The mural was painted from right to left, so the next  windows after the night time scene are the two tall ones, the darker one first.

Both tall windows show the area across the street from the mural (looking South East from Jones and Golden Gate.)


Below you can compare and find, in reality and in both paintings, the Furniture and Carpets  building towering over Market Street in the background, the old Hollywood Billiard mural on the wall facing the parking lot, the empty billboard frame, the signs, etc. --- Click image to enlarge.


The sunset scene shows a contemporary view at the time the mural was painted. The daytime scene shows the exact same place, but re-imagined.







The painting of the fantasy version was created in a participatory way, spontaneously involving the neighborhood:

After painting the contemporary view of the area, I traced the same basic drawing into the second window. As people recognized the same cityscape in my next drawing, they started asking why I was about to paint the same thing twice. I would answer that this time, it would look different. It would look whichever way we wanted. At that point, I would ask for suggestions: what would they like to see here, if it were up to them?

Slowly, an alternative vision of the neighborhood was created this way. I built upon my own ongoing series of utopian visions of San Francisco (prior examples: 1, 2, 3,), while integrating a vast range of ideas from passers by, some very practical, others just plain fun.

The fantasy vision was populated by local people as well, some of them doing a specific activity they wished for, others simply sharing space in a convivial way with people of different local communities and identities.

The inclusion of local people in this panel was particularly crucial to the concept, because I strived to illustrate a vision of the neighborhood that showed improvement without a change in population. In other words: improvement without gentrification.

I curated the ideas for infrastructural changes in a way that prioritized things that could be technically achieved and maintained by people themselves, without massive top-down intervention, by repurposing things that are already there.


detail gallery:
----[coming soon]----
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