Artists imagine new future for vital site of LGBTQ+ history

To the average passerby, the building at the northwest corner of Turk and Taylor Streets in the Tenderloin might blend into the background with the rest of the neighborhood.

But for those in the know, it was the site of an important event in the history of the City’s queer community.

In 1966, in what was then Compton’s Cafeteria on its first floor, a riot took place. Members of The City’s drag and transgender community clashed with the San Francisco Police Department in protest of the department’s targeting of them. The riot took place three years before the better-known Stonewall riots in New York City, which are commonly referred to as the spark for the queer-rights movement.

Today, beyond a plaque outside commemorating the event, little of that history is evident. The cafeteria closed decades ago. The entire building is now operated as a rehabilitation and residency center for formerly incarcerated people by the Geo Group, a for-profit prison company.

However, a group of local artist-activists wants to reclaim the site as a historical touchstone. The group — the TurkxTaylor Initiative — is hoping to transform the four-story structure located at 101-121 Taylor St. in a way that honors its past importance, comments critically on its present use and turns it into a community-focused space.

Isabella Torres — a transgender woman, artist and architect originally from Colombia — said the location of the building in the heart of The City’s downtown presents an opportunity to share transgender culture with visitors.

“I think it’s the best way to say to all of them that we [transgender people] need to be included in society,” she said.

Geo Group representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

TurkxTaylor’s goal is to start a conversation in the community about how the site could be transformed. Its first step in starting that conversation is an art exhibit at CounterPulse, a Tenderloin-based art center at 80 Turk St. Opened in May and running until August 24 — roughly coinciding with the anniversary of the riot — the exhibit includes drawings, paintings, photos and 3D models illustrating conceptual ideas for the site, leaning more toward the abstract in some areas and more toward the practical in others.

Dubbed “ Transition Times II: Reconfiguring Structures of Power at Turk and Taylor ,” the exhibit is an offshoot of another one called “ Transition Times: Re-membering Anticarceral Resistance in the Tenderloin ” that was on display this spring at the Tenderloin Museum.

The exhibit got its start a year ago, when a group of five architects with TurkxTaylor came together and created collages to hone their creative vision of what they’d like to see in the building.

“This was our starting point,” said Chandra Laborde, who helped form the group and is among those whose work is in the current exhibit.

Over the next year, as the architects checked in with each other, sharing ideas and feedback, their vision began to take shape. They made additional sketches and drawings, iterating on their ideas, until they had a final product ready to show.

“Each one of us interpreted the idea of dismantling structures of power,” Laborde said. “Those structures are mostly the prison-industrial complex, gentrification, policing.”

Laborde said she became interested in the Compton’s Cafeteria riot and the history and future of 101-121 Taylor three years ago, when she heard a talk at UC Berkeley by Susan Stryker, who is credited with reviving the story of the riot.

By the early 2000s, the event was in danger of being lost to history. But Stryker, a professor and historian, launched the story back into the mainstream with “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria,” a 2005 documentary she co-wrote, co-directed and co-produced .

At her 2021 UC Berkeley talk, Stryker discussed the potential future of the Taylor Street building. That inspired Laborde to get together with other graduate students from UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and form TurkxTaylor to reimagine the site, both as a physical and symbolic object.

Laborde’s pieces, one of which was a commentary on the building today, and another a rendering of its possible future, are more abstract than those of her fellow artists.

Her first work imagines the interior of the building as a panopticon, a prison in which the cells are arrayed in a circle around a single watch tower in the middle in which guards can always surveil prisoners. Laborde’s work, with its themes of incarceration, is a reference to the building’s present occupants and the way it’s used today.

Even though the building at 101-121 Taylor was built as a hotel, not a prison, the way it functions today is similar, she said.

“There is a theme of control, and surveillance — there's a lot of CCTV cameras,” Laborde said. Occupants are “still completing their time, even though they’re, like, in the middle of a residential area.”

Her second piece changes the panopticon tower into a chapel and adds other natural elements — such as redwood trees, a garden, and an underground water system and bathhouse — to the site.

Other artists took a more literal approach with their reimaginings of the building.

Torres, who came to San Francisco in 2017 and settled in the Tenderloin, created miniature models of what she imagined the Compton’s Cafeteria site could be. She primarily focused on the exterior of the building rather than the interior. Even though she isn’t from San Francisco, she said, Compton’s Cafeteria still holds a lot of meaning to her, and she thinks that meaning could extend to others as well.

Her work extends to a labyrinth outside people can walk through, as well as a stage and a screen where members of the community can perform. She herself is a dancer and lip-syncs to music at different venues here in The City.

“My idea is trying to put the soul of Compton’s Cafeteria, what happened in this moment — put it outside the cafeteria,” Torres said.

The artistic architectural renderings are just the beginning of what Laborde said she hopes is a growing conversation between TurkxTaylor and other community groups in the neighborhood about what a real proposal might look like to acquire and redevelop the building.

“We’re trying to be facilitators, and listen to the voices that haven’t been heard,” she said.

While there are no concrete plans yet for transforming the site, Supervisor Dean Preston, whose district includes Compton’s Cafeteria, told The Examiner his office supports TurkxTaylor’s efforts to “reclaim Compton’s Cafeteria — an important part of trans history in San Francisco — to serve and welcome the community and we look forward to continuing to work with them as this project gains momentum.”

The 60-year anniversary of the riot is coming up in 2026, and Laborde said that year would be ideal for a big step forward in cementing plans for the building.

“It just takes time to do things in a collaborative way,” she said.