An interesting piece from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 11, 2011
Willie “Wild” Sparks has loved transit terminals since the day the cover for his band’s self-titled 1973 debut album, “Graham Central Station,” was shot in front of the old Third Street train station in San Francisco.
Now he sleeps at one.
In its rubble, to be exact.
Sparks, 59, long ago one of the hottest drummers in rock music, slept on and off for 15 years at San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal, just a short ride down the waterfront from where the album cover was photographed. Demolition on the Depression-era bus station at First and Mission streets began six months ago, but Sparks never left.
He is one of about 15 hard-core homeless people who are proving tough to move as crews work toward building a replacement.
Counselors combed the terminal before and after the teardown began in August, but Sparks and his street comrades rebuffed their offers of housing and shelter. As the complex is knocked down wall by wall – a process expected to take an additional six months – the hardy few simply pick up their bedding and move a safe distance away from the main machinery.
Today they’re scattered around the fenced-off parking lots and partially demolished pillars near Tehama and First streets.
They are all that’s left of about 140 homeless people who were squatting at the terminal. The city says more than half of the other denizens were placed into housing or shelters, and the rest scattered into other parts of San Francisco – or left town.
Surge in the fall
For a couple of months in the fall, businesses at the nearby Ferry Building and along Fisherman’s Wharf reported an increase in aggressive panhandlers and blamed it on the Transbay Terminal transplants.
That has died down – although episodically, crowds of homeless people still migrate to the waterfront before police shoo them away, street counselors say.
Those who left the terminal are now fully dispersed throughout the city. What’s left are the die-hards in the rubble.
“They can’t make me leave. I’ve been here too long,” Sparks said one recent morning as he rested on a cardboard sheet under a blanket with friend Melissa Thomas, 54. “I always really liked terminals, and that one in particular. I’m fine right where I am.”
Man with a past
It’s been a long time since things were stable for Sparks, which is typical for the hard core left at the terminal.
Sparks was drummer for Larry Graham’s pioneering funk band Graham Central Station, and wielded the sticks at sessions for Sly and the Family Stone back in the 1970s. But by the mid-1980s, he fell into hard times, and former band manager Natalie Neilson can remember encountering him homeless on Market Street as long as 25 years ago.
“Willie was a wonderful, wonderful drummer, and such a dear person,” Neilson said. “I don’t know where he went wrong. I imagine drugs and that stuff from those days did it. It was all around. I feel so bad for him.”
Lifelong friend and fellow Graham band member Hershall Kennedy said Sparks slipped away from music as he became obsessed with abusing cocaine with his mentor, Sly Stone.
“He was such a brilliant person in his youth, very creative, very astute,” he said. “It was very sad. I always have hope for him.”
The Transbay Terminal is on track to be replaced by a sleek, $4 billion showcase of transit modernity by 2017, and transportation officials are already heralding it as “the Grand Central station of the West.”
Trying to find shelters
But before the first shovel bit into the ground, city counselors were tasked with finding shelter or homes for the longtime indigent population that bedded down each night among the ancient concrete pillars and wooden benches.
That proved to be daunting, as about half of them were hard-core homeless people who had been at the terminal three years or longer and suffered from substance abuse, mental illness or both.
“We placed 88 people in housing or shelters, and then as people moved around, we had our counselors follow them,” said Dariush Kayhan, the city’s homelessness policy director. “We keep engaging with the people left on the street, but most of them have scattered by now.”
Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, called the placement estimates overblown. She said her group knows of only about 14 people who definitely wound up with even a temporary roof over their heads.
“There were a lot of the most severely disabled homeless people in the city at that terminal, and they really needed help,” Friedenbach said. “But the mayor, the city and the state really blew it.
“The result is that those folks are now even more desperate, they’ve almost all scattered, and it’s harder for the city to locate them now.”
Those who stuck around are easy to find. Their shopping carts and heaped bedding are visible to anyone who strolls the alleys.
Many have mental illnesses, such as one man who lies in a cardboard box on Tehama Street and yells “Go to hell!” to anyone who approaches. Some have lived outside so long they have a hard time envisioning change – a common challenge to street counselors that can take up to two years to surmount.
“Yeah, I talked to those counselor guys,” Sparks said. “They all have an agenda, and I don’t trust them.”
Losing track of time
A block away, Edward Shank, 65, stood at the corner of Minna Street and Shaw Alley and watched a backhoe dig at the base of the last chunk of terminal wall left standing. Six months ago, he slept alongside that wall near a longtime street friend known in the neighborhood as Cat Man.
Now Cat Man is housed. Shank beds down in the debris.
“I don’t know how long I’ve been out here,” Shank said, staring at his feet. He slowly shuffled a pile of papers together, then apart, then together, over and over. “I think it’s been a long time.”
Shank rubbed his long, bushy beard and thought hard for a moment.
“Yeah, a long time,” he whispered.