Katie Conry and the Tenderloin Museum, Part 1 (S6E7)

In Part 1, we get to know Tenderloin Museum's executive director, Katie Conry. She's originally from Oceanside, California, just outside of LA, where her parents are from. They were both teachers but were priced out of the big city, a situation all too familiar around here.

 

 

Katie left home as soon as she could—when she was 18 and it was time to go to college. She had felt lonely and alienated in her hometown. But almost from the moment she arrived in Berkeley, she loved it and felt connected. In the 20-plus years since, she hasn't left the Bay Area.

 

 

She moved across the Bay to San Francisco after graduation in the mid-2000s, settling in the Mission, the neighborhood she's lived in ever since. Katie and Jeff reminisce about several Mission spots they both frequented around that time.

 

 

In the early 2010s, Katie got a job at Adobe Books, helping the bookstore raise money to make the move from 16th Street to its current spot on 24th Street. In that fundraising process, the store was turned into a co-op and its art gallery a non-profit.

 

 

This experience is how Katie started in events and working with artists. She later worked part-time at museums like the California Academy of Sciences, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and The Exploratorium, working on private events for those institutions.

 

 

Katie was originally hired at the Tenderloin Museum as their program manager when the museum opened in 2015. The next year, she became its executive director (Alex Spoto does a lot of public programming now).

 

 

From here, we dive into the history of TLM. It was the brainchild of journalist and activist  Randy Shaw, who was inspired by what he saw at New York City's Tenement Museum. The non-profit that runs TLM was formed in 2009 and they opened their museum doors to the public in 2015. The permanent collection in their gallery spotlights stories of working-class resistance movements and marginalized communities. The museum was successful early, largely because of its public programming. They sponsored showings of the film Drugs in the Tenderloin (1967), which turned out to be very popular. 

 

 

From here, our discussion pivots to the history of the Tenderloin itself. Katie shares that it (not the Castro) was the first gay hood in San Francisco. It was a high-density neighborhood filled with affordable housing, a liminal space in an urban setting. Then we hear the story of the neighborhood after the 1906 earthquake, which destroyed just about everything except the Hibernia Bank building.

 

 

The Tenderloin was rebuilt quickly, though. The Cadillac Hotel, where the museum is located today, opened in 1908 and was meant to house folks who were working to rebuild The City. The single room occupancies (SROs) left people hungry for entertainment, of which there was soon plenty.

 

 

Women were living on their own in the Tenderloin, and in response, moral crusaders came after them. These high-and-mighty types had successfully shut down the sex-worker presence in San Francisco's Barbary Coast in 1913, forcing members of that industry to the Tenderloin. And so, perhaps naturally, those same crusaders came after sex-industry women in the Tenderloin.

 

 

The first sex-worker protest in the US happened in the TL after Reggie Gamble stormed a church and gave an impromptu speech. But it wasn't enough. Those same self-righteous white men effectively shut down the Tenderloin in 1917, an occasion for which TLM did  a centennial celebration in 2017.

 

 

Check back next week for more Tenderloin History in Part 2 of this episode.

 

We recorded this podcast at the Tenderloin Museum in November 2023.

 

Photography by Jeff Hunt