May 14, 2019

An Open Letter to District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman and his Colleagues on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors:

          Thank you for today’s commendation for our twenty years in business in Glen Park.

          At Bird & Beckett. we’re glad to have been able to serve Glen Park, San Francisco, and a good number of the region’s talented musicians and poets these past twenty years. We want to provide that community service for another twenty years and longer.

          We at Bird & Beckett want to do more each year going forward to support the musicians and poets who we see as our core constituency. We want to bring those artists great, intelligent and appreciative audiences and increased performance opportunities. And we want also to be a conduit for them to attain reliable economic support of their efforts.

          I’d be delighted if in ten years we all felt that San Francisco’s arts culture was flowering in a way we can’t now imagine. And if in twenty years we could all point to the concrete ways in which artists had become significantly better equipped to live here securely and to contribute to the City’s culture without risking or even sacrificing their individual health and well being.

          I’ll welcome the opportunity to sit down with any of you individually to explore how we can come up with better ways to realize that vision. I have ideas, of course; but I well know that each of you has already developed ideas, proposals and programs that are working in that direction. I hope we’ll be able to collaborate to make great strides forward.

          Thank you very much for your time, attention, good will and hard work. You’re to be commended for working month in and month out to keep the City culturally alive and vibrant for the common good.

Sincerely,

/s/Eric Whittington
Founder and owner, since May 1999
Bird & Beckett Books & Records
653 Chenery Street, in Glen Park
San Francisco