Valencia Street Shop Owner Declares Hunger Strike Over Bike Lane With Gloriously Rambling Graffiti Message

The owner of Valencia Street art gallery Rossi and Mediterranean restaurant Yasmin has declared a hunger strike to protest the center-running bike lane on that corridor, and his graffiti declaration is quite a mouthful. Valencia Street small business owners have been bellyaching about that street’s unconventional center-running bike lane since it was completed last summer. Now one of those small business owners is taking his bellyaching to the most literal level possible. KGO reports that Eiad Eltawil, owner of Rossi Mission SF Gallery and the Mediterranean restaurant Yasmin, has declared a 30-day hunger strike to protest the new bike lane. And he declared this in a rather lengthy graffiti rant posted on the parklet outside Rossi, which was still up as of 3 pm Friday. Image: Joe Kukura, SFist The graffiti reads in run-on sentence fashion, “Eiad, the owner of Rossi & Yasmin, is commiting to a 30 day hunger strike starting April 7 to protest the unfair, racist, & Islamophobic policies enacted on his businesses by the mayor’s office, the MTA, & the Valencia Street Merchants Association. Free Palestine.” There are certainly some legitimate criticisms of the center-running bike lane, bit “racist, & Islamophobic” seems a stretch. Moreover, the...