I’ll never forget our first encounter. I was visiting a friend who lived in the hills above the Castro, and we decided to pop outside to share a smoke. He took me outside through a musty back recycling room so we could lean against the peeling paint of an ancient wooden stairwell. Above us towered the surrounding kitchens and storage rooms of apartment buildings taller than his, and below us stood trash cans overflowing with garbage and coated in pigeon shit. The only green in sight came from a shirt hanging on a nearby clothesline; everything else was ashy white, including the fog, which traveled down from nearby Market Street. It was my first time sleeping over in San Francisco, and I was instantly smitten with you, Secret Concrete Yard. I knew my friend shared you with his big city neighbors, and I wanted a piece of you too.
You aren’t something the tourists are privy to. A person has to live here, or know someone who lives here, to understand the thrill of secret concrete yards, of being boxed in by Victorian giants and hemmed in by laundry and power lines behind old San Francisco apartment buildings. You immediately symbolized urban nirvana in my mind.
From that evening on, I couldn’t think of anything that seemed more San Francisco than having a secret concrete yard of my own.
See, I grew up outside Portland, Oregon, surrounded by farmland. All that greenery weighed on me like a dull routine. I hated the vast chasm between my quiet suburban life and the loud city living I was dying to be a part of. By the time I moved to San Francisco in the mid-’90s, I was aching to trade spacious fields for compact streets. I wanted to inject myself into everything urban residency had to offer, including the outdoor spaces that most suburban folks would condemn as cramped and ugly.
My first home in San Francisco didn’t have a secret concrete yard; it was a crawlspace of an apartment so dark, it would kill dried flowers. But I finally graduated to a place with one of you out back. You included a rickety staircase and a small patio just big enough to hold a mildewed couch and a couple of overflowing ashtrays. But you quickly became my favorite solo escape, or the spot to drink beer with my five housemates by the lights of nearby apartments. The pigeons loved you as well, and I would constantly hear them having sex on the pavement two stories below. Thanks to you, I had a jagged, jumbled view of the Mission skyline – an intimate view more memorable than any postcard scene because you framed glimpses of city living that were only for my corner of the block to see.
Over the years, Secret Concrete Yard, I’ve continued taking mental pictures of your diverse configurations. I’ve coveted you at my neighbors’ places (especially the weedy Dogpatch wasteland big enough for friends to screen movies in) and have been to BBQs on your graveled surfaces dotted by dying potted plants.
After almost two decades of being in San Francisco, though, I’ll admit I ache for real greenery again. Sometimes I’ll even curse you as I fantasize about rural grassy yards. I know friends who have done the same, who’ve split for the East Bay and the North Bay and the lawns and gardens offered more readily there. Sometimes I feel sick of constantly living so compactly and long for more substantial outdoor space, where I can leave sardine-dom behind and stretch my legs against something that isn’t made of concrete.
But for now I can’t imagine giving you up, Secret Concrete Yard. You still symbolize genuine, grit-smudged San Francisco beauty to me.
I mean, really, you’re the reason I begged my landlord for my current apartment. I took one look out the living room window – and onto a gated record store parking lot – and I fell in love with you.
When older relatives come to visit, all they see in my secret concrete yard is a collection of old vans, random graffiti, and skater kids taking their cute mutts out to piss. But I see an active microcosm of the punk world I was immersed in for years as a music critic. It comes to life when my neighbors film music videos or fix their tour vans out back, or when bands haul their equipment across the parking lot and into Amoeba for an in-store. I see a place to spend happy hour – my boyfriend and I often crawl out on our tiny fire escape (our “deck”) and toast the tippy tops of the trees in Golden Gate Park, the fog rolling in over them. I see giant murals with such bright colors that the images force their way into my apartment. It’s almost as if I have a gallery wall instead of living room windows.
Most of all, I see in you, Secret Concrete Yard, the symbol of finding peace and sanity in the small, trash-lined cracks of San Francisco, those patches of concrete and city lights that we can comfortably call our own.
Written by Jennifer Maerz.
This story is part of our week-long feature, Love Letters to San Francisco's Quirky Bits. Learn more about it here.
