Walking the route from the Civic Center BART station through San Francisco’s Tenderloin district is to run a gauntlet of poverty, homelessness, mental illness and assorted addictions. The tragically disenfranchised inhabitants nevertheless exude a sense that this is their territory. While the environment is not overtly hostile, there is a sense that it is peaceable by the residents’ good will, a faculty that has every reason to be fragile. And at last, a break in the stretch of gated facades on Ellis Street and the reason for my journey: the Tenderloin National Forest.
This project, also known as the Cohen Alley Project, was dedicated on May 9 and marks a revitalization and reclamation long in the works under the auspices of the Luggage Store, co-directed by Laurie Lazar and Darryl Smith. It is the successful transformation of a one-time “throwaway space” as Smith recalls it. Before, it was a dead-end alley with defecation, prostitution and drug use. Now it is now a green space with trees, an herb garden and art.
Revitalizing Cohen Alley began in 1989, perhaps born from Smith’s mind when he lived in Room 4 of the hotel adjacent to it. He remembers the days of looking out his window to the alley’s previously dilapidated state, and how the walls of the buildings rising up from the garbage called to his mind the Anasazi dwellings rising up from the earth. Why shouldn’t they in San Francisco be rooted in something beautiful?
Lazar and Smith began reclaiming the alley to hold birthday parties for the children of immigrant families living in studio apartments across the street. Lazar explains, “You can imagine they didn’t have much room to run around. We’d close off the alley one Sunday per month, clean it up, and have it as a place for them to play.” The Luggage Store hosted many fund-raising activities and by 2001 they were finally able to gate off the alley, thereby closing it to traffic and they could work in earnest to transform the paved-over space.
A redwood tree and Japanese maple are now fixed components to Cohen Alley. But generally speaking, the content of the alley has evolved since work began to change it into a green art space, and Lazar expects that evolution will be the operative force for its future. Currently, for instance, it sports an herb garden that grows plants that the Vietnamese use, and residents come from across the street to fetch seasoning for their food. But that naturally stands to change if the makeup of the neighborhood changes. The goal Lazar and Smith sound for the Cohen Alley is that it should thrive as a function of the artists who work in it and the residents living around it, not that it should achieve any specific kind of end-state.
Smith looks forward to a future where our urban landscape contains more of the natural environment that predates the concrete and asphalt. “It’s amazing how quickly life returns. In this alley it used to be flies and rats. Now that’s gone, and what’s come back is so diverse. We have butterflies and hummingbirds.”
Photo: Darryl Smith, co-director of the Luggage Store, standing next to one of the murals in the Cohen Alley Project on May 9, 2009, the day of the project’s official dedication. (Photo courtesy of Michelle Sandell.)