Ace Auto, an auto dismantling, computer recycling and unique event space run by our friend Bill the Junkman, is closing for good on November 1st.
Here’s my write-up on Ace Auto from July 2005.
Bill the Junkman and Belinda, Mistress of Junk about the closing of Ace Auto:
it’s the end of the junkyard as we knew it
Well, it looks like the end of Ace junkyard as we know it. Our landlady is not going to renew our lease (and no amount of consciousness-raising, hippie-poi-ball-swinging or fire-oriented fundraisers is going to help, sadly). Things are looking pretty damm bleak right now. It been 25 years and the last 15 after me and most of you found each other have been especially fabulous. While many think I am the generous one, in fact, quite the opposite is true. I given you junk, you have taken this junk and turned it into amazing art, exciting happenings and and ton of fun ad good memories. Thanks to all of you, my life has become much richer. This a richness no amount of money could ever buy, because of all of you and what you create from the junk I give away. Here my heart, mind and soul is filled with wealth from the friends I have found, and the parties and events here.
This past Saturday, night someone said to me “For every door that closes, another one opens.” So let’s hope our next adventure is even more memorable, after all, it’s just the place that’s closing, you and me all still here. One more thing: over the years, you guys have helped me get rid of so much junk, now I need to ask one last favor of all of you. I’d like you to send me pictures, video, stories, etc about this place. Show and tell me about the art or project that we helped you with. It been a hell of ride, thanks to all of you for the love and aloha you have given me.
Bill the Junkman
Belinda, Mistress of Junk
belinda@dammit.org
Ace has been one of my all-time favorite venues in San Francisco and it has been host to many amazing events over the years. Here my write-ups and photos on a few of the events I’ve attended:
- Chicken John’s Woodgas Pickup Truck
- A Horrible Dangerous Junkyard Party
- St. Stupid’s After, After Party
- Cyclecide Bike Rodeo in the Junkyard
- Attaboy & Burke at The Junkyard
photo by Scott Beale
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Please provide more info about the reasons for ciosing. Bad treatment by SF?
Sigh. First NIMBY and now Ace. This is certainly a time of great upheaval for Bay Area underground art venues.
Like Scott, Ace will always hold a special place in my heart. Only a short ride (or trip in the bakery van) from our old home at Headless Point, Ace was everyone's friendly neighborhood TAZ: a janky, rusted playground for misfits and punks. At the Power Tool Drag Races back in '03, I stood atop a pile of crushed automobiles and surveyed the ridiculous scene. Dale cheerleading with trash bag pom poms. Dan Das Mann taking side bets on a blackjack table pushed on a shopping cart. Flash tending bar like a southern revivalist. John Hell, Chicken John & Dr. Hal emceeing from atop a shipping container. Jim Mason tinkering with his pressure racer (which would eventually win him the Edsel that year). And throughout it all, friends and freaks from all the tribes of San Francisco.
Simply unforgettable.
Thank you Bill, thank you Ace, and thank you to everyone who came out and made something *happen*, again and again, no matter how dumb.
Oh no! I just discovered the place this year (via Laughing Squid, I might add). I attended the 2008 power tool drag races, and the Thunder Dome event. Both were wonderful and I was looking forward to attending more. Best of luck in your future ventures Bill, I just wish I'd discovered the place sooner.
Cyclecide, the bicycle rodeo, is looking for a new home. With Ace going away, so is their clubhouse and storage site. Contact cyclecide for any leads on a new place. http://www.cyclecide.com/
Damn, even the american “garbage lots” (sorry dont know the exact word) are stylish… One more argument to visit this country.
Please someone give Cyclecide a new home! I was @ the bike rodeo this weekend and had a ridiculous amount of fun. So sad that my first visit to Ace is also going to be my last…
I just updated the post with a statement from Bill the Junkman about the closing of Ace.
I…jeez….fuck.
An adventure and a new life began the first time I set foot in Ace, summer of 1998, helping Chicken in his use of it as a general base of operation, staging, batteries, one-use random vehicles, etc. for his job, then, of running transpo for The Burning Man Project. I learned an immense amount, met the most interesting and exotic people, and thought I'd always have one more day ahead moving bullshit around that deliciously hazardous yard making room for something unprecedented and exciting and absurd to happen. A decade ago. Shit. Time for a new adventure and a new life? If anyone knows a more promising place to begin that a junkyard run by the biggest-hearted grump I've ever met, let the world know…
Aw crap.
where are the doggies going to live now?
It seemed too good to last– and, as it turned out, it was. Too hard-edged to be gentrified, and a staging area for some of the most challenging art produced in our time by the most outre groups and artisans, the Junkyard never attained the overt notice of the so-called “official” Arts Community fostered by the wealthy interests of the City, always flying below their radar. And where can we all go now?
Hal said it best.
Thanks for all you have done for the community Bill.
I have fond memories and Chicken, Hal and I announcing the Power Tool Drag Races, from the roof of the “office”. It was covered with broken glass, it was shaky, we all knew it was going to fall in. And we still jumped around on it as much as we could.
Where indeed, will we ever find another location to stage the art we love so much? How much more of the balloon can be squeezed by the bougie's of this town, before we give them what they all want, and just leave? That'll learn 'em.
Stories..
12 years.. Should I begin with the surprise birthday party for you?
Where 40 of us dressed in formal attire, listened to classical music,
drank wine, and played danger golf? Should I talk about the shows
Like Attaboy & Burke, Los Banos, Mongoloid, Kitten on the Keys, and every other local
band ever worth seeing? Should I talk about how there would have been
ABSOLUTELY NO WAY Don and I could have made a 23 foot sculpture and gotten it out to Nevada without your repeated Inspiration, help, advice, expertise, and
junk?
Or how about this Gem?
Back in 1998, when Don proposed marriage to me I flipped out. Full
Blown Panic. He wanted the commitment & I wanted to hide under my
bed. Where did I go to get my head together? ACE. Yep. The Junkyard was
the only place I knew that could help me figure it out. You & Justin let me sit in the
office and babble like a nut. And somehow after talking with you, life
wasn't so scary.
So I guess that is what Ace has always been for me. Where the
smart people are. The ones that know the reality of things. The ones
who know how to spin straw into gold, declare shiny yuppy bullshit as
nothing but future
junk, and can see the beauty in people, places & things that would scare
the hell out of the unenlightened.
You're a good listener, Bill. You knew that my B. Man bus' engine
had the
“Knock of doom” and that my marriage had miles on it. So thank you.
From
the Bottom of my heart.
Love,
Tracy
Damn. Sometime back in the early Nineties, my crazy analogue-synthesizer-building neighbor in Oakland took me to a party at Ace, to see “this place where they're building this life-sized Mousetrap game- it's almost finished!” I was entranced by the noise and the way creations emerged from the apparent chaos. Roughly a decade later, after I'd moved x-country, overseas, and back, I fell in with some delightfully demented gearheads again…and damned if the Mousetrap wasn't STILL under construction. Talk about making me feel better about not finishing my projects promptly.
Intermittent though my visits were, I feel as if you were a major part of the undercurrent that resulted in Maker Faire and Mythbusters and so on. Best of luck, and as someone who now works in Bayview, I hope they don't turn it into another !@#$%^& cheapo furniture warehouse.
-Angry Sarah
Thank you all for the kind words, please please keep them coming, it truly helps make this time much easer for me. Perhaps when this is done and i have time i want to do a dvd of this place, so spread the word to your e-mail and announce list about the end of this place. I never did what any of this for the fame, i did because it was/is the right thing to do. If we did not do this, who would?
I had a block of Playland in the 70's. As Art commune, It was the “Ace” of yesteryear. Years of Luv and Mayhem with no photos, no film, no video, not even the sound of Mushroom. COLLECT IT NOW! Send watevr in! or you end up with a empty scrapbook full of “Cmon, You're shitten me!” Send em in! Don't let the winners write the History or Heracy! Send it in!
Maybe to ^Purple Head, up there^, I dnKnow?
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