Additional information
by Robert Leland Speer (Author)
Recommended by the preeminent Californian Historian Kevin Starr, this book explores in depth the most interesting and controversial area of San Francisco--the Western Addition. Although now much reduced into a smaller district from the original nineteenth-century boundaries which previously included the districts of the Marina, Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights, Cow Hollow, Anza Vista, Hayes Valley, Lower Pacific Heights, Alamo Square, and the North Panhandle; the district continues in the twentieth-first century to be a fascinating element of changing urban development, as also examined on other cities in the U.S.; such as Kansas City, Oakland, etc. As a personal autobiography, the book adds extensive information from public memberships, social intercourse, neighborhood meetings, real estate business transactions, commission-appointed memberships, and political involvements. The San Francisco Redevelopment and Housing Agencies are revealed in vivid detail. This western development of the city was a vortex of immigrants from the Eastern U.S., Western Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. Many of these were members of a great variety of religious backgrounds such as Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, etc. This "melting pot" is analyzed in great detail. Also the importance of the political reforms by the LGBT community is explored. The utopia of San Francisco has rapidly changed with the biotech and high-tech immigrants, who work in Silicon Valley but prefer to live in the Western Addition. This book promises an amazing and wild journey for the reader.
Author Biography
The author was born in Kansas City, Kansas on January 1, 1943. Education at the University of Kansas includes a B.A in Zoology, three years of medical school, and a M.A. in Art History. He presently owns his own real estate firm in San Francisco, His corporation was established in 1976 and has had as many as five associates. The author has been intensively involved in the social fabric, politics, commerce, cultural institutions, and neighborhood organizations in San Francisco. Although he started writing forty years ago, he spend these years mostly practicing real estate, observing, reading, traveling, and volunteering to amass the great amount of information offered in this book. This book was precipitated by the murder of Oscar Grant III in the Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit Station on January 1, 2009. His paternal grandmother had been a tenant in a building that I owned with partners in the Western Addition. My accumulated stories needed now to be told in writing, with a certain urgency!
