1970s San Francisco by Janet Delaney
Think of San Francisco and you think of the centre of the technological boom. Just north of Silicon Valley (home to Google and Apple), San Francisco is now playing host to the likes of Twitter, Pinterest and Uber, with tech start-ups choosing this as the place to settle. With that comes a lot of money and a lot of gentrification – something that is very different to the San Francisco of four decades ago.
In 1978, student Janet Delaney found herself in San Fran’s South of Market (or SoMa) in the midst of ‘urban renewal’. Having resisted gentrification for so long, the area - which Delaney describes as “a place for immigrants to live while they got organised and moved to better neighbourhoods” - became a hotbed of reconstruction and upheaval – the city wanting to rid it of its ‘sketchy reputation’.
The photographs capture an area of the city on the cusp of cultural and technological transformation, with neighbourhoods destroyed, jobs lost, and locals moved out.
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