San Francisco Chronicle | March 13, 2005
By Leslie Guttman
Around the Bay Area, I have noticed quite a bit of nonlocalized y’alling these days. What I mean by that is people who aren’t from the South saying things like: "Y’all ready to go?" "Y’all stay in touch, OK?" "Y’all put your hands together now!"
Salon | August 8, 2004
By Leslie Guttman
The rap competition was held last fall on the south side of the Iron Triangle, a poor, often violent neighborhood in Richmond, near San Francisco. The grass was brown and patchy. The stage was made up of four paint-stained metal folding tables. Three plywood steps covered with dirty carpet stood in front of it. Across the street was an abandoned lot turned refrigerator graveyard.
Salon | March 3, 2004
By Leslie Guttman
For environmentalists, few quests would seem to make as much sense as the dream of biodegradable Styrofoam. As Greg Glenn, a USDA scientist who has worked on the problem for years, says, "If you’re going to have products you only use once, why make them out of material that lasts forever?"
San Francisco Chronicle | August 26, 2003
By Leslie Guttman
Spoon was a lanky, 17-year-old gang-banger making $800 a day selling drugs at the former Kennedy Manor project in Richmond when he came to the Barbara Alexander Academy. He was full of anger, sullen as a thundercloud.
Julia was 15 when she arrived at the school door. An alcoholic and severely depressed, she was in danger of a life of seamless failure.
Over the next two years, both of them would transform their lives as dramatically as a landscape goes from drought to bloom.
San Francisco Chronicle | August 27, 2003
By Leslie Guttman
Mary Sims lay on the hospital bed at Doctor’s Medical in San Pablo, a handful of heartbeats left. Nearly all of her 12 children were around her. Five of them were teachers in Richmond’s Iron Triangle neighborhood, struggling to keep a charter high school open for kids who were gang-bangers and drug dealers, addicts and thieves.
San Francisco Chronicle | May 13, 2001
By Leslie Guttman
When the Rev. Glenda Hope walks through the Tenderloin to work each day, she thinks of the 23rd Psalm because it is a walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Like an urban circuit preacher, Hope gets calls each week asking her to remember the forgotten — the homeless and poor who die on San Francisco street corners, in doorways, under freeway ramps and in the small rooms of Tenderloin residential hotels. She has been holding memorial services for them for 25 years.
San Francisco Chronicle | March 28, 1999
By Leslie Guttman
I am trying to walk like a Cubana: hips on ball bearings, swaying beneath the straight, proud torso of a dancer. I am a queen. I am in no rush. Check me out.
But it’s no use. I can’t get it, no matter how much I study the women of Havana. Maybe if I stayed a year I’d learn, but I am only here a couple of weeks, in a country that the United States has for four decades considered the enemy.
I am here to see the face of the enemy and what I am supposed to fear.
The San Francisco Chronicle | September 15, 2002
By Leslie Guttman
San Francisco’s night minister walks slowly enough down Polk Street so street people can see his clerical collar, and, if they want, stop him to talk and then unbutton their souls. But he walks fast enough so he can break into a run in case someone tries to assault him.
The Rev. Don Fox’s church is the streets he walks daily from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. His congregants are found, broken-hearted or worried about illness, on stools in Tenderloin bars. They are bundled in sleeping bags on sidewalks or high on junk in doorways.