I'M A PRESERVATIONIST Mark Ellinger August 9, 2009 For the past six years, I have been focusing my energies as a photographer and an activist on bringing to light the beauty, history, and vitality of the Sixth Street, Mid-Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods. Happily, I’ve found that there are other San Franciscans who share my love for these long-neglected areas, and it has been my privilege to work with some of them on the board of the North of Market/Tenderloin Community Benefit District and pursuing landmark status for the Tenderloin. This work has recently borne fruit in two exciting ways: the approval, earlier this year, of the Uptown Tenderloin National Register Historic District by the National Park Service, and the publication of two books of my photography (Sixth Street and Mid-Market), with a third (Uptown Tenderloin) soon to come. (For those interested in deepening their appreciation of these neighborhoods, my photographs and links to purchase the books can be found on my blog at http://upfromthedeep.wordpress.com/.) I was fortunate to grow up in a Midwestern city in the 1950s, before corporatization and urban renewal eviscerated much of this country’s soul. Grandpa “PR” Ellinger was a brakeman for the B&O Railroad, so some of my earliest memories are of freight trains being assembled in the yards by 0-8-0 switching engines, and of giant 4-8-2 locomotives waiting by the pit or in the roundhouse. Everywhere were the smells of coal smoke, oil, and hot metal, and the sounds of herculean iron machines at work: a crashing and hissing of superheated steam punctuated by whistle blasts that telegraphed the movements of the trains. My other grandfather, “Red” Tobin, was a chemist for the city water purification plant, built circa 1910. I would beg him to take me with him whenever he went there, and asked him to show me over and over again how everything worked. With few exceptions, the enormous machinery, valves, pipes, filtration pools, and conduits were original, as were the many brass-handled controls and oversize gauges, and all were perfectly maintained and housed in cavernous structures of iron and brick. Most wondrous of all was the pump house, a brick building five stories high and three stories deep that had brass-railed ironwork galleries instead of floors, and walls that were lined with banks of indicator lights and old-fashioned recording gauges—all built around the colossal steam-driven flywheel pumps that fed the city’s water supply. Such are the archetypes that inform my world view. My deeply instilled love of the past and all things historic has always, in one way or another, been expressed in my art. As an artist I often find inspiration in my surroundings, which at different times have ranged from the exalted to the lowly, and thus I find beauty in places and things that are shunned or ignored by others. As it turns out, that which all such places and things have in common—and what I love most about them—is also the primary reason for their repudiation and neglect: they are old and represent the past. This was the nexus where my art and activism merged, when I realized that my desire to change people’s perception of the central city by capturing the beauty of its architecture was also the way I could best advocate its preservation. Becoming a preservationist wasn’t as much an option as it was an act of conscience. View of Hyde Street, in the National Register District —Mark Ellinger, August 9, 2009     I’m A Preservationist - Archives back to top