its future, the battered, bare walls mimicking some alternative art space of a distant past. The Unofficial GentryFication Museum is a didactic exhibit on the state of Urbanistics and the need for human growth and possession. Gordon Matta-Clark would have probably enjoyed its apocalyptic aesthetic.

At the main entrance to the museum, a guard is patrolling the access way to the entrance on 3rd Street. Is there a fear of actual Pedestrians? If it is an alternative pedestrian access way, why is it being monitored? Is it a public sidewalk? A private access route? What the Hell is it?? It is the Unofficial GentryFication Museum! (Surprisingly, the museums neighbor the SF MOMA hasn’t co-opted the space as an alternative arts venue, which would probably hit theoretically too close to home.)

Witness gentrification in action and visit the museum. It will give you an inside scoop on the state of international urban renewal, an aesthetic survey of industrial chic and its discontents, and, finally, make you possibly realize: What is Public and what is Private? Who does this part of the street belong to anyway? Visit the museum its for Free!!

The Unofficial GentryFication Museum
On the corner of Mission and 3rd
Entrance is for free (as long as you’re a pedestrian, not suspicious looking, not homeless, not a traveling musician, not loitering, or of Arab descent) P.S. The curators also encourage adding new pieces of your own, the fence surrounding the main access route is empty at the moment. Feel free to exhibit any of your works!

Hell it’s our street, isn’t it?