Tenderloin Cam Guy Calls it Quits Over Death Threats

So there was this guy, Adam, who lives in The Tenderloin in San Francisco and realized he lived in a very active, loud, and colorful neighborhood. He realizes that he has entertainment gold looking out of his apartment at night on the weekends, decides to share it with the world by putting up 2 realtime webcams, gets crazy mad, massive amounts of traffic to his site from all over the world (apparently 40% of the viewers were out of the country for some reason), but then has to call it quits due to locals making threats against him and his girlfriend. Damn shame, because it was very entertaining the brief times I visited it.

The Tenderloin, for the uninitiated and too lazy to read the Wikipedia link I put up, is considered one of the shadiest areas in downtown San Francisco. It’s dirty and there might be folks smoking crack and it smells pissy (where doesn’t in SF, though? A: Pacific Heights + The Presidio), but it has never really struck me as that dangerous. Western Addition can feel dangerous, Hunter’s Point can get pretty dangerous, but drive almost anywhere in D.C. and you feel like you’re in much greater danger. Or, at least, you should feel like you’re in much greater danger, because YOU ARE.

OurBlock.tv will be a global network of webcams. We are running this in an effort to make a difference in the world. You can signup to stream your block very soon.

Anyway, some thugz didn’t like the cam, so they followed homeboy to work and call his employer and said he was a pedophile and followed his girlfriend and basically f’d with his life to the point of it not being worth it to continue the site. Fuckers!

Hopefully, someone will rekindle the dream in a more incog manner. I don’t love being surveilled, but come on people, this is grade A edutainment.

• The site (sans awesome video)
• Donate to Glide, because he was trying to do a decent thing.

If someone picks up the torch, please let me know. UPDATE: It looks like this will be turning into something much bigger now. Way to turn lemons into lemonade. We’ll see how this develops…