Mike and Velvet huddle under a fleece blanket on the corner at Eddy and Hyde streets. At their feet sits a tiny grill full of lit charcoal, wafting warmth as the clock ticks toward 1 a.m. and the temperature dips to 50 degrees.
The duo are good friends, both middle-aged and looking to survive with little money in hand. Velvet has a voice of gravel that rumbles along as she explains why she’s on the street tonight.
“I’m housed at the Alder on Sixth Street. Been there for three, four years now. But I’ve been living mostly on the street for the last year. I pay my rent, I got a job, but I’m out here because I can’t live in my room without problems,” Velvet tells me. “They mess with my door, I’ve had things stolen, the managers lie.”
Her voice grows as she explains problems with hygiene in the building, which worsens the symptoms of her lupus. She still visits every few days to prove her residency, but has plans to sue over the conditions inside.
“We want to live, we don’t want to just survive,” Mike adds. “There’s ghettos all over the world, and they’re basically the same.”
Like Velvet, he’s on the street because his living situation is not ideal: He shares an apartment with a roommate whom Mike describes as unstable (“It’s like living in a jail cell”).
“But I’ll say this about the Tenderloin. It has some of the best people. Every kind of person. It’s the most diverse place I’ve ever seen,” Mike says. “I never felt racism in this place.”
The Tenderloin is San Francisco’s most controversial, and derided, neighborhood — subject of endless Fox News fascination, and portrayed by the law-and-order crowd as the 10th layer of Democrat-run Hell.
This is, indeed, a place where too many people die: A spate of fatal shootings in the last six months and continuing overdoses make the Tenderloin an outlier among San Francisco neighborhoods. But it’s also a place with immense history and a swirl of culture unlike any other in the Bay Area, and I decided to experience it all last week on a full night out, from about 8 p.m. to dawn, walking the district and talking to whomever will put up with me.
8:50 p.m., Eddy and Larkin streets
People refer to the Tenderloin as a neighborhood, but it feels more like a series of corners, each with its own smells, sights, and sounds. Some are occupied by a jumble of strangers, talking shit and conducting business in the shadows between street lamps. Others are spots for regular crews of friends and acquaintances, just enjoying the cool night air (and a cigarette or three).
I approach a middle-aged woman in a bedazzled San Francisco Niners jacket and her companion, a lean man in a hoodie who seems disinterested in my approach. I ask them whether they have any thoughts on how the Tenderloin is changing, if at all.
“Well, man, there might be something to it if you have a stipend to offer,” the man says with a shrug.
I tell him I can’t pay for a quote.
“Information is to be sold, not told,” he chides before walking around the corner.
I silently stash that line for my own future use while turning my attention back to the woman, who calls herself Sam. She stares at me over the top of her black-rimmed glasses.
“I’m with him, but yeah, there’s been changes. Like the arrests of people doing stupid shit. Like this guy,” she says, pointing to a ragged-looked young man on the sidewalk slumped over on his bicycle. “Should he be arrested? Maybe.”
I ask Sam if she backs Mayor Daniel Lurie’s push for enforcement on public drug use.
“I don’t know. Shit, I’m an addict too,” she says, flashing a little glass pipe in her hand. She smiles mischievously and disappears around the corner.
9:30 p.m., Hyde and Ellis streets
Outside, I hear a man in his apartment belting a Cantonese song on a karaoke machine, filling the block with a warbling folk melody. The air smells of chicken and old grease, courtesy of the bubbling fryers at Serve Well Market on the corner.
Next door is Noor Snacks, a petite shop run by Yasin Alabdy. He’s been working and living in the Tenderloin for three decades, and he has a lot to say about the state of the city, including casting blame at former Mayor London Breed for ruining his business.
“I used to open ‘til 5 a.m. Now I have to close at midnight because of Breed’s order. But I have customers who used to come to me during the graveyard shift,” Alabdy tells me, voice rising with frustration. “I used to serve people coming home from work, going to work, giving them sandwiches and drinks. Now it’s nothing, my business is failing, and nothing has changed outside.”
He uses his register to pull up sales for the last 24 hours: Just $94.
“I used to do $300, $400 on a bad day, no problem. But police are paid six figures to protect the street. It’s not my job to deal with drug dealers. It’s not my fault they stand outside, and they always move when I ask them to,” he continues.
His ire is gaining momentum, like a skateboard rolling down a hill.
“If you call fucking 9-1-1 I have to leave a message. What enforcement?”
His grievances are broad, but one sticks out as a slap to the face: Alabdy claims an SFPD officer barged into his store just after midnight, as Alabdy was saying goodbye to a regular customer, and gave him a citation and fine for being “open” after city-mandated hours.
He didn’t move to America from Yemen to deal with this, he says with a huff. And he cares about his customers, who are the ones most affected.
“I talk to people who are disabled, have mental issues, they’re on SSI — and they don’t want to go out during the day. Or they can’t sleep. They feel safer coming at night. I never had any problems,” Alabdy says, brow furrowing. “I love my customers.”
He and his wife spent $100,000 to set up the store, but he’s thinking about closing it for good.
10:15 p.m., Ellis and Leavenworth streets
I come across an older man in a wheelchair, hawking a spread of handbags, jeans, and accessories laid out neatly on a sheet. The purses are so plasticky that they shimmer like bike reflectors.
His name is Tyrone, and he’s been living on and off the street in the Tenderloin for many years. He rubs his graying beard while gazing toward the upper floors of the apartment building across Leavenworth. “Mental illness is the number one thing here,” he says.
He gestures toward the apartments. “People are dying in these rooms, but they don’t change anything for the people who are the worst-off. Police go after the homeless, and they got nothing and no one to defend them,” he continues. “And then we’re supposed to call it a victory.”
Like many other political observers in S.F., Tyrone is suspicious of the city’s billion-dollar effort to solve homelessness. People are getting rich off those funds, with little actually trickling down to people on the street, he said with an accusatory grimace.
“Want to find the problem? Look up white-collar crime.”
11 p.m. at Eddy and Mason streets
It’s getting to that time on a Friday night when people need some fat and carbs to soak up the booze, which explains the line of a dozen people standing at Big Apple Pizza N Grill, a reliable joint for pepperoni slices and a decent chopped cheese. The queue will persist for hours; people don’t talk enough about how the Tenderloin is one of the city’s few consistent destinations for late-night diners.
Earlier in the week, a man took a bullet to the head around the corner on Turk Street, bleeding out on the pavement in broad daylight. A 23-year-old shot him, and the authorities haven’t announced a motive — just a murder charge. There’s no visible evidence of the crime remaining on the concrete. I’m guessing most of the people around here don’t even know about it.
I mosey a few blocks west toward the supportive housing building The Elm, where I meet Anthony and Roger on a smoke break. Roger, a newer tenant, is all smiles about his room. It’s a major upgrade from his recent stay at the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center, a city-managed shelter with 200 beds. He tells me about his anxiety and discomfort living there, especially when other guests turned unruly or outright aggressive; he feared getting sick, too.
He brushes his curly locks behind his ear, thinking while taking a drag off his cigarette. “I like to think it’s getting better. I think the national situation is bad. But I’ve noticed the sidewalks around here are cleaner, you don’t have to walk in the street so much,” Roger says.
Anthony, meanwhile, flashes me a look of bemusement. He’s been in the Tenderloin for longer than Roger, having moved to the district in the late 1980s.
“Things are cheaper here, it’s helped me survive,” Anthony says. “But I’m going biblical with my answer. It’s like Revelations. It ain’t getting better, man. You gotta prepare your soul for what comes after.”
11:30 pm at Leavenworth and Eddy streets
Two men are bickering like angry hounds outside the Western Hotel, throwing accusations and old grievances with spittle-flecked spite.
“That’s my shit, but okay, bitch, fine then!” one of the men screams before storming off.
Everyone else on the stoop ignores the fracas, giving the energy of a collective eye roll. Leavenworth is one of the more chaotic streets in the Tenderloin, and flashes of aggression are nothing new. Go north on the street, however, and the noise fades into quiet suffering of people who are high as hell. A gray-haired man sits cross-legged near O’Farrell Street, rocking back and forth and picking at a gaping raw wound on his left shin — a side effect of injecting fentanyl. All his limbs are covered in scabs.
Across O’Farrell, a pack of birthday revelers spill out of Pasha, a clubby restaurant that attracts a younger crowd looking for Mediterranean food and hookah. Right next to them, in a darkened section of the street, three men sit on milk crates counting cash and little dimebags. They’re gossiping in Spanish, but they nod politely as I stroll by.
Further down O’Farrell, I come across a man in a white hockey mask of sorts. He’s wheeling a cabinet down the sidewalk, and for a second I wonder if I’m hallucinating. I realize I have to ask for a photo, even though he’ll say no.
To my surprise, I see his eyes curling into a smile when I tell him the mask is a vibe. “Thanks, bud,” he says shyly before disappearing into an apartment building.
12:30 p.m. at Eddy and Hyde streets
I’m talking with Mike and Velvet when a strung-out young man covered in stains waddles over, a few bills in hand. He mumbles something about foil and fent, and immediately, Velvet puffs up in annoyance.
“Get that shit away from me. Are you out of your goddamn mind?” she hisses.
I look away and tell Mike the four golden words: “I ain’t seen shit.”
He laughs appreciatively, but says he doesn’t care. “We sell drugs, I can admit that,” he offers with a sigh.
Velvet interjects: “We’re different from people who have no respect for what goes on here. It’s just crack, baby. We don’t sell that fent shit. We don’t smoke that shit.”
“These new guys have no respect. They don’t know how to handle themselves. They smoke in front of cops and deal in front of kids. It’s disgusting,” Velvet continues, her gravelly voice crackling with displeasure.
They deal small amounts to hustle cash and survive while costs for everything spiral upward, Mike says. The public doesn’t understand that “drug dealer” means a lot of different things in the Tenderloin. The duo remain frustrated that city money to help the poor and homeless appears to have “disappeared”: “Where’s the billion dollars? Ain’t no new housing for people like me, so where is it?”
“Those in a position to help need to be honest with themselves. I feel like they’re looking out for themselves. They throw a bone once in a while to make it feel like change is around the corner,” Mike concludes, nodding sagely. “But I know how it works. I did everything right in temporary shelters, and what did they do? Just move me from shelter to shelter.”
"Meanwhile, there are people coming right out of the mud, right off the street, and being put into a room alone. They don't want to be there. They're too sick. We want to be there. But we don't qualify," Velvet continues.
Behind them, on the brick wall, is a poster memorializing a man dubbed “DeLuck.” Velvet smiles as she observes that he did not pass from an overdose, but rather from natural causes. While I’m looking at the sign, a woman with her head wrapped in a blushing floral scarf appears behind me, holding a six-inch knife in her hand. For a moment, I'm suspicious — but then she wraps the glinting weapon in a towel and conceals it before leaning in for a kiss from Velvet. Everyone needs a little self-defense.
As I depart, I hear Mike's voice from behind me: “Stay safe and warm out there… and let us know if you need help!”
1:30 a.m. at Leavenworth and Eddy streets
People tell me that Leavenworth is nicknamed “Pill Hill,” and the action is hot on Friday night. Cars circle the block like a pack of reef sharks, frequently pulling over to make a deal. I see two guys lighting up glass pipes in a Cadillac sedan, and I recognize the smell of burning meth — plastic and acrid, with a lingering hint of cat piss.
I see the dealers eyeball me, wondering what the heck this sleepy-looking Asian guy with a backpack is doing wandering the district. Eventually, the offers come: “I got shards, shards, shards,” a young man in pristine streetwear says as I walk by.
I keep walking to the end of the road, at UN Plaza. As with Noor Snacks, the city has forced Plaza Snacks & Deli at 77 McAllister St. to close at midnight, allegedly to discourage illegal activity. So much for that: The sidewalk remains lined with all manner of goods and sellers, including one emaciated woman selling a mountain of cakes and cookies acquired from Safeway.
Nearby, a boombox pumps some old-school Brian McKnight: “One, you're like a dream come true… Two, just wanna be with you…”
2 a.m. at Polk and Eddy streets
I walk into Gladstone Market right at closing and meet Sam, a young cashier who moved to S.F. from New Orleans in October to help his cousin run the business. He’s soft-spoken, but also enthusiastic about the Tenderloin: “The people are great.”
“It’s actually more diverse than what I experienced in New Orleans. There’s people from every background, every kind of life,” Sam tells me. “I’m getting used to it.”
I keep walking toward Larkin Street and notice that Alma’s Cigarettes and Pipes is the most popular spot in the TL tonight — cars are literally double-parked and people are waiting in line.
Outside, I run into Thomas and Julian, two friends who met while living in the Tenderloin. Thomas is a skinny white kid with a boyish smile, who works as a security guard at the Supreme Court of California. Julian moved here from Boston five years ago for rehab, and has since stuck around. He sports an oxygen tank to help with his breathing.
The duo agree that the city is in stasis, with little change despite big talk from Lurie and other politicos. “There’s a selective enforcement of rules that hurts the poorest people on the block,” Julian tells me with a serious look. “It’s just cycles of the same thing by a different name.”
Thomas nods, adding that he's been harassed by Urban Alchemy “ambassadors” who patrol the streets looking for trouble.
“At a certain point, it feels like profiling. What did I do wrong? Nobody can say,” Thomas says with an exaggerated shrug. “I can’t imagine what other people go through.”
3 a.m. at Geary and Larkin streets
I can hear a woman’s voice, distraught and hoarse, booming from the third floor of the Hartland Hotel. They’re screaming threats seemingly at nobody: “Shut the fuck up! I’m going to mess you up. I’m going to smear you. Smear white fucking shit…”
Her yells fade in and out like an old transistor radio, and people on the street are noticing. One man in a hoodie huffs and calls out to her. “Yo, STOP that! Man, what are you doing?”
The woman doesn’t seem to notice, and the guy realizes it’s a lost cause.
I turn left on Geary and soon run into Dina Patrick, a 54-year-old who looks much older, and more frail, than her age suggests. She’s sitting on the steps just inside the locked entrance of an apartment building. I have no idea how she got inside, but from a distance, it looks like she’s stuck in a jail cell.
She tells me she was just discharged from the hospital two days ago, and shows me a bracelet to prove it. Her wrist is so thin that I’m afraid I might hurt her with my handshake. When I ask about her living conditions, her deep blue eyes grow watery.
Dina lives with other unhoused people in a shelter at 711 Post St., but she says she avoids going back because of an “evil woman” who picks on her. She moved from Dallas to S.F. a decade ago with her husband, who died of cancer in 2020, right in the middle of their transition to low-income housing in the Tenderloin.
Since then, Dina has struggled with her health, including recurrent pneumonia from smoking. She does not know how to acquire or afford a new oxygen tank, which she once used daily.
“Promise me you won’t smoke,” she tells me. The sun-tanned wrinkles around her eyes curl as she smiles.
3:30 a.m. at Post and Polk streets
I see a woman dressed in a black trenchcoat and a matching black leather skirt, pacing on the corner and flipping her mahogany locks every so often. I wonder what she’s doing until I turn and see another woman, also in a black skirt, standing under a street lamp while scrolling on her phone. I walk farther east on Post and see two other women working the block. Business looks slow.
Across Post Street, a man grumbles out-of-breath while lugging a rack of beer down the sidewalk, but brightens up as his friends on the corner of Larkin and Post all exclaim in joy: “YOOOO WHAT UP D?!”
I keep walking east, and see three young friends squatting on the curb, sipping on Smirnoff Ices and listening to “Ya acabó” by Becky G and Marca MP. “Recuerdo cuando salías y en mis brazos te dormías, amor…”
4 a.m. at Geary and Hyde streets
A young man in a wheelchair sits alone with a sign asking for money under a flickering incandescent light. There’s nobody on the street, but Kyle enjoys the peace of the early morning hours.
He and his then-girlfriend came to the Tenderloin from San Mateo in 2021, hoping to land a temporary hotel room through the state’s pandemic-era housing program Project Roomkey.
“We went broke paying $2,270 a month for housing down there,” Kyle tells me.
As he explains it, his girlfriend got hooked on pills and then fentanyl, and he followed. They ended up on the street after two years and separated. Like Dina, Kyle is emerging after a stint at the hospital; he spent two months in treatment for an infection that nearly killed him.
“It’s from my feet getting fucked up while on the street, just wet all the time with bad socks and shoes. It’s like trench foot,” he says, pointing to his bandaged limbs.
It’s a turning point, if a painful one, for Kyle. He wants to heal and feels urgency to find a place to live indoors.
“Just somewhere hygienic that has good ADA access, that’s all I care about,” he says with an optimistic lilt in his voice. “I just need to call today and see where I’m at in the waitlist.”
4:15 a.m. at Ellis and Jones streets
An elderly man lurches up the hill, one step at a time. His walker is old, and he leans left at the hip as he zig-zags lazily on the sidewalk. A broken wheel on the walker goes click, click, click, and I flash back to the dozens of times I’ve heard a butane lighter clicking to life tonight, ready to burn up fent and meth and crack all over the neighborhood.
Half a block away, at Leavenworth and Ellis, I hear my first real fracas.
“HEY HE’S STEALING MY SHIIIIIIIT!”
I turn to see an Asian man with long, stringy hair chasing the perp with a golf club in hand. Somehow, as if summoned by Bat-Signal, an SFPD patrol car screeches to a halt right at the intersection, blipping its siren for effect.
“Drop the golf club,” a female voice says via the car’s loudspeaker.
“Man, he stole my shit!” the Asian man replies while dropping the club in the crosswalk.
She gets out of the car and walks down the block, then emerges again with the stolen goods — they were ditched.
Satisfied, the man gives the officer a nod and grabs his golf club before returning to his sleeping bag on the sidewalk. I hear Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” emanating softly from a window.
4:30 a.m. along Leavenworth
I’m exhausted, but I keep witnessing little moments that feel so oddly poetic that I can’t look away. A couple holds hands in the nook of a window at the Allen Hotel, whispering sweet nothings. I smell hairspray in the air and turn to see three men styling a friend’s hair outside of their apartment building while chatting in Spanish. Outside the Curry Senior Center on Turk Street, a thin old man — so skinny he looks like a religious ascetic — fastidiously folds and refolds cardboard for his sidewalk bed. Men in balaclavas keep offering me shards, shards, shards.
At Hyde and Golden Gate, I meet Ali, owner of the convenience store Hyde St. Gift & Snack. He tells me the Tenderloin hasn’t changed much in the last four years since he took over the shop from his brother. What bothers him most is the sheer number of drug users that he sees every day.
He rubs his gray-flecked stubble as he talks about his little interventions. “I trying not to sell pipe and torch to homeless addicts. I ask them for ID, they get upset at me, but I feel like I can’t make this place worse,” Ali says. “Business is slow, though.”
As we talk outside of his shop, a man walks by, shivering while asking for a cigarette. We don’t have one to share, and he stumbles away.
“I see things like that. I think he needs a hit,” Ali says, clucking his tongue. “I should have given him a jacket, but I don’t have one right now.”
Ali has grown paternal about this neighborhood. He says he loves the relationships he has made here, even despite the hurt of seeing so many in pain.
5 a.m. at Leavenworth and Golden Gate
A group of men are conducting a lot of business right outside of the offices of the nonprofit Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, with cars stopping by and passing goods under the illusion of friendly dap-ups. At the same corner, I see a shirtless man throwing around a literal safe — the kind you find in hotel rooms.
The safe rings loudly every time it hits the pavement. I can’t contain my curiosity.
“Anything in it?” I offer.
“Just bolts, I think,” he says.
I’m about to give the safe a crack when a SFPD patrol car suddenly appears. Right on cue, both of us stroll away in opposite directions, not making eye contact with the cops.
5:30 a.m. along Eddy Street
The first streaks of dawn light are emerging from the sky. Then I hear four cop cars screaming down the street, and sprint to witness the action.
A team of cops is geared up to breach the apartment building at 555 Eddy St. A few officers are holding less-lethal weapons, and they crowd around the front gate before undoing the lock and rushing through. Hilariously, in the excitement of the raid, two officers get left behind when the gate snaps shut on them.
I watch the police rushing into the hallway through a second-story window. But nothing happens for the next 20 minutes. No commotion, no yelling, no smashing. I wonder if they found anything at all.
The Tenderloin will seemingly never shed its reputation, even in the face of creeping gentrification. There’s simply too much texture in its past and present for the city to smooth it over into some generic “arts district.” But the mainstream negativity obscures the fact that no part of San Francisco has been forged in the crucible of struggle quite like the TL.
The result of all that brutality appears to be unvarnished humanity — a neighborhood of people who, despite their own trials, traumas, and mistakes, find a way to persist.
Whether they will is less certain, especially under the weight of a society that crushes the poor and vulnerable as a matter of course, be it through capital or addiction. But as I walk home, I think of Mike and Velvet, who showed me their truth, blemishes and all. They are here to thrive, not merely survive. Even if, for now, that just means sitting on an old stained sidewalk with me, hands hovering over charcoal heat.
