People We Meet: The mayor of Caselli Avenue

Torr Melling, 59, was facing a home renovation quandary. 

He had just received four pallets of building materials, dropped off by a Home Depot employee with a mounted forklift, and now he needed to move it all off the street and into his garage. 

He fired off a message in his neighborhood group chat.

Ten minutes later, four people showed up, ready to lend a hand. Within an hour, the stacks of drywall and insulation were in his garage.

“The fact that people showed up was amazing,” Melling said, still sounding like he couldn’t believe that, in a city of more than 800,000 people, neighbors would drop what they were doing to help each other out. 

The WhatsApp group — 170 strong, and called the 19th Caselli Security Group — started as a modest community watch in a stretch of the Castro that borders Corona Heights. It was founded by two neighbors before Melling moved to the area in 2008. For a while, it was just a handful of people who would check in about a missing package or a strange car. Eventually, it fizzled.

In 2019, Melling revived the chat, hoping to build community among neighbors. A first big meet-up was set for early 2020. Then the pandemic hit. 

A year into lockdown, Melling and a handful of neighbors in the chat began gathering outside for Friday night happy hours: Distanced, masked, but together. His cats, Archie, Bossi, and Luna, could only offer so much company.

Now, the group chat includes referrals for landscapers and babysitters, alerts about coyotes and break-ins, and a hand-me-down market for kids’ clothes. But the biggest topic of conversation, by far, is the annual block party.

Melling has run point on the block party for the past two years, designing flyers and coordinating the food and entertainment, though he’s quick to reiterate that he is not “the head” of anything. 

The first block party, held near Yukon Street, drew roughly 200 people and a fire truck from Station 24. Melling piped music from his own speakers, and neighborhood bands played. 

Last year’s event moved to the short, narrow, wind-sheltered Danvers Street; lessons were learned after the first year got blown out by gusts on Yukon. This year’s gathering is set for Oct. 11, this time on 19th Street.

Melling’s husband, Daniel Candelario, teasingly calls him the “Mayor of Caselli.” Melling isn’t so sure. “There’s a fine line between knowing people and being friendly, and knowing a bit about people’s lives,” he said, laughing. He’d rather be called Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor from the sitcom “Bewitched.”

Melling covered a lot of ground before landing on this particular quiet, foggy block in the Castro. He grew up in Owosso, Michigan, a small town about two hours northwest of Detroit. It was the kind of place where he knew all his neighbors although he said he never felt connected to the people there because of all the “bigotry and homophobia.” 

He came out at 17; “yanked out of the closet,” in his words, by his sisters who told their friends he was gay. In small-town Michigan in the 1980s, that wasn’t a gentle reveal. “It was very taboo, very ugly,” he said.

He kept his sexual orientation quiet while preparing to join the Air Force. Partly for his love of airplanes; partly, he admits now, “because I wanted to be straight, and we all know how that works out.” 

The Air Force stationed him in Gila Bend, Arizona, a town he remembered mostly for how badly he wanted to leave, spending every free weekend “driving to and from Phoenix to have a life.”

After the military, he landed in Los Angeles and then San Diego, where he found community on two wheels: A network of gay motorcyclists who rode across the state, and once organized a trip called the Queer Invasion of Death Valley to spend time with a fellow rider who was dying of AIDS.

But it wasn’t until Caselli Avenue that Melling put down the roots he had pulled up from Owasso. There, on a quiet, ordinary San Francisco street, just blocks from the rainbow crosswalks of the Castro, he built a bewitching connection with his neighbors, enough for it to feel like home.