Five stars given, but for the place as it existed during the 1990s when I lived there, at 938 Geary…read moreStreet at Polk, for ten years.
Sadly, and all too predictably, the gritty yet for-the-most-part safe atmosphere of the Polk Gulch/Tendernob area has vanished almost entirely as the place succumbs to gentrification, "merchant's associations" that prevent interesting places like the sex shops and artier head shops out, yet the crack paraphernalia simply gets sold behind liquor store counters anyway. The one good head shop left there is overpriced, never orders new merchandise (the same shirts have been on the walls since last decade...) And too many Subways!
These are minor "me things" however. The real tragedy is the Tendernob's slow but quickening end to the last true 'hood in the City where cheap apartments were available that were not surrounded by transient hotels. That is sad.
I know this will not be something most people will agree with, but in my late twenties I got a kick out of walking up and down Polk, watching the shadier characters, mostly young guys hustling. Some of them were well, let's face it, easy on the eye, so to speak...Alas, but those were different days. O Tendernob...sometimes I miss you so.
Now palm trees have grown two storeys tall, which is nice, towering over overpriced so-called 'thrift shops' and restaurants,which is not nice.
My biggest personal beef:
Once upon a time there was a head shop between Geary and Post on Polk. It's still there but different people run it now, and they don't bother with my favourite product of such places, which this particular little boutique used to carry, when I couldn't even find them in the Haight.
Now the place has plenty of smoking utensils - if you've seen one bong you've seen them all - but it now does not have a single quality blacklight poster - only the talentless crap made in the '90s, not the '70s type which had real art behind the flock and dayglo (I am a psychedelist; I really love this kind of thing. So sue me.)
There used to be boxloads of them and I bought every one, back when I had a job in 1993 - including the prized copy of the sort-of "dog-faced giant cobra" design that Mom and Dad bought me to hang on my walls (covered with pink roses on wallpaper, what an odd clash THAT was! They got it when I was literally obsessed with snakes to the exclusion of all else...) Another thing I get a kick out of is that it is that same cobra poster you'd see on Mole's wall in Mortville, in my fave John Waters' movie, "Desperate Living".
It was in every room I lived in there, then in SF, too, when one day, a third one replaced my Berkeley copy when it got ripped up.
In June of 2012, the renovaters accidentally wrecked my last copy while trying to move my stuff too fast - and no one makes them, or sells them here, any more.
I have ALWAYS had this particular stupid snake poster in the many rooms I have lived in across the decades, including 938 Geary in the TenderNob...and the one place I could count on finding it? Gone.
I know. I know. There are about 7 trillion more important things to be sad about. But you know how it is. Some changes are good and others just make things more dull and less like treasure troves.
I'm glad it was fun while I was there, but my once-dear TenderNob is now turning into Castro 2: "Less charm, more redundancy." And did I mention the redundancy?
