by Martín Granada
- USA -

Powell and Market Streets, in San Francisco, where the cable-cars turn, is the intersection of the city’s heart and gut in a melee of consumerism, poverty, street-art, soggy gutters, and timeless elegance. The lampposts of Powell and Market preside over red bricks in green rod iron, filigreed with curlicues and old San Francisco charm. At the cable-car turn around, from dawn ‘til dusk, a man named José twists a piece of neon green cardboard on a pole reminding Jesus Loves Us. Yet this is a place where you don’t smile, you don’t make eye contact. Slow moving tourists with shopping bags and cameras might take it all in, even the garbage, but they don’t make eye contact. Even my friend Hester, sporting over-sized sunglasses, rushed right by me until I bleated out her name several times. “You don’t want to make eye contact down here,” she told me.