Making a Difference

         Rare is the city or village where some are not unhoused, homeless, or living on the margin.

      In San Francisco we saw something transformative, and it is on the way to Los Angeles. All cities should take note.

        The gentlemen in the vest is part of something making a difference, Urban Alchemy

        Founder Dr. Lena Miller calls it a workforce development program that is a transforming force as a social enterprise.

        Men and women wearing the Urban Alchemy colors are visible in several neighborhoods.

        

        In three years Miller's "troops" have turned around once troubled neighborhoods through attention to detail and a full on presence.

            

Photo from SF Weekly

        When an area begins to look like the frame above,  beset with crime, filth, drug dealers and or homelessness, Urban Alchemy takes it on.

     Miller says it where a job meets the homeless, mental illness, addiction, merchants, residents and tourists.

            Urban Alchemy teams tend to the needs of the unhoused, do CPR, rescue drug overdoses, and assist those with mental crises.

        Other teams hit the alleys and streets, cleaning up, getting rid of needles, trash, human waste. 

        They've developed and care for public toilets and rest stations.

        They have created safe zones, safe walking areas and even parks.

        As one of the urban alchemists told me they are "here for everyone, just making it good for everyone."

        They try, as they say, "to hold the space" so it is safe and clean. They are guardians, clean up crews, ambassadors.

               

photo Upshot Stories

Photo San Francisco Examiner

        Urban Alchemy hires long time offenders, released on completion of sentences. Millar says they are people "with barriers to employment."

        They are men and women with street smarts who are given a job and income with the ability to earn an honest living and provide for themselves and families. She says she has seen many success stories in people who might have ended up homeless too. Her staff has a special relationship with the homeless.

        "They feel a special bond. They know what it means to be dismissed and disrespected."

        The Urban Alchemists evince a pride in the work they do. As they transform neighborhoods, bringing civility, caring, cleanliness, Miller says they too are transformed. She says there is a sense of mission and a kind of spirituality in this mix.

       As unhoused people try to survive in cities, living rough, it creates challenges and changes in the chemistry of urban life and commerce. Urban Alchemy has a balm for that.

        See you down the trail. 

        

SURVIVING AGAIN

        Our destiny changed that day and we've see an endless media loop exhausting how many ways that is so.

     None of us who saw it can erase the image. But today 1 in 4 in America were not alive then. History and education should be  the guardian of the memory. 

    

    A piece of the once "angry young man" has stirred in this old boomer, but not perhaps as you might think. To quote Ed Murrow again, "This just might do nobody any good." I'll pick up his next line too,  "...some just might accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest..."

     A Marine, counsel for the Commandant, a strong man of enduring courage wept and was overwhelmed as he remembered the day the plane struck near his office in the Pentagon.

     A brother recalls seeing his twin return to a tower to help with evacuation, minutes before he is lost in the collapse. 

    A man tells how he saw a video of a woman in flight dropping past the building on the way to her death, he recognized the clothing as that of his wife. 

    If you've been near radio, television, or a screen you too have no doubt heard more, much more, of the same. It is heart breaking. It is unfiltered tragedy. It is also excessive, and exploitive.

    The honest emotion is undeniable. Its expression is painful, horribly painful. But there is a place for it and there are reasons these humans should need dredge up such pain and heartbreak. I don't think that reason is because a network, or media enterprise thinks it should be.

    I'm sorry my father is not here to hear me say that. He was also an absolutist on the first amendment and press freedom but was not without his criticism of media's tendency to hype. As a practitioner of the craft I'd bristle and we'd have a good chat.

        The attack on Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination,

and before that the end of the Civil War and World War I would draw newspaper attention to those anniversary date,  "look- backs."

      There may be value in those historic reflections, but what makes the date of the 20th Anniversary any more appropriate or relevant to plumb the history than 6 weeks before that, for example. The hook, is anniversary; 5, 10, 15, 25, 50, until there are no survivors and few alive who endured the history.

       There is nothing in the study of history, the psychology of the brain, or compassion for victims that needs to be exercised on an anniversary date. Scholarship is ongoing while media hits get clicks or ratings. 

        I get the history, the importance of remembering and teaching and understanding, and learning. But for heavens sake we need not put these suffering people through the anguish of loss, and broken hearts so we can put together a television program or pod cast to cash in on and exploit the emotion.

        History courses, museums, memorials, family gatherings, tributes, and such is the decent and civilized place for the expressions of those thoughts and feelings. 

        Making people sit for cameras and then range through hurt and loss seems hurtful, wrong and crass.

        This point of view is probably as popular today as it was when I raised in newsrooms and pushed back against such arbitrary enterprises, "back in the day." There was a ghastly triple homicide that local stations and newspapers always trudged out around the anniversary date. Nothing new, no changes, just a replay of gore and sad stories. What's gained?

        There have been a couple of pieces in the blizzard of production that attempted to measure how we have changed, and how we have been affected. They were long on analysis and probing and short on the emotional sound bites and forced memories. 

        On September 10 I was shuttling between Washington and New York. I had meetings near the Towers and at the Pentagon and just across the river. We were working on a nuclear arms project. We were scheduled for a night flight back to Indianapolis, but one of our contacts had been delayed by weather out west. We made plans to fly back to New York, stay in Manhattan and meet him the next day and then shuttle back and take another meeting in Washington. He called to say he was stuck in Chicago and we should reschedule when timing was better. We flew home on the late flight.

        I remember a moment walking in New York, the sky was blue and it was a beautiful day, and I made note of how nice it was and how young those on the streets suddenly seemed. On most previous assignments or trips every thing seemed more of a hassle, gritty and the people were less friendly than they were on September 10, or so I remembered. 

        Several of the tortured souls I saw interviewed in the last week, mentioned what a beautiful fall day September 11 was. Somehow that touched me.

        See you down the trail.

   

 

City Takes # 2 -Lines and Rhythm

                                    

                        San Francisco has an elegance.

Even as the city morphs and changes, there is a fusion of linear forces that vivifies.

We mourn the loss of the old places, and funky personality.

Economics, largely driven by tech, disrupts, it is true.

        

     As in any city with real imagination, the architecture is a kind of code; who we have been, and who we are becoming. 

    It is not about architecture only though, at least to those of us with cameras. It is also how it all comes together; angles, spaces and the juxtaposition of style and line.

        

    This post tries to celebrate those LINES AND RHYTHM.

    

Old and new, edged and rounded, light and space

creating feel and flow.

 

After a year and half of pandemic restrictions, we were excited just to see The City.

     As a kid, when westerns were the fare on television, my midwestern sense of the West was Dodge City, Tombstone, Boot Hill and such, until Have Gun Will Travel changed all that. 

    Paladin, a sophisticated well tailored bon vivant, graduate of West Point, a Chinese martial arts specialist, president of the San Francisco Stock Exchange Club, chess player, and swordsman made his home a city that appeared as exotic as the problem solving hero. No Roy Rogers or Marshall Dillon, he.

     In 1957 that was a mind blowing concept-a gentleman gun fighter private eye who quoted literature. 

                "Wire Paladin San Francisco."

    After that the old west was, old and primitive, but San Francisco locked in my mind as, exotic, unique, a place where Asian and Western culture mixed and in a place that looked unlike anywhere else.

        There is something else in this city that deserves a look,

Urban Alchemy. That is coming in a future post.

     See you down the trail.

City Takes-Emotion and Vibe

 

        San Francisco is full of texture and emotion. This post tries to capture some of that vibe in this age of pandemic.

        Not since our pre pandemic visit to Dublin, Edinburgh and Glasgow have we been in a city. So here from a recent trip is COLOR AND NUANCE, the first post of an urban celebration of "The City."

        I hope you'll give yourself a couple of minutes to look at these frames, their color and detail, the larger the screen the better. 

        Taken in total or block by block San Francisco is a artful, arty and visually entertaining.

     

    

       

        I'm always fascinated by how people interact in public spaces. These shots capture the social distancing with dashes of California color and irony.  Create your own dialogue for the couples.

        San Francisco has stunning structure and architectural rhythm. That is coming in a future post. 

        Look around where you live and notice what you see that others may not.

     See you down the trail.