SRO

The Tenderloin is the point of entry for many who arrive in San Francisco. With its single-room-occupancy hotels and immigrant community, the neighborhood has long served as an initial foothold in the city. Yet that same supply of cheap housing, along with a cluster of social-service providers, can also make the neighborhood, more cruelly, a final destination for folks trying to hang on in an expensive city. I know this because for me, the Tenderloin was both.

My first day in San Francisco, fresh off the freight trains from back East, I found a place in an old hotel on a small alley at the edge of the neighborhood. I made a writing desk by placing a piece of wood over the sink in my room. I remember finding a hiding place above my window where someone had nested a single unused hypodermic needle. I had wanted to move to San Francisco to be a writer, and here I was. At night, the hotel’s neon sign bathed my room in a pink glow.

In the rest of the city, the dot-com boom was shifting into gear, but in the Tenderloin, old-timers sat around their lobbies, listening to ballgames on the AM radio or reading paperback crime novels or waiting for the pay phone to ring. Men on corners talked to themselves, as if broadcasting a station that only they could hear. I remember the smell of wet newspaper and weak doughnut-shop coffee, the persistent scrape of men collecting cans.

It was easy to disappear. You could leave the daylight world and turn down a long hotel hallway or into a darkened bar. There, you could go underground for good, like the man with the white beard who told me he’d first come to the city to stop the war during the Summer of Love or the drag queen who claimed to have set cop cars on fire in the White Night Riots. She smiled while she drank, remembering thousands of men dancing shirtless in the sun during Gay Freedom Day parades on Market Street.

In the downtown library, I found another kind of hiding place: an ancient file cabinet stuffed with folders of faded local news clippings. All had been cut out by hand and pasted onto white paper with the newspaper name and the date — hours of work performed by an unknown librarian. I’d begun photographing the neighborhood’s neon signs, so I came back and pasted my photos onto white paper, labeling them by address and adding them to a new file that I marked tenderloin — bar and hotel signs.

Not too long after that, I moved to another neighborhood, and indeed I did become a writer. But the money wasn’t too good and I eventually found myself back in the Tenderloin. By now the neighborhood really was disappearing. Rents were soaring as tech firms moved in. When my building eventually sold, I knew what would come next. I listened to baseball games on the radio. I read crime novels. Then, a day came when I stood on Market Street, shaking hands with my lawyer after we’d negotiated a settlement with my landlord. I would use the money to start over in a new city.

As we walked past the library, I thought of an old drawer full of newspaper clippings. I tried to remember what it had felt like to be young and so in love with this place. But all I could remember was my first hotel and its flickering sign, glowing pink through the night. — Erick Lyle