“Every crane on every corner tells a story” San Francisco Magazine, October 20, 2013.
San Francisco of late has embarked on a building boom whose scale and scope exceeds any in the city’s collective consciousness. And while the eyes of the city settle on the cranes in the skyline (more than two dozen, by one count), their earthbound counterparts - mounds of dirt, manifold and mountainous - go barely noticed.
Morphologically, these mounds are synonymous with both construction and destruction; in a broader sense, beginnings and ends. Paydirt describes the liminal landscape typified by such incidental earthworks that are not planned or designed but exist as a corollary, or by-product, of building activity - breaking ground. The abundance of paydirt, or lack thereof, is a powerful metric for measuring the health of a local economy. Its archeological condition - loose, compacted, vegetated, barren, tarped - marks the length of disruption and scale of change.
In this landscape of excavation and deposition artifacts are exhumed, foreign species transposed, and seeds stowed. The porous and pliant dirt is an exceptional interruption in an otherwise sealed and impervious urban crust.
