A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

"A remarkably wide-ranging progressive field guide to the Bay Area, from famous movements like Critical Mass, the leaderless bike ride that has spread to 350 cities around the world, to little-known sites like the Ghadar Memorial, a house in a quiet San Francisco neighborhood where Indian expat revolutionaries in the early twentieth century planned to overthrow British colonial rule, to still-active subcultural spaces like Berkeley's 924 Gilman, a punk/underground/youth oasis for a quarter of a century. A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area offers an alternative, bottom-up perspective on the contested history and geography of this region that's thought provoking, informative, and often surprising."—Gary Kamiya, author of Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

"The People's Guide is literally a tour de force of the Bay Area that opens a window to unseen landscapes of popular struggle, heartbreaking loss, and inspiring victories from the grassroots. In place of the usual glorification of big business and builders, this book is witness to the way everyday people shape the city from the ground up."—Richard Walker, author of Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area

"This fascinating book takes you to Bay Area spots you may have walked by every day and reveals their untold stories—from thousand year-old Ohlone shellmounds, to the Oakland headquarters of the first Black-led AFL-CIO union, to a San Francisco hillside where Sandinistas jogged to train for the Nicaraguan revolution. With sparkling prose and vivid photos, Brahinsky and Tarr provide a fresh, richly layered perspective on the region for newcomers and residents alike. I'm going to carry it with me everywhere I go!"—Elaine Elinson, coauthor of the prize-winning Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California