IMO, back then and now, lawyer Vince Courtney got outfoxed* by a layperson.**
But You Make The Call:
I don’t know, if I were a certain attorney, I’d let sleeping dogs lie.
But that’s just me…
*I can explain to you how “street mediation” works, you know, when conducted by peace officers in this kind of situation. Could this lawyer have been arrested? I don’t know. But he seemed afraid of something.
**I mean, he just pushed and pushed until he got the most he could possibly get, and he got it all recorded, and then posted it for tout le monde to see. That’s called advocacy.
(Artist’s conception, but the window was painted over for a while.)
And then it was all like this*
And now, just before the Great Lighting Ceremony of 2011, there’s no train at all:
Poor Obama!
(I’ll check and see if the Obama train pops up before Christmas. It’s a mystery to me. Of course, this is in Golden Gate Park on public land, as is the Prayer Book Cross and other things. Sometimes, We, those of us way out West, lose track of that nettlesome Bill of Rights.)
*Fear the beard and all. You know, I don’t think certain people, people like MC Hammer, understand that they threw their weight behind the Republican choice** for Mayor, understand that they (blindly?) supported the first choice of just 7% of San Francisco. We’ll see if they do this again.
**Ed Lee was the only viable candidate on the San Francisco Republican’s Endorsements webpage.
Anyway, the big Presidio Trust meeting is coming up. Will we get a lodge? Well, who would want to operate it, who would want to deal with the Presidio Hysterical Association and the wealthy, white, weathering NIMBYs in San Francisco’s Great White North? Maybe a non-profit?
And will the 1000-seat Main Post Theatre ever get used again? Speaking of non-profits, I think it’s the San Francisco Film Society what wants to run the joint, have three screens and 600 seats, run little festivals and whatnot. (You know who funds those who oppose ever using the theatre again? The owners of neighboring theatres! Isn’t that funny! You can ask these melon farmers all about it.)
Our moribund Main Post Theatre. Don’t use it, don’t touch it, else you’ll upset area NIMBYs/HYSTERIC SOCIETIES/THEATRE OWNERS. No no, just lock it up forever and let “arrested decay” do its magic. Bode, CA, here we come:
Anyway, the Presidio Bowling Center rolls on, surprisingly resilient. (I thought the wrecking ball would have taken it down by now, shows what I know. I still think it’s doomed, long-term.) (And check out the time that Check, Please reviewed the snack bar as if it were a restaurant right here. Snooty lady walked out is what happened. Good times.)
Anyway, they have a deal for you. Check it:
Oh, here we are, the crux of the matter. Area NIMBYs will have to cool their heels before getting a chance to tell tout le monde about where they were born, how long they’ve lived on which street, where their kids went to college, etc. And then they’ll say how they’re going to move away from Cow Hollow if a lodge goes in, how Their Lives Will Be Ruined.
"Due to unavoidable scheduling challenges, we regret that the Presidio Trust Public Board of Directors meeting that had been scheduled for Wednesday, December 8, must be postponed. We will reschedule this meeting as early as possible in the new year and will notify the community via Presidio eNews and www.presidio.gov. Thank you for your patience. If you have any questions, please contact the Presidio Trust at (415) 561-5418."]
The other news comes from the new, more Internet-friendly KQED. Here’s their take on the proposed “hotel-style lodge” (or is it a lodge-style hotel? Don’t know.):
(Oh yes, you Adobe Flash-haters / HTML 5-lovers should simply avert your gaze at that link. Sorry iPadders, email Steve Jobs or somebody if you can’t listen in…)
Can you hear all that, from area super-NIMBY David Bancroft, and from Presidio Hysterical Association President Gary Widman talking about “monster hotels,” and from Presidio Trust spokesperson Tia Lombardi talking about how quiet the place is these days and how the Main Post needs to be a “more public place?”
For the record, this is what a “monster hotel” looks like, IRL. Just to give some needed sperpective, this joint is 50 times bigger than anything proposed at the Presidio:
Und here’s what we’re talking about, more or less, again IRL and not from some fretful NIMBY’s fever dream / nightmare. The boxes on the left are what I’m guessing the nascent proposal will be like:
Oh, it’s on. It’s going to be on at our Presidio Trust‘s Board of Direcor’s meeting tonight at 6:30 PM.
Why, well it’s cause the Presidio Historical Association, area NIMBYs, and local business interests will be on hand to object to anybody competing with existing lodging and entertainment purveyors outside of the Presidio. That’s why.
Now, this was the before and after for the lodge that was proposed a couple years back:
Do you think that the proposed buildings would have interfered with the historic Great Parking Lot of Northern San Francisco? I don’t, but the motel owners of Lombard Street didn’t like the idea one bit. We’ll have to wait and see how the new proposal for a lodge fares.
Same thing with the Main Post Theatre. This shot is from while ago but I’m sure the view of the moribund lobby is the same:
There are proposals to reopen this real Presidio Theatre with fewer seats than it had back in the day. But, again, that runs up against interests of those who own theatres outside of the Presdio. Oh well.
(Man, how the NIMBYs would squeal if all those thousands of horny military mens and womens came back to the Presidio to breath the air and clog up the streets. Wouldn’t that be a nightmare scenario, having those, those people in our hair again?)
Anyway, see you after the jump, where you can see the board’s agenda, the PHA’s POV and a statement from one of the District 2 Supervisor candidates.
(I think I’m satisfied with that headline.) All right there’s this guy, let’s call him Manatease, who functions as our Department of Recreation and Park‘s number one social gadfly - I bump into him from time to time. And there’s this other guy who now runs the RPD - I think I might have been at his law school* the same time he was, a year or two apart maybe. O.K. then.
Apparently, one of them was haranguing the other in or around RPD HQ last week and that somehow led to an incident betwixt Manatease and a lawyer for the gardener’s union. Now, that’s not on tape, but the rest of it, including a humiliating apology, was recorded by some kind of beltcam or something.
I’ll tell you, I don’t share Manatease’s world-view, really. I mean I agree with some of his positions (like the advisability of charging foreigners $7 to get into Strybing Arboretum, coming soon) and disagree with others (like the idea of using park property to make a few bucks off of Peter Pan) [UPDATE: Well, I suppose I could have phrased this in a different way - I object neither to the general concept nor to this particular execution of using Sue Bierman Park, aka Ferry Park, aka Fairy Park, to put on Peter Pan].
But it’s Mantease’s right to “disrupt” the plans of RPD, correct?
A skinned knee perhaps but the quick brown red fox lives to fight another day. This is what the foxes of the San Francisco Botanical Garden looked like back in the day, back before I decided to never again step foot in the joint. As seen in the New World Cloud Forest:
I think the YouTube clip speaks for itself, but stay tuned for all the deets (from Manatease’s point of view, anyway), after the jump.
*Back in the day when it was a dirt-cheap** top-20 law school. (It’s neither of those things now….)
**For CA residents, that is - the price of tuition was less than ten percent of what USC’s was, back in the day. Those days are over, never to return. Oh well.
See it? 700 spaces, free of charge. It’s historic, you know. When the U.S. Army wasn’t out there killing a million or so Filipinos it managed to create the GNPLoSF. Therefore, these parking spaces are sacrosanct:
Now that that pesky modern art has been gotten rid of, a question remains over what to do with the upper end of the Main Post. You know the Burger King corporation had an outlet that served as an Army Mess on the Presidio for so many years, it would be only fitting to give it the right of first refusal to get a chance to replace the famous itty bitty bowling alley that’s up there now.
An artist’s conception, avec just one installation of evil modern art thrown in to see if the NIMBYs can tolerate it.
