Book by Damon Scott
"The City Aroused is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political i... more "The City Aroused is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Damon Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organizing among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement.
Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape."
University of Texas Press
Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Damon Scott
Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis: Landscapes of Time and Place, 2020
This chapter reflects on methodological and historiographic insights gained using GIS to reconstr... more This chapter reflects on methodological and historiographic insights gained using GIS to reconstruct the impact of urban renewal on “hangouts for homosexuals” on the San Francisco waterfront during the 1950s and early 1960s. These stigmatized places—which entered the popular-spatial imaginary through contemporaneous local press coverage of bar raids—were initially documented as historical sites by LGBTQ community archivists who culled basic information about the physical location, approximate years of operation, and business type from oral history transcripts, newspaper clippings, early gay bar directories, and nightlife columns in the city’s first gay periodicals dating to the early 1960s. In a collaborative project with the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California, the author mapped these and similar sites in order to “sketch out” temporal and spatial changes in the sexual geography of the city. The pragmatic and technical challenges of mapping the waterfront sites, in particular, drew the author deep into the urban planning and redevelopment archives of the city in a search for basic information about the physical landscape prior to the transformation of the area from a low-rise, mixed-use, wholesaling, and maritime trade-oriented district into a freeway-oriented gateway to an expanding downtown financial district. Charting this transformation demonstrates the productive possibilities of triangulating a historical-geographic fix on the queer past from personal recollections, contemporaneous published sources, and historical urban planning documents in pursuit of a new spatial imaginary of “gay community” formation. Informed by—but ultimately not constrained by poststructural critiques of GIScience—this chapter illustrates how the representational artifices and associative power of GIS can serve as instruments for unraveling teleological narratives that conflate urban development and modern LGBTQ subjectivities.
During the summer of 1964, the Haight Theater in San Francisco operated briefly as “gay movie hou... more During the summer of 1964, the Haight Theater in San Francisco operated briefly as “gay movie house” that screened B-movies, held drag shows, and hosted male physique contests. For Haight-Ashbury neighborhood activists, already engaged in a fight to block a planned freeway and reverse the attrition of white families from the community, the reopened theater presented an existential threat to the family-oriented character of the neighborhood. They saw the growing visibility of gay men in the area as a harbinger of social disintegration that could, if allowed to continue, result in the classification of the area as blighted, making it a candidate for demolition and renewal. The moral anxieties of Haight residents are best understood not simply as the manifestation of an inherent, latent homophobia but as part of the broader struggle of neighborhood activists to stave off the destructive impacts of urban renewal and freeway expansion. The episode reveals the degree to which taken-for-granted assumptions about the social and economic impacts of gay men on urban space have changed as postwar planning discourses about blight and social disorganization have been eclipsed by more contemporary narratives of gay-led urban revitalization and the productivity of creative capital.
Gender played an important role in framing arguments for and against modernizing San Francisco’s ... more Gender played an important role in framing arguments for and against modernizing San Francisco’s transit system by replacing cable cars with motor coaches. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, appeals for public support from cable car preservationists and advocates of buses were saturated with gendered representations of the vehicles themselves, their intended ridership, and the areas of the city that they served. To counteract male-dominated discourses about transit progress, which stressed the benefits of greater efficiency and cost savings, a coalition of women’s civic organizations emphasized a romantic attachment to the city’s past and promoted the cable cars as a centerpiece of the city’s tourism economy. The “cable car war” demonstrates how the cultural politics of transit modernization in postwar San Francisco was refracted through competing visions of the gender of modernity.
Lethaia, 1995
How well do autochthonous leaf assemblages reflect live plant communities? How do leaf assemblage... more How well do autochthonous leaf assemblages reflect live plant communities? How do leaf assemblages accumulating over different time scales compare in paleoecologic information content? Forest-floor leaf assemblages accumulating over ten-day intervals (referred to here as short-term assemblages) and over a five-month season of leaf abscission (referred to here as a long-term assemblage) were compared with the surrounding community in a modern temperate deciduous forest in northern Ohio. Leaf number in the long-term leaf assemblage is strongly correlated with the abundance of taxa (stem number) around the accumulation site and weakly correlated with both average taxon size (stem circumference) and average taxon distance from the accumulation site. Of the variance in leaf number, 45% is explained solely by stem number and 67% by stem number and average distance together. Average size explains an insignificant amount of the variance in leaf number. Like the long-term assemblage, leaf number in the short-term leaf assemblages is usually strongly correlated with stem number and usually weakly correlated with average taxon size and average taxon distance. However, these patterns are not consistent, and the correlations are highly variable. Similarly, there is high variability in the degree to which stem number, average taxon size and average taxon distance account for variance in leaf number. Short-term leaf assemblages are characterized by great fluctuations in taxonomic relative abundance, caused by seasonal variation in the timing and rate of leaf abscission among taxa. While autochthonous leaf assemblages accumulating over several months can reflect the surrounding community with fair accuracy, leaf assemblages accumulating over shorter time spans are inconsistent records of the surrounding community. The depositional circumstances producing short-term assemblages (i.e. event burial) may result in well-preserved specimens, but community data from such assemblages should be treated with caution and, if possible, compared with data from contemporaneous long-term assemblages.Paleobotany, taphonomy, actualism, paleocommunity reconstruction, time-averaging.Keith H. Meldahl, Damon Scott and Karen Carney, Department of Geology, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, 44074, USA; 6th June, 1994; revised 8th February, 1995.
Reports by Damon Scott
Theses by Damon Scott
This dissertation examines the intersections of urban redevelopment and sexual politics in San Fr... more This dissertation examines the intersections of urban redevelopment and sexual politics in San Francisco from the first calls for a comprehensive land-use plan in the early 1940s to the highpoint of landscape destruction in the mid 1960s. During the war years, city leaders and prominent citizens compiled and prioritized a list of postwar planning projects that included improvements to the mass transit system, redevelopment of the downtown waterfront, and expansion of the city’s tourism and convention facilities. The footprint of these projects necessitated the destruction of significant elements of the built environment, including cable car lines, low rent hotels, industrial zones, and nighttime entertainment districts. After the war, civic leaders, elected officials, business interests and newspaper publishers attempted to rally support for these projects and searched for new ways to assert control over the urban landscape. San Franciscans, however, resisted significant components of the post-war civic improvement program by mobilizing against plans to replace cable cars with buses, by voting down schemes to redevelop the waterfront, and by blocking efforts to expand the freeway network. In this larger context, gays and lesbians in San Francisco in the early 1960s organized as a response to displacement from the low-rent hotel and bar districts on the edge of an expanding downtown. Specific examples of the loss of gay social spaces due to redevelopment pressures include the destruction of a popular gay bar to make way for a new airline bus terminal; the acquisition and razing of several businesses on the waterfront that hosted a thriving gay subculture; and the closure of a gay-oriented movie house after it aroused the ire of neighborhood activists in the Haight Ashbury district. This dissertation builds on previous work that examines the cultural politics of urban landscape change, as well as literature on the formation of urban sexuality-base subcultures to argue that the material transformation of urban space played a fundamental role in the emergence of contemporary notions of sexual difference.
Papers by Damon Scott
University of Texas Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
University of Texas Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
This chapter reflects on methodological and historiographic insights gained using GIS to reconstr... more This chapter reflects on methodological and historiographic insights gained using GIS to reconstruct the impact of urban renewal on “hangouts for homosexuals” on the San Francisco waterfront during the 1950s and early 1960s. These stigmatized places—which entered the popular-spatial imaginary through contemporaneous local press coverage of bar raids—were initially documented as historical sites by LGBTQ community archivists who culled basic information about the physical location, approximate years of operation, and business type from oral history transcripts, newspaper clippings, early gay bar directories, and nightlife columns in the city’s first gay periodicals dating to the early 1960s. In a collaborative project with the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California, the author mapped these and similar sites in order to “sketch out” temporal and spatial changes in the sexual geography of the city. The pragmatic and technical challenges of mapping the waterfront sites, in parti...
cultural geographies
Drawing on the ‘reparative turn’ in queer feminist scholarship, we situate a commemorative march ... more Drawing on the ‘reparative turn’ in queer feminist scholarship, we situate a commemorative march that took place in late March 2018 in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco as an entry point into the affective conditions of living in and through a period of intensifying urban development. Complete with a brass band, drag queens dressed in mourning, and black banners, participants stopped at the sites of former gay bars and other commercial establishments where they laid wreaths, offered eulogies, and affectively asserted the social and historical significance of these places. Nine months later, we interviewed organizers and participants and analyzed recordings of the event in order to register the sensate conditions that preceded, pervaded, and followed in the wake of the March. In so doing, we unravel the ‘undecidability of the urban’ in which residents call into question the impacts of gentrification. Through our tripartite engagement with the affective contours of the Marc...
Planning Perspectives
response to noise complaints. But the advent of quieter jet engines in recent decades may have do... more response to noise complaints. But the advent of quieter jet engines in recent decades may have done the most to reduce airplane-related aural pollution. Another negative consequence of JFK’s success was the heavy traffic on roads leading to the airport, which in Bloom’s view was exacerbated by policies established by the Port Authority and Robert Moses. The Port Authority designed JFK with the car-driving passenger in mind and, for years, resisted calls to provide mass transit service between Manhattan and Kennedy because of concerns about costs, while Moses barred trucks from the new system of parkways he designed for the New York region, so rigs carrying cargo to and from Kennedy had fewer route options. As a result, the drive to JFK on roads such as the Van Wyck Expressway became notoriously slow going, although AirTrain has helped reduce airport-bound automobile traffic. Bloom notes that JFK’s early advocates saw developing the airport as crucial to securing New York’s economic future – that was why, to them, JFK mattered – and The Metropolitan Airport offers a general account of JFK’s commercial impact on the region. It identifies some of the industries that made use of airline service at JFK in different eras but does not describe how extensive their use was. It provides some statistics quantifying Kennedy’s overall contribution to the local economy, circa 2010, but does not explain what comprised that contribution or how it presumably changed over time. It notes that the Port Authority became larger and more profitable after assuming management of Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark International, but says little about the agency’s relationships with airlines, contractors, concessionaires, and workers, or with the Civil Aeronautics Board – relationships which, at other airports, at least, could be quite contentious. It reports that a variety of businesses, including hotels, restaurants, and bars, popped up around the airport, but does not explain how their development occurred, and it tells us little about JFK’s impact on the local labour market – about the demography of the people who worked at the airport, the nature of their work, their incomes, or their relationships with their employers. For historians interested in the economic development of cities and metropolitan regions after the Second World War, these issues matter, and The Metropolitan Airport opens the door for their further study.
... Carole Geiger, Jim Smith, Gabe Wasserman, Kim Green, Vic Wright, Ellen Thompson, Paul Fischer... more ... Carole Geiger, Jim Smith, Gabe Wasserman, Kim Green, Vic Wright, Ellen Thompson, Paul Fischer, Cesar Escalante, Eduardo Contreras, Constanza Svidler, Brian Springfield, Elizabeth Chur, Remy Charlip, Brent Armendinger, Elizabeth Romero, Aaron Hamburger, Cheryl ...
Journal of Urban History, 2014
Gender played an important role in framing arguments for and against modernizing San Francisco’s ... more Gender played an important role in framing arguments for and against modernizing San Francisco’s transit system by replacing cable cars with motor coaches. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, appeals for public support from cable car preservationists and advocates of buses were saturated with gendered representations of the vehicles themselves, their intended ridership, and the areas of the city that they served. To counteract male-dominated discourses about transit progress, which stressed the benefits of greater efficiency and cost savings, a coalition of women’s civic organizations emphasized a romantic attachment to the city’s past and promoted the cable cars as a centerpiece of the city’s tourism economy. The “cable car war” demonstrates how the cultural politics of transit modernization in postwar San Francisco was refracted through competing visions of the gender of modernity.
Journal of Planning History, 2014
During the summer of 1964, the Haight Theater in San Francisco operated briefly as ''gay movie ho... more During the summer of 1964, the Haight Theater in San Francisco operated briefly as ''gay movie house'' that screened B-movies, held drag shows, and hosted male physique contests. For Haight-Ashbury neighborhood activists, already engaged in a fight to block a planned freeway and reverse the attrition of white families from the community, the reopened theater presented an existential threat to the family-oriented character of the neighborhood. They saw the growing visibility of gay men in the area as a harbinger of social disintegration that could, if allowed to continue, result in the classification of the area as blighted, making it a candidate for demolition and renewal. The moral anxieties of Haight residents are best understood not simply as the manifestation of an inherent, latent homophobia but as part of the broader struggle of neighborhood activists to stave off the destructive impacts of urban renewal and freeway expansion. The episode reveals the degree to which taken-for-granted assumptions about the social and economic impacts of gay men on urban space have changed as postwar planning discourses about blight and social disorganization have been eclipsed by more contemporary narratives of gay-led urban revitalization and the productivity of creative capital.
Book Reviews by Damon Scott
Gender, Place & Culture, 2024
At the intersection of queer theory and urban studies, social geographer DamonScott’s long-awaite... more At the intersection of queer theory and urban studies, social geographer DamonScott’s long-awaited spatial analysis of the San Francisco waterfront’s queer land andits demise has finally been published, renewing scholarly interest in the social dynam-ics and sexual politics in post-war American urban planning. Building on thesocio-political context of the Lavender and Red Scare in the 1950s –when homosex-uals were expelled from merchant marine and naval forces– The City Aroused exploreshow the San Francisco waterfront became a containment zone for a thriving queernightlife. Scott argues that this gay cruising strip was framed as a vice district bypro-growth advocates such as business leaders and state officials who labeled it a‘blighted’ area to drive down the cost of land for an urban renewal project and a newfreeway network called the Golden Gateway. This project was supported by city plan-ners eager to ‘modernize’ San Francisco as the financial center of an expanding met-ropolitan area. The queer bar culture responded to the cracking down, bar raids,street sweeps, and liquor suspensions, through collective organizing, creating politicalnetworks and local publications to call for equal treatment under the law. Despite thedestruction of the queer waterfront sites and their replacement with office towersand freeway ramps, the displaced queer community managed to continue organizingand resisting within other designated contained zones in the city, such as theTenderloin, where their presence was allowed and tolerated but still tightly controlled.
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Book by Damon Scott
Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape."
University of Texas Press
Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Damon Scott
Reports by Damon Scott
Prepared by: Damon Scott for the Friends of 1800
Presented to and Approved by the San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Board, 2004
For more information, see: http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=3673
Theses by Damon Scott
Papers by Damon Scott
Book Reviews by Damon Scott
Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape."
University of Texas Press
Prepared by: Damon Scott for the Friends of 1800
Presented to and Approved by the San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Board, 2004
For more information, see: http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=3673