Each street sported an abandoned storefront or two, some fast food, usually a bail bondsman’s office, a Chinese dentist or acupuncturist, other businesses selling auto parts or advertising specialties or discount clothes. In every block you’d find a bar, or more often a venue that rented itself out as a club catering to a different clientele every night-Monday a hip-hop dance spot, Tuesday a lesbian pickup joint, then salsa after-hours, or karaoke on the Japanese tour circuit. Vagrants and changelings and explorers and the lost among the substrata of humanity that existed in the margins and mostly at night in one of the world’s most glamorous and glittering cities.

In the midst of all this, in a former flower warehouse, Wyatt Hunt had created a kind of wonderland. Hunt had kept the original outer structure intact, so the first thing that hit you, if you entered by the door next to the garage entrance on the Brannan Street side, was the sheer volume of the space under the corrugated iron roof, perhaps twenty feet high, that spanned the building’s nine thousand square feet.

Once inside, you’d probably next notice either Hunt’s Mini Cooper parked by the garage door, or maybe it would be the NBA regulation half-basketball court he’d picked up for a song from the Warriors. When you crossed the court, you got to another play/work area filled with guitars and amps and desks with computers, and then you got to a door in a wall that ran from one side of the enormous room to the other.

Beyond that wall, Hunt had built his living area-bedroom, bathroom, library, den, kitchen-three thousand square feet. All white and pastel and modern, modern, modern. Lots of glass blocks in the wall to the alley out back, and above them high windows for natural light, the drywalled ceiling back here sloping down to fifteen feet or so.