OJ Simpson never looked back at the Potrero Hill neighborhood where he grew up, now a fast-gentrifying area not particularly keen on remembering him

Before there was a Bronco on the freeway, or a glove in the courtroom or the trial of a lifetime, OJ Simpson became a puzzle piece on Nicole Emanuel’s wall.

This was in 1987 when then the name ‘OJ’ meant the ultimate in achievement for any African-American child growing up on the wrong side of a hill. And to Emanuel, a muralist celebrating her Potrero Hill neighborhood at the 17th and Connecticut bus stop, Simpson was the one she needed to paint in the mural’s center – a man who rose from nothing in a community San Francisco largely forgot.

Football had taken him from the Potrero Terrace public housing development to the top of the world and so Emanuel posed him like a conqueror in gold pants and a white jersey. She gave him his own square in a mosaic of buoyant images that were crafted to give hope to a place that had little. In Nicole Emanuel’s tribute to Potrero Hill, OJ Simpson was the ingredient that made the collage work.

“He was supposed to be a good piece of the puzzle,” Emanuel says.

She pauses.

“Now he’s a bad piece.”

Not long after OJ went on trial for the murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, vandals began to attack Emanuel’s masterpiece. One painted a red circle and a slash through OJ’s head. Another added devil horns and a knife. Someone scrawled the word “Guilty” beside his legs. When Emanuel, who had since left San Francisco, heard about the defacing, she told friends to leave it.

Such a work of public art is an open statement of its community. In the case of hometown hero OJ Simpson, the people of Potrero Hill had spoken.

The most famous football player from this year’s Super Bowl city is completely gone from her mural. Someone has doused Simpson in paint the color of a Band-Aid, leaving OJ an empty, faceless shell with the silhouette of horns on its head. Somehow this seems fitting. For the Potrero Hill of today not only wants to forget their most famous son, they seem to want to forget where he came from entirely.

“There is no thought of OJ,” says Edward Hatter, the director of the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, a powerful black voice in a community that is quickly going from poor and black to wealthy and white. “He’s another one who came out of the housing to end up in prison. There was a bunch of big stuff in between, but he was just a guy from the Hill who did something dumb and wound up in prison.”

The streets below Hatter’s office on the top of Potrero Hill are changing. He is fighting a battle he’s already lost. The tires of gleaming BMWs kiss curbs where African-American children one walked to the safe embrace of the community center on 23rd. Real estate agents have long since discovered the hidden promise of Potrero Hill. Stunning views! A modernist, mid-century house recently sold for $9m.

This is the story of America in 2016. Another refuge of the poor is being seized as a trophy for the rich. And this is especially the story of San Francisco, where gentrification has gone from an affliction to an epidemic. Maybe this is why Hatter’s voice registers a particular weariness for OJ. For in rising from the Potrero Terrace to running through airports with Arnold Palmer, OJ had a chance to pull up his old neighborhood as well. Only he didn’t. He never returned long enough to invest.

There was big stuff in between, but [OJ] was just a guy from the Hill who did something dumb and wound up in prison Edward Hatter, director, Portrero Hill Neighborhood House

“He did what he wanted to do,” Hatter says. “He wasn’t a community leader in going to USC, he was a football player. He got picked to go to Buffalo and played for Buffalo. He got traded to the 49ers and played for the 49ers. But he didn’t do anything for the community. He made commercials but did he use local kids in the commercials?”

To the few left in the Potrero that raised a young OJ, his life is a kind of fable. He ran away to the wealthy world and rarely looked back, then the wealthy world devoured him, making him a punchline, spitting his name. Now the wealth that cut through OJ has taken Potrero Hill too. What, in the end, was the fame of OJ worth to the community that needed him most?

“We put up the mural because he did come from the neighborhood,” Hatter says. “But that’s all he is – just someone who came from the neighborhood, but not someone who did something for the neighborhood. And there is a big difference.”

For generations, Potrero Hill was an afterthought in the west coast’s first great city. It rose unfashionably to the south of downtown as a working class district with surprisingly dramatic vistas. The southeast hillside, which offers wide-open glimpses of the San Francisco Bay and Oakland Hills was mostly vacant until the government constructed Potrero Terrace to house families displaced by the Great Depression. When the second world war came along, several new buildings – called Potrero Annex – were quickly constructed for workers at local defense factories. Soon, much of the hillside was covered with the rectangular three-story buildings that looked from the sky like matchboxes scattered across the hill.

By the time OJ was growing up in the Terrace, the residents of both developments were mostly African Americans with little money. Potrero Hill became known for its violence and a place where few in San Francisco dared to tread.

“We didn’t used to be in guidebooks at all,” says Peter Linenthal, who bought an early 1900s Victorian row house on top of the hill in 1975 and eventually became a local historian. “We were left out until maybe sometime in the 1980s.”

Everything changed in the 2000s when restaurants began top appear on the blocks around his house. Then came the coffee shops and the boutique stores. Suddenly Potrero Hill wasn’t only in the guidebooks, it had turned into one of the hottest neighborhoods in town.

Hatter watches as gentrification creeps over his hill and wonders what place his world still has among the coffee shops, spas and pilates studios. He can see the rec center, located on a ridge, just behind the highest rooftops of the Terrace and the Annex. As rivalries grew between residents of the Terrace and the Annex and angry words gave way to fists and knives, the rec center was the place where everybody could be safe.

The young OJ played basketball under its curved roof. He played football and baseball on the fields outside. In many ways, the rec center saved him as it saved many children who grew up in the developments. In 1977 a local artist included him in a mural of successful neighborhood athletes that was painted on the outside wall above the front door. Simpson is in a blue Buffalo Bills jersey, No32. All these years later the mural is still there, washed out, but nonetheless unblemished by vandals, probably because it is too high for them to reach.

Hatter wonders why no one has painted over the entire mural on the rec center’s wall. “It’s not a welcoming place for the kids on the hill as it used to be,” he says. Much like the neighborhood that has been commandeered by the rich, the modest rec center with its bulletin boards of yellowing OJ clippings has become a home for the entitled. On Sunday afternoon the gym that Hatter says would have been dedicated to pickup basketball in another time saw mainly white children playing futsal as parents hovered near, ready to whisk them to bathroom breaks.

Hatter sighs.

The real fight, he says, is the one that is coming on the hill just below the rec center’s fence. OJ’s old home is doomed. All of the Terrace and Annex buildings are scheduled to be ripped down, replaced by stylish new apartments that will be sold at what is described as “market rates.” Given the views and the quick walk downhill to the Muni Line, “market rates” will easily exceed $1m.

The current residents of the Terrace and Annex are required to have affordable housing in the new development but what does that mean? Will they live beside their wealthy neighbors? Will they be gathered in a huddle of slapped-together homes tucked away from the gleaming new palaces? Will they be fenced-in like prisoners to be kept a safe distance from their new wealthy neighbors?

Hatter says he and other activists have not been told. The first demolition starts this year and the lack of information frustrates him.

“As we see the African-American population disappear around here, the people there don’t know where they will go,” he says.

Late Sunday afternoon, the shouts of the children’s futsal game wafted outside the gym where two black men played with their children at the rec center’s playground. They seemed skeptical of a white reporter from a British website asking about the legacy of America’s most notorious alleged killer who is still celebrated on the building’s front.

“I know he’s in the pen now and that’s unfortunate,” says one who identifies himself only as Benny. “I don’t think he was equipped for all the stuff that came with his fame.”

He glanced around at the surrounding houses, many of which have been refurbished for tens of thousands of dollars then he looked back at the gym with OJ’s painting on the front. He is asked about the irony of this image of Simpson trapped for nearly 40 years as a hero in a neighborhood that now sees his past as part of a blemish rather than a solution.

“Hero to zero,” Benny says and shakes his head.

His friend scoffs.

“First of all,” the man says, “I don’t think he did that to his wife.”

Benny nods.

“That’s right,” Benny says. “He didn’t kill her. Write that down. He didn’t kill her.”

The friend laughs.

“OJ didn’t spend a lot of time here,” the man says. “He just wanted to play golf. I thought he would want to come back. I thought he’d work at the rec center.”

But OJ never did come back. Not in the real sense. Not even after he was found not guilty in the deaths of his wife and Goldman. The OJ who went away had no intention of returning to the place that would still open its arms to him.