Monthly Archives: January 2014

A Fire on Cole Street, and a Boom in San Francisco

In 1999, my college friends and I moved into an apartment in the progressive community of Jamaica Plain in Boston. Some of us stayed on the east coast, and some of us moved to San Francisco. I eventually followed the latter group, and after living for a time in a single occupancy hotel in the Hayes Valley neighborhood, I joined some friends in a house in the Haight-Ashbury district.

Amidst the afterglow of the hippie movement in the late sixties and the collapse of the dotcom bubble the year before, my roommates and I worked at various jobs in the service industry. We were neither hippies nor hipsters, just people who were interested in “striving for realization of one’s relationship to life and other people,” to borrow a principle that the owner of The Blue Unicorn, a coffee shop near the strip of park called the Panhandle, printed on leaflets in the mid-sixties.

We had plenty of problems along the way. Drug use, food addiction, notions of self-importance—nothing too far from what hampered (and fueled) the sixties counterculture. But along with our issues came meaningful attempts to connect with one another and understand life, just what the coffee shop proprietor identified as important.

Due to high rent, I’m sure, we didn’t have a common room. But we still had trouble paying our landlord at the end of the month. Near the end of my stay, one of my roommates spent our rent money on alcohol and perhaps other drugs, and about four months after I moved out in October of 2001, the house burned down.

This piece is about the house, San Francisco and its cost of living then and now, and finding a place to be.
Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on A Fire on Cole Street, and a Boom in San Francisco