‘You are not your car’: At this parking garage, every space gets a pearl of wisdom 
Written by Astrid Kane Published Feb. 03, 2024 • 8:00am for the SF Standard

"You are one of the great lovers.” 
“Relax. You’re already there.” 
“You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?” 
 

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The messages—some uplifting, some cryptic—sound as though they could have been sealed inside a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant. But they’re found in a place more closely associated with motor oil than chili oil. 

Anyone who’s parked their car North Beach Garage at 735 Vallejo St. may have noticed that the spaces aren’t identified in the typical way, with rows of white numbers painted onto concrete. Instead, they’re labeled with warm wishes and practical advice. 

The 20-year-old structure owned and managed by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has almost 200 spaces across five color-coded levels, each with a message that can sometimes sound like the advice that swims up from a Magic 8-Ball (“Keep your plans secret for now”) or the banal exuberance of a life coach (“No one can make you feel bad without your consent”). 

As we leave the Americas Archive, here are more of Amanda's photos from Argentina. 92% of all the countries and artists in the Americas now have updated archives. Mexico is the only one left, and we are still trying to figure out the most efficient way to update the larger-sized archives. Argentina will also get one last update once that is figured out. Meanwhile, we will continue to work around the fringes of the Stencil Archive where smaller amounts are easier to update. Stay tuned!

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Why, yes, curious viewer(s), the New Era Stencil Archive now supports document files. This means, the small amount of pdfs collected over the years is ripe for the sharing.

What better way to inaugurate this opportunity than by making the first pdf on the site be Banksy's 2002 classic minibook "Exinstencilism". Don't remember where I found it, but do know it was in 2012. Flip through and be inspired!

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Saturday in South America. Today we give you updated photos for DJLU in Colombia and Argentina (thanks for photos, Kellan and Amanda) and Run Don't Walk in Argentina (thanks, Amanda). Run Don't Walk's archive lived in the Europe Artists section, but is now properly in the Americas.

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This nice Messi stencil just came in from Amanda, and is the only new image in Cartoonneros's archive. However, one of his stencils was in the Argentina archive and was moved to the artist's archive. Then there were the filenames missing an "n" in the artist's name. We usually do not let you all know when these types of changes happen, but this is what we will be doing in 2024: every image and every folder will be gone over. Slowly, slowly.

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Continuing our update, we have also looked beyond the Archives to see what else needs revising. Turns out that our Videos stream had some broken links to research, possibly repair, or delete. There were over a dozen broken links to off-site videos and they are now gone. Several got fixed, and maybe you all noticed that we were adding new ones yesterday while trying to repair the rest. Click on through for stencils in motion!

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While we continue to test the waters, Amanda, Kellan, and Lauren took some nice stencil photos in Colombia while we were neck high in the deep end. Always appreciate the submissions.