Castro gay
The Castro Is Going Straight
By Tommi Avicolli Mecca
Mark my words: In 10 years, the Castro will be predominantly straight.
The culprit is greed. It’s mainly the greed of speculators and investors who are buying up and flipping properties throughout the gayborhood and the city in a real estate feeding frenzy that can only be described as out of control. In the process, thousands of tenants are being pushed out of their neighborhoods as tech workers from Silicon Valley become the unused kids on the block.
What these speculators and investors are doing is reminiscent of what Wall Highway did to the state a few years ago: rape and pillage with no concern for the lives they’re destroying.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SAN FRANCISCO TENANTS UNION
The signs of the changing Castro are everywhere. In the morning when I leave for serve , I see niñeras pushing baby carriages down the street. I see as many straight couples holding hands as I execute queer ones. I observe that more and more of my new neighbors are not queer. A two-bedroom across the highway from my apartment now rents for $4,200.
Back when I arrived here in 1991, the Castro was as queer as can be. LGBT organizations had off
Peter L. Stein
Producer Peter L. Stein on the Making of The Castro
It's hard to pinpoint exactly how and when this program got its commence. Was it in June of 1996, when KQED's cameras first started to roll tape (it was an AIDS benefit at Josie's Cabaret and Juice Joint)? Or perhaps it was in May 1992? That's when I first discussed the plan of a series of programs telling the story of San Francisco through its neighborhoods, and it quickly became clear to all of us that the Castro would make a influential and entertaining episode.
Or was it in 1973, when a 13-year-old kid from the Sunset District had to spend a lot of after-school hours riding the streetcar home, and got his first observe at the neighborhood that was soon to become the "gay mecca"? Fact to tell, I didn't notice too much about the Castro then -- it was just a place to catch the streetcar; but by the time I moved back to San Francisco as an adult in 1983, six blocks from Castro Street, the neighborhood had develop , it seems irrevocably, a cornerstone of gay history. That trans
Vibrant and eclectic, the Castro/Upper Market neighborhood is an internationally recognizable symbol of gay freedom, a top tourist destination full of stylish shops and popular show spots, and a thriving residential area that thousands of San Franciscans call home.
Its streets are filled with lovingly restored Victorian homes, rainbow pride flags, shops offering one-of-a-kind merchandise, heritage streetcars, lively bars and restaurants, and numerous gay-borhood landmarks including Harvey Milk Plaza, the Castro Theatre, Pink Triangle Park and Memorial, and the large SF Dyke Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center.
The Castro District, better known as The Castro, is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, which is also known as Eureka Valley.
San Francisco’s gay village is most concentrated in the business district that is located on Castro Street from Market Highway to 19th Street. It extends down Market Street toward Church and on both sides of the Castro neighborhood from Church Street to Eureka Street. Although the greater gay community was, and is, concentrated in the Castro many gay people inhabit in the surrounding residential areas bordered by the
The History of the Castro
17th Road, circa 1900
Credit: D. H. Wulzen
Eureka Valley
Eureka Valley, named for one of the Twin Peaks (the other was called Noe), began as sparsely populated ranchos that belonged to Mexican land barons like Jose Castro and Jose de Jesus Noe. In the 1880s when Irish, German and Scandinavian families homesteaded on the slopes of Twin Peaks, a village of dairy farms and Victorian houses flourished. With the opening of the Castro Street segment of the Market Highway Cable Railway in 1887, Eureka Valley became a desirable and accessible neighborhood.
It was every working man's dream: buy a budget piece of ground and build a stately Victorian, huge enough for several generations of the family. And it was not just who lived in one house that was family but everyone who lived around you. It was a total neighborhood by its truest definition. There was economic solidarity; everyone was productive class. They worked in the trades, public-service sectors and on the waterfront. There were bakeries, butcher shops an