by Gary Kamiya
Islais Creek is lost, but San Francisco has come a long way from the days when it wanted to turn the canyon into a freeway. For today, Glen Canyon is not only a park; it is also a designated natural area, which means that the city is devoted to preserving it in its original state.
The Natural Areas Program, created in 1997, is a unique part of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department. It takes care of 31 natural oases throughout the city, with a total of 1,100 acres. A tiny staff of nine, along with thousands of volunteers, labor in these scattered places to preserve and restore as much of the city’s native flora and fauna as possible. The seeds of the program were sown in 1977, when voters—after rejecting it twice—approved a city proposition that created the Open Space Fund. The city used the fund to acquire a number of open spaces, including some of the most magical places in town, like Tank Hill, Kite Hill, and Billy Goat Hill. At first, acquisition was the most important part of the program, but over time, maintenance became more important. Eventually that led to the Natural Areas Program.
“We have about a quarter of the Rec and Park land and 1 percent of their budget,” said Kirra Swenerton, who has worked for the Natural Areas Program for three and a half years. “We started our program in tandem with the volunteer program. We couldn’t do it without them on our budget. All kinds of people volunteer—people between jobs, docents, seniors, students, and of course, neighbors. Glen Canyon has one of the most active neighborhood groups.”
I first met Swenerton when I was wandering through Palou and Phelps Park, a tiny, little-known, unspoiled hillside in the gritty Bayview District where she was gathering seeds from a native plant called goldfields. A month later I met her high up on the stunning eastern slope of Glen Canyon, below Berkeley Way. Using water from a tank on a pickup truck, she, a couple of co-workers, and some volunteers were watering native plants they had planted on the hillside near one of the enormous boulders that dot the canyon. The volunteers included a retired businessman who lived in the neighborhood and two young hipster-ish guys who lived in the Haight, who said they loved nature and just wanted to work outdoors. Pulling up invasive plants nearby was an Asian high school student who had taken a summer job with the program.
Swenerton said the Natural Areas Program does “restoration ecology”—restoring natural areas to their original state, within the limits of feasibility and without unduly impacting other uses. One might think that in environmentally conscious San Francisco, a city department tasked with this greener-than-green mission would receive unanimous public approval. But anyone who thought that wouldn’t know San Francisco. When it comes to left-wing NIMBYism, self-righteous argumentativeness, and just plain selfishness and ignorance, San Francisco is a serious threat to unseat the reigning world champion, my hometown of Berkeley. And the Natural Areas Program has implacable foes.
“Some people think we’re Sierra Pacific [a huge logging company] because we cut trees,” said Swenerton’s colleague Dylan Hayes, who has worked in the program for eight years. “They get angry because we want to cut some of the eucalyptus trees on Mount Davidson, for example. Well, these are introduced, nonnative trees, and they’re threatening habitats needed by endangered species. Our purpose is to preserve the most species for the most people for the longest time. And you have to make decisions to save things.”
“Look, our plan is not to get rid of all the eucalyptus—far from it,” Swenerton said. “We try to strike a balance. Natural spaces are a map of the human history of the world. European grasses came with the Spanish. Fennel may have originally come from a garden. Other plants come from the grazing era. Only a tiny percentage are aggressive. Like this wild radish.” She pointed down to a purple plant growing on the hillside. “It’s beautiful, but it’s invasive. These are the ones we try to get rid of.” Fortunately, Swenerton said, there are no controversies over the Natural Area Program’s actions in Glen Canyon.
I left the workers on the hill to fight the good fight against wild radishes and ignorant NIMBYism and followed a winding trail down the canyon toward Islais Creek. I stopped at a spectacular chert outcropping whose intricate red patterns looked like a Max Ernst painting. Birds sang and insects buzzed in the noon sun. Farther up the canyon, a network of trails meandered on the steep slopes, past huge boulders that had been sitting there from time immemorial. I wandered down to the willow-fringed creek. The water, just a trickle, gleamed next to a muddy trail, from which a gnarly-rooted old tree grew. I walked out of the dense canopy and back into the sun. Looking down the canyon, past towering rock formations, Mount San Bruno loomed, five miles away. A hawk hovered silently overhead. I was in a steep canyon in the middle of the city. There was no one around.
Chapter 7
The Temple
The Palace of Fine Arts, Lyon and Bay Streets
The beauty of the Palace of Fine Arts is inseparable from its strangeness. A vast, purposeless rotunda supported by mighty Corinthian columns and surrounded by a mysterious, vaguely ruinlike colonnade, it looms above its tranquil lagoon like one of those illogical, pseudo-classical structures that appear in the backgrounds of baroque paintings. The Palace is so familiar that it is easy to forget that it is a folly. And like the other members of that peculiar architectural genre, it is a mood enhancer, as much a drug as it is a building.
The Palace of Fine Arts is the only on-site survivor of one of the most delirious miniature cities ever created, the joyously ephemeral Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 that announced the rebirth of San Francisco from the 1906 catastrophe. Magnificent courts—the Court of the Universe, the Court of Abundance, and the Court of Four Seasons—adjoined a pleasure strip called “The Zone,” which featured enormous models of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and, in a more modest vein, the Creation. The crown jewel—literally—of the fair was the Tower of Jewels, a 435-foot structure decorated with 102,000 cut-glass “novagems” that at night turned into a vast, glittering diadem. Not until Burning Man—which started on Baker Beach, just around the seafront corner from the fair’s site—would the world see another fake city so dazzlingly psychedelic.
The Palace was so beloved that a movement to preserve it started while the Exposition was still going on. It was saved, but it had not been built to last, and in 1965 it was completely rebuilt. It is appropriate that the Palace is the last building on the site of the last of the great world expositions. For it is a shrine to absence, a tribute to a vanished world, a concrete manifestation of things unseen.
The Palace’s architect, Bernard Maybeck, was charged with creating a building that would serve as a kind of decompression chamber for fairgoers, a mind-calming passageway between the crowded and chaotic fairgrounds and the paintings and sculpture housed in a hall behind the Palace. May-beck drew his inspiration from the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi’s atmospheric etchings of Rome, in particular his etching of the collapsing, overgrown ruin of the Temple of Minerva Medica. He was also deeply influenced by Isle of the Dead, the eerily evocative painting of a surreal funerary island by the 19th-century Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin.
Both works captured the emotion that Maybeck was searching for, a feeling he called “modified melancholy” or “a sentiment in a minor key.” But as Maybeck noted in the fascinating little book he published about creating the Palace, Böcklin’s painting was too sad to serve as an “art gallery frontispiece,” just as a Greek temple set on a wild island surrounded by stormy seas and mighty cliffs would be too terrifying and uncanny. Maybeck’s solution was to place his Greek temple (the Greeks did not have domes, but for the visionary Maybeck that fact was irrelevant) on “the face of a placid lake, surrounded by high trees and lit up by a glorious full moon.” This temple, he wrote, “would recall the days when your mother pressed you to her bosom and your final sob was hushed by a protecting spirit hovering over you, warm and large.” It would achieve a “transition from sadness to content.”
As they wander around the Palace and its lagoon
—for its magnificent setting is an inseparable part of it—some may feel the sense of a protecting maternal spirit. The Palace has never had that particular effect on me. But it could, because it offers every other effect.
For Maybeck achieved his goal. He created a building so mysteriously evocative, so perfectly balanced between nature and artifice, reflection and joy, sadness and content, that it is like a giant mood ring. Its appearance depends not only on what time of day you see it but on what emotions you bring to it. The associations it evokes are infinite: a granite peninsula in a High Sierra lake; the endless vegetation-tangled ruins in Termessos, Turkey; the altar of a kindly god, who left it as a gift after a brief visit here.
Who are those mysterious downward-looking women atop the colonnade, their faces turned away? Are they symbols of mourning? Or symbols of searching? Do they sum up the entire building, an impossible, Orpheuslike attempt to bring back the dead? Are they embodiments of time itself, which disappears even as we try to seize it?
Maybeck never explained. But in a way, perhaps he did. After noting that “the artist began his work a long time ago in a nebulous haze of whys,” May-beck wrote that he must work for a long time before he realizes that he is not aiming at an object, but at “a portrayal of the life that is behind the visible.”
The life that is behind the visible: Maybeck’s words recall those of another great Romantic, a young poet who in the face of his own impending death used an ancient urn to celebrate the eternal spirit of art:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …
Like Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts is an elegy so profound that it takes its own place in the pantheon it extols. Like the urn, and the poem about the urn, it says to all those who stand before it,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Chapter 8
The Long March
Mountain Lake, near Lake Street and 12th Avenue
After Sebastián Vizcaíno discovered Monterey in 1602, Spain lost all interest in Alta California for more than 150 years. What led Madrid to settle its neglected possession, oddly enough, was fear of the Russians—the first in a long history of bogus Red Scares that would culminate in the duck-and-cover cold war drills I was forced to take part in as a grade school student in Berkeley in 1960.
Russia was nosing around the west coast of North America. Its explorers had ventured across the Bering Strait in 1743 and begun hunting sea otters in the Aleutian Islands. When they brought their catch to China, they discovered the million-hairs-per-square-inch pelts—sea otters have the densest fur in the world—fetched exorbitant prices. More traders followed, setting up villages in the Aleutians. In late 1767, the Spanish ambassador in St. Petersburg received (false) reports that Indians had killed three hundred Russian troops who had landed in California. The next year, King Charles III was tipped off that two Russian Navy ships had sailed on a secret exploratory mission expedition to Alaska. Alarmed, he decided that the old grass-throwing rites of possession were no longer sufficient and that Spain needed to take actual control of Alta California.
An expedition was dispatched from Mexico to settle the unknown land to the north. Made up of two land parties and two ships, it was led by a veteran soldier named Gaspar de Portolá and under the spiritual guidance of a deeply pious, self-flagellating Franciscan father named Junípero Serra. Serra was once anointed as the greatest Californian of them all: He was the first person from the state who was honored with a statue in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. Today, California no longer knows what to think of him.
The Sacred Expedition, as it was called, was plagued by mishaps. One of the ships dispatched to San Diego, the San Carlos, did not arrive for 110 days. It was a death ship: 24 of the men aboard had died, and the rest were too ravaged by the dread scurvy to lower a boat. After Portolá and Serra established a mission in San Diego—whose priest was soon to be butchered by enraged Indians—Portolá headed up the coast by land, leading 64 men so emaciated from starvation he described them as “skeletons.” His goal was to establish a camp at Monterey, which Vizcaíno had hyperbolically described as “a fine harbor sheltered from all winds.”
When Portolá’s party reached a hill above Monterey, they looked down upon a long, unprotected beach pummeled by great swells from the Pacific. Convinced this open roadstead could not be that snug harbor, he ordered his party to keep heading north. Portolá later explained that the reason no one in his party recognized Monterey was that “we were all under hallucination,” the first recorded example of what would become a familiar San Francisco excuse.
Portolá pushed on, stopping to camp near a stream at present-day Linda Mar in Pacifica. Linda Mar, which is just north of a famously sheer stretch of coastal cliffs called Devil’s Slide, is one of those slightly seedy and forlorn places that dot the central California coast, a collision of nature at its grandest and humanity at its most banal. It’s the last beach enclave in the southern part of Pacifica, an endearingly unglamorous California beach town with a white trash element mixed into its middle-class population. When somebody did a study of drug use among Bay Area high school students some years ago, they had to go to Pacifica to find a big enough cohort of white students to measure their drug use. The weirdest place in the vicinity is Rockaway Beach, a bizarre “village”-like development, as fake as the one in The Prisoner, that seems to have been designed for naughty assignations between retirees and bikers. A few confused tourists stroll around its stage-set-like architecture, while foaming waves break on the jagged golden cliffs behind. For connoisseurs of the half-assed sublime, Rockaway Beach is a case of Château d’Yquem.
Portolá sent a scouting party north to look for Point Reyes, which he believed to be a great harbor. That party, led by Sergeant José Francisco Ortega, walked to the top of a nearby mountain—probably San Bruno Mountain—where they saw a vast body of water. They had discovered San Francisco Bay. A few days later the entire party saw the “grandiose estero” from the top of nearby Sweeney Ridge. By a weird coincidence, the plaque (more or less arbitrarily) marking the discovery site is just a few yards away from a decaying Nike missile guidance station—crumbling testimony to a later Red Scare.
Unfortunately, no one understood the significance of what they had discovered. Portolá and his men were desperately looking for Monterey and were not sure whether it or Point Reyes lay ahead. (Just to add to the Keystone Kops quality of the whole thing, the suitable-for-bathtub-toys inlet at Point Reyes was called “San Francisco.”) After they discovered there was no way to cross the estuary, they decided in discouragement to return to San Diego. On the way back, they again failed to recognize Monterey. Reduced to eating a mule a day (“What misery!” wrote Portolá), they staggered back to San Diego “smelling frightfully of mule meat,” only to face the caustic tongue of Father Serra, who said, “You come from Rome without having seen the Pope.”
So far, so stupid, but the comedy of errors had just begun. Believing that the bay was a great river running out of the heart of the continent, the Spanish kept up a futile search for the “port and great river of San Francisco” for years. When a high-strung captain named Fernando Rivera finally set foot on San Francisco soil in 1774, he dismissed it as a worthless site.
In 1775, the San Carlos, the same ship that had drifted into San Diego with most of its crew dead, became the first ship to sail through the Golden Gate, under the command of Lieutenant Juan de Ayala. Ayala explored the bay for six weeks before departing for Monterey. In a foreshadowing footnote, Ayala’s men named Mission Bay “Ensenada de los Llorones” (“Cove of the Weepers”), because they saw some Indians weeping on the beach.
(There is something creepy about the role this death ship plays in San Francisco’s history. At the moment that California was born, the San Carlos delivered on her shores a dr
eadful cargo: Strong men cut down by a hideous disease that robbed them of their youth, turned them into emaciated ghosts, and slowly killed them. Later, the same ship was the first one to sail into San Francisco Bay. Two hundred years later, another terrible disease, with strikingly similar symptoms, swept through San Francisco. When I was a taxi driver, just before the AIDS epidemic, I used to regularly pick up gay men leaving a Mission District bathhouse, one of the major vectors for infection in the city. The bathhouse was on San Carlos Street.)
But the place where San Francisco’s history officially begins is on the southern shore of a small body of water in the Richmond District called Mountain Lake. This is the site where, on March 27, 1776, Juan Bautista de Anza, who two years before had blazed an overland trail to California, camped on his first night in what is now San Francisco. He had just led 240 men, women, and children and 1,000 head of cattle 1,200 miles from the Sonoran presidio at Tubac, south of present-day Tucson, Arizona, to California. Crossing harsh deserts and snowy mountains and negotiating with suspicious Indian tribes, Anza had safely delivered the colonists who would permanently settle California to Monterey, then continued on to San Francisco. There he selected sites for the first buildings in the city, the presidio (military base) and the mission—the two indispensable instruments of Spanish colonizing. Only one member of the expedition, a woman who died in childbirth, did not make it to California. It was one of the epic treks in American history.
Anza recruited most of his colonists—soldiers, settlers, and their families—from the Mexican provinces of Sinaloa and Sonora, promising them rations for five years, supplies, and wages. The crown even provided ribbons for women’s hair. Most of the colonists had been “submerged in poverty”; some had shady pasts. One was the mother of Juana Briones de Miranda, an illiterate woman who would escape an abusive husband to become one of the most remarkable figures in San Francisco’s history. Another was an Apache. But a “free mulata” widow named Maria Arballo deserves special mention.
