“This is a call to action for all people of color in San Francisco and, honestly, the larger Bay Area as a whole. We need to take the Marina over, like, yesterday.”
A TikTok, posted by the user @coolsxyhotfungirl in mid-February, gained some notice. Here was a young Black woman in San Francisco who was saying the quiet part out loud: For all of its natural beauty, the Marina is not a very hospitable place for most anyone who isn't a “Chad and Brad and Ashley,” as she puts it in the video. The hope? “El Rio at the Marina.”
Tomicia Blunt, a 26-year-old product marketing manager at Walmart’s data division and a founder of a card game called Close Connections, was one of the thousands who saw the video — and wanted to bring that idea to life.
“You really see the neighborhood kind of follow the same format; the same type of people go to the Marina, predominantly white, 20s to 30s,” Blunt, a born-and-raised San Franciscan, told Gazetteer SF. “They kind of follow the same format: the Balboa Cafe, the White Rabbit. It seems very routine and not to knock that routine or who goes there, but I think that an infusion of newness to the space is something that folks on both sides were expressing an interest in.”
What a takeover it is: Blunt is calling it Marina Mayhem, and it’s an infusion of new color and energy into a space that could use it. It will take place Saturday at 2 p.m., starting at Westwood, perhaps the neighborhood’s most infamous country-Western bar, before moving to Rockwell. There will be line dancing and yeehaw music, to be sure, but the playlist will be filled with R&B and rap and hopefully a few classic Bay slaps — which she rarely really hears when she does go out to the Marina.
And it seems like that idea has legs: Her own video announcing Marina Mayhem received a few hundred comments from people who wanted to attend. She expects over 500 people to attend from all over the Bay, a far cry from her guess that around 60 would show up when she devised the idea.
(@coolsxyhotfungirl told Gazetteer in a message Thursday that Blunt was the first person, after many false starts, to put a proper plan in action.)
The venue choice is intentional: Westwood and Rockwell both have established scenes and cultures, with trivia, line dancing and, of course, the mechanical bull. Having line dancing will help people, some of whom may have never trekked into the Marina, to ease into the new space. Maybe some people will even be emboldened to ride the bull. Neither bar will be closed off for the Mayhem, and Blunt says that both bars have agreed to host the event. Still, the party feels like a shift.
Even though she went to school at San Francisco University High in Pacific Heights, she never saw herself coming back to the neighborhood when she reached adulthood. “I did my time in Pac Heights and the Marina,” she joked.
Blunt saw this online, too. Newcomers see the Marina depicted by influencers and transplants as the place to be, she said, only to be disappointed by how white it is.
“It's one of those things where a local could have told you that, but they didn't know because they're new here, trying to experience something for the first time,” she said.
The demographic shifts in the city have only grown more pronounced in recent years. She lamented the downturn in the city’s Black population and the erasure of its history. For one, she laughed, sadly, at the rebrand of the historically black Fillmore as Lower Pacific Heights. And as she’s gotten older, the feeling of alienation — of just not being able to live and have fun in the city she has roots in, of not being able to “see my people anymore,” she said — only exacerbated. She knows she’s not alone.
So reclaiming the Marina for people of color around the Bay feels like a small course correction, both for the neighborhood and for San Francisco.
“If I can do my part in creating a space for people who are like me, and for transplants who want to come to the city and not always have to compare the Bay Area to the Atlantas, the Chicagos, the New Yorks of the world, I’m like, ‘let me give them something to talk about.’”
