A Love-In? Not Likely

Punks and yuppies. Are they really so different? Al Cummings wants to know.

He wants to know what would happen if two of this city’s most entrenched cultural archetypes--young bohemians and young capitalists--were to spend an afternoon together. And get drunk together. And maybe mix it up in, oh, a lighthearted little yuppie-punk smackdown--”dyed blond versus dyed black, Prada versus Ben Davis,” as Cummings describes the most current incarnations. He wants to know: Would it improve civic relations? Would it build bridges?

Also, crucially, would hotties from both sides hook up with you if you won?

In some cities, such questions might stop where they started--in the 25-year-old mind of a T-shirted, unemployed temp/electrician/stand-up comedian who lives over the Taqueria Can-Cun with his sister, a musician and a computer guy. It would be noted that every city with an uptown crowd has an equal-but-opposite downtown crowd, and no more would be said about it.

But this isn’t just any city. This is a city whose young singles have spent several years now disparaging each other as antisocial “punks” and shallow “yuppies,” thanks to a dot-com boom that hurled them by the tribal thousands into a vicious battle for apartments, parking, restaurant food, cabs, barstools and just about every other urban amenity, including space on the sidewalk. Long after the boom’s end, the rage of the displaced has lingered.

Thus on July 13 in Golden Gate Park, Cummings plans to emcee an event that has generated more interest among 20-somethings than a citywide happy hour with free food: an “Olympics” in which the punk-filled Mission District, in the heart of the city, and the trendy Marina, four miles away on its yuppified north side, compete in a series of tongue-in-cheek contests.

The aim: to end the post-dot-com war of the stereotypes.

“I’m just tired of all this tension,” said Cummings, lounging one recent workday in his Mission District apartment, a decrepit, four-bedroom affair whose living room features a futon, a barber chair, a bong, a wall full of electronic equipment, numerous keyboards and a concrete duck. “If either group goes into the other group’s scene at all, you get this cold shoulder, this vibe. What I want to say is that this isn’t just a city for Marina-type people or for Mission-type people. This should be a city for everyone.”

Internecine rivalries are nothing new in San Francisco, a city of fierce neighborhood identification from North Beach to Nob Hill. Beatniks and bankers have scoffed at each other almost from the moment the city was founded. But matters became openly hostile in the late 1990s as housing costs were driven up by the high-tech gold rush. The hardest-hit sections of the city were those that were most popular with the young dot-commers--the clean, well-lighted, apartment-filled Marina and the cheap, colorful, apartment-filled Mission.

Always on the pricey side, the Marina saw rents in its half-mile-square sector rise to the size of middle-class mortgages--$2,500 a month and more for an ordinary two-bedroom apartment. Meanwhile, creative types in the more sprawling Mission found themselves driven from their old haunts as Marina refugees outbid them for even the humblest flats. Locals blamed techies and “bourgeois bohemians,” who, when confronted, said they had just wanted to be around the “cool” people. Tensions deepened, however, with every new sign of growth and gentrification. Humvees and four-star restaurants began sprouting on blocks that formerly had been known for local characters and good burritos. Galleries, studios and rehearsal spaces began to disappear.

The city split badly. When one Mission Street dance troupe left in 2000 following the sale of its building, demonstrators occupied the place and the story made national headlines. For more than a year on Market Street, the words “Yuppie Go Home” reappeared like a chronic rash on a street-level Gap billboard. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the city’s poet laureate and Beat Generation celebrity, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that his town had become “an artistic theme park, without artists.” Slow-growth measures were put on the ballot, and when they failed, city politicians who were perceived to be pro-dot-com were voted out.

Some hoped that the bruises would heal when the economy softened. And they did, a little, as the tech bust proved to be an equal-opportunity font of joblessness. But one of the city’s better social barometers, the Internet bulletin board Craigslist, still is riddled with Mission-Marina trash talk, and one of the longer-running chain e-mails is an ever-evolving joke list of Mission and Marina disses. (“You know you’re a Marina chick when you know that red is the ‘new black,’ ” reads one. “You know you’re a disgusting Alterna-chick when black is ALWAYS the new black,” retorts the version aimed at Mission dwellers. Moreover, people on both sides of town say, there remains little personal interaction.

“I don’t really go to the Mission much,” confessed Emily Boyd, a 25-year-old, laid-off investment banker, sitting in a Jamba Juice bar in the Marina one recent day. “I don’t really know anybody down there.”

“It’s true,” agreed her friend, Lorelei O’Hagan, 26, who still has her investment banking job but was taking a mental-health day. The women were both blond, both articulate, both ponytailed, both in workout gear and both sipping the same mango drink with a vitamin “fem-boost.” O’Hagan, however, had recently been to the Mission, to the backyard barbecue of a friend who recruited for the Peace Corps.

“San Francisco is very diverse, but depending on where you are, you may never see it,” said O’Hagan. “We all work--or worked--at the same places and we all go to the same restaurants. The Marina can be--what’s the word I want?--homogenous.”

It is that homogeneity, in both cultures, that inspired Cummings one day during an Internet job hunt. Clicking around Craigslist in search of the job board, he says, he found himself stumbling repeatedly over Mission-Marina insults.

“There were just all these obvious conflicts,” he said, “and I just wanted to see people get along. I know it sounds like a bad ‘80s film, but I thought, ‘We should duke this out on the drinking table instead of bashing each other.’ Also I thought it would be cool if I could get a kind of poor-boy-meets-rich-girl date out of it.”

Cummings posted a message that day on the Web site’s events board, proposing a Marina-Mission “drinking Olympics” with such events as a “Zima vs. Olde English” contest in which the two groups chugged their signature beverages. He expected to be ignored. Instead, he has been deluged with e-mails, from sponsorship offers to event suggestions. (One correspondent wanted to give spray paint to yuppies and calculators to punks for a tagging versus basic accounting contest. Another suggested an “SUV versus ‘60s vintage car race” and a “fake tans versus tats” (comparison of bronzers and tattoos). Media inquiries came in from Seattle, Toronto, Britain and Omaha.

“I’m really enjoying my 15 minutes,” said Cummings, laughing, as friends milled in and out last week, noshing on Mexican takeout. “But really, I just want to put aside the differences.”

“I don’t want to put aside differences,” shot back Allison Muir, a 26-year-old unemployed filmmaker with a tattoo, dyed hair and a picture of the British punk girl-group “The Dirty Burds” on her T-shirt. “I want to win! I want to embarrass and humiliate someone!”

Muir said that after the dot-com wave hit her corner of the Mission, she found herself “paying $600 a month to live in half of a dining room that didn’t even have a floor in it. And meanwhile, my friends were all getting clipped on their scooters by Marina people who were coming down here, slumming in their SUVs.”

In the Marina, Boyd and O’Hagan were more conciliatory. They said the party sounded intriguing, not least because of the financial insecurity they now share with Cummings and his friends. Boyd recently moved in with her boyfriend to save on rent during her job search. O’Hagan, who used to do her eight-block commute by cab, now walks to work and counts every penny.

“There are differences” in the two neighborhoods, “but they’re not as extreme as they used to be,” said O’Hagan, who noted that she hadn’t gone shopping for clothes “in at least three months.”

Cummings has a city permit allowing for 125 contestants in his Olympics and plans to pass out fliers around the city, though he adds that he’ll be surprised if anyone but his friends shows up. Nonetheless, he thinks he has a good pitch.

“This would be a funny moment in San Francisco,” he wrote on one posting, daring punks and yuppies to give peace a chance here. “Or possibly a drunk moment we will forget for the rest of our lives.”