damian samuel: growth in anything is important- in yourself, in the community, whatever- even the giants. but it all comes at a price. when the dot-com came in, we saw them come in in limousines and leave in u-hauls. they... decimated this area kinda like crack. it was horrible. they threw all the musicians out, people that had warehouse space or anything were moved. we had neighbors that moved in the back alley and they voted some gentleman in that was gonna be the spokesperson for their bunch of lofts and the gentleman came around and decided that he wanted to talk to one of the owners and managers and he told us we had to repaint our building so that the value of his building wouldn't go down. we told him "you've been here for six months. you can go get stuffed." it's been a corner bar here, probably since 1910 at least. it's been used from the irish immigrants building the ships to the music people from kqed. it's been al's trans-bay tavern since the 40's, which clint eastwood said in one of his films, "see you at al's." there's a lot of people that have been living here for 20 years