All-inclusive Randomness

You wondered about that awesome-looking mural on Church and 15th? This is the story (stolen from SF Guardian’s Best of the Bay):

As Swiss-born muralist Mona Caron points out, Market Street is a public space whose purpose transcends traffic and shopping. Caron’s Market Street Railway Mural — which she recently finished at Church and 15th Streets — quotes from history to show how that public space has been reinvented. The mural is divided into eight color-tinted sections linked by the progress of a 1924 streetcar. (The car on which it’s modeled, no. 798, was being restored by noted preservationist David Pharr until his death last October, and Caron, who met Pharr while working on the Duboce Bikeway Mural, adjacent to the streetcar repair yard, has dedicated the Railway Mural to him.) Each section captures a moment in Market Street history: The leftmost, tinted like an old sepia photograph, shows the mid 1920s, when four streetcar lines carried riders from the Ferry Building to points west. The next section shows “Bloody Thursday,” a 1934 labor riot between longshoremen and police; from there, Caron moves on to a Labor Day parade, the 1940s (with bus service reducing the streetcar lines from four to two), and a late-’70s gay-pride parade. Next, a modern-day panel shows streetcar service crowded out by SUVs and a semi bearing “Globalization” cargo, while on the sidewalk the Reverend Billy preaches against corporate hegemony. A section devoted to the antiwar protests of Feb. 15, 2003, reminds us that the debate over Market Street’s public space is still raging. But the future seems to promise peace in the struggle. The mural’s rightmost panel presents Caron’s idea of utopia on Market Street: a “San Francisco Swapping Center,” cars running on solar instead of fossil fuel, the United Nations replaced by the United Bioregions, and free lectures (and free coffee) at sidewalk cafés. And the future of the artist? The mural shows Caron painting at her easel atop the Odd Fellows building at Seventh and Market Streets, “thinking about the future still.” Church and 15th Sts., S.F. www.monacaron.com.