A flock of 75 runners scampered through San Francisco’s Tenderloin on Thursday night, spilling into bus lanes and darting between changing traffic lights for what was, by anyone’s recollection, the neighborhood’s first-ever 5K running event.
Justin Bautista, an avid runner who hosted the group run through his clothing shop, Tilted Brim, on Larkin Street, said a big focus was to bring attention to the Tenderloin and urban running, and to bring running to the broader community.
“The TL is just so associated with bad headlines, and most of them are true,” Bautista said. (Just this week, a young man was reportedly shot in the head and thrown from a car.) “We organized the TL 5K to bring attention to an overlooked part of the neighborhood, which is the positive cultural energy.”
The run was Tilted Brim’s contribution to the First Thursday art walk, a popular event when residents from in and outside the neighborhood roam between local businesses and art galleries, sipping wine and cheap beer.
Though Bautista capped the run at 60 participants, he allowed more than a dozen walk-ins who heard about it to join in.
When I arrived an hour early, a crowd was doing stretches on the astroturf outside his store at 706 Larkin St.. That’s when I knew Bautista’s hope for a “fun run” rather than a true race was unlikely. Nearby, a man in a long leather coat sipped a can of Pacifica and blasted old school R&B out of a speaker.
“I’m just passing through,” he said, lifting his hands, decked in oversized rings, to the beat of the music. He was uninterested but unbothered by the sporty crowd growing next to him.
This coexistence of worlds continued as we hit the streets. Some runners flew off at a seven-minute-mile pace, others started a slow jog. A few walked.
And so, instead of a horde descending onto a neighborhood, a steady stream of runners simply merged into the flow of twilight traffic, sidling up past office workers and badge-wearing conference attendees, fancy-dressed hotel guests and befuddled tourists, and a queue of diners at a popular ramen spot.
Along the way, people cheered. On Grove Street near Market Street, a woman in a bright pink hoodie stopped in her tracks to watch: “Yes! Yes! I don’t know what you’re doing, but yay!”
Street activations have become a popular tactic for revitalizing the Tenderloin, from official events to neighborhood groups “taking back” certain blocks. The Tenderloin Merchants Association helped sponsor Thursday’s event, and its director, Rene Colorado, said he personally donated $2,000.
Colorado hosts events on the second Saturdays of the month: Coming up is the 50th anniversary of Little Saigon; last month, it was the Love Fest block party.
Colorado said that street activations generate excitement and have a positive effect on communities, especially when done consistently. More eyes on the Tenderloin, he believes, can have a bigger impact.
“They’re exposed to different parts of the city that they weren’t before, and they get to see that it’s a neighborhood in every sense of the word,” Colorado said of those who come in from outside the neighborhood.
“If we get people from outside of the Tenderloin advocating for [it], that most definitely has a tenfold impact than me, a resident … yelling at the top of our lungs for cleaner, safer streets forever,” he said.
For Chris, a 24-year-old living in the East Bay, it was the jersey that brought him out, with TENDERLOIN emblazoned across it.
In running culture, which these days involves buying “$300 everything,” Chris said, “usually the Tenderloin was not something I would see flaunted by a runner.”
For North Beach resident Molly Higgins, who has lived in the city for 10 years, it was the “excuse to work out and eat a banh mi.” All participants got one from Bo & Beurre, a relative newcomer restaurant on Little Saigon. That, and the excuse to come to the Tenderloin, which she usually only visits for nightlife.
“It just came up on my feed, and I thought, ‘that sounds cool and unique,’” said Higgins, who got into running to meet new people, and decided to try the same at the Tenderloin run.
Others were more connected to the neighborhood: Jacky Tijerino Gomez, who lived in the Tenderloin as a child and today works in a restaurant here, said she learned about the event through a trash pickup she participates in regularly.
The other day, she helped replace trees that had died, and noticed people had stuffed trash into them.
“We’re probably gonna clean some after,” she chuckled. (She and her friend had trash bags and gloves with them.)
Bautista estimated that about half the participants were his customers or clients, who live within a small radius of his store, and another third came through Unseen Run Club, the event’s other sponsor. The rest just seemed to show up.
It was a word-of-mouth thing, “not meant for mass consumption,” said Justin Williams, who founded Unseen Run Club. He hopes the concept can be repeated, with growing neighborhood involvement.
And that’s how it went: Multiple members of the Tenderloin Community Benefit District ran, as did District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who learned of the event upon returning from his wedding and honeymoon and ran with his chief of staff.
I learned about it from my colleague, Mission Local reporter Oscar Palma, who once worked with Bautista at Trader Joe’s.
The course circled the neighborhood, down Polk Street to Civic Center, down Market and up Powell Street, with a loop around Union Square, and back up Geary Boulevard onto Larkin Street, with an extra loop into lower Nob Hill. Volunteers on bicycles helped keep everyone on track.
And after the run, when a sweaty crowd sat on upturned milk crates and munched their banh mi, mixed in were people who hadn’t run at all. One had just attended a drag show, and Isabel Cuza had been walking to a nearby restaurant when she realized it was closed and Bautista invited her in.
“He told me they’re gonna have a party,” said Cuza, who wore shimmery eyeshadow and sat on stools with her friend, a Peruvian woman dressed in animal print and silver boots.
Cuza first came to the United States from Cuba in 1980, and has been in San Francisco for 19 years. She doesn’t have much family or friends in town, but the city and the Tenderloin have grown on her. Whether it’s a Vietnamese block party or the gay pride parade, when there’s an event, she shows up.
“I like [it], because of the relations with different people,” she said, sipping a plastic cup of white wine. She only wishes there were more.
Why would you have these people risk their lives to run through drug dealer territory? I live here, and it’s a bad idea.
Check your privilege.