My old back yard. This used to be Valencia Gardens, now it is a pile of rubble. Why was Valencia Gardens ever there in the first place? The following is info based on my observations and experiances and should not be considered as fact and correct.
So I've been told, at one time this was a baseball field. Sounds like fun. I learned this from a local punk rocker who is sentimental about the historical use of public spaces.
Then, in 2000 while on a motorcycle ride, I was stopped for lunch in a small town in Missouri. Old people tend to be friendly, and an oldster noticed that I was from San Francisco by the license plate frame on my bike. He told me, "I went to San Francisco once. It was the only time in my life I left Missouri." He moved there during World War II so that his mother could work in a factory. This oldster said he went to Mission High and lived in Valencia Gardens. Wow! Valencia Gardens was my current back yard! I was currently doing volunteer work at Mission High! He said Valencia Gardens was build to house people who work working for the war effort.
I moved onto 14th Street in 1998 or so. I really liked it there; I knew most people around me and got along well with many of them. Valencia Gardens was my back yard, and mostly it was the same as having any other neighbors. At this point Valencia Gardens was a public housing project. There were some colorful murals about community. There was also a weird marble statue in the courtyard that I never understood.
Then, a couple years later, they (who are THEY) put up a white fence all around the projects, with a buzzer security system. The fence was at best silly, as I noticed many people were able to break the electromagnetic force holding the gates shut, thus eliminating the need for the buzzer system. I even saw a small person open one of these gates; they got their body close to the gate, grabbed hold of the handle, and swung their body away from the gate... As a physicist, I would analyze this meathod in terms of Energy... The kinetic energy of the small person's moving body vs. the potential energy of the electromagnet. An engineer might look at it only in terms of the force required to open the gate, that would be a mistake if you are interested in security. When the fence wasn't silly, it was _____ (what do you call it when the decision making ability of a group of people is restricted?) ... not depressing or sad, but something like that. The fence did nothing to keep people out (the gates were also often propped open), and at the same time gave Valencia Gardens the look and feel of a ghetto.
Around the same time, windows in Valencia Gardens were borded up rather than repaired... the back parking lot filled with various debris... sadness.
And then, one day, I was driving by and it looked as though the whole block had been leveled. A few buildings remain standing, but WOW! something sure is gone.
Note that there is no warranty of any kind on the information in this document. It has been assembled from a variety of sources of varying reliability. Efforts have been made to exclude information known to be incorrect.