Pleasure, pain, hope
Mar 12, 2021, 08:40 AM
San Francisco streetcar reimagined by John Tenney.
"This piece is deeply personal. I grew up in and around San Francisco, still live less than 15 miles away, and haven’t visited the city for a year. I rode the old streetcars literally hundreds of times.
"I have experienced all of the sound you hear, over the same fifty-plus years of the streetcar stops: hippie jam sessions, black rights demonstrations decades before 2020, the cheerful anarchy of St. Stuped’s Day, hardcore disco music, the Lunar New Year parades, local radio commercials.
"And then toward the end there is the sense of everything turning dull, colourless, muffled during the long year of the pandemic. Hope keeps us going, which is why our streetcar rider can finally get off at The Embarcadero, San Francisco’s fabled waterfront, and hear life coming back in its full glory."
Part of the Until We Travel project to map and reimagine the sounds of transport and travel in a pre-pandemic and pandemic world. See the whole project at https://www.citiesandmemory.com/travel.
"This piece is deeply personal. I grew up in and around San Francisco, still live less than 15 miles away, and haven’t visited the city for a year. I rode the old streetcars literally hundreds of times.
"I have experienced all of the sound you hear, over the same fifty-plus years of the streetcar stops: hippie jam sessions, black rights demonstrations decades before 2020, the cheerful anarchy of St. Stuped’s Day, hardcore disco music, the Lunar New Year parades, local radio commercials.
"And then toward the end there is the sense of everything turning dull, colourless, muffled during the long year of the pandemic. Hope keeps us going, which is why our streetcar rider can finally get off at The Embarcadero, San Francisco’s fabled waterfront, and hear life coming back in its full glory."
Part of the Until We Travel project to map and reimagine the sounds of transport and travel in a pre-pandemic and pandemic world. See the whole project at https://www.citiesandmemory.com/travel.