“This is a bad idea, Mick.” “I’ll be fine, Pete.” My brother’s modifed police-issue Chrysler is parked at the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth, halfway between the elegant shops of Union Square and the majestic rotunda of City Hall. The Tenderloin is one of the few areas in San Francisco that somehow continues to elude gentrification. Its low-rise residential hotels, teeming streets, and narrow alleys are home to the destitute and the disenfranchised. The neighborhood takes its name from an infamous district in Manhattan where the cops used to supplement their meager earnings with extortion money. They spent their spoils on the choicest cuts of meat. The sidewalks here smell of urine and the streets are populated by drug dealers and sex workers. The Sunshine Massage Spa operates on the top two floors of a crumbling three-story building. The ground-floor space next to the garage is home to a peep show and a locksmith shop. “Let me handle it, Mick.”
