Pause for aesthetics
Richard Segovia’s house is as loud as the Latin rock music he teaches children to play in his basement studio. With colors ranging from jungle green and royal blue at the pavement to a red and yellow sunburst at the ridge, the otherwise modest Spanish-style home is essentially one enormous mural, a crowded portraitof long-gone musicians, Segovia’s family members, social activists, various psychedelia, and the odd jungle animal.
Segovia has lived in San Francisco’s Mission district since 1963, and he sees himself as a custodian of the neighborhood’s culture, specifically as the birthplace of Latin rock. (Carlos Santana, a family friend, grew up nearby.) But increasingly the 68-year old “Mayor of the Mission” finds himself face to face with a stark representation of all the color that has been bled out of the city over successive waves of tech-fueled gentrification.
“I walk the neighborhood every day and I see all these gray houses,” Segovia says. “It’s like being in a cemetery.”
Noooooooo. San Francisco is gorgeous and one of the ways it’s gorgeous is all the pistachio and peach and hyacinth houses. One of my few complaints about Seattle [leaving aside the explosion of new high-rises] is the passion for drab muddy dark dreary colors for the houses – gray, darker gray, brown, tan, mud, smoke. I stop to drink in every brightly colored house I see and wish there were more of them. What is wrong with people? Why would anyone want San Francisco to be more gray?
From the Golden Gate Bridge’s International Orange hue to the elaborately carved and painted façades of the Painted Ladies fronting Alamo Square, vivid color has long been the grammar of San Francisco’s vernacular architecture.
Yes but also of the much more ordinary Little Boxes, way out in the Sunset and Richmond, the flattest and least interesting part of the city (except that it’s next to the ocean), which are a sea of pink and lavender and pale green, or at least were when I lived in SF decades ago.
But apparently that doesn’t say Money loudly enough.
But more and more, amid the pastels and the gold-leaf embellishments, you see a striking juxtaposition: 125-year-old houses painted in the tones of a cold war-era nuclear warhead or a dormant cinder cone. In neighborhoods like the Mission and the Haight, this phenomenon reads to some residents as an erasure of the Latino community or of the lingering counterculture. Gentrification gray homes have become a totem of affluent interlopers.
It’s a crime.
I live in a city known for its multicoloured houses, in a part of the city where these multicoloured houses exist. On my small block, in the last year or so, three homeowners have had their houses repainted…all in the identical shade of beige. I did remonstrate with two of them, but it isn’t a huge surprise that my opinion carried little weight. (My house is pinkish-lavender–I rent it, so don’t have any choice over the colour, but I’m happy with it.)
If these rich people really want to live in gray buildings, they can just go to East Germany. Lots of them there (though I hope they started tearing some of them down and rebuilding after reunification; I saw a few when I visited, but didn’t notice a lot. But then, I was only in Berlin one day).
My current house and my last house have both been in historical districts with older houses that don’t look alike. When I lived in Oklahoma, there were constant moves to tear down the historical district (called the poor district or the ratty district by naysayers, but a lot of the people there were middle class, not poor, and they kept their homes neat). Coalitions managed to save these late nineteenth century houses that had more character than the ones that were built later.
Where we live now, the gated communities are sort of away from where we are, on the outskirts of town, and can be mostly ignored. They ignore us, we ignore them. Our neighbors are a mixed bag, but the main issue is the tendency to cut down beautiful old trees (just as bad as dreary repainting). Our house is sort of a neutral color; the siding was already there when we bought it. But it does have character in the trees, in the trim, and in the fact that it looks different from every house on our street, only one of which is gray.
I live near Darlington which, in addition to being the birthplace of the world’s first public steam railway and a certain prominent feminist, was the home, rather surprisingly, of the world’s first black professional football player and fine moustache-curator, Arthur Wharton.
A fan painted an exceptionally good mural of Wharton on his house:
https://darlingtonfc.co.uk/source/DSC_3638.jpg
That’s nice, right? I mean, it’s not just me, is it, that’s something you’d enjoy seeing on the end of an otherwise unremarkable terrace if you happened to be passing? It’s the sort of thing that might cause a person to fire up DuckDuckGo and find out a bit more about this forgotten piece of history, yeah? It might cheer a person up, seeing a rather nice piece of public art, especially one celebrating a surprising fact about a town not at all known, to say the least, for its fondness for racial minorities?
The people of Darlington, or at least those who frequent the comments of its newspaper, the Northern Echo, don’t like it, though. They don’t like it at all.
It has nothing to do with racism, though. Of course not, not at all. It’s because murals – regardless of their subject matter – make the place “look like a ghetto”. That being a direct quote from at least four different NE site users on around a dozen occasions when the mural has been featured.
So definitely not racism.
Racism aside, though, I suspect the people of Darlington would object to virtually anything that brightened up an otherwise drab terrace, forlornly symbolic of the frittered-away glory of a proud industrial past. Having Nice Things in the North East of England isn’t really allowed, despite its outstanding natural beauty, and the people here seem to fall over each other to condemn those who make any effort at all to brighten the urban bits of it up.
What I see here and in the OP are people who are proud of some of the better aspects of where they live and are putting some bones back into the places. Up With That Sort Of Thing, I say.
iknklast
I have seen gray buildings in East Germany, but also some of the most beautiful towns I have ever visited, such as Schwerin and Weimar. I lived in Leipzig for a short while in 2002, and have been back to visit several times since then. I definitely wouldn’t describe it as gray. I visited Dresden several times during my time in Leipzig and again in 2008. I couldn’t believe how much the city had changed for the better in just 6 years. East-Berlin has also changed enormously since the first time I visited in the autumn of 1994. Back then Potsdammer Platz was still a no man’s land, and large parts of the Berlin Wall were still standing. Today Potsdammer Platz is completely rebuilt (I’m not sure “beautiful” is the first adjective that comes to mind, but certainly lively and cosmopolitan), and you have to actively seek out the few remaining pieces of the wall. Prenzlauer Berg seems to me like as good an example as anything I can imagine of rehabilitation of an inner city neighborhood done right. So it’s not all gloom :)
That Darlington mural is very nice.
Bjarte, I actually have nothing against gray buildings in general. Having one or two gray houses scattered on a block can leave the block looking quite nice, if the houses are well kept and so forth. I don’t think I would like to live in a place where most of the houses were gray, but I could probably make that same statement for any other color. I like character in a neighborhood, and my neighborhood has that, but I fear that may not last. If it can last two more years until I retire, then I will say let it do what it does.
A person I know wrote a monologue against beige. Every usage of the color. I also think beige is quite attractive when done correctly, but many people have overused it (my ex for one).
“A person I know wrote a monologue against beige. Every usage of the color. I also think beige is quite attractive when done correctly, but many people have overused it (my ex for one).”
Lindybeige!
Sorry, that just had to be said out loud :)
latsot, I just looked up Darlington on Wikipedia and I’m tempted to ask what you think of the town hall. I certainly think that could do with a mural.
Francis:
Yes, or covering up altogether, it is truly awful. It’s in the process of being replaced, fortunately. I haven’t seen the new building yet but it can hardly be worse. I don’t know whether the old building is being razed to the floor and the architect led away in chains so no such folly can ever occur again, but I sincerely hope so.