About 14,000 people a day enter or exit through the 24th St. BART terminal. Of those, maybe half will go through the east side, where McDonald’s and El Farolito are. The ones that do will pass by one of the city’s most interesting murals — but they probably won’t notice, because it hides, with peeling paint and faded colors, behind a row of trees. An old Mission rumor says those trees were planted to hide the painting, and its anti-BART message. It isn’t true.
But like the mural, the rumor speaks to a long history of unease with development in the Mission district, and to the difficulty of interpreting public art. The mural’s creator is ambiguous about what, if any, message is behind the 24th St. BART Station Mural.
Paid BART service in San Francisco started in 1972. The BART Station Mural was painted three years later by Michael Rios with Anthony Machado and Richard Montez. It depicts a row of human-like figures with downturned faces carrying a train out of downtown. Below that are hundreds of faceless people huddled together, who all appear to be shuffling in the same direction. It’s hard to imagine such an ominous image being interpreted as anything but anti-BART in 1975. The subway system was not greeted with open arms by the neighborhood. Protests were held during BART’s construction, and the same year Rios painted his mural, the bilingual newspaper El Tecoloteran an editorial that was highly critical of the system. The paper blamed BART for contributing to higher rents that were pricing out residents and businesses.
Neighborhood resistance was met by city officials with assurances BART would be good for the area.
“The feeling in the community was that that was a bill of goods,” Patricia Rose, a longtime Mission resident who works with Precita Eyes Muralists told me. “The feeling was BART being built on the backs of the people. And Michael captured it beautifully with that image.”
But looking back, Rios doesn’t interpret the mural that way.
“I wouldn’t say that it’s anti-BART,” he told me. “Maybe at the time when the BART system was first coming in that was the sentiment in the communities, and the mural took on that connotation.”
His website says the mural is showing BART “on the backs of hardworking taxpayers,” but Rios says that was a metaphor.
“It could have meant a lot of things,” he said. “It could have meant their pocketbooks. But it’s totally beyond me how people interpret things. Who knows what our politics were back then?”
A look at his early influences offers a clue. In June of 1974 Rios was an assistant to Jesus “Chuy” Campusano on Homage to Siqueiros, which was painted inside a Bank of America branch a few blocks away. Siqueiros wasn’t exactly pro-development. It featured a “serpent-like BART writhing out of downtown,” according to historian Tim Drescher in his book San Francisco Bay Area Murals: Communities Create Their Muses. In 1972 Rios painted a mural at Folsom and 22nd that depicted Mission residents as rats, and police as pigs. His explanations were as confusing then as they are now. He told El Tecolote,“I think cops are pigs” and “we’re not putting down the San Francisco police” in the same 1972 interview.
Regardless of what BART Station Mural meant, Rose was definitely right about one thing: Rios captured the time beautifully. Drescher described it as one of the city’s best forgotten murals, and a “brilliant use of space.”
“It just leads you naturally down the stairway into BART,” he said.
Photos courtesy of Tim Drescher— Special thanks to El Tecolote for letting me dig through their archives!
Got a tip for The Bold Italic? Email us at tips@thebolditalic.com.