Sunday, December 28, 2008
Item Three about Geary Street: The Driving out of Righteousness
Sure there are a lot of cute and meaningful things I could write about what’s been happening around here over the past few weeks. But I’m just not ready for that yet, can you dig it? Things have not yet hit a stride; there’s no natural structure to things yet. Plus, I’m continuing to have niggling network problems that have kept me from doing much photo editing, and I have yet to send off my SD card for data recovery. Short story shorter, if you are here for current events and updates in the life of Chuck el Hutt, you may feel free to return at a later date.
However, I do have an old story to share with you and as I work my way up toward actually talking about actual stuff, and in the meantime, writing up some of the many buckets of drivel I have festooning my holiday yurt, I figure I might as well dump this one on you and complete my triad of essays on The Questionable Influence of Geary Boulevard:
This one is a downtown story, and its’ not even about people - but it is a tale of the boulevard and as such it can stand with the others I posted before my trip to Seoul. To me, the rationalization is significant - it creates a coherence to my writing I find somehow gratifying. I’ve said too much about this already, I fear.
Downtown, it’s true, Geary is a St, not a Blvd - but it still carries more than its share of vital civic essence. It’s crammed with goodies of all types and qualities, from the highest of brows to the lowest of nether bodily thatching. Way in near where Geary hits Market is an upscale patch from way back. Many of the buildings are stone, beaux-arts, opulent and confident even when what they house is a Rite-Aid or a tired old travel agency. Some of the stuff right off the square even has been redone lately to enhance the opulence even further. As a wise man once told me, it’s not a lily if it isn’t gilded.
One of the old school shops of lower Geary was Pauline Books. Their plainfaced streetfront spoke honestly of the plainfaced interior within - several long shelves of books with a special focus on Catholic matters. I personally didn’t shop there, but some people did. Pauline Books was cranking right along until rather recently. What happened? Maybe it had to do with sales and profit margins and the move away from reading and religion, but I think it had more to do with an Agent Provocateur. By which I mean, a new neighbor might have left ol’ Pauline Books feeling a bit out of place.
As I said, that area - always, superb - has been undergoing an additional renaissance. Pauline Books was cheek and jowl with Prada and Borelli and high-end shops like that; folks down there were setting the fashion. In that crowd, Pauline Books and some of its neighbors - the old shoe shop, the travel agent, the HoHo Smoke Shop - seemed distinctly out of step. Finally, after years stretching back to before my time, a small clothing store next to Pauline Books closed its doors for good. The sign came down and the storefront went into pupal mode, wrapping itself in plywood and scaffolding for months. I recall particularly the dusty translucency of the big front window going dark behind sheets of blank butcher paper, and thinking at the time that the paper actually looked good in comparison with the tired lonely storefront that had been there before.
It took several months, but by Union Square measures that’s not really so long considering where they started. In the end, the transformation was pretty much complete. From my seat on the bus there’s no mistaking what moved in next door to reliable, staid old Pauline Books: Agent Provocateur lingerie emporium is now the hippest panties and push-ups boutique in town, and its front windows are imaginative and detailed, with regular seasonal updates for valentine’s day, mother’s day, arbor day.... it’s a hot piece of commercial crumpet, if you want to get right down to it. It’s very downtown Geary. And it sure as hell ain’t Pauline Books.
It didn’t take long for AP to work its disruptive influence. Within a few months of its opening, Pauline Books took a powder and closed up shop, boxing away all those crucifixes and gospels and carting them way down to Redwood City, far, far away from the split-crotches and peek-a-boo bra-cups of Agent Provocateur. The storefront has been shuttered for some time now, repainted an unobtrusive tan color and undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. I have to admit, considering what we got when the clothing store next door closed, I am waiting for the outcome with bated breath. The possibilities are endless. Geary Boulevard, don’t let me down. Then again, it usually doesn’t.
