Downtown Development Pushes for More Territory in SOMA
The Olympia and York firm had been hired by SFRA to begin breaking ground
on the Yerba Buena project area, and if that was not enough gentrification
pressure, the Planning Department opened another front South of Market,
in what was being called the “Down- town Plan.” It called for allowing
the building of high rise towers south of Market Street and down to
Harrison. In the city’s eyes, SOMA was seen as being so diverse as to
be unorganizable and thus more amenable to this kind of redevelopment.
To combat this perception, Valerio and Connell became the SOMA Alliance
advocates at the Mayor’s office, Board of Supervisors meetings and with
SFRA and Olympia representatives, at Planning Commission meetings and
in the media. They produced a series of negotiating points around affordable
housing and community-controlled economic development, putting in place
a viable infrastructure for small businesses, and securing renovation
monies for the only primary school in the SOMA area, Bessie Carmichael.
In essence, they were placing on the table an alternative vision of
development (as opposed to re-development) of the SOMA area,
one based on balanced, mitigated and sustainable change and growth.
Their initial foray as a team proved a relative success. They secured
from then-mayor Dianne Feinstein $5 million for low-cost housing and
backing down on the high-rise corridor plan, as well as open space commitments,
the creation of Clementina Gardens, continued funding for social services
and the South of Market Clinic, and a host of other real and symbolic
victories.
These victories were cautionary, however. Both Valerio and Connell
were made acutely aware that some of the militant anti-growth leadership
in San Francisco did not have a warm spot in their plans for gay and
lesbian retention in South of Market. The rise of gays into political
power in San Francisco was not welcomed by all heterosexual activists
in town, and the rumor of a new gay cancer was buzzing around the city.
Connell and Valerio observed the more cynical politicos whipping out
their political calculators as the “cancers” resulted in rapid decline
and death in the gay community. Coldly and calmly, before the horrified
Connell and Valerio, these so-called progressive leaders chattered away,
and calculated various future political equations should the gay male
community be wiped out by the new disease.
Taking A Page From Harvey Milk’s Book
Needing, therefore, a massive leapfrog strategy to defend the ailing
LGBT community south of market, they searched for a model, looking
to the newly politically galvanized Castro district. In the air was
the militancy that had erupted in 1978 around the election of Supervisor
Harvey Milk and then his tragic assassination, with the accompanying
White Night Riots. There had also been in 1978 the No-on-6 campaign,
where the gay community had effectively mobilized itself and general
public support throughout California to defeat a religious-right sponsored
ballot initiative that would have made it illegal for known homosexuals
to be hired as public school teachers.
The one political event that most caught the eye of Connell and Valerio
was how Harvey Milk had used the Castro Street Fair as a platform to
mobilize, organize and inspire gays and lesbians into a sense of united
community with political power. In a classic “aha moment,” Connell and
Valerio sought a meeting with Harry Britt, who had been appointed to
the Board of Supervisors following Harvey Milk’s death and who had acted
as a mentor to both in navigating the shoals of city politics. He urged
them to “do what Harvey did,” to create a presence in SOMA with a street
fair, and use it as a political organizing tool. In a leap of inspiration,
they transformed this spontaneous moment into an intentional strategic
intervention that was to be populist and activist. It was to strike
a very San Francisco balance between fun and fundraising, pleasure and
politics. It was the first Folsom Street Fair. Later, the founders were
to purchase all of their street decor at a SOMA business reputed to
be the best place for struggling non-profits—Mark Leno’s Budget Signs.
In 1983, the pair devoted themselves to quickly, quietly and systematically
researching every other large neighborhood event, and then set about
creating a carefully crafted plan of their own.
1984. Orwell’s Nightmare Year Yields “Megahood: The Folsom Street Fair”
Entitled “Megahood” and taking place in 1984 on the autumnal equinox
(when the weather is seasonally at its warmest and fairest in foggy
SF), the Folsom Street Fair was a complex beast, created to accomplish
many ambitious goals at once: supporting local SOMA businesses; bringing
together the diverse, eclectic populations South of Market and attempting
to unite them; and placing SOMA on the city map and in the public’s
eye as not a “blighted zone” awaiting redevelopment, but as a vital,
energetic part of the city desiring further development of its existing
potentials. It also had one other crucial overarching purpose—helping
to fight for the survival of the LGBT communities South of Market—including
leather—as the full realization of the onset of AIDS and its harrowing
and devastating implications was reverberating throughout the city.
The fair was to be a healing, celebratory response,
The fair was to be not just reactive to all of the external pressures,
but proactive and resilient. The term megahood was selected to redifine
the South of Market as “the city’s neighboorhood—a turnabout retort
to 30 years of being labeled as a ‘blighted’ area.”
Playing with and extending the megahood concept at the second fair,
Valerio and Connell wrote in promo literature in July 1985, “MEGAHOOD
was discovered during the first Folsom Street Fair in 1984. During the
course of the day, noise from the event seems to have awakened the beast
from its sleep, on schedule. It came to the surface and ended summer.
The MEGAHOOD has made it quite clear the SUMMER ENDS here, in SAN FRANCISCO.
On the Equinox of each year, it rises to the surface to partake of its
annual meal, the summer season. Aside from its great size and unity,
the MEGAHOOD is scaled, clawed, fanged, and quite colorful. These are
the results of its living in the underground waterways located throughout
the industrialized South of Market.”
Objective:Spectacular Reclaimation of The Streets of SOMA
In its birth, the Folsom Street Fair contained all the elements of its
later incarnations. “Megahood” spanned the area that to this day marks
the boundaries of the fair: from 12th Street to 7th
Street between Howard and Harrison, with Folsom at the center. Intended
to showcase the SOMA community, whose leather “miracle mile” lay at
the heart of the fair, it also included the wide diversity of the SOMA
neighborhoods, perhaps most aptly caught by the early morning street
art painting done by pupils of the Bessie Carmichael school while watched
over by nuns.
Connell and Valerio intended to go spectacular and not incremental,
to include a dance stage (run by the emerging DJ Page Hodel), and a
constant menu of upcoming live local bands and performers presented
on the 12th Street stage. The Folsom Fair was also a venue
for local crafts persons and entrepreneurs to sell their wares, and
a large public site for the leather community to celebrate and revel
in itself.
Professionally run by paid subcontractors and a volunteer staff of
400 individuals and 50 supporting organizations and businesses, the
fair managed to do at the outset what most street fairs are unable to
do after years of operation—turn a profit that was all returned to charity.
A surpisingly large turnout of 30,000 persons at the first fair helped
return roughly $20,000 to community coffers. The word of the first fair’s
success spread, and the attendence in 1985 and beyond—like a living
cell—continued to double each year for many years, expanding the fair
to Division Street and the side streets.
In every way, the first fair had been a success. Quickly, within two
years, word spread about the event and the attendance and charitable
monies raised spiked. It also rapidly became more than just a local
event, drawing people from across the U.S. and eventually from all over
the world, so that today the fair routinely sells out all hotels in
San Francisco, as over 300,000 people gather in the 4th largest
single-day event in the U.S. and the largest leather event in the world—one
that last year returned $250,000 to local charities. Over its 17 year
history, a conservative calculation is that “Folsom” has returned just
short of a billion dollars in earned revenue to local business, and
millions to charity.
In 1986 Connell “retired” as co-producer due to a job shift to Silicon
Valley, and asked Jayne Salinger, a lesbian and theater major from New
York State, to take her place.
All around Valerio, Connell and Salinger, friends and supervolunteers
began to sicken and die. First one, then another, then a lover, then
the lover’s lover, then 10, and soon hundreds fell in the city and a
deep gloom and atmosphere of loss, fear and grieving settled on San
Francisco.
Salinger willingly began to work on fair production with Valerio, forming
a new duo that continued to produce the next several fairs and community
organizing projects in SOMA.
