Over 15 years or so, one corner of San Francisco has moved from ghetto to glimmer. The few who have lived through it all, from days of neighborhood through the pit of crack and into the land of coffee houses now find themselves being pushed firmly away. One of the survivors is PNS commentator Joseph Simon, who was born in San Francisco and lives and writes essays in that city.

SAN FRANCISCO -- One of my best friends, Ed, is being evicted. Not because he's a bad tenant, but because his landlord wants his tiny studio as a home. Another friend, Steve, is being evicted for the same reason, though his studio is even smaller -- probably the old servants' quarters.

Ed and Steve are both black males who have lived in my changing neighborhood for over a decade. It also happens that they have the cheapest rent in their buildings. And that a landlord can't legally get you out of an apartment unless he decides he wants the place for himself.

Only a few of us are left, we black males who kept jobs and paid bills. When I moved into this neighborhood 15 years ago, it was known as the Western Addition or simply as "the ghetto." We referred to it as the Fillmore, after the main street of black commerce.

In the 1970s, it was a black community composed of both welfare recipients and of middle class citizens who had reached a level that earned them the epithet "bourgeois" from the black nationalists. They lived in these Victorian houses before the gingerbread paint jobs, before the cafes, before the tour buses and the German tourists.

Now coffeehouses are booming -- ironic that all this attention to a brew of beans originally from Africa is a first sign of the declining number of blacks. Young people fill the cafes morning, noon, and night. With six of them packed into a three-bedroom flat, the cafes become their living rooms.

We enjoy the new mix, but this isn't the kind of diversity that will let my friends remain my neighbors.

Spacious lawns and warm weather across the bay seduced the Victorian-owning black families. All my life I've heard these transplanted Southerners complain about San Francisco's foggy summers.

My former neighbor, a debonair man of eighty-plus, sold his home and used the profits to buy two homes for his daughters 40 miles away in sunshiny Vallejo. Early one morning, this man -- who worked his way out of the south and owned a piece of our real estate boom -- put most of his old furniture on the sidewalk. They were lovely, sturdy pieces, but to him they were just old and useless. The retro-hip kids loved it. Since then I've been asked if I have any old furniture that I'm not using.

Fifteen years ago, this neighborhood was full of black-owned nightclubs and people hopped from one to another. Ed would sit at his bay window and call down to the girls passing by. Sometimes he was able to coax them upstairs with promises of a drink, and party with them until dawn.

Then crack came roaring in. Many of those beautiful young women were transformed into tense bodies wandering the streets in the small hours. Some would stand in the middle of the street trying to stop cars. At times they'd grab me, and tell me how cute I am.

In the daytime things were still fine, but the night was like a horror movie. Black bar-owners closed down, fed up with watching their customers become possessed by cocaine. 

I would strike up friendships with people in the neighborhood. Then at around 2 a.m. the same people would knock on my door, begging for $20 diaper money, $20 gas money to take the baby to the hospital -- always exactly $20 -- or just to talk. After a time I had to shed my friendly nature in order to get a good night's sleep.

The new residents leave their drapes open, displaying coordinated furniture, rugs, and lamps. Computers glare out from their front rooms. Once, this would have been an invitation to some crack head but gentrification has brought new cars, fresh paint, brass railings -- and a feeling of safety. Wealth makes a neighborhood shimmer. It also hikes the rent, making my two friends speed bumps in the race for higher returns on investments.

We stroll home after caballing in the cafes. The night Steve told me about his eviction we walked, quiet and very depressed -- past the new natural foods store, the bakery, the corset shop, being passed by the young girls jogging in spandex. I sighed. "It sure is getting nice around here." Steve was silent. The only thing on his mind was trying to make more money so he could stick around and enjoy the new finery. His life has changed after years when a week's pay covered a month's rent.

The next night I was sitting alone in the cafe -- it's easy for me to sit alone since I don't know anybody anymore -- and the people next to me were swapping stories of haunted Victorians. Maybe they are. Maybe it's not only memories that linger.