Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  Whether humans killed off the megafauna, or climactic changes brought about by the end of the last glacial period did them in, or both, the magnificent creatures that had flourished for more than 240,000 years (some for much longer) suddenly died off. In just 1,500 years, most of them vanished forever.

  Remains of these extinct Rancholabrean megafauna have been found all over the Bay Area, but few in San Francisco. In 1993, however, paleontologists made an astonishing discovery. They unearthed the 25,000-year-old skeletons of three Columbian mammoths and one giant bison on the southeast corner of Pacific and Columbus—549–559 Pacific, to be precise. The skeletons were found in what had been a shallow, muddy freshwater pond or bog at the base of Telegraph Hill, surrounded by a prairie grassland and a variety of deciduous trees.

  This is one of the city’s sacred blocks, in the heart of the old Barbary Coast, across the street from City Lights, Francis Ford Coppola’s flatiron Sentinel Building, and fabled Beat-era bars like Vesuvio, Spec’s, and Tosca. It is fitting that this archaeological find was made here, if only because certain denizens of those bars are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from 25,000-year-old mammoths.

  Once the big game disappeared, which they did by 10,000 B.C.E., the San Francisco peninsula had little to offer the few people—there were no more than several thousand total—living in California. Exposed to the prevailing westerly winds, San Francisco was colder than the surrounding areas, had less game, and less seed-bearing grasses and other edible plants. There were modest numbers of live oaks and buckeyes, but California Indians did not make acorns their staple food until 2500 B.C.E. Most critically, San Francisco had no marshes or mudflats. Those muddy, murky areas at the edge of land and water would later generate a cornucopia of shellfish, shallow-water fish, and waterfowl. But the bay did not yet exist.

  Then, around 9000 B.C.E., the great glaciers started melting, and the sea levels began to inexorably rise. At a rate of three-quarters of an inch a year, or more than 100 horizontal feet in some areas, sea levels rose quickly enough that the change was noticeable to anyone camped permanently or temporarily along San Francisco’s coast. The shoreline moved eastward, turning the Farallon peaks into islands. The bay began to fill—a process that continued for 3,000 years. As the sea poured in, the Golden Gate turned into a wide channel. Within a generation, ancestral homelands and hunting and fishing areas vanished beneath the water. When sea level rise slowed to 0.001 inch a year, by 4000 B.C.E., extensive marshes began to appear at the edges of the bay—a perfect environment for mollusks, fish, and birds. By 2500 B.C.E., the Bay Area had been completely transformed: It was now a superrich food environment, with oysters, clams, mussels, fish, and waterfowl easily available.

  Before this time, it’s unlikely that more than a few people lived permanently on San Francisco Bay. They probably came to the great estuary to collect shellfish or ducks, then moved on to warmer and more food-rich places in a migratory pattern common to hunter-gatherers. But when word got out that a vast free shellfish restaurant had opened its doors off Hunters Point, and Mission Bay, and Ellis Landing in Richmond, and West Berkeley, more and more people began to settle permanently or semi-permanently on the bay. Most of them chose the East Bay, but a few chose the cold, windy, hilly, sandy peninsula on the west side.

  We don’t fully understand why. Trading probably played a role: San Francisco Indians engaged in three-way trade with the people living in the North Bay, who had access to coveted obsidian, and with those in the East Bay, with whom they could trade coastal shells. For whatever reason, a few people ended up on the tip of the peninsula, discovered they could gather enough food to survive, and either kept coming back or never left. By the time the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, a few hundred people had settled in San Francisco. They and their successors, following a way of life that remained largely unchanged, lived here for the next 4,000 or 5,000 years. It is one of the great success stories in the history of the human race.

  Chapter 4

  Stairway to Heaven

  The Filbert Steps, between

  Telegraph Hill Place and Sansome Street

  San Francisco is filled with steps and staircases, shortcuts and obscure passages. These walkways constitute a kind of alternative and secret grid, a human-size way of moving through the city. There is something playful and gratuitous about steps. Walking on them makes a journey less purposeful and more like a game of hide and seek. They turn grown-ups into kids, and the city into a giant backyard. A delicious, slightly illicit quality hangs over stairways; walking on them has a faint whiff of climbing over the neighbor’s fence, an essential tactic in reclaiming one’s city and one’s soul. They blur the sharp boundary between public and private space that makes urban life alienating. They offer an escape from the abstract machinery of the city.

  Many cities have memorable stairs. Lisbon, a gorgeous white seaport that resembles San Francisco in many ways (right down to having suffered a catastrophic earthquake), has its share. Paris, in its flat river valley, doesn’t have a lot of stairs, but the few that it does are world-class: The old steps that run up to Sacré Coeur evoke the lost yellow-white-and-black world of Utrillo. Pittsburgh claims to have 712 stairways, even more than San Francisco does. (One could compare this with Birmingham, England’s idiotic boast that it has “more miles of canals than Venice,” a claim that avoids addressing the issue of quality, but Pittsburgh is a lovely and underrated city.) Hong Kong has its mighty escalator system climbing up Victoria Peak, which sort of counts. Every Italian hill town, from Perugia to Erice, has divine stairs. So does Guanajuato in Mexico. Rio has some wonderful steps. The list could go on indefinitely.

  But none of these cities have stairways that possess the extraordinary variety and beauty of those in San Francisco. According to Adah Bakalinsky, author of the delightful little book Stairway Walks in San Francisco, there are more than 600 of them. Because San Francisco is so hilly, stairs are found all over town, from the Richmond District to the Bayview. And each one of them has a different flavor.

  There are the long, exposed, steep stairs that go up from 16th Avenue and Moraga to Golden Gate Heights, the city’s great western balcony. There are the gaunt ones on the north slope of Hunters Point. There are the stately ones that go up to tiered Alta Plaza, ominously reminiscent of ceremonial steps leading to an Aztec sacrificial site. There are virtually unknown ones like the overgrown, uneven passageway—as much a trail as a set of steps—that emerges onto 19th Street from Kite Hill, as unexpected as the wardrobe that opens onto Narnia. There are the superb Vulcan Steps on Twin Peaks and the formal, Last Year at Marienbad–like Pacheco Stairway in Forest Hill and the verdant Green Street steps on Russian Hill and the wondrous Pemberton Steps on Twin Peaks. But the most sublime of them all are the Filbert Steps.

  What makes the Filbert Steps so beautiful is the way they mediate between and harmonize the human world and the natural one. That harmony is epitomized by the gardens that surround them, which must be among the most stunning gardens on any public passageway in the world. From those lush gardens you have a tree-filtered view to the wharves of the Embarcadero and the bustling bay. Standing on these old, worn, wooden steps, next to some of the oldest houses in the city, you can almost hear the footsteps of a wandering 49er, or a 1930s longshoreman walking home from the docks. The two little wooden lanes that intersect the steps, Darrell Place and Napier Lane, are hideaways so magical there should be a permanent rainbow pointing at them. And this oasis is located in the most dramatic location in San Francisco, on the sheer, quarried eastern face of Telegraph Hill, which rises improbably up in the city’s extreme northeastern corner.

  The Filbert Steps made a memorable appearance in the 1947 film noir Dark Passage, when escaped con Humphrey Bogart, his face bandaged after plastic surgery, walks up them to Lauren Bacall’s apartment on Montgomery Street.

  It was a fitting scene, because the steps connect wildly disparate realities. Just seconds after you leave their dr
eamlike confines, you emerge on Sansome Street next to Levi Plaza, amid landscaped grounds and modern office buildings. You’re back on the grid. You feel like you’ve just climbed down a rope ladder that drops from a tree house to Times Square.

  The Filbert Steps run between Coit Tower and the waterfront, but they take you to the best destination of all: nowhere. On those worn steps, surrounded by fuchsia and redwood and magnolia and cypress and roses, the city fades away. You and this verdant dell are all that’s left, a green thought in a green shade.

  Chapter 5

  The Harbor at the End of the World

  Mouth of Drakes Bay, Point Reyes National Seashore

  Some historical events are so strange, so incongruous, so haunting, that they feel like dreams. Usually, the locations where those events took place are unremarkable, but every now and then their appearance is as otherworldly as their history. Drakes Bay is one of those places. For the two beleaguered sea captains who missed San Francisco Bay and put in there in the 16th century, Drakes Bay was a harbor at the end of the world. And that’s exactly what it still looks like.

  Drakes Bay and the surrounding Point Reyes peninsula are a world apart. That isn’t just a figure of speech: Point Reyes sits on a different tectonic plate than the rest of North America. The silence that hangs over its drowned bays and enigmatic inlets is the cosmic, indifferent silence of the high mountains. At once toylike and eternal, this landscape is the perfect setting for an apparition from another universe. You don’t even have to half-close your eyes to imagine a galleon sailing in below its white cliffs. It’s like a stage set designed by God.

  The two galleons that sailed into Drakes Bay came within 30 miles of the future city of San Francisco, but they had absolutely nothing to do with its history. They might as well have been hallucinations, tunnels through space-time that immediately collapsed. Which makes them perfect emblems for the city.

  For most of its history, San Francisco was the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of cities. It could not even manage to get itself discovered. Until it made its grand entrance onto the world stage with the Gold Rush, it was a meaningless bystander in a grand drama, a two-bit courier carrying self-defeating messages, not even worthy of being killed onstage. Its entire early history is one of futility—missed opportunities, blind alleys, roads that led nowhere, farcical mistakes, and enormous events that it had nothing to do with.

  For a San Franciscan, there is something perversely satisfying about this dubious genealogy. If you can’t be at the center of the universe, better to be an unknown asteroid whirling through some distant galaxy. Plus, it suits San Francisco’s character more.

  Blame it on Pangaea. When the primordial supercontinent broke up and left the continents in their present configuration, the west coast of North America ended up being terrestrial Pluto. During the great Age of Exploration, California was harder to get to from Europe than almost anywhere on earth. To reach it, explorers had to either sail across two mighty oceans or cross a vast continent filled with towering mountain ranges, waterless deserts, and hostile Indians.

  From the 15th century until well into the 18th, the west coast of North America was the great unknown, a blank spot on maps, thought to be part of Asia or a mythical Strait of Anian leading to the riches of the East. When Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, it was by mistake: He was trying to find a sea route to the East Indies. He never knew what he had found.

  In 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa waded into the Pacific off Panama and claimed it and all of its islands for the king of Spain, becoming the first European to reach the great western ocean, which he called the “South Sea.” Seven years later, Ferdinand Magellan sailed into the Pacific through the straits at the bottom of South America that bear his name. But the South Sea’s northern extent remained unknown, as did almost all of the west coast of the New World.

  This ignorance is reflected in contemporary maps. A 1508 map by Johannes Ruysch depicts South America as the New World, with Asia in the place where North America actually is. Seventy-five years later, the “northern mystery” was still a mystery. Indeed, some cartographic depictions of this blind spot in the world seem to have been simply made up. One of Ignazio Danti’s two famous hemispheric “Mappamondos” (world maps) in the Vatican loggia, executed in 1583, shows a long, narrow peninsula, inexplicably in the shape of a huge “V,” connecting the west coast of North America with China. A 1600 map by cartographer Gabriel Tatton depicts California running almost due west and virtually touching China (although the trustworthiness of that depiction is somewhat undercut by a note admitting that the land “was yet to be discovered.”) Cosmographers—a wonderful, sadly extinct profession—argued about what lay in the northern stretches of the South Sea: A land mass connected to Europe? An open sea? Four great islands? California remained terra incognita.

  The idea that California was an island, which largely derived from the peninsular shape of Baja California, proved particularly hard to kill. Even after an intrepid Jesuit Father named Eusebio Kino led overland expeditions over the top of the Sea of Cortez in the early 1700s, the myth persisted. Maps depicting California as an island appeared as late as the 1750s, despite King Ferdinand VI of Spain’s 1747 edict—a leading candidate for the title of Most Hilarious Royal Decree of All Time—that “California is not an island.” (In a disgraceful act of lèse-majesté, Ferdinand’s pronouncement has been ignored by the editors of the New York Times and other East Coast publications, who continue to obsessively run any story depicting California—in particular, Northern California—as an island of wild-eyed utopian dingbats given to hedonistic, slightly stupid practices. Which is not to say that Northern Californians do not frequently provide them with ammunition. The Times recently seized with relish upon a story about how George Lucas’s wealthy Marin County neighbors rejected his proposal to build another state-of-the-art film facility in their bucolic vicinity, leading Lucas to change plans and instead propose—suck on this, rich white people!—a low-income housing development. The horrified neighbors began squabbling among themselves. One anonymous woman said the atmosphere was “sheer terror” and—this is what really must have made the Times editors drool—compared the situation to “Syria.”)

  The endurance of the irrational belief that California was an island highlights another reason, besides its remoteness, that it remained undiscovered for so long: It was shrouded in myths. Those myths originated in a wildly popular chivalric potboiler called Las sergas de Esplandián (The Exploits of Esplandian), written by Garcia Odoñez de Montalvo and published in 1510 as a sequel to Amadis of Gaul, the most successful printed work in the early 1500s in Spain. These fantastical romances, featuring addictive yarns about noble Christian knights battling evil giants and hot Amazon warrior queens, were the comic books, bodice-rippers, and raised-type-silver-and-purple-cover airport thrillers of their day. They were so popular that there was actually an attempt to ban them.

  The very word “California” comes from Montalvo’s wild page-turner—a fact that may have somehow made its way into the state’s Hollywood-laden DNA. In Las sergas, the brave and chaste hero woos and wins an Amazon queen named Calafia, who is fighting with pagan forces besieging Constantinople. In the course of his quest, Esplandian is told an enthralling story about Queen Calafia’s island homeland: “Know, then, that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, and it was peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they lived in the fashion of Amazons. They were of strong and hardy bodies, of ardent courage and great force. Their island was the strongest in all the world, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores. Their arms were all of gold, and so was the harness of the wild beasts which they tamed and rode. For, in the whole island, there was no metal but gold.”

  The Amazon legend found in Las sergas inspired the first explorations of Baja California and was “confirmed” by reports from soldiers who told Hernán Cortéz that while exploring
the northern coast of Mexico they had heard of an “island of women” and spoken to “the lords of a province named Ciguatan, who strongly affirmed that there was an island populated entirely by women 10 days’ journey away … very rich in pearls and gold.” Tales of the opulent “Seven Cities,” another medieval legend, circulated widely, becoming mixed up with the stories about California and other fabulous places like La Gran Quivira, where even the kitchen utensils were made of gold. (The word “Quivira” appears on the abovementioned map by Danti.) The most peculiar story was about a king called El Dorado (“the gilded one”), a kind of ur-Goldfinger who was supposedly painted with gold dust every morning and washed off every evening.

  But subsequent expeditions to Baja California in search of the fabulous island kingdom were disastrous. Cortéz’s final, inglorious expedition ended with more than half of his men dead of famine and disease, and the survivors cursing his name and the land he had discovered. When later explorers bestowed the name “California” upon the barren peninsula, they may have done so in bitter mockery: The godforsaken coast they encountered bore no resemblance to the gold-filled “earthly paradise” described by Montalvo.

  (To the cavalcade of futility that is California’s Hispanic history, we must fast-forward 300 years to attach a final “Kick Me” sign. James Marshall discovered gold in California on January 24, 1848. On February 2, 1848, former Spanish colony Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding California to the United States. The heirs of the conquistadores had unknowingly owned the real El Dorado for nine days.)