Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  But none of the fathers’ good intentions can alter the fact that their entire project, measured even by their own standards, was a complete failure. Fifty-four thousand Indians, most of them from the coastal regions between San Diego and San Francisco, were baptized in California in the mission period. But during that time, the native population in that area fell from 72,000 to 18,000. The biggest killer was disease. At Mission Dolores, a measles epidemic in 1806 killed 236 people in nine months. As the pioneering anthropologist Alfred Kroeber noted, “The brute upshot of missionization, in spite of its kindly flavor and humanitarian root, was only one thing: death.”

  Because of the cold weather and poor food, the death rate for Indians at Mission Dolores was the highest of any mission in the chain. Between 1800 and 1820, 200 replacement neophytes a year had to be brought in to keep the mission population at 1,000. Conditions were so bad that a hospital mission was opened at San Rafael in 1817. The Indian population at Mission Dolores peaked in 1825, with 1,252 people. By this time, most of the local Indians had come into the missions. Of those 1,252 people, only 190 were Ohlone speakers, and only 18 of those were Yelamu. Most of the rest had died.

  By 1830, the decline of the native population meant that the mission population had dropped precipitously. There were only 13 Yelamu still alive—3 men and their wives and 6 children. By 1847, 14 years after the missions had been secularized, a census found only 34 Indians on the entire San Francisco peninsula.

  In 1850, an Indian agent interviewed Pedro Alcantara, who was thought to be the last living Yelamu. Born in 1786 and baptized at Mission Dolores, Alcantara was Yelamu on his mother’s side and Cotegen on his father’s. He said, “I am very old … My people were once around me like the sands of the shore … many … many. They have all passed away. They have died like the grass … They have gone to the mountains. I do not complain, the antelope falls with the arrow. I had a son. I loved him. When the palefaces came he went away. I do not know where he is. I am a Christian Indian, I am all that is left of my people. I am alone.”

  In fact, Alcantara’s son, Bernardino, had gone away only temporarily, possibly to the gold mines. Bernardino, in turn, had several children, one of whom, Marie Bernal Buffet, was tracked down by the San Francisco Examiner in 1922. The reporter found her dying in poverty in her little home in Millbrae. With her death, the last member of the Yelamu people passed from the earth.

  Pedro Alcantara’s lament was premature, but in the essentials the old man was right. His people, his culture, his world, had been destroyed, swallowed up by an unfathomable power whose symbolic center was the white adobe building with the three bells, the one that now stands peacefully on the edge of the Mission District.

  I do not complain, the antelope falls with the arrow. Alcantara’s words remain in the mind, like the fading overtones after the ringing of bells. The missions will always carry a bitter legacy. Those words cannot change that fact. But they can, perhaps, help us make peace with it. They can allow us to see that white church on Dolores Street without sentimentality but without rancor, as another ripple in the river, a blood-red pane in the vast stained-glass window of San Francisco.

  Chapter 12

  Maximum City

  Jackson and Hyde Streets

  I live on Jackson Street, in northern Nob Hill, just below the corner where the cable cars on the Powell-Hyde line turn north onto Hyde. The cars rattle around that sharp curve with the tourists hanging on, head down the last block on Nob Hill, cross the saddle at Broadway, then clank along the top of Russian Hill, past the famous crooked street Lombard, over the crest of the hill, past the Norwegian Seaman’s Church with its big anchor in the yard, and down the long 21-degree grade to the cable car turnaround near the northern waterfront, the gripmen leaning hard over their long levers.

  The sweeping view of the bay you see looking down Hyde from the top of the hill, with Alcatraz straight ahead and Angel Island behind it, is one of the most spectacular in the city. It is also the one image of San Francisco that has probably been seen by more Americans than any other, thanks to a packaged food product of Armenian origin called Rice-A-Roni. TV commercials for Rice-A-Roni started running in 1958, and they have been on the air ever since—probably the most effective use of a city as branding in the history of American advertising. As a cable car drops over the hill, an insufferably catchy jingle ends with the phrase “Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat!” and a final, chipper “ding ding!”

  I sometimes wonder if any tourists on the Hyde Street line, as they look down at that stupendous view, find it polluted, or even replaced, by their memory of the Rice-A-Roni commercial. Roland Barthes compiled a whole list of such Invasion-of-the-Image-Snatchers moments in his book Mythologies. But you don’t have to be a French semiotician to have experienced them. Every tourist has felt the letdown of being unable to see some world-historical monument because they’re trapped inside a guidebook’s description of it. I once spent two futile hours at the Colosseum, unable to make that vast arena become anything other than the visual appendage of some Cliff’s Notes version of Roman history.

  Like all fabled cities, San Francisco is in constant danger of disappearing into its own postcard. Critics have long accused San Francisco of being too touristy, too smug, too caught up in its own legend. But those are minor sins. A more serious charge was voiced by a New Yorker who once dismissively told a friend of mine (an ex–New Yorker herself), “Oh yeah, it’s beautiful here—but it’s not real.”

  At bottom, her complaint was about money. The critique goes like this: San Francisco has become so expensive that it has lost its soul. It is an urban boutique, an overgrown version of Carmel or Santa Fe, a private playground for dot-com moguls and overpaid techies and investment bankers and businesspeople from Hong Kong. The cops and teachers and artists and barbers and clerks who gave it its sinews and muscle have been priced out, and what is left is a toy city, as impractical and overpriced as its cable cars.

  There’s some validity to this accusation. There’s a reason San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children of any major U.S. city. But the reality is more complicated.

  There’s no denying that San Francisco is extremely expensive. In 2012, a two-bedroom apartment rented for an average of $2,364 a month, the highest price in the country. The average selling price of a single-family house in April 2012 was $1.24 million. Private high schools now cost $35,000 a year; private elementary schools cost $25,000. To buy a modest house and send two kids to private school here, a couple needs to make around $250,000 a year. In short, it’s Manhattan West.

  These prices have taken a toll. Money has a homogenizing effect. San Francisco feels less eccentric, and a lot less blue-collar, than it used to. And it has hardly any black people left. Despite its high crime rate, Oakland, the city’s unglamorous sister across the bay, has a thriving black middle class and an infinitely more rich and mellow racial vibe.

  But San Francisco is not a toy city—not yet, anyway. Despite the high cost of housing, plenty of young people and poor people and artists and working-class people still manage to live here. They live in rent-controlled apartments, or with roommates, or just scrape together the rent every month. It’s harder than ever, and too many people are priced out. But it was never easy. When I moved here in 1971, rents were $250 a month, but there weren’t any more jobs than there are now, and the ones there were paid $500 or $600 a month. The golden age when poets could pay $75 to live in a cottage on Telegraph Hill and eat spaghetti and red wine for 75 cents has been gone for 80 years, and it isn’t coming back.

  I personally think the city’s low point, soul-wise, was during the nauseatingly named “go-go ’80s,” when young zombie business types escaped their containment zone in the Marina and shamelessly flaunted their suits and ties in North Beach. The Google, Twitter, and Zynga employees and graphic artist/baristas who have replaced those Reagan-era interlopers seem preferable to me, although it remains to be seen whether the second dotcom boom wil
l bring in so much of what my schoolteacher pal Ed Lopez calls “air money” that the city becomes intolerable.

  But arguments about whether a city has lost its soul are as subjective as arguments about whether a certain indie band has sold out. The only real way to evaluate a place is to get granular, to go through the streets building by building. The streets I know best are in my neighborhood, Nob Hill. Since Nob Hill is San Francisco’s most famous neighborhood, a legendarily plutocratic address right in the center of town, it’s a good place to test the toy-city thesis. And conveniently, the Hyde Street cable car line runs through it. So let’s jump on and take an imaginary ride.

  Before we board, it must be admitted that functionally, the cable cars are a toy—or more accurately, a Disneyland ride. They cost a tourist-gouging six bucks for a single trip—the most expensive local transit fare in the United States. But despite suffering the indignity of being used by the city as a de facto tourist tax, the cable cars are real. They were invented to haul people up and down San Francisco’s hills, and they have been clanging up and down them since 1873. Moreover, they are still a viable means of transportation for San Franciscans. The two most popular lines, the north-south Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason lines, carry almost exclusively tourists, but the east-west California Street line carries quite a few locals, people who live on Nob Hill or the southern edge of Pacific Heights and work in the Financial District. (A monthly pass makes these trips affordable.)

  Our ride begins at one of the most touristy spots in town: the cable car turnaround at the foot of Hyde Street, at the west end of Fisherman’s Wharf. Ignoring the buskers and the five-minute-sketch artists, we climb on. The gripman releases the brake, the old wooden car jerks forward, and we are pulled up the long, steep slope at nine and a half miles an hour. We come to the Rice-A-Roni vista at the top of the hill and go past crooked Lombard Street to Greenwich.

  So far, so patrician. In the three minutes and six blocks we have traveled, we have traversed some of the priciest terrain in the country. Houses atop Russian Hill can sell for $13 million or more, and the rents are equally astronomical. (Although even up here, there are plenty of people in rent-controlled apartments.) But cities don’t lose points because they have rich neighborhoods. They gain points when those rich neighborhoods are right next to poor ones, and both are right next to middle-class ones. And they hit the jackpot when multimillionaires live cheek-by-imported-guanciale from immigrants who crush cans for a living. Which they do a few blocks away.

  We roll along Hyde through the little restaurant-and-shop section of Russian Hill, cross Union, and drop down toward Broadway, the nebulous border between Nob and Russian Hills. This is still an expensive neighborhood, but it’s more mixed. In another block, at Pacific, we have returned to Nob Hill and economic reality—Chinese families and working stiffs. The population of Nob Hill is at least half Chinese. We roll up to my corner, Jackson. A Latino jazz sax player and his singer wife live in the apartment building on the corner. Across from them, a sweet-faced Syrian man is struggling to keep his corner grocery going. He bought the store from a Chinese guy who called everybody “bra” and spent most of his time standing outside, smoking cigarettes with a bunch of older Chinese men from the neighborhood, the world’s most innocuous posse. The Chinese owner’s wife is a waitress at a fancy dim sum restaurant downtown. The guy most often behind the counter now is a Yemeni man with a gold tooth who always jokes around with my daughter.

  We climb up another block, then turn east on Washington, and head toward the summit of Nob Hill at Jones. On Jackson, where the Hyde Street car runs going the other way, my impecunious poet pal Tom lives in a literal garret. On the corner of Jackson and Leavenworth lives an elderly, bullet-headed Italian photographer who likes to ring a cable car bell that hangs in his window. He’s been there forever. Up Jackson, the Chinese son of my former landlady has set up housekeeping with his young family in one of the buildings she owns. Another friend, a conceptual artist, lives in another of her buildings. The same motley cast of characters has been walking up and down Jackson Street for close to 30 years.

  (Sometimes the character of a neighborhood is revealed in unexpected ways. In 2013, a Trader Joe’s opened at California and Hyde, replacing a scary old 24-hour Cala Foods whose 3 A.M. clientele were legendarily unsavory. The grocery Mecca instantly provided a comprehensive portrait of Nob Hill’s inhabitants: They are much younger, hipper, and more “San Francisco” than I had thought. Odd that a supermarket can permanently change one’s sense of one’s neighborhood.)

  We cross Jones and drop down the steep grade, the buildings of downtown and the bay flashing in front of us. This identical view—all the buildings in it are still there—is depicted in a wonderful Saturday Evening Post cover that ran on September 29, 1945, six weeks after V-J Day. A bunch of sailors carrying their bags are running toward a cable car that is poised to drop downhill. The cable car is jammed with men, every one of them in uniform. Other sailors look down from the windows of apartment buildings on both sides of Washington, which have No Vacancy and Rooms to Let signs. The Bay Bridge and the Ferry Building glow in the sun in the distance. In the foreground a Chinese man with a basket of fruit on his head and a little Chinese kid, both wearing traditional clothes, gawk at the sailors. A young sailor leaning way outside the cable car looks back with a smile. The painting is corny as hell, and one of the most joyous images of San Francisco I know.

  The two Chinese figures are a weird Orientalist touch. Except that they aren’t. Because even on the windswept top of the hill, we’re in a finger of Chinatown. And we’re about to roll into it.

  Going down Washington is like descending through an archaeological dig whose exposed strata reveal completely different cities. There’s a spectacular new house on the very summit of the hill, and the first block is filled with classy, expensive apartments. But one block after you cross elegant Taylor Street, at Mason, decrepit tenements begin to appear. In the four blocks between Jones and Stockton (the cable car turns a block earlier, on Powell) you go from grand apartments and soaring vistas to filthy alleys and neon signs, from deserted streets to sidewalks so packed you shuffle along like you’re on Nathan Road in Kowloon. It has to be one of the most dizzying four-block transitions in any city in the world.

  Jane Jacobs nailed it 51 years ago in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Cities are kept alive by heterogeneity—the juxtaposition of radically different things in a small space. Paris lost a piece of its soul forever when it bulldozed Les Halles. New York is still the king of glorious urbanism, but it took a heavy hit when Times Square was cleaned up. San Francisco’s list of urban offenses is too long to count. But in its very heart, where its seven-by-seven-mile area gets compressed down to a little steep mile-by-mile square, everything essential to the city is jammed together, the rich and the poor, the sublime and the ridiculous, the ethereal and the raunchy. It’s where the city’s tectonic plates meet.

  One of those fault lines runs through my block. In fact, it runs through my property. To explain this requires a brief real estate digression.

  I’ve lived on Jackson Street for 29 years. For 16 of those years, I rented an apartment on Jackson between Jones and Leavenworth, two blocks from where I live now. It was a huge two-bedroom place with a panoramic view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The rent was low, and my kindly Chinese landlady didn’t even raise it for years. Then, in 1999, I was strolling down Jackson past Hyde when I saw a small, run-down Edwardian house with a For Sale sign on it.

  I was intrigued. This was my ‘hood. There are very few single-family houses anywhere in the northeast heart of the city. My wife and I had been looking in a desultory way at houses, so we went to see it. It turned out that two buildings were for sale on the same deep, narrow lot—the house in front and a three-unit apartment behind it. A dozen or so potential buyers, mostly Chinese but with a few white people mixed in, wandered around checking it out.

  The single-family house was, to put it mildl
y, not ready for its spread in Martha Stewart Living. It had been divided up into a bunch of locked-off rooms. The banister of the staircase leading upstairs had been covered over with plasterboard and a door framed in front of the stairs. There were about 15 Chinese people living in the house, including an old lady and a baby in the basement, an old couple in the front room, a young family of four in an ugly-linoleum-floored room next to the deeply yucky downstairs kitchen, and seven or eight more people living upstairs, where an even yuckier illegal kitchen had been installed. It looked like the joint hadn’t been painted in 30 years.

  The back building had even more tenants—about 20 in the three apartments—and was equally run-down. The whole deal wasn’t nearly as squalid as another tenement we had looked at in the neighborhood, but it was definitely a Chinatown rooming house.

  De facto rooming houses, many of which are nominally illegal, constitute the majority of apartments in Chinatown. Chinese landlords there generally rent to other Chinese, whom they pack into illegally divided houses or apartments with bedsheet partitions. The tenants live in incredibly crowded conditions, sharing kitchens and bathrooms in poorly maintained buildings, but entire families often pay only $400 or $500 a month rent. You could see the owners as slumlords, but you could also see them as providing a social service. And as I was about to find out, if you buy the building, you become your own private nonprofit housing agency.