Geek tour of the San Francisco Bay Area

People come to San Francisco, still, in pursuit of the technoutopian dream, but also they like to pay homage to an idea of “Silicon Valley”. Now that the Mozilla monument has gone to storage, there aren’t a lot of public monuments out there to visit. We really need enormous, beautiful public monumental art to celebrate Internet and computer history!!

But we don’t have that. So, where to go on your nerd pilgrimage? I have a list of recommendations for the computer nerds with a romantic soul!

The Computer History Museum heads the geek tour list of course! It is in Mountainview and the public transit options aren’t ideal, but are doable. You can take Caltrain to Mountainview and look for a city bus or a shuttle bus, or just take a cab/rideshare for the last leg of your trip.

The MADE – The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment – is a hands-on video game history museum where the retro games are all playable, often on incredible and well maintained old hardware! It’s in downtown Oakland, a few easily walkable blocks from the 12th Street BART station.

The Exploratorium, while a broad tech and science museum, is gorgeously hands on and participatory. There are actual experiments you can do (not like so many science museums where interactivity means pushing a button or watching a video). And the techy things are elevated to really beautiful art in many cases (look for the creations of Ned Kahn, for example!)

Noisebridge hacker and maker space is open daily in the afternoons and evenings, and it’s basically a long running, large, donation supported and volunteer run, workshop. It is free, but cash or online donations are very much appreciated and needed! It’s a bit like going into a giant, messy, anarchic, collaborative garage. People are generally friendly, you can show up any time, and someone will give you a tour. If you feel like soldering something, or using the 3D printers, or learning a new skill, or just want a co-working space for an afternoon, this is a great spot to meet new people and hang out. Check the meetup page for classes and workshops!

San Francisco Railway Museum – this is a tiny but fabulous museum near the Ferry Building along the Embarcadero in SF. It tends to appeal to computer geeks!

Historic Ships at Hyde Street Pier – Now, this has nothing to do with computers but if you are the sort of nerd who like me, enjoys transit and infrastructure and history, you might like this very quiet park on the waterfront at Aquatic Park (avoid the Fisherman’s Wharf maelstrom). Seriously you will be the only person on some of these ships. Giant pulleys and block and tackle arrangements! Lie down in an actual ship’s bunk! You can walk onto the sailing ship Balaclutha and onto a huge paddlewheel steamship and a couple more interesting ships. Notably — the Balaclutha is wheelchair accessible, with a (very steep) ramp onto the ship, and a scary-fun lift down into the cargo hold!!!

The US Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model in Sausalito. Nerd heaven if you like this sort of thing. It’s a giant relief map of the entire Bay Area with its waterways, the size of two football fields, and you can walk around it to learn geography and history. Sadly there is no longer water flowing in it because it is now cheaper to run computer simulations of the water flow in the Bay. You can take the ferry there and walk (a fairly long walk but doable) to the Model!

Google! If you’re walking along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, the Hills Brothers Building plaza is a nice place to sit, and you can take a picture with the Google sign if that appeals to you. Coming up soon in October 2023, the Google Visitor Center will be opening up in Mountainview – maybe good to combine with a visit to the Computer History Museum!

Apple Park Visitor Center in Cupertino is an hour or so away from San Francisco by car. If you’re already down there or in San Jose and you’re a huge Apple fan then maybe it’s worth going to see. I’ve never been to it, but I see people asking about it often in the bay area subreddits.

The Intel museum in Santa Clara! If you want to read some corporate stuff about how chips are made, this is for you, but I am not sure if I actually recommend it since I’ve never been there and it seems to be mostly for school kids.

Hiller Museum of Aviation in San Carlos. If you love planes, or you kind of like them and you’re already on the Peninsula south of SF, this is a fun and cool little museum. Also great for little kids as they can run around very freely, and there’s entire sections of planes they can go into and climb around in.

More transit! Historic aircraft! Moffett Field (ie, the Bay’s own little part of NASA!) offers tours led by a docent and they have a small visitor center.

If the Mare Island shipyard museum ever opens up again, i highly recommend it because it is HUGE and super old fashioned and sort of clearly beloved by the people who used to work there and created a lot of the exhibits. They used to build nuclear submarines ! There’s a little periscope in the cockpit of an old nuclear submarine (or whatever you call the spot in a sub where there’s a periscope) that you can look up into Vallejo from!

There must be more. And there should be more! Add suggestions to the comments and I’ll add them to the post!

Historic bricks from San Francisco City Hall

San Francisco’s original City Hall was built (on top of a cemetery!) starting in 1872 and finally opened in 1879, to be actually completed in 1899. (You can see some interesting photos and more history of the old City Hall on FoundSF.) Just a few years later, City Hall was destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, collapsing in a huge pile of stone, iron, glass, wood, and brick.

ruins of SF city hall, 1906

My house was built in the late 1880s or early 1890s – though I have not pinned down the exact date, it was definitely here by 1892, built with a few other similar Italianate houses on land next to the original farmhouse on Mission Street. We’re doing some excavating under part of the house, and found some bricks marked with the letters C H in a fancy serif font:

brick marked with a C H

We looked this up hoping to find a magical database of historical brickmarker marks and YES. That exists! At least for California bricks.

Our C H brick was made in the 1870s for San Francisco’s original City Hall! It was probably in that pile of rubble in 1906 (cleaned up by 1909 according to some sources). These bricks were clearly part of a retaining wall which got covered over by some dirt, gravel, and a cobblestone patio (“Belgian brick”) at a later date.

Our bricks database lists them thusly:

Remillard Brick Company
San Rafael, Marin County, CA
1872-1878 for San Francisco City Hall

And there’s further cool info about the Remillard Brick Company from Oakland Localwiki and from Wikipedia!

We found other bricks, stamped CALIFORNIA and with round rivet-like raised dots in the corners, that were part of another layer of patio and wall that is now under the back of our house. The California Bricks database identifies them as California Brick Company and W. S. Dickey Clay Manufacturing Company, Niles and Decoto districts, Fremont and Union City, County, CA, 1913-1926.

Around that time, in 1920 or so, a future mayor of San Francisco, John F. Shelley, lived in our house with his parents and siblings. As a young man he drove a bakery delivery wagon, then went to law school, then became head of the bakery delivery wagon drivers’ union, then served in the California Senate and US House of Representatives, then became Mayor of SF.

Danny found us a quote about the C H bricks, which looks like it may be about SF City Hall. I will need to find the book to be sure of the context of the quote, but it’s from Bricks and Brickmaking: A Handbook for Historical Archaeology, by Karl Gurcke:

The initials ‘C. H.,’ impressed in the brick of which our new City Hall is built, put there to denote that they were intended for that edifice, may (should they prove to possess the lasting properties claimed for them) become to the antiquar[ians] of the remote future a source of much worriment as they labor to decipher their probable meaning.

Here we are, the antiquarians of the remote future!

Really it’s hard to express how much I love our 150 year old, C H bricks! I’ll figure out how to work them into our garden somehow after the construction project is done! For now, our back yard is turning into a sort of brick museum.

DWeb Camp Day Zero and One

Day Zero at DWeb Camp. We drove down Highway 1 stopping in Moss Beach to look at a strangely cheap vacant lot to try and figure out what is wrong with it (On the fault line, a weird shape, has a utility pole smack in the center of the tiny property.) Saw a huge hawk in the tree next to the utility pole and then realized I had dropped my car keys somewhere in the tall grass. If we buy this vacant lot and park a derelict trailer on it and build cinderblock library and a tiny house from a kit, I shall name it Keyhawkia. (I never found the keys but Danny had a spare.)

I brought an entirely unnecessary cooler and bag full of food. There is abundant and delicious vegan food 3 times a day! Our glamping tent is comfortable, equipped with a foam mattress, a wooden crate, and a battery powered lantern. I brought a Yeti 150 battery hoping to heat my early morning coffee with it, a solar lantern, a second lantern to charge off the Yeti, my two wheelchair batteries, and about a million different charging cords.

Met a ton of people, passed out some copies of my zine, and helped wash and sanitize some loads of thrift store dishes. Went to bed and as soon as I laid down realized my body was screaming in pain – oh fuck! Vowed to lie down and rest more during the day the rest of the time here.

I was saying to some of the mushroom farm people that, everyone coming here is used to being the person who just does stuff directly and feels super confident and capable of being in charge of whatever, and so we are about to have a physical manifestation of decentralized activity and it will surely be a bit hilarious. (So far, from day 2, definitely true).

Day One. Woke up at 6am, made lukewarm coffee using my Yeti and a car charger travel mug. Sat in zero gravity chair before it was fully open, falling slowly and gently backwards, and actually set the coffee mug down without spilling it AND no one saw me fall over.

Over the afternoon a couple of hundred people arrived. It started to feel festive. The “Mesh Hall” now looks like Noisebridge complete with “sans flaschentaschen”. Lots of discussions of Scuttlebutt and also of Kazakhstan. I love seeing everything take shape.

I pedantically corrected the sign for Shiitake Camp with a sharpie, adding the second “i”. The kerning may bother someone but it wasn’t a bad job of insertion given the spontaneous nature of the action! Danny laughed at me…Guys sitting by the sign somewhat bemused…

Set up my tarp outside the tent so that my wheelchair has shelter from the dew – within 5 minutes I found some pointy iron rods which Bill, who is amazing, told me were foundation rods. People passing by had sledgehammers, extra tent spikes, a hatchet which broke while being dramatically used in exactly the way you should not, so that the sharp end is about to embed itself in your forehead – All was well and my wheelchair is protected from the elements in the night. While I took a short nap, someone (probably James) left me a little roll of cord to tie up the tarp! Miraculous!

I washed more dishes and spent the day mostly loafing. (Under my tarp lean-to.)
Did some crosswords in Portuguese with Seth (I don’t know Portuguese but faked it from knowing Spanish) – relaxing and fun.

Could not hear or see most of the opening circle stuff but some of the talks made it to the outer fringes. At one point I gathered that people were sticking a branch into a fire pit and then saying a word in their language and maybe explaining the word’s significance (to them? to the moment? to their culture?) and I had a saucy suggestion to Danny as to what his special representative British word should be. 10 points if you guess it!

Day Two – The showers are amazing in this upper camp. Huge compared to my bathroom, a handy bench to change on, everything rather beautiful in that people-who-have-spent-years-living-on-communes wood shop way with shelves constructed of sections of tree trunk and attractive large pebbles as decor – Lots of Dr. Bronners soap to share. We had a nice camaraderie in the shower this morning as I complimented someone’s tshirt which said in scrolly print, “Brats push to master” and she then explained it to the people in the bathroom with us (Christie the biologist and her daughter) who were not familiar with version control software or its jokes. (“Good bois push to branches” I guess would be the alternate version.) “I’m blogging this” – my sudden declaration from behind the shower curtain after like 5 solid minutes of explanation of the joke.

My yeti battery heated the travel mug of instant coffee beautifully today. It takes a while. The trick is falling back asleep after plugging it in so that you aren’t waiting tediously for the water to hot up.

Plans for today: set up a little zine making workshop. Get set up with scuttlebutt. go to some discussions or talks. Work on my small text adventure game of this event and then put it up somewhere in the hackitorium room if anyone has a spare computer to display it on.

Busy day and a trip to Oakland

Lots of work today, got my car washed, then took BART over to the Oakland museum to hang out with my mom & sister & nephew for a couple of hours. It was great.

Bus ride to BART, I have to note that a guy yelled sarcastically when I got on “Great job driver make sure everyone gets a seat now” as he was asked to move back, I guess. He kept talking to himself loudly about it but I was only going like 10 blocks, and there were a lot of people between us so I didn’t pay attention. Then when i got off he yelled “GOOD RIDDANCE KICK IT OFF THE BUS. GET OUT OF HERE” and I looked back at him, furious. “I was just talking about MYSELF” he said, with all the quick wit of a badly lying 3 year old. The bus driver and I exchanged kind glances and we wished each other a good afternoon, wearily.

Oh… well….. At least the rest of my transit journeys were peaceful, quiet even, and pleasant. I got some stickers and a BART hat at Lake Merritt station! and… They still have some socks! The guy in line before me bought like, 5 pairs. Lake Merritt station should totally build a little gift shop with mugs and tshirts and junk. It would be so popular.

The tile in this station is a funky irregular hexagon pattern, dark red, and it has a very cool and beautiful glass elevator from the platform to the concourse.

On the train, I thought of some more good stuff for my game and took notes.

At the museum I loved pretty much everything. I need to spend several days there. I especially liked the giant trippy mural in the museum cafe, Ode to California by kozyndan. I took this pic of one of my favorite bits but I had so many favorite parts of it. This one has tiny naked people riding segways and a guy reading a book under a tree in the background while giant fish float around nearby and a kelp stipe and holdfast are wrapped around a rock.

Detail of mural with segways

Here’s an image of the full mural from a site that sells prints of it:

ode to california mural.

Pacifica side trip

After work I went off with seelight to have a sandwich and catch Pokémon at the beach. We looked for whales (none) and discussed geography, geology, clouds, games, and she told me there is a novel about magical BART. Or something. I only found this decolonized BART map so will ask her later about the book.

A woman standing by us at the cafe counter when “Funkytown” came on the radio sighed and said “You just want to put on those roller skates!” and I had just been thinking the same thing and remembering myself swinging about the roller rink with my feathered hair, my blue eyeshadow, my metallic weave buttondown shirt, white jeans with my name embroidered on the pocket, and a skinny stretchy gold metal belt (you know what I mean? sort of snake textured, like a cord where one side is flat). The belt buckle was a green roller skate. Probably, I was also drinking a “suicide” which was getting a soda with all the soda flavors mixed together. The junior high mocktail of my people. You felt badass skating up to the counter, like the fucking Continental Op but 3 feet high and on skates, leaning on one elbow to mutter to the bartender, “I’ll have a suicide“. I had mentally put the lady at the counter in a “older person” category as she had long grey hair and was leaning on a cane; go figure, we are likely less than 5 years age difference; my hair is half grey and I’m in my wheelchair. I enjoyed the moment of our gentle mutual reminiscing. The song is so perfectly evocative of a specific time.

A walk down the pier, where we watched fishermen, the sunset, the waves, the fog, the stripey layers of clouds that looked like both Jupiter and lasagna when photographed with my phone camera up to one lens of my binoculars.

sunset through a rounded lens

On the way back to land, Claire was like omg there is a … Grundleoot or …. I’ll be damned if I know what it was, but some powerful pokemon I had never even heard of, as the pier debouched into the street. We decided it was too tough for the two of us. But right around the corner a little knot of people were under the streetlights in a familiar configuration, a half circle, thumbing their phones with fervent concentration – they were catching the whatever it was, in a raid. We joined the stragglers and caught it too. The group then went off to reconvene at a church somewhere to the south to get a Kyogre, hitching rides with strangers and timidly Friending each other on the app. Tempting but…. I was tired. Yay now I have, well, one of those. Grundhorn? Groundlarg? I don’t want to get up and look at my phone.

A small travel plan for the year

One of my plans for this year is to ride BART to every stop. I’ve always wanted to do this but have not felt energetic enough to do it! I’ll plan out my excursions beforehand, marking cafes with wifi and nice lunch spots near the stations if they exist. Then I can haul myself out there for an afternoon and work from a cafe, getting to know the entire Bay Area more intimately & scouting for future excursions!

BART map

It would be nice to do this with the ferry, too.

I’ll get VERY ridiculously excited about going to Antioch, or Union City! And I’ll report back with the results of my travels!

Do you examine places on maps and mark down spots you’d like to visit? I had a great virtual tour of Sicily’s north coast near Messina (Villa Terrafranca, Bauso, and Serro) where some of my ancestors lived, walking along the village streets and the waterfront in Street View.

Whenever I’m going to a new part of town just within San Francisco I have a look on the map as well, to mark anything that might be interesting and study the accessible MUNI stops & best routes to go there and back.

Like Des Esseintes’ journey sometimes this map-journey is all I get. The real journey never happens and I am reasonably content with the imaginary one! If it does, then the imaginary journey deepens the enjoyment of the real journey. I learned something about this from how, when I was a little kid in Detroit in the 70s, my dad would write away to parks and chambers of commerce, get back a lot of maps and brochures, and we’d learn stuff about the history and geology of a place before we went.

Along with this knowledge is a sort of errand geography, so that I have buckets of errands to be done and if I’m going to a particular place I’ll know “And while I’m there I should do everything that needs doing in a hardware store since there’s one right next to the BART stop”. Very handy when you don’t drive (much) and have limited energy.

Today's small political actions

Today I am reaching out to my friends through chat and email, both hackerspaces I’m connected with (Noisebridge and Double Union), our various women in tech organizations, and in person. I woke up this morning (from my grief and disassociation last night) with staunch, fierce determination full of energy and fire and ideas.

I read through the President-Elect’s 100 day plan. Have a look. It’s quite scary. For instance how many people do you know who have health care through the Affordable Care Act, or who have it through their marriages to same sex partners — here we have a direct threat to their family health. Also deeply on my mind – what will happen with Sanctuary cities?

My friend hazelbroom and I met for coffee and discussed our lives, what we do to support others, what support we need, what we can change, what structurally we might be able to affect. A lot of my ideas are around mutual aid networks. How can we create them and make them sustainable? But here is a brief outline: better self care, mutual support for activists, support for others in our communities and beyond, political engagement with whatever politicians represent us. We try to move beyond a charity model and it is often not greatly successful.

For me, I have good mutual support with several friends for example I am around to help out if a friend is down on their luck and needs help with a medical bill, or getting a ride, or groceries during an illness, or wrapping your mind around a complicated legal or bureaucratic situation — and many friends have helped and visited me when I’ve been in difficulties. In those situations, boundaries are hard to negotiate and maintain – hard to even articulate. Learning to have that kind of conversation is likely part of the work we need to do. Hazelbroom pointed out that as queer folks we have more practice than many others with that kind of “chosen family” bond. Those bonds are something more like quasi-cousins, loose partnerships for emotional and economic support. I have many ideas here, and will be writing about them over the coming days and weeks.

Our first practical action was to leave the cafe and go a few blocks down the street to the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center. We signed up as volunteers and got some information from them and talked to Executive Director Gina Dacus, who super nicely took the time to give us an outline of what the BHNC does. I knew already they provide a lot of the low income housing support of our neighborhood and there is some sort of senior center. I found to my happy surprise that the senior services and classes are “senior and disabled” which means : Free senior/arthritis tai chi classes for me just a few blocks away, JUST what I need and have been wishing for!

We described some of our skills for Gina (Hazelbroom: she is an RN, so can give flu shots and that sort of thing! Me: some thoughts on helping with informational discussions of wheelchairs and scooters.) I am donating to the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center right now, online. Our next step is to pull in our local friends and neighbors (including all our energetic, healthy teenage children) to show up to the community engagement meeting, and listen to see if we get any immediate ideas where we might be needed and we can be helpful.

Another next step, I am donating immediately to CARECEN SF, picked a bit randomly out of a list of community organizations in my neighborhood of Bernal Heights-Mission.

colorful mural at 26th and mission

Driving through McFarland

Driving up from San Diego through Bakersfield, Fresno, and Merced to San Francisco I noticed a lot of decayed infrastructure. I guess the San Fernando Valley is still recovering from earthquakes. Over half the highway ramps were closed. It had a post-apocalyptic feel. Maybe it was temporary but it was hard to imagine a temporary situation in which one would close miles and miles of highway exit ramps on a weekday rather than work on them one at a time.

Then we were mercifully out of the L.A. traffic and over the mountains coming down into the dusty central valley. I wanted to stop in all of the small towns just to look around. It was just as beautiful to me as the drive down Highway 1 looking at the ocean, imagining life in these country towns and wondering what it would be like. I don’t know, man. The American Dream! We constructed a future where we retired to one of them (spinning out stories of each town as we passed from its general look, the billboards, the state of the train yards) Perhaps a computer-fixing store with that crazy old coot with his old-fashioned “Internet” and the stern civic minded old lady with the purple and silver hair. Oblomovka kept doing monologues in a cracked voice where he explained to the youth of the future what an ethernet cable was and what particular computer components were for, not like those jacking-into-your-brain nanotrons.

I pulled off the highway in a very small town called McFarland only to find that the gas station pumps had signs on them. “NO GAS”. Quiet and dusty. We looked in vain for the Business District pointed to by a road sign. I think we were in it. There was a tiny barber shop, a corner store, I think a pizza place and two huge churches, signs with pithy proverbs in Spanish, a big football field and then some cow fields. I wished for the time to explore McFarland and wondered even harder what it would be like to live there, the good and the bad of small towns, whether someone would just beat the hell out of me instantly or if I would fix everyone’s web sites, teach at the high school, and start a utopian beekeeping co-op despite being one of 3 lunatic atheists in town plus clearly the evil first wave of gentrification and if they would shave the sides of my head at the barbershop or not. Imagining the BBQs and perhaps a 4H auction or rodeo or two, church picnics, knowing way too much about everyone’s business, who could fix a car, who was an alcoholic, who is rich and who isn’t, and all the things that seem to go with small towns.

Later on as Oblomovka drove part of the way I was surfing around with the connection from my phone and looked up McFarland, still thinking about the impression it made on me many miles away. Aside from the boringest possible demographic info on its Wikipedia page there was one significant thing about McFarland: The Budweiser Story. In a glurgey post-sept. 11-2001 email forwarded around the Internets, McFarland was the scene of a Budweiser truck driver coming to deliver some beer to a convenience store and finding some Muslim guys in there celebrating the fall of the towers, really whooping it up. He took all his cases of Bud and left and the company will never deliver their beer to that town again. The end! This story and its million variants were debunked quickly, but of course that didn’t stop the natural life of the racist faux-patriot email forward.

sandow birk oil painting

Oblomovka and I then began to spin out the image of the oil painting of the incident, the Beer Truck driver guy haloed in a beam of light angelically pointing, the celebrating guys lit by red neon as if by the fires of hell, a globe knocked over on its side, an observing cat in the shadows, all the elements of composition in triangles. I can’t remember all the details that were making me howl with laughter in the car. In my mind it was as Sandow Birk might paint it and I wished for a whole series of meme paintings done in some classical style.

Warm Water Cove and Pier 70

Today’s random expedition led me to Potrero Point and Warm Water Cove, a tiny, gritty park one step above a vacant lot in an industrial wasteland. It’s a vacant lot in an industrial wasteland with a bench! I love this park. Right now it’s full of wild mustard, radish, dock, mallow and other great edible plants. The remains of a creek ooze out of a scary tunnel. It’s all surrounded by warehouses, parking lots surrounded by barbed wire, and off in the distance, rusting ocean-going cargo ships. Apparently there used to be weekly punk concerts there run off generators and lots of campers. While I was there today a woman and a dog in a very DIY camper van were doing some housekeeping and enjoying the late afternoon sun, so the camping, or homeless-person-occupancy, probably continues despite the recent community makeover, graffiti cleanup and daily policing. A few years ago people were still fishing from a pier to take advantage of the warm water coming from the power plant outfall (which attracts fish.) The pier’s gone now.

Sounds like a lot of piers have been closed over the last few years, including San Mateo Pier, the longest fishing pier in California.

From there I could see a very interesting building that looked like a lot of cubes piled up on top of each other.

It’s behind the Pacific Gas & Electric Station A, a huge and beautiful red brick building.

Pier 70

Here’s some links to the history of Potrero Point:

* Station A

A block or two north, little alleys wind around the decaying buildings of Pier 70.

* The Noonan Building
* Map of Pier 70 structures – a great map with notes for each building.
* Irish Hill This hill full of houses and apartments for the iron and steel mill workers and their families was leveled and the rubble used to fill in the Bay. I saw a tiny bit of the hill left – you can tell it’s not just a pile of dirt because it looks like a roadcut through serpentinite.

Underneath these industrial buildings is a tide-washed labyrinth of slag pits, cisterns, waste dumps, and wooden pilings. I can’t even imagine the giant amounts of toxic junk still leaching into the Bay.

Building 104, an office building from 1896:

Pier 70

Building 21, from 1900.

Pier 70

Building 11, The Noonan Building, 1941. People obviously live there.

Pier 70

During wartime this shipyard churned out countless ships. Thousands of people worked there in round-the-clock shifts. As the shipyards closed the area became neglected and used for storage for old cars, MUNI trains and buses. It sounds like then there were decades of concern from people in the Dogpatch, Potrero, and Hunters Point communities, plans for redevelopment, toxic cleanup, reclamation, preservation of the historic buildings, and industrial customers who still might use the land for power plants, and ship building or repair. The largest floating dry dock facility in the world was sold to the City in the 1980s for one dollar — probably because the massively polluted land (and ongoing pollution of the Bay) was clearly a liability and someone was going to have to *clean it up* before it got seriously used again.

As I mulled over What Is To Be Done here’s what I thought up. While it’s not being used for much else and it’s polluting and dangerous, full of crumbling buildings and broken glass and probably more asbestos than anyone can imagine, make it a public Dangerous Park. Just let anyone do whatever the hell they want in there and graffiti it up and have punk rock shows and photograph the roofs of falling-down warehouses. But let them know the dangers to their health and safety — just as you’d put up signs to say that a seaside cliff is dangerous because of erosion and high waves. The conditions of entering the Dangerous Park should be agreement that you’re not going to sue the city for whatever injuries result.

Some of the Historic Buildings would be graffitied and fucked up, but maybe some would be improved, cleaned up, cared for by artists and colonized in interesting ways.

I realize this isn’t going to happen and instead it will end up being a squalid industrial center for a while longer until some asshole buys it and Develops it, because the only way that people are “allowed” to be in or live on a toxic waste dump is if some bunch of developers makes an obscene profit off it while covering up any risks with massive lies. But people using crappy in land in some less centralized and profitable way, with accurate information about the problems of that use, is, weirdly, never okay.