The Rebellion at Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966 laid down a marker that is still relevant today: San Franciscans suffer under unjust policing and laws. Also, the urban fabric of San Francisco – i particularly the balance between public and private space – reflects rules and expectations created during a period of rapacious capitalism and social injustice. The Turk and Taylor building embodies these troubles: its size reflects the opportunistic consolidation effected by ‘disaster capitalism’ following the 1906 earthquake and fire, and in use it has been part of the city’s repressive social machinery, whether operating as a site of queer and trans concentration in the mid 20th century, or as an outpost (inpost?) of the state’s incarceration industry as it does today.

At Turk and Taylor I propose a process of un-building and re-creation of this state of affairs. The area of the T&T building previously occupied by Compton’s Cafeteria will be removed, and a new architectural typology of gathering and projection will be grafted on to the remaining structure, with a reimagining of the limits and divisions between public and private. This new space will extend out into the intersection of Turk and Taylor, marking a first step in a neighborhood-wide reinvention of the street as civic space. But not just the street: all buildings and lots devoted primarily to the automobile, that engine of community dismemberment, will be converted into new “neighborhood” space. The car presently dominates the Tenderloin – as traffic, street parking, on-grade parking, enclosed parking, and auto repair shops – and yet the car offers so little to the residents of the Tenderloin themselves. It threatens their children, chokes their air, mows down their elders, and encourages the trafficking of drugs and captive bodies into and through the neighborhood. Removing the car will create new spaces for recreation, sustenance, cultural endeavor, making, and living.

These new spaces demand that we reimagine what a public architecture can be, including historic and novel building and space types. The neighborhood is mostly composed of small to infinitesimal living accommodations, including many SROs, so it needs reinvigorated public space and a new ethic and praxis of communal living to make up for this limitation. My initial drawing for this proposal shows the “transition” of the T&T building through surgical, conceptual, and programmatic reinvention, from a site of incarceration to an open site of community gathering and creation. The parking lot adjacent to Aunt Charlies receives a new hostel space for transient and newly-arrived residents. A rental-car agency’s garage becomes a new interior workspace for neighborhood enterprise. The Warfield Theater is opened out and up, claiming the street in front as a continuation of its performance space, and connecting the new neighborhood greenways to Market Street. All streets in the Tenderloin are to be reduced to two lanes without curbside parking, to make room for wider sidewalk living spaces and additional plantings. Golden Gate Avenue will be completely transformed into a greenway. Countering the demise of the La Cocina market, and the continued need for healthy food and small enterprise in the Tenderloin, Boeddeker Park will be transformed through the addition of a Public Market and Food Hall with adjacent production and agriculture in repurposed older buildings. Other former car-centric spaces in the Tenderloin will also be rebuilt, many as housing for San Francisco’s lower-income residents.

An unseen aspect of this work will be the neighborhood organizing needed to create and operate these new facilities, that is: a ground-up, we-before-I rethinking and decolonization of the neighborhood.

Trans experience shows that, while it may be true that you can’t change minds just by changing the body, it certainly helps.

Traditional Animation of different ways that the Turk and Taylor building can transform and flush itself out, and fill itself with something new; phoenix rising from ashes, bursting at the seams

Portray some sort of change through time/process of flooding or bursting

Policing, Compton’s Cafeteria Riots, Non-hierarchical power, Horizontality/horizontal power and organizing

Exploding or flooding the building, taking out systems of power that do not serve the community (but in fact, harm them), and realigning the built environment with the horizontal distributions of power that contributed to the strength of the Compton’s riots

Using the horizontal lines that run through the building to explode it, revealing a naked structure

An imperfect vision of transfeminist utopia

After a series of events, now perceived as a single catastrophe, the panopticon’s watchtower of patriarchal imposition has been carefully unbuilt. Its elements were deconstructed and transformed into a bathing pool for the hot springs that flow from underground rivers connected to the center of the earth. This vessel is not passive or essentialist, but a metaphor for a relationality of gathering and connection. The building’s original lightwell has been opened and extended around the pool with a spiraling ramp with arches and balconies that overflow with vegetation.

The top floor of the old prison lost its roof, opening skyward and hosting a sculpture garden with ancient ideograms whose biological difference has been purposefully effaced. The bottom stories of the structure are buried, lying like graveyards under the floors where posthuman nomads dwell in their portable architecture. Some of these rooms are chapels or observatories. One shows disinterred archeological artifacts that activate communication. Another one offers space for ritual decommissioning. One chapel seems to be dedicated to the death of the hegemonic cultural idea we used to call Nature.

Outside, the pile of debris of capitalist ruins is now a compost pile, slowly decomposing while becoming nourishing soil. This shellmound has transformed neoliberal wreckage into a sacred burial ground for ceremonial regeneration.

Urban Renewal

Although the building remains a vague memory that almost no one knows, the purpose is to elevate it to an urban symbol or landmark of our Tranrangero community of San Francisco Ca., for having been where our rebellion against the oppression of the police and of a society with double standards and as a result, degenerated becomes a prison. Our proposal, in its second, more urban intention, is based on literally bringing out or externalizing the soul of this beautiful building, integrating it in a shameless and direct way with the urban space and its surroundings. It will be done taking advantage of the need to reinforce the internal structure of the building to integrate some of its reinforcement beams into its facades, creating a new exterior structure linked to the structure of the existing building, to create and define an accessible urban space to all. This new space contained by these walls, similar to that of the border with Mexico and other countries, will be completely open, translucent and transparent, signifying the liberation of the oppression that exists today in the prisons that are shelters of bars and chains. many injustices such as transphobia or xenophobia. Thus from the outside from the street we appropriate and expose the soul of the most important Trans milestone of rebellion. The new structure will virtually contain the spirit of protest and defiance that our community dared to give in 1966 within these walls, walls that have continued to contain and enclose those “antisocial” spirits as the oppressors of the world have dared to consider, as well as the patriarchy that has never accepted our existence. We are going to continue rebelling by creating this landmark monument where the interior and exterior, the old and the new, the body and the soul are combined, those walls are going to fall, be demolished and defeated, so that they do not separate and divide populations, people. and even nations.

To unravel the building and create a spiral - the spiral leads down to an underground passageway - the passageway cross-references spatial notions of fringe society. In an urban context the unwanted or the illicit moves in the dark, it is underground and subconscious or subculture: the sewer, the river of the underworld, catacombs, subway tunnel homes. These spaces and the people of them feel the veils thinning, death is closer and so life pulsates stronger. On the surface, nothing can hold purchase it is clear that we are here, but we do not belong. The streets are already remade with installations, structures that are made through assemblage. Already vans with supportive mobile services that lean on an order made outside this unraveling matrix visit intermittently. Thinking of them as pollinators but amplifying the inverse relationship, where the mobile body is nurtured by the flower, mixing granules and taking them back to the hive, but rather the mobile body moves to nurture flowers (people). How does it change us to understand activating services like health care, hygiene, platforms for potential economies, and cultural practices as cross-pollination? This project leans on the structural qualities of waterways, bee sociality/activity, slime molds, and tin smoke.

For the above-ground part of the project, I want to play with the idea of opacity, to reduce surveillance and the rationalizing control that accompanies it. The building will be guided by the logic of movement, that stagnation and cornering are psychological traps that render survival difficult. Lastly, I will consider the act of accumulation of objects as a practice of hope, graffiti as a statement of existence as resistance, and a covert re-coding the city with bodies but leaving behind trails as monikers - as words.