Jan 16, 2024
In Part 1, we get to know
Tenderloin Museum's executive director,
Katie Conry. She's originally from Oceanside,
California, just outside of LA, where her parents are from.
They were both teachers but were
priced out of the big city, a situation all too familiar around
here.
Katie left home as soon as
she could—when she was 18 and it was time to go to college. She had
felt lonely and alienated in her hometown. But almost from the
moment she arrived in Berkeley, she loved it and felt connected. In
the 20-plus years since, she hasn't left the Bay Area.
She moved across the Bay to San
Francisco after graduation in the mid-2000s, settling in the
Mission, the neighborhood she's lived in ever since. Katie and Jeff
reminisce about several Mission spots they both frequented around
that time.
In the early 2010s, Katie got a
job at Adobe Books,
helping the bookstore raise money to make the move from 16th Street
to its current spot on 24th Street. In that fundraising process,
the store was turned into a co-op and its art gallery a
non-profit.
This experience is how Katie
started in events and working with artists. She later worked
part-time at museums like the California Academy of Sciences, the
Contemporary Jewish Museum, and The Exploratorium, working on
private events for those institutions.
Katie was originally hired at
the Tenderloin
Museum as their program manager when the museum opened in 2015.
The next year, she became its executive director (Alex Spoto does a
lot of public programming now).
From here, we dive into the
history of TLM. It was the brainchild of journalist and
activist Randy Shaw, who was inspired by what he saw at New
York City's Tenement
Museum. The non-profit that runs TLM was formed in 2009 and
they opened their museum doors to the public in 2015. The permanent
collection in their gallery spotlights stories of working-class
resistance movements and marginalized communities. The museum was
successful early, largely because of its public programming. They
sponsored showings of the film Drugs in the
Tenderloin (1967), which turned out to be very
popular.
From here, our discussion
pivots to the history of the Tenderloin itself. Katie shares that
it (not the Castro) was the first gay hood in San Francisco. It was
a high-density neighborhood filled with affordable housing, a
liminal space in an urban setting. Then we hear the story of the
neighborhood after the 1906 earthquake, which destroyed just about
everything except the Hibernia Bank building.
The Tenderloin was rebuilt
quickly, though. The Cadillac Hotel, where the museum is located
today, opened in 1908 and was meant to house folks who were working
to rebuild The City. The single room occupancies (SROs) left people
hungry for entertainment, of which there was soon
plenty.
Women were living on their own
in the Tenderloin, and in response, moral crusaders came after
them. These high-and-mighty types had successfully shut down the
sex-worker presence in San Francisco's Barbary Coast in 1913,
forcing members of that industry to the Tenderloin. And so, perhaps
naturally, those same crusaders came after sex-industry women in
the Tenderloin.
The first sex-worker protest in
the US happened in the TL after Reggie Gamble stormed a church and
gave an impromptu speech. But it wasn't enough. Those same
self-righteous white men effectively shut down the Tenderloin in
1917, an occasion for which TLM did a centennial celebration
in 2017.
Check back next week for more
Tenderloin History in Part 2 of this episode.