Author: Anne Ewbank / Source: Atlas Obscura
Just outside a Burger King on Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare, classical music plays day and night. Instead of the hits circa 2018, it’s more the hits circa 1718, from composers such as Vivaldi and Bach.
For years, San Franciscans have puzzled over why baroque constantly plays at a high volume on this block. But as an article published today in the Los Angeles Review of Books explains, the otherworldly music serves an earthly purpose: to discourage local homeless people from sticking around.Sound has long been used in public places to discourage loitering. In LARB, author Theodore Gioia writes that classical music as crowd dispersal probably dates to 1985, when a Canadian 7-Eleven pioneered the playing of Mozart in parking lots where people gathered. The tactic became store policy at almost 200 locations. Other methods are…
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