San Diego Reader

Xavier Nuez photographs alleys.

His candy-colored images of urban decay have been exhibited internationally, including here at the San Diego Art Institute, and featured on NPR.

Ruin is his gig. “History,” Nuez says. “Rust, bent metal, all the garbage strewn about.” He scouts locations in cities across North America and shoots alone, at night, in the “shunned places” people avoid even during the day. Recently in an Indianapolis alley he was “almost clobbered by a street gang.” He’s been held at gunpoint more than once.

But something even worse happened to Nuez last spring in Barrio Logan. The alleys were too good, he tells me. Too clean, too new, and too safe.

I’m interviewing him by phone at his home in the Bay Area. Nuez assures me he can find a “dirty corner” in any city, but, he says, “San Diego falls into the not-so-run-down category, which is great for San Diego” and not so great for him.

I can’t hold back. Passion overrides what little journalistic detachment I possess.

It’s because, I tell Nuez, we’re paradise-in-rehab. Our façade is what’s history. Crispy lawns. No jobs. More potholes than tourists. Alleys are where our life is! They’re like the last frontier —

The demilitarized zone in the people’s eternal war against the city —

Maybe even our greatest seminatural resource —

I mean, really, I ask him — Has he ever seen cooler alleys?

On the other end of the phone, there’s dead silence. I’ve totally blown this interview.

Finally, the closest thing to a national authority on the subject of urban alleys as I can find speaks.

“I agree. I think the word ‘cool’ is the right word,” says Xavier Nuez.

Coors, Girls

Google/Bing “San Diego alley,” and nine out of ten hits will start with the words “Body found in.” Photographer Nuez eventually admits he’d lined up a police detective who’d promised him a tour of San Diego’s worst alleys, and the guy flaked.

But today this Pacific Beach alley south of Chalcedony is sunny and deserted. Palm fronds clatter softly. Bougainvillea overwhelms low backyard fences. From where I stand in the dark garage, the alley outside is so neatly framed by the open garage door that it looks like a stage set of the perfect San Diego morning.

Jack Whalen hands me a beer. “I’m king of this alley,” Whalen says, then points west. “Down there, the king of that next alley is Tom Sweet. He’s 97.”

Whalen is a laconic, tan man in shorts and a chartreuse T-shirt. He’s been king of this Pacific Beach alley for 20 years, ever since he rented the two-car garage in which we’re standing. By law, he explains, landlords must provide parking with beach rentals, but some rent out garages separately because there’s such a demand for them. All Whalen’s friends rent illegal garages. It’s an alley subculture.

In Whalen’s case, the garage provides storage for his work tools, his mother’s Christmas decorations, and a bunch of stuff he’s picked up shopping in “Alleymart,” including a poster of Richard Nixon, a radial arm saw, and a parachute.

But the real value of “The Compound,” as he lovingly refers to his garage, is its social function. “It’s definitely a vortex,” Whalen says. “Once I open the garage door, they just start coming.” If his blue truck is parked out front, everyone knows the Coors is on ice. Seven days a week, daylight hours only. “I don’t want to piss off my neighbors,” says Whalen.

What exactly does his alley mean to him? I ask. “Privacy,” he shoots back. “The wives are in the house. Police are on the street. In PB, you can’t go out front and drink a beer anymore,” says Whalen. “This is all we’ve got left.” Whalen speaks fondly of his 80-year-old neighbor Ben, who in the last years before he passed away would sneak down the alley to Whalen’s garage to smoke and hide from his wife.

Once in a blue moon, Whalen says, the meter maid makes a stink about his buddies’ trucks parked in the alley. The “drive-by bitchouts” are the worst. That’s when wives drive by, stop outside Whalen’s garage, yell at husbands to get home, then roar off.

“Girls hate the alley,” says Whalen.

My friend Mary Trombley agrees. Growing up in Clairemont, she says, “You just always knew nothing good happened to girls in alleys.”

My Texas friend Barbara copies me on an email featuring a woman at a firing range, wearing a T-shirt that says, “Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her own pantyhose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.”

But a few blocks from Jack Whalen’s garage, in an alley near Grand and Hornblend, jazz floats from the open door of Alicia Raposa’s duplex, wafting bits of Ella Fitzgerald down the otherwise barren canyon of automatic garage doors.

Raposa, 24, lives in the only rental on the alley, and her front door is always open. “My dad swears I’m gonna get broken into, but I never have.” In four years of living here, the only trespassers have been stray cats who abuse the open-door policy.

A surfing instructor and SDSU double major in literature and furniture-making, Raposa needed something affordable. “When I first saw this place, I thought, ‘Cool. It’ll be cheaper because people won’t like the negative connotation of being in an alley.’ ” It was cheaper. It’s also bright and quiet.

Raposa points to a battered surfmobile just outside the front door. “You forget something in your car, and there it is. This is the best place I ever lived,” she says.

Across the alley, Heather Wilson sorts golf balls into a plastic bag. She’s standing outside an open garage, whose contents spill out and flood the pavement knee-deep around her. Like Jack Whalen, Wilson rents her Pacific Beach garage. She uses it to store the things she finds in alleys, on the street, or in the course of her work as owner of Heather’s Helping Hands, a cleaning and maintenance company.

“Some people across the way,” Wilson says as she points to a condo complex abutting the alley, “mentioned they were going to buy beach chairs. Well, I had beach chairs. I just pulled some out and gave them away. Another girl, over there, she hurt her leg, and I gave her crutches.” Parked beside us, her boyfriend’s SUV is loaded with pillows Wilson will deliver to an elderly widower for whom she cleans. (We Southerners would call Wilson’s garage a “getting place,” after the outbuildings where our ancestors hoarded potentially useful items in hard times.)

From what I see, there doesn’t appear to be much that Wilson doesn’t have to give. “I once found a full nitrogen tank in a La Jolla alley, but I didn’t know what to do with it so I left it,” she says.

“I bring all my clutter here. Easy to drop off, to load up,” says Wilson, who looks more like a tennis instructor than your average alley scavenger. But the best part is, she says, that in the alley there’s lots of “interaction with people” passing through.

“This is my refuge,” says Wilson.

Cutting Loose

I’m a girl. I like alleys.

I like knowing about the secret parking behind Warwick’s and Kensington Video. I like shortcuts. I like to speculate about people’s real lives after peering into their backyards. I like finding cool things hidden in alleys, like the U.S. map made of license plates on a certain Pacific Beach garage and the Katnip Kafe contraption somebody built to feed alley cats.

I like how plants growing in alleys are still green because they’ve been making do all along. I love the hubbub of commercial alleys.

The New Urbanists like alleys too. New Urbanism is an American design movement that promotes user-friendly neighborhoods based on principles derived from “old” town/city elements that worked. (You can see the effect of New Urbanism on real estate developments around San Diego, for example, Corky McMillin’s Liberty Station.) According to Robert Steuteville and Philip Langdon, coauthors of New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide, alleys are a New Urbanism favorite because, among other things, they force parking off the street and offer pedestrians alternative walk routes.

One day in a Bay Park alley, I spot two fellow alley walkers. Their gait says it all. Alley walkers cut loose. We stride, walk abreast, gesture wildly. These two are also waving and calling out to folks working inside the open delivery doors.

I introduce myself.

Coworkers Debbie Bales and Art Walker take this alley almost every day. It’s the most direct route from work to the deli for lunch. “Or to Starbucks,” Bales says. “And to the bank,” Walker says. In the alley there’s less traffic, they say. “No stopping at lights,” Bales says. “No jaywalking,” Walker says.

But the best part, they both agree, and the real reason they go this way, is Jeffery.

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