Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  TO JONATHAN ALFORD,

  FOR A LIFETIME OF FRIENDSHIP

  AND TO MY CHILDREN, ZACHARY AND CELESTE

  Contents

  Map

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Outer Limits

  Chapter 2: Adventures in the Skin Trade

  Chapter 3: The Alcatraz Triangle

  Chapter 4: Stairway to Heaven

  Chapter 5: The Harbor at the End of the World

  Chapter 6: The Canyon

  Chapter 7: The Temple

  Chapter 8: The Long March

  Chapter 9: The Borrowed City

  Chapter 10: The Lost River

  Chapter 11: Our Lady of Sorrows

  Chapter 12: Maximum City

  Chapter 13: Outside Sands

  Chapter 14: Pluto on the Pacific

  Chapter 15: The Chronicler

  Chapter 16: The Country in the City

  Chapter 17: Huck’s Hideaway

  Chapter 18: The Dead City

  Chapter 19: The Bridge

  Chapter 20: Californio Dreaming

  Chapter 21: The Puertozuela

  Chapter 22: The Lotus-Eaters

  Chapter 23: The Last Roll

  Chapter 24: The Farce

  Chapter 25: A Streetcar to Subduction

  Chapter 26: The Delirium

  Chapter 27: The Balcony

  Chapter 28: City Limits

  Chapter 29: The Torch

  Chapter 30: The Park

  Chapter 31: Hill of Hate

  Chapter 32: Happy Trails

  Chapter 33: The Balloon

  Chapter 34: The Front Door

  Chapter 35: A Tale of Two Earthquakes

  Chapter 36: City Beautiful

  Chapter 37: Trying to Find Chinatown

  Chapter 38: Deserted Cities of the Heart

  Chapter 39: Port of Embarkation

  Chapter 40: The End of the Road

  Chapter 41: The Haunted House

  Chapter 42: If You Were a Bird

  Chapter 43: The Greatest of These

  Chapter 44: Rota Fortunae

  Chapter 45: The Sand Castle

  Chapter 46: Taking It to the Streets

  Chapter 47: Genius Loci

  Chapter 48: Dancing on the Brink of the World

  Chapter 49: Lands End

  Acknowledgments

  Select Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Map

  Preface

  This book begins and ends with walking. Its spirit is ambulatory—the product of the countless explorations I have made across San Francisco on foot. I began those wanderings more than 40 years ago, but only in the past 2 years have they assumed the obsessive form that has led my friends to hide when I come calling, chirpily announcing another thrill-packed excursion to the Outer Mission.

  Blame it on titanium. For most of the past two decades, my knees were so shot that I could not walk without pain. You learn to work around chronic pain, but you lose certain things you are not even aware of. One of them is whims. A whimless city is a diminished city, a city whose mysteries are kept under lock and key, a city that repeats itself like a scratched record. After I had my knees replaced, San Francisco became endless and enticing. Like an iron-jointed butterfly, I began flitting around town—at first aimlessly, then systematically. And so it was that one fall day, after dropping off my daughter at her high school a block from that endearingly city-soaked rectangle of green called the Panhandle, I decided to finally learn Golden Gate Park.

  I should have known the great park better. I’d been going there forever. But every time I got off the beaten trail, I got lost. The problem was that I’d never tried to learn it in a systematic way. Golden Gate Park is so big—at 1,017 acres, it’s 20 percent larger than Central Park, and much more overgrown and opaque—that if you don’t approach it methodically, you’ll just keep forgetting whatever you learned. So I divided it up into rough grids and started exploring.

  It took about 20 days, walking an hour or two a day with my dog, to cover just about every part of the park. It was glorious and addictive, making new discoveries every day. I savored the mingled pleasure of the map-maker and the outlaw. I was Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn—one part of me greedily storing up information, the other blissfully absorbing experiences that had not yet blazed trails through the forest of my neurons. I discovered that systematic flitting, if not the secret to human happiness, is a pretty good start.

  My park voyage turned out to be a dry run, an experiment on a bite-size part of San Francisco. For I had so much fun that when I was done, I decided to do the same thing with the rest of the city. I set out to “do the Knowledge” for San Francisco.

  “Doing the Knowledge” is an expression used by London taxi drivers. To get a license, hacks must learn every single street in that vast metropolis—and as anyone who has ever looked at the endless map-book London A to Z knows, that is a feat that would tax even Funes the Memorious, the character in the Borges story who never forgets anything. Preparing for the test is called “doing the Knowledge.”

  I figured it wouldn’t be that hard. Compared with London, San Francisco is a one-horse town. Plus, I already had a head start, having been a taxi driver here for years. So I set out to do the Knowledge (walking and rolling version) for San Francisco—to explore as many hills, streets, inlets, trails, vacant lots, and beaches as I could in the entire city. I left some out, for reasons of logistics, personal safety, and utter boredom, but I was pretty thorough. If you divide the city into 1,000 approximately quarter-mile-square grids, I can honestly say I have set foot or bike tire on every one of them.

  I undertook this somewhat demented odyssey, in part, to do research for what was to become this book—but only in part. I knew that very little of what I discovered would ever make it into print. I was not planning to write a guidebook, and even if I had been, it seemed highly doubtful that there would be a large market for a tome offering detailed instructions on how to slip between the two houses at the end of Valletta Court (was Thomas Pynchon involved in naming the SF streets?), skirt someone’s backyard, make your way through a dense thicket of blackberry bushes, push past a bright yellow Bailey acacia, clamber over some dead trees, and climb up the craggy face of an obscure hill on O’Shaughnessy Hollow.

  So what drove me to go on those countless 8 A.M. walks was not just a search for material I could use. It was the same impulse that drove me to master the park: Curiosity. Passion. The desire to discover the unknown. To make my little world bigger and deeper. Thoreau described it in his essay “Walking”: “An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.”

  I can’t deny that there was a childish, game-like element to my quest. Like all games, it involved a kind of miniaturization, a shrinking of the world. To be interesting, my little universe had to have borders. I made the arbitrary decision that the 46 square miles bounded by Ocean Beach on the west, the waterfront on the north and east, and Daly City on the south were sacred space. Everything inside those lines was interesting by definition.

  “Man’s maturity,” Nietzsche wrote, “consists of regaining the seriousness one had when a child at play.” And it was child’s play for me, the whole peculiar odyssey. It was my version of Blind Travel, the game played by Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle: When the good doctor wanted to go on a voyage but wasn’t sure where, he closed his eyes, opened his atlas to a random page, and made a mark with a pencil. Wherever the pencil landed, he had to go. My world atlas was a tattered old Thomas Brothers map of San Francisco, and I didn’t choose my spots q
uite that blindly, but the selection process was similar. It was almost absurd how euphoric I felt as I tramped merrily through remote parks, across hidden trails, and through vacant lots, planting my little invisible flags like some two-bit Cabrillo. Best of all, I realized that I could play this game forever. If I went to a different place in the city every day, at the end of a year I could start again and it would all feel new—an urban explorer’s version of Kierkegaard’s “rotation method.” I felt so giddy I began to be a little embarrassed. This was not grown-up behavior. John Calvin did not wander the streets of Geneva with a blissed-out grin on his face.

  I was starting to write myself off as one of those inexplicably beaming homeless kooks you see stumbling down Market Street when I remembered an explorer who was even happier than me: John Muir. The legendary naturalist walked into the Sierra Nevada one day, and that was it. He was permanently stoned on some kind of divine speedball ever after.

  I had found my role model. If stumbling around in a happy daze was good enough for John Muir, it was good enough for me. I never tried to wipe the smile off my face again.

  Actually, I needn’t have worried about being too euphoric. Life being what it is, the smile tended to vanish of its own accord. On all too many days, San Francisco became just a dull backdrop to my duller mind.

  On those days, I sometimes found it useful to remind myself of what happened to the Spanish after they discovered California in 1542. For more than two hundred years after that, as their explorers sailed up and down the coast, dreaming of a safe harbor, they kept missing that narrow, fog-shrouded break in the coastal mountains that we now call the Golden Gate.

  That story is a parable that applies to all of us, whether we live in San Francisco or Sheffield, Perugia or Paris, New York or New Delhi. The real treasures are right under our noses.

  This book is a voyage to a beautiful land I discovered long ago. And one that I am seeing for the first time today.

  Introduction

  In the 1820s, the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai began working on a series of woodblock prints titled “36 Views of Mt. Fuji.” Hokusai depicted the great mountain from a variety of perspectives—from the sea, across the plains, with pilgrims in the foreground, through a screen of trees. Sometimes the mountain dominates the composition; at other times it is barely visible. People appear in some prints; others simply portray the mountain itself, in all its stark grandeur.

  Hokusai’s magnificent series was extremely influential in the West. It had a particularly powerful impact on the French painter Henri Rivière, who in 1898 began work on a series of lithographs titled “36 Views of the Eiffel Tower.” Just as Hokusai did with Mount Fuji, Rivière portrayed the mighty steel tower—the highest structure in the world when it was completed in 1899—from many different viewpoints, at different times of day and night, and in different weather. Sometimes it is a tiny smudge on the horizon you have to strain your eyes to see.

  Rivière published Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower as a book in 1902. In his prologue to the book, the critic Arsène Alexandre extolled it as a record “to describe the daunting beauty of Paris … to those carefree, ungrateful Parisians who are forever forgetting it. To make this album a memento of beauty for those who live now and a testimonial for all those who will follow.”

  In the spirit of Hokusai and Rivière, this book is a series of 49 portraits of San Francisco. Like them, I approach my subject from many different perspectives: from the shark-haunted islands 28 miles off its coast, and the teeming tenements of Chinatown; from the dreamlike summit of Russian Hill, and the mad depths of the Tenderloin; from the patrician mansions of Nob Hill, and the windswept dunes of Larsen Peak.

  Like Rivière’s portraits of Paris, this book attempts to capture the “daunting beauty” of San Francisco. I feel no qualms about emphasizing her appearance. San Francisco’s beauty may be only skin-deep, but it is the most enduring thing about her. People come and go, but the land and water and sky remain. As Joseph Brodsky wrote in Watermark, his exquisite little book on Venice, “Surfaces—which is what the eye registers first—are often more telling than their contents, which are provisional by definition, except, of course, in the afterlife.” Every writer always describes, or creates, the city that is closest to his or her heart. And my San Francisco is first and foremost a place—a jagged peninsula that faces one of the most dramatic straits on earth, a 46-square-mile cornucopia of sea cliffs and hidden beaches and deep canyons and flowing streams and hills, always hills.

  But of course San Francisco is more than its terrain. It is a vast human hive with a long human history. From the first San Franciscans, who hunted enormous beasts at what is now the bottom of the bay, to the Keystone Kops–like explorations that finally led the Spanish to the shores of the bay, the lost-boy Yerba Buena years, the collective lunacy of the Gold Rush, the catastrophic earthquake and fire, the muscular port city years, the poignant last-stop intensity of World War II, the uncanny eruptions of the Beats and the hippies, the tragedy and triumph of the AIDS crisis, to the dot-com delirium and beyond, San Francisco’s history is as extraordinary as her landscape. Her story, like every city’s, is a mixture of the inspiring and the dismal, the noble and the disgraceful, the sublime and the ridiculous. I have not shied away from her dark side. My intention has been to paint as complete and unvarnished a portrait of San Francisco as I can.

  A few words should be said about this book’s structure. It is not a strictly chronological tale. There is a historical through-line here, but it is constantly interrupted and intersected. Space trumps time. A chapter on the first San Franciscans is followed by one on the Filbert Steps. The dark farce of the Bear Flag Revolt is succeeded by the story of an eccentric San Francisco geologist and the feisty woman he inspired. This kaleidoscopic approach is an attempt to capture the visceral, spatial experience of moving through the city while simultaneously relating her history and my own journey. By crisscrossing space and time, I hope to bring both dimensions to life, stripping away the shroud of familiarity that can make both historical narratives and descriptive writing feel formulaic. But it’s not a scientific approach. Much as I’d like to see myself as the creator of a revolutionary new Cubist School of Spatial History, the truth is, I’m just a humble bartender, trying to mix the perfect San Francisco cocktail.

  For there is nothing neutral or dispassionate about this book. I fell in love with San Francisco as a child when I first saw her rising up like a fairy-tale castle at the end of a rainbow bridge, and half a century later I still find her miraculous. As I walk her streets, the only thing that keeps me from stopping on every block and throwing my hands in the air in amazement are the old Jacob Marley chains we all clank around in, chains forged not so much by sin as by the weight of the weary world. But San Francisco, like the ghosts who visit Scrooge, always offers me another chance. In San Francisco, it is always Christmas morning.

  That sense that redemption is attainable simply by opening one’s eyes is found in the poem that gave this book its title. For years, I played in a weekly basketball game in Alice Marble Park on top of Russian Hill. Just below the court, on a gravel path overlooking a (strikingly Hokusai-like) view of Mount Tamalpais, there stood a forlorn plinth bearing a bronze plaque on which was inscribed the following:

  Tho the dark be cold and blind

  Yet her sea-fog’s touch is kind,

  And her mightier caress

  Is joy and the pain thereof;

  And great is thy tenderness,

  O cool, grey city of love!

  Those words are the last lines of a poem titled “The Cool, Grey City of Love,” written in 1920 by George Sterling. Now largely forgotten, Sterling in his day was the leading light of San Francisco’s artistic rebels, whose more talented friends, including Jack London and Ambrose Bierce, loved him because he embodied the bohemian ideal. The poem is purple in places, but still powerful, and Sterling’s fierce, melancholy passion for his city—not just that of a lover but of a pat
riot, as if San Francisco were a medieval city-state—shines through it. When he called San Francisco the “city of love,” Sterling was thinking of the gentle saint after whom the city was named. Today the phrase evokes the hippies and the Summer of Love. But Sterling’s almost elegiac use of the word (he was an alcoholic who committed suicide six years after he wrote the poem) adds a deeply personal dimension to it, as if San Francisco were the mother or lover he never had.

  Although I do not personify San Francisco quite that explicitly, anyone who loves a city inevitably comes to think of it as a true companion, a faithful friend who grows old with us. But a beloved city is more than that. It is a mirror; it is a universe; it is a home. This book is a love letter to the place in the world that means the world to me—my city, San Francisco.

  Chapter 1

  The Outer Limits

  The Farallon Islands,

  30 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge

  For almost 50 years, an amusement park called Playland at the Beach stood just off the Great Highway. I used to go there as a kid. It was a gaudy, decrepit place, filled with clanking roller coasters, shrieking children, unnerving carnies, and every conceivable variety of fried food. Playland was vulgar, vaguely sad, and magnificent—a greasy Garden of Earthly Delights marking the place where America ran out of land. When the sun went down and night swept in off the Pacific, Playland became a foolish illuminated wonderland, its innumerable lightbulbs creating a magic circle within which hormone-addled teenagers could whirl rapidly through space and tired smiling dads could buy their daughters teddy bears.

  Beyond that illuminated circle, the darkness waited. If you were to leave Playland and cross the Great Highway, by the time you walked halfway across the wide sands of Ocean Beach, the night would have taken over, and the sound of the surf would drown out the shrieks from the rickety Alpine Racer. If you waded into the ocean and began to swim, the lights of Playland would flicker behind you like birthday candles for a long time, until the dark miles blew them out. When you cleared the cliffs at Lands End, the red lights atop the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, a last faint link with the human world, would come into view. Then they, too, would disappear, and you would be alone in the cold, slapping Pacific. For more than two thousand miles between here and Hawaii, there would be nowhere you could stand up—with one vicious exception. For if you kept swimming, after many hours you would hear the unexpected sound of waves crashing on rocks. And suddenly a grim citadel, a mountain in the middle of the ocean, would loom up before you.