“We just had faith, that if the freeway came down, it would change the neighborhood forever,” said business owner Keyvan Behnia, looking back 20 years into the past.
Like many of his original Hayes Valley neighbors, Behnia now only remembers a time when he was too afraid to leave his house at night, the many months he had to close up shop before dusk, and the day his best friend – the future president of the Hayes Valley Merchant’s Association - was mugged and beaten up in broad daylight only two blocks from their businesses on Hayes Street.
The reason: the city’s Central Freeway hovered darkly over the community, creating an unsafe and unsightly haven for crime, drugs and prostitution.
Then the earth shook.
In the early evening of October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta Earthquake brought the Central Freeway to the ground in pieces, leaving room in its wake for one of the city’s greatest neighborhood transformations. Now on the 20th Anniversary of the quake, residents look back on the community’s changes and think ahead about what’s next to come.
Behnia, a long-time Hayes Valley community member, says that now “Walking from my house to here (his store) is like walking through a locker room. I know everybody.” He says that 20 years ago small business owners and residents alike were “solely attracted to Hayes Valley because rents were cheap,” an image hard for new residents to imagine because the neighborhood is currently “one of the most desirable zip codes in the city.” According to Behnia, the freeway’s destruction sparked development that led to an intimate small town vibes in this central San Francisco setting - a great source of pride for the people who live and work in the Hayes Valley of today.
Ron Davis, a native to San Francisco, moved to Hayes Valley with his life partner just after the earthquake, because he says more families moved into the area and new housing developments were being constructed. “Back then, I was still contributing to the mayhem. I was young,” says Davis who was in his early twenties back then, remembering that the neighborhood didn’t exactly embrace change for the first few years after Loma Prieta. He added that the neighborhood today is unrecognizable from Hayes Valley 20 years ago, with the worst crimes before being murder, now petty theft and vehicle robbery.
Other relatively new residents of Hayes Valley say they were attracted to the area after the quake because of certain developments and neighborhood improvement projects that popped up after the city government decided it was too expensive, and far too opposed by neighborhood organizations, to restore the Central Freeway’s lost on-ramps and exits. With multiple vacant lots and freeway parcels left to undecided fates, plans began arising on what became the creations of the Market Octavia Plan, Octavia Boulevard and Patricia’s Green.
“The green was an on-going project after the freeway’s destruction,” says Mark Thompson, manager of a boutique furniture store on Hayes Street. He says the completion of the park at Octavia Boulevard and Hayes Street is what gave Hayes Valley businesses an overhaul. “The area is its own little neighborhood shopping district now.”
Mitch Satram, a native of Trinidad in the Caribbean, has been working at The African Outlet for over 20 years and lives just down the block from the famous store. He says the most significant changes to the neighborhood have happened in the last 10 years with a new population of people moving in. “Some of the kids around here used to be terrible,” he says speaking of the days when he too was afraid of being out at night. Now Satram, sitting on the sidewalk watching a football game on a plasma screen TV in The African Outlet’s storefront window, says the neighborhood is peaceful and a place where “everyone gets along.”
Behnia also attributes the success of the neighborhood to the new populations of people moving in, specifically those that brought business and new money to the up-and-coming community during the dot-com boom, when the entire city’s population increased. He says that although this inflow of new residents may contribute to gentrification of the neighborhood, but that the neighborhood has maintained most of its historically African-American community institutions and population. “Instead of hair salons and funeral parlors, those same people now own corner markets and restaurants.”
Although some community members may debate over the human impact of the neighborhood’s growth and newly acquired affluence, they’re at least on the same page about what they want in the next 20 years in Hayes Valley – increased pedestrian safety, expanded municipal transport, and cleaner streets.
A balancing act occurs between older residents and the younger generations of families and single professionals that live and work in the area today, leading some residents to believe the future of economic prosperity and social connection in Hayes Valley relies on a time when these younger generations begin to take the place of neighborhood leaders and business owners.
The key to this, according to Behnia and others, is taking pride in the community harmony that exists today.
Unused freeway parcels offer Hayes Valley temporary possibilities
From an electric car plug-in station to an outdoor cinema, a pop-up art exhibit space to a slow food vendor market, community members speculate on possible future installments for the unoccupied freeway parcels of Hayes Valley left as ruins of the once grand Central Freeway.
The power over who gets to decide what happens to these unused freeway parcels, now overgrown by weeds and littered with garbage, transferred from state authority to the city in January of 2001, according to the San Francisco Planning Commission. But since then, the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association led by community activist Frances Neagley, says they have the right to decide the temporary uses of certain sites.
Although permanent developments for the parcel spaces will not begin for many years to come, proposals for lot K at Fell and Oak streets, and lot L at Octavia Boulevard and Laguna Street, both in the heart of Hayes Valley, may be put to action in the next coming years, according to the HVNA.
Funding for the proposed projects, all oriented around community social and economic benefit, is yet to be determined. But that certainly hasn’t stopped residents, tourists, and the HVNA from spreading enthusiasm and excitement through the neighborhood’s side streets and businesses as the proposals for lots K and L make their way to the mayor’s office.
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