Introduction

Polk Street (a.k.a. Polk Strasse, Polk Gulch, Lower Polk, Polk Village) was San Francisco’s premiere gay male center in the 1960s and 1970s. The residential enclave and business district provided fertile ground for the development of gay economic and political power through organizations such as the Tavern Guild, the Imperial Court, and through fundraisers at area bars and businesses.

Its bloc of middle-income gay businesses evaporated in the mid-1980s, leaving a “blighted” area known for its underground sex work and drug economy. During these decades, Polk Street served as a home, refuge, and family for queer runaway and homeless youth, often fleeing abusive or unwelcome homes; immigrants, primarily from Asia and Latin America; and lower-income transgendered women and seniors.

The neighborhood now is again changing dramatically. Since the early 2000s, the scores of queer bars that formed the backbone of the Polk community have almost all been replaced by upscale, heterosexual and mixed drinking establishments, while the street’s sex work economy has largely disappeared.

Tension, bitterness, and misunderstandings now accompany the changes. In 2007, a gay activist group blamed changes on a newly formed neighborhood association for “destroying the last remaining public gathering place for marginalized queers” in order to “accelerate property development and real estate profiteering.” A 2006 Wall Street Journal article characterized the conflict as one between residents working to increase neighborhood “cleanliness, beauty and safety” and those who want to instead maintain the street’s “gritty ambience.” Residents and business owners have made charges of “homophobia” and “gentrification.”

In this essay I instead argue that changes are part of a shift from one dominant economic bloc to another – one of three major shifts that have taken place since the 1950s, which have themselves been shaped by citywide economic and social forces. On Polk Street, a coveted bloc of city space long zoned as a commercial corridor, the buck has always been the bottom line. The economic forces that would create a “gay” neighborhood in the late 1950s would also lead to its demise by the early 2000s. This essay is not a comprehensive history of Polk Street. Instead, it is an attempt to trace some of the street's primary economic shifts over the past sixty years.

By the 1950s, a citywide shift from a blue-collar manufacturing to a white-collar office economy undercut an economic bloc on Polk Street made up of working class taverns and automobile manufacturing plants. As white residents left the city for the suburbs, gay men increasingly made it their home in the city. By the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the City redeveloped downtown to make San Francisco more competitive with the suburbs by refashioning the downtown areas as the Bay Area’s financial hub, displacing the low-income queer communities that had taken root there. Displaced gay bar and business owners banded together on Polk Street through business associations that were an expression of economic self-interest and a vehicle of upward economic mobility for an emerging gay political arena.

AIDS devastated the gay bar-going communities and businesses in the Polk Street area in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Also undercutting the gay commercial bloc was a national recession in the early 1980s, a spike in commercial rents, and economic competition from the emerging Castro district. Development of Bay Area Rapid Transit and “beautification” projects on Market Street in the early 1970s, part of the city’s continued transformation of downtown, displaced a “trade” sex work economy to the Polk Street area. After initial tension, by the mid-1980s, this economy emerged as the street’s dominant economy, forming their own “underground” self-policing and protection mechanisms.

By the 1990s, the fear and confusion surrounding AIDS and a growing dependence on methamphetamine led to an increasingly desperate street population that competed for less and less money, eroding the cooperation and camaraderie that was a hallmark of the 1970s. The emergence of the Internet as a social networking tool and a citywide aging of the bar-going population also undercut the street’s sex work/bar economy. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the dot.com housing crunch, rising citywide commercial rents, and an influx of artists and businesspeople seeking central city space led to a transition from a faltering, queer bar and sex work-based economy to an emerging, above-ground economy championed by a bloc of businesses, neighborhood associations, and residents working to attract a new set of clients to the area.

Polk Street is a commercial crossroads situated between several very different neighborhoods: the low-income Tenderloin area; the Van Ness commercial thoroughfare; the affluent, residential Nob Hill; Western Addition, a low-income African American neighborhood transformed by redevelopment in the 1950s; and the seat of government at Civic Center. As such, the relatively small swath of land in the city center has often been a flashpoint, providing a magnified view of issues such as housing, homelessness, real estate, and sexual politics that divide the city as a whole.