A recent Monday, 2:05 pm: Tim Armstrong always thought of himself as an artist. He sacrificed the middle-class lifestyle his parents gave him as a child to follow his creative dreams.

“I came out to pursue the neo-beat culture in San Francisco, the ’90s version, which was to be romantic, pursue your art and live in North Beach,” Armstrong said. “I think of myself as a (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti. Look at this beard.”

He signed up for classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, but gave up one semester short of graduation. His professors wanted to groom artists fit for galleries, and Armstrong was into large-scale, temporary art made from flour that lasted only as long as the rain held off and hungry birds stayed away.

He found a small apartment in North Beach for $200 a month and soon landed work at the San Remo Hotel on Mason Street as a handyman. It didn’t pay a lot, but it gave him the flexibility to pursue his art.

Seventeen years later, the 53-year-old Armstrong has become an integral part of the quirky hotel on the edge of North Beach, which was built in 1906 to house refugees from the great earthquake and fire.

“He knows where all the bodies are buried, he’s been around so long,” said Tom Field, who has owned the San Remo with his brother Robert since 1972. “He is our curator, handyman and decorator. He does all kinds of things that I’m not even aware of.”

Wearing suspenders and signature green Carhartt work pants, Armstrong scurries about the 65-room hotel with “bathrooms down the hall,” looking for the next problem to fix.

“Sometime people vomit in the sink and toilets overflow. I have to deal with it,” Armstrong said. A more pleasant duty is maintaining the Field Brothers’ collection of a dozen-plus antique cars, one of which he drives to the front of the building every day — eye candy to attract customers.

It’s all part of a job that allows the bohemian lifestyle he relishes. Ironically, he doesn’t have much time now to create art, but he still has that mind-set.

As he organized 100-years worth of junk in the hotel’s storage areas, he came across all manner of old photographs and interesting objects. Now, one wing at the San Remo is devoted to antique baby photographs he found and framed. Another is lined with rock posters from the 1960s.

In a way, the artist who shunned the gallery path now hath his own gallery. Nothing is for sale.

“I curate whatever I find and put it on the wall,” Armstrong said. “If it looks good, it stays.”

When he was evicted from his apartment two years ago, the Field brothers let him stay for free in cramped sleeping quarters in the warehouse where the vintage cars are kept. They say he can stay until the right place comes along.

“All my friends have been evicted, and I’m living rent-free in San Francisco. I’m easy to please,” Armstrong said. “Other guys my age, they want to be in love and want their own private bathroom, but I’ll just take what comes my way. What else can you do? I mean, I get to live in San Francisco.”

To see a multimedia production of this piece, go to http://blog.sfgate.com/cityexposed. If you have ideas for the City Exposed, e-mail Mike Kepka at mkepka@sfchronicle.com.

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For decades, a group known as the “anchor-outs” enjoyed a relatively peaceful existence in a corner of the San Francisco Bay. The mariners carved out an affordable, bohemian community on the water, in a county where the median home price recently hit $1.8m.

But their haven could be coming to an end – and with it, a rapidly disappearing way of life.

The anchor-outs live aboard semi-derelict boats abutting the town of Sausalito, an upscale enclave just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin county where mansions boast floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the water. Tourists arrive by ferry from the city on weekends, strolling the promenade of restaurants, wine bars, art galleries and boutiques.

• Top: Anchor-out boats sit in Richardson Bay in Sausalito, California, last month. Bottom: Jeff Jacob Chase looks out the window of a friend’s boat.

The agency that oversees the local waterway known as the Richardson Bay has in recent months begun a fervent crackdown on the boat dwellers, who they say are here illegally and pose a threat to safety and the marine environment. Determined to clear the waters, a hardline harbormaster has even begun confiscating and destroying boats that overstay their welcome.

The anchor-outs, meanwhile, are fighting back, staging protests and clashing with authorities who they say are in effect rendering them homeless.

On a recent afternoon, the sounds of a tractor’s hydraulic arm crushing a fiberglass sailboat carried on the wind. The noise lingered over a homeless encampment that has grown near the waterfront. “Camp Cormorant”, as boaters nicknamed it, has become the political base of the anchor-outs’ protest movement.

For the 50 or so people camped in neat rows of tents, the frequent whir, crunch and crack of the crusher represents their way of life being torn to bits. Many say they were forced to decamp here after their vessels were destroyed.

“They want to take our homes and shut the anchorage down,” says Jeff Jacob Chase, a 20-year anchor-out with a trademark pirate swagger, a long, salt-and-pepper beard, spectacles and floppy hat. “They basically want to eradicate a culture.”

In a region dominated by water, boats have been used as a cheap source of housing since the Gold Rush, when miners lived aboard vessels. In the 1950s, a community of bohemians and artists grew along the Sausalito shoreline, with residents building wildly creative floating constructions that offered shelter and inspiration to Beat writers and artists such as Allen Ginsberg and Shel Silverstein. It transformed into a hippy music scene in the 1960s, but in the mid-1970s, residents of those houseboats were mostly pushed out in a series of local enforcement actions known as “the houseboat wars”.

Despite its beatnik origins, today the Richardson Bay hosts a unique waterfront class system.

At the top are the authorized houseboat marinas where floating, luxury homes with shingle siding, plumbing and electricity can sell for over $1m. Other boaters, known as live-aboards, can pay a monthly fee to dwell on their sailboats and cabin cruisers in a marina slip, but the number of spots is tightly controlled and authorities say there is a long waiting list. Finally there are the anchor-outs, whom some see as the last of a dying breed of free spirits who eschew the world of rent deposits, credit checks and bills.

The anchor-outs get by with minimal resources, hauling their own water and generating power from tiny solar panels. They brave the bay’s famous winds to travel to and from the shore in rowboats or motorized dinghies.

Housing advocates say the battle over their way of life is just the latest chapter in a crisis that has seen living options for low-income residents all but vanish.

Chase still has his sailboat, a sloop named the Jubilee, but he also spends time in Camp Cormorant, organizing his fellow boaters to protest against the evictions as an officer of the local chapter of the California Homeless Union.

“What they’re doing is criminalizing this entire community,” said Chase.

Waterfront patrols and crushed boats

Curtis Havel, the harbormaster, would be the first to call himself the villain of this story.

It’s a breezy Wednesday morning and Havel is out patrolling the waters. He stands on the bow of his aluminum patrol boat and gestures at the spectacular scenery around him.

“For a long time, people regarded Richardson’s Bay as this sort of bohemian live-and-let-live situation and the vessel count continued to increase,” he says. “Now it’s time for us to enforce our rules.”

The state agency that oversees the San Francisco Bay had been building pressure on local authorities to act, and Havel says clearing the harbor of illegal anchoring was the primary mission he was given when hired two years ago.

Citing a long-unenforced rule that says boats can anchor for no more than 72 hours, Havel has been confiscating boats, dragging them into a shipyard and crushing them into chunks. Of the 190 boats out here when he took over, Havel says he has gotten rid of all but 86 vessels – about 70 of which are now occupied by full-time residents.

Havel argues boats and their occupants can cause a laundry list of problems and environmental concerns. Their anchors drag along the bottom and destroy the eelgrass, an important habitat for marine life. Boats break loose from their anchors during storms, endangering those aboard and others along the shore. The residents dump sewage and leave abandoned boats and parts polluting the bay. And there have been complaints about drug use and crime.

Havel says his enforcement has made him unpopular, but he’s willing to take some flak in order to get the job done.

His patrol boat edges up to the side of a rusting, metal-hulled craft, piled with plywood and corrugated metal, which appears to have become home to a flock of seagulls. Havel had already plastered a note on the side of the boat, warning that it would be disposed of if not removed within 10 days.

“I hate to even call this a boat; at this point it’s just a shell,” he says, adding that he hasn’t seen occupants aboard the vessel for several months. “That’s a dead boat you’re looking at.”

Havel recently announced plans to leave his role at the end of the month, and while his agency appears undeterred in its mission, he says they are trying to find long-term solutions. The state has agreed to extend the timeline for clearing the bay by a few years, and for those still living aboard, Havel says, the county plans to send outreach workers to help find other housing.

But around the anchorage, signs of rebellion abound. Some boats fly upside down American flags, the maritime signal for distress. Occupants of a boat named Evolution have taped up a big, hand-stenciled “R”, rebranding it the “REvolution”.

As Havel patrols, a metal dinghy motors up behind him. The driver, a boat-dweller with a white megaphone, starts shouting at Havel, peppering his taunts with expletives. “Tell them how you’ve been crushing people’s homes, sir,” yells the man. Havel, however, appears unflustered.

“It’s always been politically charged; it’s just getting heightened because we’re doing something.”

‘I’m not homeless, I’m houseless’

Authorities say they have only been seizing abandoned and derelict boats, but around Camp Cormorant, numerous residents claim to have lost their homes to the crusher.

Michael Adams and his wife lived in the anchorage for decades, raising two kids. The couple had recently become afraid to leave their boat, a historic 1928 pleasure cruiser named the Marlin, for fear it would get destroyed.

“I went off one morning and he crushed it,” says Adams as he paints a mural on the plywood patio he built in front of the tent he and his wife now call home.

Robyn Kelly, a former skincare technician, moved into the anchorage after giving up her apartment and job to care for her sick mother, and ended up living on a 28ft power boat for a decade. She says it made an excellent home, until one day in 2019 she found it had been confiscated by the harbormaster.

“I went away for 24 hours and I came back and it was gone,” said Kelly, who has since filed a lawsuit against the authorities for destroying her boat and possessions.

Kelly and her two pups, Hank and Nacho, are currently staying on a friend’s boat; she’d like to move back to shore but her small income isn’t enough to make the deposit for an apartment and her arthritis is starting to give her trouble. “I couldn’t afford an apartment now,” she said. “I’d love one.”

Kelly’s friend, Billy McClean, is a fourth-generation Marin county resident. He can look across the water from where his Dutch cruiser is anchored and see stately houses constructed nearly a century ago by his grandfather, a local builder.

He recalls growing up seeing people living freely on the water. “When I was a teenager I used to come down here to the boats and buy pot from what I called ‘the hippies’,” he says. “Now I live here.”

McClean says people like him have been priced out of the region by an influx of tech workers making six-figure salaries. McClean couldn’t afford a decent apartment at his previous job working for a fencing company – so he bought a cheap motorboat and moved into the anchorage in 2009.

His vessel has a TV, DVD player and a small refrigerator, all powered by a generator. He doesn’t have much space inside, but from his white decks he can see green waters and California hillsides all around him.

“It’s nice out here – and then it’s not,” he said. “It’s a lot of work – and in the winter, it can be downright life threatening.”

• Top: Brian Doris, left, the homeless coordinator Robbie Powelson, center, and Jeff Jacob Chase, right, talk in Doris’s boat. Bottom: Doris on his boat.

A short skiff ride across the anchorage from McClean, Brian Doris is fixing up an old pleasure yacht named Marlia that he bought for $1 after it was abandoned. The outside of his boat is still cluttered with toolboxes and boat repair supplies, but he’s transformed the interior with sumptuous Turkish rugs and plants.

“I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,” says Doris, who says he can no longer sleep on land because he misses the rocking of the waves.

Like many anchorage residents, Doris scoffs at the idea of being placed into shelter housing. “This is my home,” he says, adding if they want to take his boat, they should “bring a body bag”.

The last of a dying breed

Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the San Francisco-based Coalition on Homelessness, says living on a boat was one of many “very-low-income housing options” that used to exist in California alongside residential hotels and live-work spaces in warehouses. But these types of marginal housing have vanished.

“Once gentrification came, those options disappeared, and that puts pressure on homelessness,” says Friedenbach.

Timothy Logan, a boat owner descended from three generations of California travelers, bought his houseboat cruiser the SS Patio nine years ago to serve as his primary residence. But since then, he has been kicked out of one harbor after another.

He started as a resident of a marina in Sacramento, living along river waters that eventually feed into the San Francisco Bay. That marina closed for development, so he moved his boat to other harbors, including ones in Antioch and Oakland, only to see boaters kicked out of those places too.

“Out of the blue, the whole state of California was like: ‘You can’t live on the water,’”he says.

While the SS Patio is still anchored out in Richardson Bay, Logan fears his boat will eventually end up being crushed like many of his friends’.

Havel, the harbormaster, and authorities governing both Richardson Bay and the state of California say they are determined that within five years, the last of the anchor-outs will be gone. For their part, the anchor-outs don’t intend to go quietly.

“We are a community; we’re trying to stick together,” says Logan.

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San Francisco

Unsplash / Eduardo Santos

When I moved to San Francisco from England in 2007, the city was still a lovely, fun mess. I’d gotten to the rough edge of America for Rudyard Kipling to be called a “crazy city inhabited by completely insane people”. For every young Brit who saw “Bullitt” under a poster of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in their dormitories, San Francisco was the coolest place on earth.

Although it had been half a century since the beats roamed the streets and bars of San Francisco, the city and the completely insane people didn’t disappoint. Instead of a ’69 Mustang GT, I happily drove my old VW Jetta like Steve McQueen over the hilly intersections of Nob Hill (but with more respect for bike paths). I moved into an apartment on Golden Gate and Baker on what is known as Western Addition and secured the spot over the phone, invisible, for about a third of what he would rent today. I discovered that the apartment was the lower half of the duplex where Patty Hearst was held captive by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. That was pretty cool. Everything was pretty cool.

I formed a band and spent my nights in the dingy pubs and music venues of town listening to or playing hideously loud guitars. We rented a shared rehearsal room at SoMa’s community studio / street drink facility Lennon Studios, where we took in $ 75 a month for the room.

Our band played shows to small, whiskey-soaked crowds, mostly made up of friends forced through Facebook events at Hemlock, Kimo’s, Elbo Room, and Fernet shots with ginger hunters at The Summer Place and Koko. We’d see better bands with a bigger crowd at Slim’s or 330 Ritch. I wrote about the shows for SF Weekly and my English friend, who was also making the trip to California, photographed them. We’d wake up and watch Liverpool at Mad Dog in the Fog and eat Bloody Marys before our hangover could kick in.

As you can see from these links, each of the places mentioned is now permanently closed.

Until 2007, the first dotcom bubble was mostly just a joke about Pets.com and Boo.com’s short life, but the growing disdain for techie culture often voiced by the artist community was real. The great recession, which faced the rise of more resilient tech giants in the city like Twitter, Facebook, and Google (and their greedy, transplant employees), forced artists to make money as landlords. A spike in homelessness, a wealth gap, and protests over “Google Buses” (remember them?) Embodied the city suddenly deprived of the art, music and free-running spirit of crazy creativity we came here for. The mood can be summed up pretty well in an incident at Molotov’s punk pub in Lower Haight when a user was greeted frostily with Google glasses.

The city was changing again, as it had so often before.

Up until 2016 it was harder to find any messy issues or bands to go through the nights. Most had moved to Oakland, Portland, or LA – the all-surface-no-feeling SoCal rival that San Franciscans traditionally grinned at for lack of real culture. But by then Los Angeles had apparently become the target of all hedonistic creatives who had suddenly left the no longer so interesting streets of San Francisco.

Many of the rehearsal and art rooms in the warehouse disappeared and were replaced by startups, e-scooter stations, condominiums, and artisanal gyms (yes, that was one thing).

I wrote an elegy on the scene that frustrated people with sincere hope and still tried to hold onto the heady days of yesteryear. I regretted being the naysayer, but in fact, the city where the rent for a one-bedroom apartment was nearly $ 4,000 a month was proven not to be an artist’s destination anymore.

But creative kids will always find a way, especially in San Francisco.

This year has been an endless tornado no matter how you look at it. People love to speculate and read about stories of seismic cultural changes in the city, whether it be hate clicks from the political right enjoying the ultimate destruction of Nancy Pelosi’s modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, or from local Franciscans who worry about moving into all things tech. This can often lead to exaggeration in changes in the city, but 2020 is not just any year.

This year, over 100 restaurants and bars in San Francisco have closed permanently, and many more are temporarily closed for the time being. Rents in SoMa and in the city center have fallen by over 20%. Many of the tech companies in the middle of the market have told their employees that they can work from home forever, ruining any remaining hope for tech-driven renewal of the struggling neighborhood. And wealthy city homeowners are selling like never before.

It’s not a pretty picture, but could there be a sense of commotion when you return to the city’s artistic roots? Some believe the city will move back in that direction, and those hopes were bolstered by the $ 12.8 million round of annual grants Mayor London Breed announced last week for arts and culture across the city, including many organizations promoting urban musicians such as Intermusic SF and the Women’s Audio Mission.

Musician and longtime SF resident Jeff Knutson is optimistic that the scene will rise again, but it may not happen soon. “I really hope that bands, musicians and performers will revive in the city,” he says. “I haven’t seen that many apartments in SF in over 15 years, and rents are definitely falling. But let’s go.” Be honest, the rents here are still very, very high. “

One of the founders of the San Francisco Arts Collective, Tshakie N, sees some light at the end of the tunnel. “I am confident that the arts will return in a bigger wave to San Francisco,” she says. “What is evident is that SF residents are avid supporters of the arts. They have shown this through donations, support for online services, and demand for work from local artists.”

Outside of bands and artists, some residents have noticed a welcome slowdown in the pace of everyday city life.

Konstantin Kosov, AKA Fruit Jesus, the man who has been driving custom-made trailers full of fruit from the town’s farmers’ market since 2014, sees something happen through the chaos of the crisis.

“I think San Francisco is going to have a renaissance,” he says. “So much has happened in the last couple of months that it feels like an old SF to me. People are moving out, but thank god it got crazy here! Too many people, it was just, I don’t know, I like It kinda What happens, people just in the park or on the beaches just hanging out. I remember when the recession hit, I lived in Dolores Park, people were just people. They didn’t have to plan a three week hang because they were like that employed.”

What’s next for the bars and music venues around town that have gone through the pandemic over the decades from lubricating SF natives and artists to serving money tech staff to closing their doors?

Martin Cate, co-owner of Smuggler’s Cove and Whitechapel, believes a return to “normal” is imminent, whatever that means in San Francisco. “As vacancies go up and rents go down, we can see the return of hospitality, firefighters, teachers, and all of those professions that struggle to live in SF. We could see them repopulate and diverse the city.” Support the industrial sector. “

While the big established music venues like The Fillmore and The Warfield wait with bated breath for a timeline where they can potentially hold thousands of sweaty concert-goers again, the DIY punk scene that recently emerged from the garages of Ingleside and The Living Room is of sunset are ready to resume the underground explosion that was inadvertently the rock music sanctuary of San Francisco.

Just as thousands of square feet of street art and murals took over the boarded-up shop windows when they closed in March, when those painted wooden panels were finally pulled down and the bar’s doors reopened, the city emerged from its cocoon and may look different.

While the drop in rent and newly emptied office space could ultimately make room for artistic endeavors, in reality the rent in the city is still one of the highest in the country. Unless rates continue to fall, the city’s demographics are unlikely to change abruptly. But after a decade of the second tech boom that pushed San Francisco’s bohemian roots back into the ground, there is hope that bags will grow back with something more useful.

“It’ll happen eventually. And if it does, it might be better than ever. San Francisco is a special place, and it’s always been a magnet for creative people,” says Knutson. “In a way, the city has opened up and is less crowded, which is kind of cool. The real San Franciscans are still here, they will be here – they will find a way and they will not go anywhere. Hopefully we go. Come on.” with a little more balance, more space for everyone, not just the privileged few, to be part of what makes this city great. “

This will not be like Detroit, which has seen severe urban decay, barren streets, and a subsequent influx of artists. Right before an almighty earthquake, San Francisco’s 47 square kilometers are too sacred to be abandoned. And it won’t be a regression to the romanticized scenes of the past. North Beach won’t suddenly fill up with beat poets, the Fillmore won’t regain a jazz scene desecrated by crooked urban development. The Haight won’t be full of rock and roll bands again. But after the unprecedented chaos of 2020, San Francisco is about to change again, just like it was when I first found this great city thirteen years ago.

Andrew Chamings is an editor at SFGATE. Email: Andrew.Chamings@sfgate.com | Twitter: @AndrewChamings

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One last Monday, 2:05 p.m .: Tim Armstrong has always seen himself as an artist. He sacrificed the bourgeois lifestyle his parents gave him as a child in order to pursue his creative dreams.

“I came out to indulge in the neo-beat culture in San Francisco, the ’90s version that should be romantic, do your art and live in North Beach,” said Armstrong. “I consider myself (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti. Look at that beard. ”

He signed up for courses at the San Francisco Art Institute, but gave up a semester before graduation. His professors wanted to cultivate artists suitable for galleries, and Armstrong was into large-scale, temporary art made from flour that only lasted as long as the rain stopped and hungry birds stayed away.

He found a small apartment in North Beach for $ 200 a month and soon ended up working as a handyman at the San Remo Hotel on Mason Street. It didn’t pay much, but it gave him the flexibility to do his art.

Seventeen years later, 53-year-old Armstrong has become a permanent fixture at the quirky hotel on the outskirts of North Beach, built in 1906 to accommodate refugees from the great earthquake and fire.

“He knows where all the bodies are buried, he’s been there for so long,” said Tom Field, who has owned the San Remo with his brother Robert since 1972. “He’s our curator, craftsman, and decorator. He does all kinds of things that I’m not even aware of.”

Armstrong, wearing suspenders and signature green Carhartt work trousers, scurries across the 65-room hotel with “bathrooms in the hallway” looking for the next problem that needs fixing.

“Sometimes people vomit in the sink and the toilets overflow. I have to take care of it, ”said Armstrong. A more pleasant job is maintaining the Field Brothers’ collection with more than a dozen vintage cars, one of which he drives in front of the building every day – a feast for the eyes to attract customers.

It’s all part of a job that enables the bohemian lifestyle he enjoys. Ironically, he doesn’t have much time to create art right now, but he still has that mindset.

While organizing 100 years worth of garbage in the hotel’s storage areas, he came across all sorts of old photographs and interesting objects. Now a grand piano in the San Remo is dedicated to antique baby photos that he found and framed. Another is lined with rock posters from the 1960s.

In a way, the artist who eschewed the gallery trail now has his own gallery. Nothing is for sale.

“I curate whatever I find and put it on the wall,” said Armstrong. “If it looks good, it stays.”

When he was evicted from his apartment two years ago, the Field brothers let him stay for free in cramped bedrooms in the warehouse where the vintage cars are kept. They say he can stay until the right place comes.

“All of my friends have been evicted and I live rent free in San Francisco. I’m easy to please, ”said Armstrong. “Other guys my age want to be in love and have their own bathroom, but I just take what gets in my way. What else can you do I mean, I can live in San Francisco. ”

A multimedia production of this piece can be found at http://blog.sfgate.com/cityexposed. If you have ideas for City Exposed, send an email to Mike Kepka at mkepka@sfchronicle.com.

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