"No Murals in the Quiet: A Tenderloin Memory"

Eddy Street at Hyde in San Francisco's Tenderloin is a chaotic corner where you constantly need to stay alert due to the presence of numerous drug dealers and addicts.

Looking at an old photo I took during my time in San Francisco—three decades worth—I see boys on a Tenderloin corner. That part of the city, always a little too alive. The Tenderloin where immigrants land, where lower-income lives pile up around rent checks, SROs, and corners that never rest.

I once tried to live in one of those SROs—Dalt Hotel, Maria Manor, maybe it was another. One room, one window, and no space to write without the walls closing in. It made me feel overwrought and borderline insane. So I left. I wasn’t Dashiell Hammett, after all—though he lived not far from there, at 620 Eddy Street in the 1920s, spinning fiction that still cuts. I’ve always admired him—I'd have shared a drink under the table if we'd met. Even back then the Tenderloin had teeth, and now it’s just sharper: open drug markets, working girls on every corner. But it was also mine.

There’s no street in Peekskill that hums like that. No hood, at least not like the Bronx or the Tenderloin. Bolmann Towers might come close, from the stories I’ve heard. I’ve never stepped inside, but I imagine it might whisper in a similar register.

I remember walking through Valencia Gardens in the middle of the night once—because someone said I'd get robbed, killed, or maybe just swallowed by silence. I saw none of that. Just poverty, and a stench I’ve long tried to forget.

That mural I stumbled across recently? It’s painted on the old Central Towers building—my first solo apartment after a breakup when the San Francisco Giants played Oakland A’s in the World Series during a major earthquake. 

Central Towers had a courtyard with a fountain that muffled the city's roar. That juxtaposition—chaos outside, calm within—is still somewhere in me. And in Peekskill, where the ghosts are quieter, I realize I miss the grit, the confrontation, the humbling quirks that made writing feel urgent.
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From a writer’s point of view, you come to need places like the Tenderloin. Not because they're broken, but because they make you feel something that polished spaces never do.

Central Towers, now called Mosser Towers, consists of two connected buildings located at 350 Turk Street and 455 Eddy Street. The complex features 14 stories above parking and includes 364 rental apartments and studios.–

A typical studio apartment in Central Towers on Turk Street, featuring a terrace with views of the courtyard and the Eddy Street Central Tower. Today, Central Towers is called Mosser Towers after the new owners.

A Tenderloin Memory