Remembering the AIDS Quilt

Front matter

Remembering the

AIDS Quilt

Morris Ill, Charles Ef Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011 ,»https://doi,org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf offUnknown Institution

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS +: + te ttt tt ee ee vii PROLOGUE | Cleve Jones eea a aa a a e a aa a a a xl The Mourning After | Charles E. Morris II --- +++ ++++++++++> xxxvii

Part I. Emergence

The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration | Carole Blair and Neil Michel..--.+---- 3

The Politics of Loss and Its Remains in Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt | Gust A. Yeps. +++ 00sec eee cence eee 43

Morris IlI, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Part 2. Movement

Q.U.1.L.T.: A Patchwork of Reflections | Kevin Michael DeLuca,

Christine Harold, and Kenneth Rufo- > ->55 +0000 00 eee eee ee

Collage/Montage as Critical Practice, Or How to “Quilt’/Read Postmodern Text(ile)s | Brian L. Ott, Eric Aoki, and Greg Dic kinson ule aah ivede fe BY Se SP ie VR coe eh he GER AR Be ae Se ae a eR. a, a, a,

A Stitch in Time: Public Emotionality and the Repertoire of

Citizenship | Jeffrey A. Bennett TETERE ey ae Savas Uae ae 4, a REO aS at are

From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again: Ideologies of Mobility in the AIDS Quilt’s Search for a Homeland |

Daniel C. Brouwer Gi lau Bi ght wets Kale aaa a aE Sele, Gece Se ar we. a ahah ai

PART 3. TRANSFORMATION Rhetorics of Loss and Living: Adding New Panels to the AIDS

Quilt as an Act of Eulogy | Bryant Keith Alexander. -...+++++++-

Repeated Remembrance: Commemorating the AIDS Quilt and

Resuscitating the Mourned Subject | Erin J. Rand. ..+-++-++++-

How to Have History in an Epidemic | Kyra Pearson --+++++++ ++

Experiencing the Quilt | Charles E. Morris IHI -- +. ++ +++ ++++++5

CONTRIBUTORS ee le a ee ee Oa a an Se PS ee a ee ee

Morris III, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Acknowledgments his project began here in the South End over Sunday morning cof-

fee in November 2005, although the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt

has long had a recurrent role in my personal and professional life, from my coming out in 1992 through dozens of seminar conversations in Granville, Nashville, and Boston. It has been a privilege and an honor to edit first the special issue in Rhetoric and Public Affairs and then this volume, both of which in some small way I hope will extend engagement with and deepen commitment to those brilliantly embodied—and those strikingly not embodied—in the Quilt, and all those past, present, and future transformed by, lost to, and struggling against AIDS.

That this project came to fruition has everything to do with Martin Medhurst, editor of Rhetoric and Public Affairs and the series bearing the same name at Michigan State University Press, and to the talented and dedicated contributors of the essays herein. Marty answered my email and endorsed my pitch in ninety minutes flat, and his support throughout

Morris Ill, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution viii Acknowledgments has been enthusiastic and meaningful. As those who know us both can confirm, it would be an understatement to say that Marty and I see and move through the world in different ways. But over more than a decade we have more than discovered common ground, and Marty has taught me much about the meaning of goodwill and generosity of spirit. My friends and colleagues featured in these pages enriched this project—intellectually, emotionally, and politically—with their manifold presence. As you will see, their work graces the Quilt by its moving commemoration and insightful critique.

Many thanks to the staff at Michigan State University Press, especially Kristine Blakeslee and Annette Tanner, whose patience and skill have been much appreciated during the production phase of this project. Martha Bates, in particular, has been a friend to this book, and a delightful fellow traveler. Thanks as well to the staff of the NAMES Project for their assistance and support.

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and helpful feedback. I am grateful, too, for experiencing years of the transformative engagement of Quilt panels and scholarship, Cleve Jones’s memoir, and a number of documentaries with so many of my students. I will never forget reading names aloud with them on the campus lawn at Vanderbilt, or the tears in the eyes of the four straight boys who sat with me in Gasson Hall at Boston College watching Common Threads—and the many stories of witness that emerged from all those experiences. | strongly believe that the Quilt has induced both mourning and activism among the undergraduates I have taught.

I would never complete any project were it not for the many wonderful people in my world who generously offer ongoing intellectual stimulation and cocktail dish, political comradeship and encouragement, love and friendship, and who abide my ever-increasing idiosyncrasies. Among so many, especially beloved are Rob Asen, Dan Brouwer, Mary Kate Morris, Chuck Morris, Ginny Morris, Jackie Childress, David Morris, Shea Doyle, Tom Nakayama, Andrew Hansen, Jason Black, Dale Herbeck, and Pam Lannutti, who during this book’s creation and beyond have constituted my lodestar and laughter, my inspiration and indulgence, my prodding and patience. During the course of this project I lost two from that group who are dearest to me, Virginia Blanck Moore and Alex Hivoltze-Jimenez.

Morris Ill, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Acknowledgments ix

Marvelous muses were they; my work will always bear their inscription. So much, it turns out—and as this book attests—can be measured and forged by profound loss.

Finally, I offer my greatest thanks, accompanied by my deepest love, to Scott Rose, my Gatto, who is my partner, my mainstay, my sine qua non. After more than seventeen years, our crazy quilt of a life together continues to amaze and comfort us, a very queer collaboration. I dedicate my labor in this book to my beautiful, darling boy, Augustine, our feline familiar who left us against his and our wills in September 2009. Augustine is now waiting for us with our Ophelia at the limen, apparently a gay bar called the “Rainbow Bridge.”

Morris III, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution we | eee tem eer ie 4 oe

Morris III, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Prologue

A Vision of the Quilt

Cleve Jones

A fter eight months on Maui I was back in the Castro. I had no job,

no money, and was sleeping on a friend’s couch (Jim Foster had

taken me in). But I had a plan. I’d written a speech that I hoped would reignite the will to fight. I would give my speech at the candlelight march commemorating the day Harvey Milk and George Moscone had been shot. After that, who knows? I never really worried about career and fortune in those days. I was surviving, and that seemed quite a lot.

It's hard to communicate how awful it was in the fall of 1985. I'd left town out of my own fear and frustration. And somehow that sabbatical had been recuperative. Physically I felt fine. The shingles had left with only lingering tingles. And I’d gotten myself out of the coke and drinking routine, thanks in part to Randy Shilts, an old friend from Haight-Ashbury days. He, alone among my friends, had encouraged me to go to an AA meeting. It was hard as hell to attend those first meetings.

xi

Morris Ill, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt.

E-book,

, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078.

Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution xii Cleve Jones

Then, slowly, I broke the pattern and eventually learned to sleep without numbing myself with drink.

But there was something different in the San Francisco I returned to. Everyone seemed exhausted, almost fatalistic about AIDS. I understood that, certainly; but I also detected signs of hope within the despair. For one, the media had caught on to what was happening. Randy, who'd been a staff writer for the Advocate, was hired full time by the Chronicle to write weekly AIDS columns, and he was extremely dogged in his attempts to puncture all the myths. There was a piece on the fallacy of AIDS being transmitted by mosquito bites, by tainted water, by waiters handling dinner plates. He went into AIDS wards and interviewed the nursing staff and doctors, and the truth was coming out.

Other newspapers followed his lead, and the public began to learn, if not always to accept, that this disease was not divine retribution. And other “points of light” flared up. Bobbi Campbell and his lover sat smiling on the cover of Newsweek in an article on the new disease—appearing shockingly alive and productive. There were respected physicians speaking out and against the panic. These were all important achievements, but still it was just so much whistling in the dark. We desperately needed an immediate fix, and it wasn’t even on the horizon.

Seven years before, on the night of Harvey Milk’s murder, I swore to myself that he would not be forgotten and began organizing a candlelight march to mark the day of his and Mayor Moscone’s deaths. It had become a ritual, with thousands attending every year. A few days prior to the 1985 march, my friend Joseph Durant and I were walking the Castro handing out leaflets reminding people of the candlelight memorial. We stopped to get a slice at Marcello’s Pizza, and I picked up a Chronicle. The front-page headline was chilling: “1,000 San Franciscans Dead of AIDS.” Td known most of them from my work with the KS Foundation. Virtually every single one of them had lived within a ten-block radius of where we were standing at Castro and Market. When I walked up Eighteenth Street from Church to Eureka, I knew the ugly stories behind so many windows. Gregory died behind those blue curtains. Jimmy was diagnosed up that staircase, in that office behind the venetian blinds. There was the house Alex got kicked out of when the landlord found an empty bottle of AZT in his trash can: “I’m sorry, we just can’t take any chances.” I wasn't

Morris Ill, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Prologue xiii losing just friends, but also all the familiar faces of the neighborhood— the bus drivers, clerks, and mailmen, all the people we know in casual yet familiar ways. The entire Castro was populated by ghosts.

And yet, as I looked around the Castro, with its charming hodgepodge of candy-colored Victorians, there were guys walking hand in hand, girls kissing each other hello, being successfully, freely, openly who they were. So much had been accomplished since the closeted days when the community met furtively in a back-alley culture. The Castro was a city within the city, an oasis and harbor for thousands who lived there and millions of gay men and lesbian women around the world for whom it symbolized freedom. And now, in what should have been its prime, it was withering.

Angrily, I turned to Joseph: “I wish we had a bulldozer, and if we could just level these buildings, raze Castro . . . If this was just a graveyard with a thousand corpses lying in the sun, then people would look at it and they would understand, and if they were human beings they'd have to respond.” And Joseph, always the acid realist, told me I was the last optimist left standing: “Nobody cares, Cleve. This thing doesn’t touch them at all.”

November 27, 1985, the night of the memorial march, was cold and gray. As we waited for people to gather, Joseph and I handed out stacks of poster board and Magic Markers, and through the bullhorn I asked everyone to write down the name of a friend who'd been killed by AIDS. People were a little reluctant at first, but by the time the march began we had a few hundred placards. Most of the marchers just wrote first names, Tom or Bill or George; some of the signs said “My brother” or “My lover,” and a few had the complete name—first, middle, and last—in bold block letters.

That Thanksgiving night we marched as we had for six years down Market Street to city hall, a sea of candles lighting up the night. One of the marchers asked me who else would be speaking this year, and I said, “No one else. Just me. People are tired of long programs anyway.” I was an angry, arrogant son of a bitch. The candles we'd been carrying were stumps by the time we'd gathered at Harvey Milk Memorial Plaza at city hall.

“We are here tonight to commemorate the deaths of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, victims of an assassin’s bullets seven years ago this very day.” I talked of Harvey and how even back then he was not really our first martyr, that we’d lost many people to murder

Morris III, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution xiv Cleve Jones and suicide and alcohol and AIDS. “Yes, Harvey was our first collective martyr, but now we have many more martyrs and now our numbers are diminished and many of us have been condemned to an early and painful death. But we are the lesbian women and gay men of San Francisco, and although we are again surrounded by uncertainty and despair, we are survivors, and we shall survive again, and the dream that was shared by Harvey Milk and George Moscone will go forward.”

Then we moved down Market to the old federal building. At that time it housed the offices of Health and Human Services—not such an effective rallying point as city hall, but perfect for our next demonstration, one that turned out to have more impact than I ever imagined. Earlier in the day, Bill Paul, a professor at San Francisco State University, and I had hidden extension ladders and rolls of tape in the shrubbery around the building’s base. As the federal building came into view, I ended the chanting (“Stop AIDS now! Stop AIDS now!”) and explained through the bullhorn that we were going to plaster the facade with the posters inscribed with our dead. And that’s what happened. The crowd surged forward, the ladders were set in place, and we crawled up three stories, covering the entire wall with a poster-board memorial.

It was a strange image. Just this uneven patchwork of white squares, each with handwritten names, some in script and some in block letters, all individual. We stared and read the names, recognizing too many. Staring upward, people remarked: “I went to school with him” . . . “I didn’t know he was dead” . . . “I used to dance with him every Sunday at the I-Beam” . . . “We're from the same hometown” . . . “Is that our Bob?”

There was a deep yearning not only to find a way to grieve individually and together but also to find a voice that could be heard beyond our community, beyond our town. Standing in the drizzle, watching as the posters absorbed the rain and fluttered down to the pavement, I said to myself, It looks like a quilt. As I said the word quilt, I was flooded with memories of home and family and the warmth of a quilt when it was cold on a winter night.

And as I scanned the patchwork, I saw it—as if a Technicolor slide had fallen into place. Where before there had been a flaking gray wall, now there was a vivid picture, and I could see quite clearly the National

Morris Ill, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Prologue xv

Mall, and the dome of Congress, and a quilt spread out before it—a vision of incredible clarity.

I was gripped by the same terror and excitement that I'd felt standing before other large works commemorating other large issues. Not long ago I'd seen Christo’s running fence in Sonoma County. It was a beautiful and moving sight, and I was struck by the grandeur of those vast expanses of shimmering opalescent fabric zigzagging up and down the golden hills. How it billowed in the breeze with the light playing off it, like a string of azure tall ships sailing on a golden sea. And there was the memory of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. This was a long table, maybe one hundred feet in length, with each place setting designed by a different artist. Both Christo and Judy Chicago had taken commonplace items, sheets drying on a line in his case, plates and utensils in hers, and by enlarging them had made the homely a dramatic, powerfully moving statement. It seemed an apt synthesis: individual quilts, collected together, could have the same immense impact.

When I told my friends what I'd seen, they were silent at first, and as I tried to explain it, they were dubious: “Cleve, don’t you realize the logistics of doing something like that? Think of the difficulty of organizing thousands of queers!” But I knew there were plenty of angry queens with sewing machines. I wouldn't be working alone, I told my friends. Everyone understands the idea of a quilt. “But it’s gruesome,” they said.

That stopped me. Was a memorial morbid? Perhaps it was. And yet there is also a healing element to memorials. I thought of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. I did not expect to be moved by it. I was influenced by the Quakers, who are suspicious of war memorials, which they believe tend to glorify war rather than speak to the horror of it. But I was overwhelmed by the simplicity of it, of that black mirrorlike wall and the power it had to draw people from all across America to find a beloved’s name and touch it and see their face reflected in the polished marble and leave mementos.

So I thought about all these things and also about how quilting is viewed as a particularly American folk art. There was the quilting bee with its picture of generations working together, and the idea that quilts recapture history in bits of worn clothing, curtains, jackets—protective

Morris Ill, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution xvi Cleve Jones cloth. That it was women who did the sewing was an important element. At the time, HIV was seen as the product of aggressive gay male sexuality, and it seemed that the homey image and familial associations of a warm quilt would counter that.

The idea made so much sense on so many different levels. It was clear to me that the only way we could beat this was by acting together as a nation. Though gays and lesbians were winning political recognition in urban centers, without legitimate ties to the larger culture we'd always be marginalized. If we could somehow bridge that gap of age-old prejudice, there was hope that we could beat the disease by using a quilt as a symbol of solidarity, of family and community; there was hope that we could make a movement that would welcome people—men and women, gay or straight, of every age, race, faith, and background.

To this day, critics ignore one of the most powerful aspects of the Quilt. Any Quilt display, no matter how small or large, is filled with evidence of love—the love between gay men and the love we share with our lesbian sisters, as well as love of family, father for son, mother for son, among siblings. Alongside this love, the individual quilts are filled with stories of homophobia and how we have triumphed over it. There’s deep and abiding pain in letters attached to the quilts from parents bemoaning the fact that they didn’t accept their dead son. And there's implacable anger in the blood-splashed quilts blaming President Reagan for ignoring the killing plague. All these messages are part of a memorial that knows no boundaries. We go to elementary schools, high schools, the Bible Belt of the Deep South, rural America, Catholic churches, synagogues, and wherever we unfold this fabric we tell the story of people who've died of AIDS.

That night, standing with those few men and women in the damp and dark, I saw a way out for all of us, a method of surmounting our fears and coming together in a collective memorial of our experience: all the sadness, rage, and anger; all the hope, all the dreams, the ambitions, the tragedy.

Eleven years later, this picture in my mind’s eye became reality. But that night in November 1985 it was just an idea, and on the 8 Market bus up to the Castro, my friends Joseph Durant, Gilbert Baker, and Joseph Canalli were unimpressed. Reagan will never let you do it, they said. Straight families won't join any cause with a bunch of San Francisco

Morris III, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Prologue xvii queers. It was late, they were tired. An AIDS quilt was a sweet idea, but it was morbid, corny, impossibly complicated. Give it up. But I was on fire with the vision. The idea made so much sense, in so many ways—the irony and truth of it. I couldn't get it out of my head.

The First Displays: D.C. and S.F., 1987

When people ask me today when I knew the Quilt would catch on, I say always. From that first night at the federal building I just knew it would work—that people would be touched and respond. But for all my sureness, it was maddening trying to explain the idea, because I didn’t have anything to show. When I told friends I wanted to take ten thousand quilts and lay them out on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on October 11 for the National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights, they really thought I'd lost it.

Finally, after a year and a half of thinking and scribbling on napkins, Joseph Durant and I sat down and made a list of forty men we felt we knew well enough to make quilts for, and in February began cranking them out, each of them three feet by six feet. The panels were that size because of the vision of bulldozing the Castro and leaving only corpses lying in the sun. I wanted to show the space that would be taken up by each of those bodies, about the dimensions of a grave. I told Joseph that we'd sew them into twelve-by-twelve-foot squares, large enough to be efficient and small enough that people could reach out and touch the fabric as they walked around them. Joining them together that way also allowed flexibility, so that some of the panels could be made horizontally and some vertically, like the parquet pattern on the floor of my grandfather's house.

All this was fine with Joseph until he started talking about how we were going to have to build scaffolding to hold it up. I said, no, the power of it comes from laying it flat on the ground. Joseph was adamant that it should be up in the air like a flag, but I knew that that would totally alter the experience. We use both methods of display today, and you can see the difference. If you view the Quilt hanging upright, you have a very different experience from what you have when it’s flat on the ground. You're much less conscious of your surroundings when you're looking down and

Morris Ill, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution xviii Cleve Jones more likely to pause and perhaps kneel and touch it. The argument spiraled out of control, and, unfortunately, Joseph decided he couldn’t work with me any longer.

I knew then, as I've always known, that I couldn't do it alone, and I asked Gilbert Baker, who I knew was a good seamstress, to become technical director. But Gilbert, who’d created the rainbow flag, wanted to be called artistic director. And then Ron Cordova came on board also demanding that title. I told them both that there was to be no artistic director. The only artistic director would be the people who made these things. All we do is gather them, uncensored, unedited, and sew them together. Our only job is to display them. Fortunately, Ron decided to put up with me in the end, agreeing to become technical director, and he worked like a dog getting things ready for October.

With the Quilt itself begun, we needed someone with management experience, able to oversee the resources and the money I expected to start coming in. I was living at the time with Atticus Tysen, a sweet young man I'd met at Quaker meeting. He told me about Michael Smith, a fellow Stanford MBA who was looking for work. I couldn't offer a salary, but I had something better, a cause. Mike was the first person I convinced to give me his life. We were a terrible mismatch, and for three years we treated each other with incredible cruelty. But we worked together starting up the Quilt, and it wouldn't have happened without him.

The key to getting any idea off the ground is reaching people, letting them know and see what it is you're pushing, and so sometime in May we called a public meeting. We plastered the Castro with flyers and rented the Women’s Building for a couple of hours for our meeting, but as the time drew near, I was stricken with anxiety and became convinced that no one would show up. I was wrong. Two people came: Cindi “Gert” McMullin and Jack Caster. They'd both made quilts much more sophisticated than Joseph’s and mine. Gert’s was for AIDS activist Roger Lyon: an intricate design containing eighteen notes written to Roger from a class of fifth graders he’d spoken to. The notes were really wonderful, and captured the fierce loyalty and love these kids felt for Roger. They said such wonderfully innocent things, like, “I hope you get out of this tuff spot” and “If you don’t get well you owe me 5 dollars.” She'd eventually make two more for him.

Morris Ill, Charles E. Remembering the AIDS Quilt. E-book, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.14321/9781611860078. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Prologue xix

The quilt Jack made for his lovers Wade and Joe has always been one of my favorites. It’s a double panel connected across the top with a ribbon spelling out a line of mystic gibberish. Just before he died, deep in dementia, Wade lifted his head off the pillow and with this joyful look said, “Tve got it, the median above to be three!” Jack had no idea what this message meant, but I think it reflected the confusion we all faced—nothing made sense. I love quilts inscribed with something nonsensical, code words and pet names or an evocative sentence like Remember that night in August. . . . You're allowed a glimpse of the intimate communication that existed between these people. That's what matters most about the Quilt, that it allows us to lose our cynicism in connection with someone we love and to make private declarations public.

Although Gert and Jack were treasures and quickly became an integral part of our team, the meeting could be looked on only as a failure. The idea was catching on too slowly; we'd never get to D.C. if the Quilt remained an underground effort largely confined to the gay community in San Francisco. In spite of our fears, not one of us gave in to hopelessness. We all had so much riding on it, and so all of us—Gert, Jack, and Mike, the nucleus of the early days—tried to analyze exactly what would make it work. The one thing we'd always had trouble with was explaining the idea in conversation. People needed a visual representation to grasp the idea, something they could see and touch.

Getting the Quilt out there, in front of as many people as possible, became our goal that late spring of 1987. We expected to get a good deal of publicity at the upcoming gay and lesbian pride festival. There'd be upward of 250,000 people attending the event, and we would be able to talk with hundreds of them as they stopped by our booth. Also, I’d been invited to speak at the opening ceremonies and would talk about the Quilt and invite all 250,000 to join us, both in making a quilt and in making the presentation in D.C.

Jack came up with a great idea. I remember him saying, “Cleve, you know Mayor Feinstein. Why don’t you get her to hang the Quilt in front of city hall during the week of gay pride?” We were all immediately excited. City hall sits on one of the busiest streets in the city, so no one could miss seeing those panels hanging on the ornate neoclassical facade. It would be a coup. I’d known Mayor Feinstein casually when I worked for Harvey