Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los AngelesMain MenuResearch of the DecadesResearch1960s Illustration DevelopmentIllustration DevelopmentPlaylists of the DecadesPlaylistssparcinla.org185fc5b2219f38c7b63f42d87efaf997127ba4fcGreat Wall Institute - Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC)
1970s San Fransisco Gay Life 3
1media/Screen Shot 2023-04-03 at 1.39.26 PM_thumb.png2023-04-03T20:40:17+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a4911Castro Street Fair in August 1976. The Castro was no longer poor, and in a sense it was no longer a neighborhood. Milk had railed against the city’s spending money on making San Francisco a tourist center, but now the Castro had become a mecca for gay tourists. The air shuttle between Los Angeles and San Francisco was now nicknamed the Gay Express, for every Friday night it was filled with gay Angelenos coming to town for the weekend. New Yorkers, Chicagoans, and others would spend their vacations in San Francisco, staying at gay hotels, going to gay restaurants, and shopping at gay stores. In the summertime, you could hear the accents of New York and Houston on the streets of the Castro, and also of London, Paris, and Sydney. Then, too, with many of those who came as tourists returning to settle, the Castro was becoming the hub of a vast redevelopment project. Gay people were moving into Noe Valley and the Mission district; they were moving into the Haight-Fillmore district and settling the back slopes of Pacific Heights, painting and refurbishing as they went. In some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, Victorian façades blossomed with decorator paint.plain2023-04-03T20:40:17+00:001976Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49