Michael Nolan, the ‘mayor of Elsie Street,’ dies at 81

Michael Nolan was a history-keeper, a man who hunted down old sepia-toned photographs of his ancestors and knew the names of all the prior inhabitants of his Elsie Street home, going back to 1900; he listed them on a plaque affixed to his front fence, ending with his own name.

He was a neighborhood organizer, involved in pushing dozens of civic projects in San Francisco, from public-housing rehabilitation to the creation of the Esmeralda Mini-Park on Bernal Hill. More recently, he was the driving force behind the famed (on Bernal at least) Elsie Street block party, recognized by the city as an “Extraordinary Neighborhood Block Party” in 2018. 

Nolan was a dancer of Cuban salsa — he took trips to the island to practice — at any number of spots in the Mission, like the old Cha Cha Cha and Revolution Cafe. He was a participant in the Carnaval parade itself, for some years.

To Marco Senghor, the owner of popular Senegalese dance spot Bissap Baobab, Nolan was a “second dad in America,” one who helped the eatery survive in a city that devours its small businesses — and who enjoyed the dance and the food and the Francophone culture in Baobab.

“I felt like sometimes Michael was a Black man with a white face,” Senghor chuckled. “That’s what I used to tell him. Everybody loved Michael.”

He was, but no longer is, those things and more: Michael David Nolan, dubbed the “mayor of Elsie Street” and “captain of the Elsie Street irregulars” by his neighbors, voted “All-Around Boy” by his 8th grade classmates at Public School 99 in Brooklyn, New York, and known simply as “Mikey” to family and friends, died Saturday evening. He was 81.

A childhood of rallies and marches

Nolan was born in Brooklyn on June 21, 1941, to Harold Francis Aloysius Nolan, an Irish Catholic from the borough, and Lena Zelda Porgamon, a Polish Jewish immigrant. He was one of three children, including his brother James Joseph Nolan and his sister Eileen “Ikie” Nolan Kressel.

Nolan attended P.S. 99 as a youngster, the alma mater of Woody Allen and Tony Sirico, AKA Peter Paul “Paulie Walnuts” Gutieri of “The Sopranos.” Nolan wrote in his blog that Mia Farrow’s character in “Zelig” was named after his principal, and that the Sirico brothers, Tony and Paul, preyed on Jewish kids like him on their way to school.

He grew up a leftist, attending rallies and protests as a teengar, and once mobilized “two busloads” of students to attend a march pushing school integration in the late 1950s. “I began a life of demonstrating before I was in high school. I paraded for peace down Broadway alongside Pete Seeger on banjo,” he wrote later.

At Columbia University, he wrote a two-and-a-half pound thesis paper on “A History of Negro Protest” and, months later, joined that very history, bringing students to Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington and witnessing the “I Have a Dream” speech in person. Then, as later in life, he showed an interest in taking time to pause and record.

“Do you think that King was conscious that his demands required basic social changes?” Nolan asked Bayard Rustin, the studied proponent of nonviolence and key adviser to King, in an interview four months after the march.

“I do not!” Rustin answered. “I think he realizes it more now. You see, from the Negro point of view, this is all a struggle for dignity.”

Genealogy, history, politics

For the past 26 years, Nolan styled himself a “chief genealogist,” offering to unearth the ancestors of his friends and neighbors. 

“It’s thanks to him, I was able to find out the exact date that my dad’s family crossed the border from Mexico to the United States, through what means, I don’t know,” said Joshua Arce, the city’s head of workforce development and Nolan’s neighbor, and friend, for many years. 

Browsing books at Medicine for Nightmares the weekend of his death, Arce texted Nolan a black-and-white photo he stumbled upon in “Images in America: San Francisco’s Bernal Heights” showing Nolan at the celebration of the Esmeralda Mini-Park in Bernal Heights. 

When Nolan moved to San Francisco, in 1970 — after time in Chile with the Peace Corps, six years in anti-nuclear weapon activism, and stints in news — he took up the focus that would largely define him for the rest of his life: Local organizing. 

“It was a difficult time,” said Buck Bagot, an organizer in the same vein as Nolan and the man standing in front of him in the photo. The strength of the peace movement “cracked and eroded” throughout the ’70s, Bagot said; urban renewal was in full swing, the police were terrorizing minorities, and Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by the end of the decade. “The hopes that were raised gave us a false sense of being able to do anything.”

Still, there were victories, and ones larger than a mini-park: Bagot recalled Nolan and others pushing for the rehabilitation of hundreds of public housing units in places like Alemany, and working with the Latinx community to reduce police violence. In 1977, Nolan ran for District 9 supervisor, placing third in a race of 13.

In 1974, Nolan created a short film interviewing Patricia Rodriguez of Las Mujeres Muralistas, which was, at the time, painting a mural on the side of Paco’s Tacos, to attract business in the taqueria’s struggle with McDonald’s. Now, the McDonald’s at 24th and Mission streets survives; Paco’s Taco’s is no more.

“The 1970s [were] much more activist, more working class, economically, and more Latino than it is today,” Nolan said in 2014, remembering that time. “There was a lot of community organizing going on, and arts and culture fit into that very nicely.”

“I always felt that he had a real strong connection and identified with the plight of the immigrant Latino,” said Jim Salinas, Sr., a lifelong Mission denizen and former executive officer with Carpenters Union Local 22. “If anyone’s an unofficial Latino, it’s Michael.” 

And then there was Elsie Street.

The first annual block party was in 2007; it has, since then, involved bouncy castles and bake-offs and kids’ face-painting. Perhaps more critically, it has also made the 200 block of Elsie Street tight-knit and organized: They have their supervisor’s ear, they host police chiefs and talk about crime, they organize fundraisers for local campaigns. Nolan, neighbors agreed, was instrumental in this.

“He should have been a union organizer,” said Morton Gensburg, 90, his across-the-street neighbor.

“He was very much just the person on the street that everyone loved and trusted and looked to for advice,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen, also a neighbor. “He was always the main organizer and the center of the party.”

‘The Mission District has been my sandbox‘

“For the longest time, even though I’ve lived on Bernal, the Mission District has been my sandbox,” Nolan said in a 2019 video spotlight made by Mission Local. “I go down there to play, and organize, and instigate, parade, make music, dance, make trouble, I dunno — and meet friends.”

“He knew how to handle the ladies,” laughed Roberto Hernandez, the longtime head of Carnaval, who met Nolan as a child. “They’d say, ‘It’s like dancing with my dad or grandpa.’”

When Bissap Baobab shuttered its doors on 19th Street to move around the corner, Nolan was there at its farewell, “still on the dance floor,” per Senghor.

“Michael, he was older than all of us, but he was still on the dance floor, from the beginning to the end,” he said. “We were closing the space and he was there. He always had a young spirit. He loved to celebrate.”

“My fondest memories of him are at Cha Cha Cha,” said Supervisor Myrna Melgar, a close friend, who plans to hold an in-memoriam session for Nolan at next week’s Board of Supervisors meeting. “Mikey was everywhere.”

Nolan was a frequent presence at the Mission Local offices, too, where he would gossip with the newsroom and feed reporters stories; this reporter knew him then, and Nolan was keen to take journalists under his wing.

It was a role he played for several others in his life.

“You remember what an 8th grader meant to you in 6th grade? That’s what Michael was,” said Bagot. “He was always an 8th grader to my 6th grader. He was everyone’s 8th grader.”

“A gentleman and a scholar and a humorist,” recalled Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who met Nolan at the Trust for Public Land in the mid-’80s. “He took a shine to a young environmental project manager circa 1985. He was a dear then.”

The pandemic was, by all accounts, difficult for Nolan, a man wont to drop in unexpectedly on friends and businesses in the Mission. Multiple loved ones noted that he took a turn downwards after Covid-19.

“His love of people, his love of having fun together and being together in person — the pandemic was particularly unfair to him,” said Arce. “The time he spent reconnecting with all of us, I just felt enriched to experience that magical energy.”

Nolan’s health declined in the past year, and he was hospitalized for brief stints. He chose to enter hospice at home in the last months of his life and died, peacefully, in his sleep.

He is preceded in death by his brother, who passed away on March 2 this year, and survived by his sister and two adult children, Mac and Rosy.