The crack-cocaine users who sleep across the street from Victoria — or “bubble boys,” as she has nicknamed them, after a slang term for drug use — screamed when Department of Public Works employees sprayed them with high-powered hoses a few weeks ago, she says. 

It was about 4:30 a.m. in the Mid-Market area of downtown San Francisco, a few hours before the daily arrival of tech industry employees, whose firms recently moved into the neighborhood. DPW workers gave the sleeping young men four warnings and then started spraying, said Victoria, 52, who only offered her first name out of a mistrust of police common among San Francisco’s homeless people.

Victoria described herself as a “polite,” obliging homeless woman who picks up and leaves when asked by the authorities. She said the young men were given fair warning by the cleanup crew. But the sight of them being hosed was disturbing. “They were screaming,” she said.

Reports of DPW workers “washing away” homeless is nothing new—Street Sheet posted the above video back in 2008, and in late September, department employees told homeless around 16th and Mission to leave or be “sprayed out.”  However, Al Jazeera reports that hosing the homeless has reached new levels, with daily sidewalk washing happening since September that activists claim are a “very orchestrated campaign to gentrify the Mid-Market area and draw in tech companies and offer them a tax break to move into that area.”

“We’re doing a good job. I got Market Street cleared out,” a DPW employee, working with a police escort, told Al Jazeera while “his team cleaned a dead-end alley with an encampment of homeless people, just blocks from Twitter headquarters.”

Police ultimately asked at least one homeless man to relocate from mid-Market to 25th and Potrero in the Mission District, only to find himself ousted once again.

[Al Jazeera]

I found myself up in the Tenderloin the other night, hungering for Golden Era's vegan drumsticks and the warm glow of cult propaganda on the television, but the restaurant had gone kaput.

I was hoping there might be something good to the closure—perhaps the owners going on to bigger and even better things?—but, sadly, it's just another verse in San Francisco's sad song:

LOST OUR LEASE.

Golden Era will be closed permanently at this location starting Monday, November 25, 2013. We thank you for your patronage in the past 15 years. We will miss you all. Love, Love….

We reached out to the restaurant over Facebook and are yet to hear back.  But according to some folks on Yelp, the landlord jacked their rent when the lease was over and were economically showed them the door.

On Facebook, they announced, “we are working very hard to find our new home in SF.”  We'll update if we hear more.

[Photo by Jovan J]

PianoFight and EndGames Improv, two relatively new groups in San Francisco's reignited comedy and performance arts scene, recently announced a partnership in opening a new venue at Taylor and Eddy Streets.  Everything about it sounds absolutely awesome.

“The 5,000 square foot Tenderloin complex will include rehearsal and office spaces, 54-seat and 96-seat theaters in the back of house, and in the front of house a 60-seat restaurant and bar with a full liquor license and a cabaret stage,” PianoFight writes on their website. “The complex will be a collaborative hub for artists and a creative destination for audiences. It will meet all the production and performance needs of up-and-coming independent companies and take risks to entice non-traditional audiences hungry for inventive live performance.”

What's more?  Both theaters have a three-camera setup capable of editing video in real time, so any performance can be live-streamed.  And PianoFight sees themselves as becoming “the ultimate hangout spot,” with performers joining the audience at the bar after the show, and a grip of original programming keeping the crowds entertained:

There will be multiple shows a night, by local performers and touring acts, including dinner theater performances on our cabaret stage. We're interested in producing shows that make you laugh, make you think, and generally challenge the status quo of how theater is presented. Audience-judged playwriting competitions, fully-scripted choose-your-own-adventure plays, ballet horror comedies, Throw Rotten Veggies at the Actors Nights — this is the kind of content we want to see, so it’s the kind of content we produce.

PianoFight is already 90% done with construction, and just started promoting a $120,000 Kickstarter campaign for equipment and finishing touches.  But, as a for-profit company, PianoFight's Artistic Director Rob Ready tells us the group will avoid the pitfalls of having to fundraise constantly, making the space sustainable for years to come.

PianoFight also has the backing of District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim and Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development.  Through the city's SF Shines grant program, which awards grants to businesses seeking to make facade improvements, Ready says the complex will become an anchor in the city's new theater hub:

[The SF Shines] grant is available in a bunch of neighborhoods in the city and available to a bunch of different kinds of businesses. That said, Mid-Market gets a good chunk of that funding due to the Cultural Arts District that City Hall is trying to set up. What's amazing is that it's starting to finally take shape. In those two square blocks, between Market and Eddy and Mason and Taylor, by 2015 there will be about 10 performing arts venues, with about 20 different stages.

Ready says we can expect to see the space open in March, and we don't need to worry about two-drink minimums or any of the other big league comedy club bullshit.

Below, their Kickstarter campaign video:

Brazilian twins Os Gemeos were back in San Francisco in September and painted two new murals, the first of which is above The Luggage Store on Market:

And the second (a collaboration with Mark Bode) can be seen behind The Warfield on Turk and Taylor:

[Photos via Fecal Face and Os Gemeos, because my cell pics are terrible]