Manifesto for the Gold Dust Lounge
Dear Sir:
WHEREAS The Gold Dust Lounge is a San Francisco institution - one that’s been open since 1933.
WHEREAS The Gold Dust Lounge is a class joint, but an unpretentious one. It may have velvet banquettes and cherubs on the ceiling, but it also has cheap drinks and a 60’s cover band.
WHEREAS The Gold Dust Lounge is a unique space in San Francisco where people of all varieties: rich and poor, tourist and local, old and young, gay and straight, nerd and jock, urban and suburban, can gather together and share the pleasure of a whiskey and coffee.
WHEREAS The Gold Dust Lounge is a money-making enterprise already paying a nice chunk of change to its landlord, who hardly needs to take out a beloved historic landmark to make a few extra bucks.
WHEREAS Powell Street already has enough places to buy pants.
WHEREAS Even if it didn’t, visitors are not drawn to our fair city by the opportunity to purchase the same clothing they could purchase in Minneapolis, Oslo, or Hong Kong. They are drawn by San Francisco’s taste for its eccentric past, its easygoing hedonism, its fabled tolerance of both the strange and strangers.
WHEREAS three generations of the Handlery family have managed hotels dependent on the historic appeal of San Francisco!
WE KNOW that this city has lost hosts of small, local, eclectic, glorious, and important institutions to the forces of greed and shortsightedness.
WE REMEMBER when 711 Market Street was a beautiful art-deco bar, and not a 711. We remember when the Starbucks on Upper Fillmore was a classical music store, and before then the Batman Gallery. We remember when that generic boutique on Divisadero Street was the African Orthodox Church of St. Jon Coltrane. We remember when the usually empty banquet room at the Cliff House was our beloved Musee Mechanique, the last tie to nearby bygone Playland at the Beach. Downtown has already been malled enough!
Cities everywhere were born free and are now in chain stores.
WE SAY not one more. Not this one anyway. Save the Gold Dust Lounge!
We Sincerely Appeal To You,
Occupy The Gold Dust Lounge!
