IN SAN FRANCISCO, RED-LIGHT DENIZENS FIGHT TO STAY SEEDY

Plan to Add Trees Gets Face On a 'Wanted' Poster; Safety for Sex Workers

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Carolyn Abst moved into this city's harsh
Tenderloin district several years ago, she thought she would be welcomed.

As owner of an architecture firm, she was bringing in jobs and ideas
to revitalize the area. Instead, some of her neighbors called for her
head. "Wanted" posters went up around the Tenderloin last year,
featuring Ms. Abst's photo.

Someone circulated pamphlets disparaging her. Residents yelled at her
in the street.

Ms. Abst's offense: trying to plant 400 trees in the area. "I had no
idea that cleanliness, beauty and safety could get people so riled
up," the 58-year-old says.

In San Francisco's Tenderloin, residents aren't fighting the usual
gentrification battle over displacing low-income families.

Instead, they are fighting for the neighborhood's gritty ambience.
Often described by tourist guides as San Francisco's worst
neighborhood, the Tenderloin has for years been a gathering point for
pimps, drug addicts and transvestites and transgender residents, some
of whom work as prostitutes. Some residents say that's what gives the
Tenderloin its personality and makes it a crucial piece of San
Francisco's diverse cityscape.

Cleanup efforts, these residents contend, threaten to destroy an
atmosphere that welcomes people on the fringe of society, who
otherwise could find no refuge. And it distracts from the issues the
neighborhood really cares about, such as safety for sex workers and
affordable housing. "This was a place where people who don't fit in,
the ostracized and cast-off, could find a place of their own," says
Tenderloin resident Matt Bernstein Sycamore, a former prostitute and
now a member of a local gay activist group called Gay Shame. The
group, which was behind the "wanted" posters that targeted Ms. Abst
and her tree-planting campaign, has been joined by other neighborhood
activists in efforts to combat what it calls a "sanitized vision for
the future." Mr. Sycamore, a sometime club host who is also known by
his drag-queen name, Mary Hedgefunds, says he has now moved out of
his one-bedroom Tenderloin rental because the neighborhood is no
longer a place where he wants to live. At least one city official is
sympathetic to the local activists' cause. "Yes, people are addicted
to drugs and, yes, there's homelessness," says Chris Daly, a Democrat
who represents the Tenderloin district on San Francisco's Board of
Supervisors, the city's legislative branch.

But "why shouldn't these people have a place of their own?" Mr. Daly,
a proponent of affordable housing, has steered funding to nonprofit
social services and tenant-protection programs for the area.

The Tenderloin is a 20-square-block area sandwiched between downtown
and the tony neighborhoods of Pacific Heights and Russian Hill. It
bears the old name of a district in Manhattan, where patrolling cops
in the early 1900s who profited from extortion could afford the
choicest cuts of meat. In the 1970s, Polk Street, the main
thoroughfare of San Francisco's Tenderloin, became a cluster of sex
shops, spurred by the area's cheap rents. In recent years, with the
city reeling from some of the nation's highest housing costs,
professionals like Ms. Abst have also eyed the area's affordable real estate.

And they are remaking the district.

Along the Tenderloin's western edge, chic new digs are replacing the
dives and hangouts that catered to sex workers.

The Polk Gulch Saloon, where transgender patrons and drag queens once
congregated, is now the Lush Lounge, serving watermelon martinis to
an upscale clientele.

The Giraffe, a working-class gay bar since the 1970s, is now Hemlock,
a venue for rock and punk bands that attracts the college crowd. The
changes are anathema to Daisy Anarchy (her real name, she says), who
heads the local Sex Workers Organized for Labor and Civil Rights, a
labor union. The 42-year-old retired stripper says that with all the
recent upgrades, transgender residents of all professions have been
increasingly harassed. Ms. Anarchy says she frequently consults with
Mr. Sycamore to figure out ways to stop beautification efforts.

She attends neighborhood meetings held by the likes of Ms. Abst in
order to disrupt the gatherings, loudly seeking to refocus the
proceedings on her agenda of rights for sex workers. "I'm giving
voice to the voiceless," Ms. Anarchy says. Some Tenderloin
traditional residents like the changes.

Tamara Ching, a transgender former prostitute who has lived in the
Tenderloin for 13 years, says she is sick of the brazen drug use in
public areas, and welcomes the improvements. "Honey, yes, we got drug
dealers, crazy people and prostitutes with razors in their purses,"
says the 57-year-old. "Change is good, as long as tolerance remains."
When Ms. Abst, the architecture-firm owner, moved to Polk Street in
1999, she knew the neighborhood's reputation. But she persisted
because of the affordable building she found.

She and her husband turned the building's ground floor into an office
for their firm, Case Plus Abst Architects; the upstairs loft became
their living space.

But by 2002, Ms. Abst was weary of the patrons of the neighboring
homeless shelter, who she says often used drugs in an alley between
the buildings and treated her doorway as a restroom.

That year, she created the Lower Polk Neighbors community
organization. Comprising 35 residents and business owners, the group
successfully petitioned the city for more street cleaning and pushed
to shut down a needle-exchange program operated by a nonprofit out of
the alley. Last year, Lower Polk Neighbors began implementing a plan
to plant 400 trees around the Tenderloin's western edge, a largely
treeless area rife with drug sales. Ms. Abst enlisted a local
organization for homeless youth to get the program started, paying
each kid $6 a day. The first project: plant two palm trees in front
of her own building.

Ms. Abst, whose group has planted 26 trees so far, says her cleanup
efforts will ultimately benefit the whole neighborhood. "It needed to
be done," she says. "It was like the city had forgotten about this
neighborhood. It was filthy." But the tree campaign struck a sour
note at Gay Shame. The youths were hired "to do grunt work, and what
they should be learning is computer skills or learning how to be an
architect, not planting palm trees," fumes Mr. Sycamore. "It's
exploitation." By March of last year, "wanted" posters and pamphlets
were circulating featuring Ms. Abst's smiling face and accusing her
of "forcing homeless youth into the planting of palm trees." The
poster encouraged residents to call a phone number if they spotted
her. The number was fictitious, but Ms. Abst says the posters
frightened her and focused a lot of negative attention on her in the
neighborhood. Mr. Sycamore says the poster was meant as a "prank,"
and he isn't sorry.

He says his organization's most recent meeting to strategize, in May,
didn't result in action.

But the group is still looking for new ways to capitalize on the
attention drummed up by the poster campaign. Ms. Abst says she isn't
giving up. Her organization is building alliances with other
community groups to help clean up the neighborhood. "I've caught hell
for trying to do something about" the neighborhood's grime, she says.
But "I'm fine with that."