Chris Carlsson
By Heather Abel
CHRIS CARLSSON has done a lot to mess with the power structure of San Francisco. He spent 13 years stealing office supplies to produce Processed World, a zine that chronicled the drudgery of 9-to-5 desk jobs. He helped bring Critical Mass into being, clogging streets with bicyclists for years to come. But his most ambitious project to date has been to battle citywide amnesia.
"This society can't hold itself together without amnesia," Carlsson says. "If it had a memory of how it got to be the way it is – and who benefited – we couldn't go on."
To Carlsson amnesia means that no one knows that the 1913 Raker Act compels San Francisco to be fueled by public power. And that no one remembers that in 1944, workers around the city marched down Market Street during the General Strike.
Or, as he puts it, "Amnesia means that in 1999, nobody thinks there is a working class, let alone that they are a member of it. It is incalculable how much we don't remember."
The idea to excavate the city's forgotten history came to Carlsson in a brainstorm. It was 1992. Carlsson was riding with a group of bike messengers when he passed some old buildings on Nob Hill and wondered about them. Who handed whom the envelope of cash that determined who lived there? What deals were struck? Who labored? Who got rich?
Carlsson set about finding the answers, not just about Nob Hill, but about every neighborhood in the city. A few years later, with the help of his coworkers Jim Swanson and Greg Williamson, the answers became Shaping San Francisco.
Shaping San Francisco is a virtual tour of the histories of labor, ecology, racial politics, land use, feminism, immigration, the arts, and the gay and lesbian movement in the city. The project cumulates work from volunteer writers, researchers, photographers, artists, computer programmers, community organizers, and anyone else who chose to investigate a piece of San Francisco's past.
You can take the tour at a computer station in six public kiosks around the city. A scaled-down tour is available on a CD-ROM, and there's a book version, titled Reclaiming San Francisco.
Because of its form – ever-expandable multimedia – Shaping San Francisco can engulf more stories as they are unearthed. Carlsson says he thinks of the project as a vessel in which to gather the stories left out of history books. The public kiosks – in the San Francisco Main Library, Modern Times Bookstore, Rainbow Grocery Co-op, Building Resources, the California Historical Society, and the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society – make these stories available in a sort of high-tech public commons.
Another of Carlsson's brainchildren also reclaims public space. He won't cop to coming up with the idea for Critical Mass (it was a group effort), but he clearly nursed it into existence. After pestering the Bike Coalition to pick a time to ride home together, he made flyers telling cycling commuters to meet one Friday.
"I stood on the corner of Seventh and Market, passing out flyers to bicyclists," Carlsson says. Forty-five people came to the first communal commute. Carlsson didn't miss one of the next 60 rides.
Having lived in San Francisco most of his life, Carlsson has watched the city become a less forgiving place. When he was toiling as a temp in the 1980s, he did his real work after hours from an apartment on Haight Street, putting out Processed World. "There used to be room to come to San Francisco and not work very hard and have time to be an artist or radical," Carlsson says. "I don't think we're going to have that energy anymore."
Carlsson, Swanson, and Williamson seem to have some energy left. None of them have gotten paid for the countless hours they've put into Shaping San Francisco. And a second edition will be out before the end of the year. The host of the San Francisco history tours at the dawn of the millennium? Zeitguy on his bicycle.
You can find more information on Shaping San Francisco at www.shapingsf.org. Carlsson's writings on Critical Mass can be found at www.sflandmark.com/cm.
→ My bike pages.