SAN FRANCISCO --The view from Potrero Terrace is spectacular, a panorama of hills and bay and mighty industry. Turn your eyes back into the San Francisco housing project, though, and another scene confronts you.
Thirty-eight drab cinderblock buildings, some unpainted for years, teem with 1,500 men, women and kids.
Young boys sell crack in the streets. From time to time, there's a murder.
This project in the Potrero Hill neighborhood is where the incredible story of O.J. Simpson began.
Long before Orenthal James Simpson became a football star, before he moved into movies and became a television pitchman, and before he was accused in a double slaying, "The Juice" was a boy in trouble, like so many here today.
So his arrest has hit hard.
"He is a black leader," says Dior Green, 12, who has lived in the project all his life. "He represents black people. . . . He came up out of the ghetto, and he became a great player and sportscaster."
"All my life I heard about O.J. Simpson," says Charles Kendrix, 14, also a lifelong resident. "I wanted to be just like him. It feels good when you're born and raised where a hero comes from. But now, I don't feel too good."
Simpson, whose sunny smile and modest demeanor thrilled a celebrity-weary world, spent the first 15 years of his life in Potrero Terrace, living with his mother and three siblings. He formed a gang called the Persian Warriors, and soon he was steering it into trouble.
"I was somebody that didn't care about anything, and the best thing you can say about me and trouble was that I was borderline," he once said.
In biographies, he later recounted how the group burglarized local factories and warehouses - until he was arrested. That same day, sports hero Willie Mays came to visit him. Mays didn't lecture but spent the day with him. By sunset, Simpson was going straight.
That, and his incredible abilities, seemed to save him.
Jon Greenberg, director of the Potrero Hill Recreation Center, sits in front of a glass case filled with trophies and photos. There's a shot of O.J. at 12 with his Little League team; another of O.J. during a 1975 visit; and several from the commercial he filmed here in the early 1980s.
"Welcome to Potrero Hill, where I grew up," a smiling Simpson said in the ad for TreeSweet orange juice.
A mural on the front of the building depicts O.J. in his heyday as one of the greatest running backs ever. Greenberg says Simpson always gave generously to the center. That's made it doubly hard for some of the younger kids who play here to put into words what's happened.
"We've been trying to explain to them that O.J. is a human being like anybody else," Greenberg says, "and he goes through the roller coaster of life just like we all do. Now, we just have to wait for the facts."
Still, many are less impressed with Simpson, says local social worker Tanom Domingue. "They just look at O.J. as another black man who's going down," he says.
"People don't care much about him," says project resident Tyron Hackett, 18. "People here are just trying to survive themselves."
Enola Maxwell, director of the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, a social welfare organization, particularly remembers Eunice Simpson, O.J.'s mother, who has been hospitalized since his arrest. Eunice, she says, was here two months ago to memorialize her godson, who had been killed.
"She came here and was comforting the mother and everything," Maxwell says.
Greenberg says that despite everything, the community has its aspirations.
"Hope," the gym director insists, "is still alive here."
O.J.'s climb from Potrero Hill
O.J. Simpson rose out of the Potrero Hill housing projects of San Francisco to reside in the posh Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood. How the two compare:
