Earthquakes Move Mountains and Art Students Alike
These United States and some of the origins of today’s troubles, personalized.
(No. 29, a ±09 minute read)
History, we were all there.
A little after 5:00 p.m. on October 17th, 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake struck San Francisco. Centered in a state forest ten miles inland and north of Santa Cruz the temblor killed 63 people and injured almost 4,000. I was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, waiting for a ride at the school’s front entrance, abruptly knocked to my knees. The two weeks afterwards were profoundly uncertain times in San Francisco.
Though not so direly as the many who lost family, friends, or homes, that day changed my life. I knew a sculpture grad student who came from generations of plumbers and himself fit pipe in new construction and substantial remodels. He’d heard I had some carpentry experience and needed someone to demolish an entry stair and replace it after he dug out the collapsed terra cotta house-main sewer that ran to the street delivering that commodity which ought ground us to the earth, and every living thing on it, to the city sewer. All over the Bay Area Loma Prieta collapsed the terra cotta building-mains installed during the area’s post-war building boom.
I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground as a carpenter, honestly, but this is where our story begins. I could fake a staircase, especially if it was a replace-in-kind and I had the old one as a pattern. No problem. The story though, is that I fell in with a peculiar cadre. I don’t know with any certainty, but I am suspicious, that it was one unique to the Bay Area, perhaps particular to that time, or at least died with it. This job led to others and soon I was on my friend’s more regular projects; building out studios for painters, expanding kitchens in Berkeley restaurants, building brew-pubs.
I soon met people I’d never imagined existed — incredibly well-educated tradespeople, women and men. There were a couple of frame carpenters who had masters degrees (at least one in an esoterica within English literature), our hole digger who was finishing his doctorate in philosophy, a fellow plumber who was getting her masters in engineering, a drywall taper with a masters in something or other, and a whole host of other SFAI and Berkeley graduates. All shared an abiding belief in the particular dignity of labor and building with one’s hands. All of whom could have worked in the white color world. I learned here the virtue of physical labor; learned the pain, pride, and necessity of it.
I graduated from SFAI in 1991, right into the recession of the early 1990s. In the time I spent in Arizona before transferring to SFAI I’d skated the pools the Savings and Loan Crisis provided as it helped pave the way to this recession — which made George Bush Sr. a one-term president and left young people like me facing genuinely terrible work prospects. And some of us college debt besides. Thanks to Loma Prieta this was not the case among the “intellectual” blue collar brigade I’d found myself a part of.
In 1991 there were not many options coming out of art school. With a photo degree I had more opportunity than most and worked some at dragging a 4x5 and lighting kit around doing architectural photo work, and augmenting that learning electrical work to build out my own studio.1 But the older brainy trades people had figured out something I still couldn’t yet do — they bought old houses needing work, in a market depressed by earthquake and recession, and moved in. They were able to take a trade wage, pay college loans, buy and renovate a house in the Bay Area, even San Francisco, and enter into the American paradigm of creating generational wealth with real estate.
Any younger readers at this point are forgiven for throwing this down in disgust. I want to. I was 15 years younger than any who managed this, or more, and ended up working for one of those SFAI graduates with multiple degrees and a home on a state-run multi-unit residential renovation. There wasn’t an easy way for me to see the path they were on. But that’s not what I’m after. Writers and editors always want to give the reader credit but here I am going to spell it out: A carpenter’s wage was once enough to buy a house, anywhere maybe, but certainly in the San Francisco Bay Area. And that carpenter’s trade was accepted more widely, certainly than it might be today, as a viable path for someone with white collar options. Trade work was devalued neither socially nor in the market.
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around that today when it seems to be a fight to create trade schools and apprenticeship programs (typically run by unions, the story there is that that they are rebounding some today, but still at historical membership lows). And of course there is our present paradigm of colleges and universities having become incredibly expensive white collar trade schools and networking sites for which students are going into terrible, unremunerative hock.
Never mind now the exploration of an esoteric branch of English literature, or a doctorate in — philosophy?! Those departments are being trimmed or culled outright. The idea of an education for the sake of shaping a critically thinking, informed citizen who might bring a still-valued liberal arts education into the job market seems to be rapidly falling by the wayside. It’s STEM all the way — learn to program kid.
We are very obviously today in a period of social and economic upheaval, the harvest of the deregulation of our economy from airlines to Hollywood begun during the Carter administration and fed steroids during the eight years Reagan was in office; his administration even refused to enforce anti-trust laws on the books. Clinton came in and wiped them off those books. Our national domestic situation today can in large part be traced to this period — our appalling concentrations of wealth, the lack of any but bad choices in the market controlled by vanishingly few players; from the grocery industry to tech. This was the project underway when I finished college and kept myself afloat better than most all my friends with trades work.
1991, it turns out, was a year in a portentous time, those early ‘90s. There exists the beginning of Trumpist nationalism as globalism ate domestic occupations and exported them. It was the finalization of American hegemony as the Iron Curtain fell, delivering us to the ill-fated W. Bush wars. 1990 was the year Photoshop 1.0 arrived ushering in the beginning of both a public distrust of photographs and the technology that would later democratize image-making, for better or worse.2 I watched the onset of wage deflation in construction and the pervasive arrival of immigrant labor from Latin America and China in the trades. Any idea of a “gentle-person trades worker” was supplanted by increasing pressure on schedules and an influx of capable, and hungrier labor. And, of course, this was the period of venture capital finding its feet —the industry financing Amazon, Google, Apple, Salesforce and their ilk — starting in the mid-nineties, and moving on to explosive growth in the first decade of the twenty-first century.3
An important part of a journalist’s job is bearing witness. We witness history being made, if we are lucky, and write a draft — the primary sources for researchers of the future. My residence in San Francisco happened to occur at a time that we are now living the consequences of — the project of deregulation, continued union-busting (we all worked for-hire, none of us had union cards), the early years of wealth being concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller population group and in greater proportions than ever before.
We all live through history, a reality that isn’t always apparent in our day-to-day. Loma Prieta was obviously history being written in real time in 1991. Today, in 2024, we are again living in a period that will count as momentous history. We can’t yet know what the outcome in Ukraine will be, even as we can be sure that Putin will not be well-remembered. In Gaza a miserable history is being recorded by a horrific, indefensible civilian death toll in response to an immoral terrorist act, itself in response to an insupportable occupation by the Israeli state. At home we are watching an ex-president sit at the defense bench of a criminal court as he runs for re-election on an authoritarian ticket. Dissatisfaction with the American project is at an all-time high and life is increasingly hard to manage for citizens of ordinary means.
These are our times, this is our history being written. We are all living amidst consequences — the fall of the U.S.S.R., partition and occupation, a Neoliberal project that did not have at heart our national well-being. I’d like to think that we might return again to a time when an post-secondary education was relatively affordable, trades and other blue collar work was valued better than it seems to be today, and insane wealth concentration wasn’t a thing; let alone a flash point causing national economic and social distress. How do we see a way forward through this tangle, let alone the many other thickets it seems are closing in on the nation?
Our dilemma is that mired in the present, resident as we are amidst the consequences of our national history, none of us are sages. Today we are able only to take the testimony of the circumstances of our times, and from that undertake efforts that might improve them, as best we can. But amidst today’s complexity how can any of us know what those efforts might be, let alone if they are truly actionable? Re-regulation, proportional taxation at home, these are starts but not nearly enough.
History seems to show us most clearly today what has not worked; even as we keep at it, our momentum apparently unstoppable. And when we see fixes, say an increase in small-dollar political donations over corporate political largess, they often come with a surprise outcome: those small donors give because they are the most partisan in our population which sends divisive candidates into government.
In 1989 Loma Prieta stopped everything for a while in the Bay Area, just as the pandemic did worldwide in 2020. In both cases we pulled together, repaired our systems as best we could. Thirty-three years ago my life took a turn to help make buildings livable again; maybe there’s a turn today for all of us that might make things more broadly livable than they have gotten to be. How we got here today to this spot where it seems that things are shaking apart is evident, I was witness to much of it. The turn out of our mess seems to be harder to find than identifying the choices decades ago that delivered us here. That’s the trouble with history, it’s hard to see it coming in the moment, not unlike an earthquake.
A highlight was an overnight job in Modesto photographing a newly installed cubical farm for Panel Concepts, a manufacturer of modular office furniture. I was paid to make absolutely soulless photos of the guts of American administrative capitalism set up with brand new desktop computers. It was great.
And ultimately largely ended the specialist architectural photographer’s occupation based around a large-format camera and complicated lighting kits.
By all means read Daniel Bessner’s piece in the current Harper’s Magazine to understand how private equity has overwhelmed Hollywood, controlled it, and is now destroying it.