Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  This was at the height of the dot-com boom. People were throwing money hand over fist at anything that didn’t move. Real estate, which has been a San Francisco obsession since city officials during the Gold Rush carved off the choicest lots in an orgy of self-dealing, was booming too. So you’d think that one of the only single-family houses on Nob Hill, a nice if trashed little 1908 Edwardian just off the cable car line, on a pleasantly residential, racially mixed street, with a yard, a rooftop view of the Golden Gate Bridge, and including an apartment house on the same lot, would have created a feeding frenzy—especially because the price was absurdly low.

  But no one except us was interested. The reason was simple. The Chinese buyers were looking at the deal as a rental-income investment, and the numbers didn’t work—the rents were much too low. The white buyers obviously had a different problem: They were going to buy it to live there, and they didn’t want to have to deal with swarms of impoverished Chinese tenants. And if there were any dot-com moguls among them, they wanted to buy a place they could move right into.

  I wasn’t overjoyed by the prospect of becoming an involuntary slumlord, not to mention being locked in forever to collecting rents that were only four times more than the water bill, but I decided that it was worth putting up with it to buy a house. Besides, I’d been renting from a Chinese landlord for 16 years, so I was karmically due to reverse roles. So we made an offer $1,000 over the asking price—this at a time when bidding wars on shanties in the Mission District would routinely go up to $50,000 or more over asking. It was immediately accepted.

  We’ve been living there ever since. Most of the tenants in the back building are still there. They’re good people. We get along fine, observing the unspoken rule: They pay me almost nothing, and they don’t bug me on landlord-related issues unless something fairly major goes wrong.

  For years, one of my tenants was the grandfather of one of the extended families who live in the top apartment. They moved him in illegally and I was too hapless to do anything about it. My cousin nicknamed him the General because he stood as straight as a ramrod and had eyes like a hawk. It was impossible to say how old he was. He could have been 55 or 75. He spoke no English. Maybe he really was a general back in the Cultural Revolution, was accused of being a “capitalist roader,” managed to escape, and ended up on Nob Hill. I have no idea.

  The General spent his days collecting and selling cans and bottles at the local recycling center. This is a major Chinatown cottage industry. You’ll see stooped old people walking down the street with a stick balanced over their shoulder and bags on either end. It’s a sight you could have seen in Guangdong Province during the Tang Dynasty. I once watched an old woman sitting next to the sandlot of the playground on Hang Ah Alley, carefully pouring small measures of sand into cans to make them heavier.

  The General wasn’t that unscrupulous. I would hear him rummaging around down in the walkway that goes to the back building, shoving aluminum cans and bottles into black plastic garbage bags, and loading the bags onto a shopping cart. Then he’d head out to the closest recycling center to make a few bucks. He moved out a while ago, but his middle-aged daughter took over the enterprise. The edge of the walkway is still packed with bags of bottles and cans.

  Across the street from our house is a brand-new three-unit modernist condo building that took more than a year to construct. It was one of those foundation-up jobs where they bring in structural steel with cranes. I took a tour of one of the units before it sold. The dishwasher was worth more than my car. The top unit had a rooftop hot tub with a panoramic view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It sold for $2.5 million. It’s always empty. I’ve only seen the owner once.

  So there we are, the three of us, the rich, the poor, and the downwardly mobile middle, within 100 feet of one another. Negative and positive charges. Creating the invisible electricity that keeps this screwed-up, heartless, unfathomable city running.

  Chapter 13

  Outside Sands

  Baker Beach

  Baker Beach is the least celebrated great urban beach in the world. Most non–San Franciscans have never heard of it. When travel magazines put together their (admittedly moronic) 10-best-city-beaches lists, it is nowhere to be seen. In a superficial sense, this is understandable. Baker does not have the sweep of Ipanema or Copacabana, the golden sand of Waikiki, the exhilarating muscularity of Miami’s South Beach or Tel Aviv’s Gordon-Frishman, the surf of Sydney’s Bondi. But it is every bit their peer. Because of its location just beyond the Golden Gate, Baker Beach faces the literal and symbolic gateway to a continent—and faces it from the outside. No other city beach in the world has such a location. It’s as if Venice Beach were plunked down beyond the Statue of Liberty, between two sets of ancient cliffs through which the surging waters of an ocean and the tidal currents of a vast bay dueled.

  The Golden Gate Bridge is such a symbol of finality, so associated with the end of the continent, that even San Franciscans tend to imagine it as standing at the extreme western edge of the city. The truth is that it hits the city a full two miles east of Point Lobos. Baker Beach, which occupies the gently curving center of that two-mile stretch, is a reminder that the most dramatic and spectacular part of the entire city lies west of the great bridge. For not only does the beach look back at the Golden Gate; it also faces the two mighty formations that guard it, the Marin Headlands and Lands End. This setting, between the towering cliffs to the west and the bridge, gives Baker Beach a feeling of being simultaneously detached from the city and nestled into its heart. It is more protected and comfortable than the city’s longest beach, the exposed, windswept, west-facing Ocean Beach, and yet because it faces the Golden Gate and the channel cliffs, it is far more dramatic. Marvelous as it is, Ocean Beach could exist in any seaside city. Baker Beach could only be found in San Francisco.

  Actually, the real reason this stunningly beautiful beach is so underappreciated is because San Francisco does not have a conventional beach culture. Los Angeles, Rio, Sydney, and the other legendary beach cities have a fully developed beach lifestyle. In Rio, I would stroll four downtown blocks to Ipanema wearing a Speedo through hordes of people, and each day that I walked to the sea, they looked straight ahead, not at me. The one time I tried that here, walking down Polk Street to Aquatic Park, I felt like some West Coast version of the Iranian Basij was about to beat me with sticks and force me to get dressed.

  But this is San Francisco, after all, and Baker is as sybaritic as any of its more celebrated cousins. The northern part of the beach is filled on warm days with naked people, not all of whom embrace the nonlibidinous, carrot-juice-drinking, “varing no clothing iss only for vun’s health!” approach to nudism. (Not that such people aren’t around. Possibly the most jaw-dropping sight I have ever seen in San Francisco was an elderly, earnest-looking couple with walking sticks strolling briskly along next to the DiMaggio Playground in North Beach one warm summer afternoon—stark naked.) It is appropriate that this part of the beach dead-ends at an outcropping of serpentine, because I have witnessed quite a few snake-y dudes here, trying to convince various Eves to chomp on apples. If the fruit of that forbidden tree really did bring death into the world and all our woe, a significant part of that woe is contributed by the lame-ass voyeurs who sit high up on the bluffs with binoculars, scoping out the naked chicks below. Once, I actually saw a guy dressed in camouflage fatigues there, a disgrace to the proud military tradition of the Pacific Port of Embarkation.

  The truly hard-core action, however, used to take place on the isolated and hard-to-get-to beaches north of Baker. In the venerable tradition of gay-cruising haunts in obscure locations, those beaches and the cliffs above them were a happy hunting ground for dozens of gay men. Hiking in that sublime stretch of lost coast was an adventure: You’d go past a bush and suddenly bump into a bearded guy in a plaid shirt just standing there like a flexed-up statue, ready for action. They were good furtive times while they lasted, but the lost coast was opened up
when trails were put in. San Francisco cruising seems now to have returned to its time-honored haunt, Buena Vista Park. Or so at least one gleans from a Web site bearing the admirably straightforward name Cruising Gays City Hookup Guide. In the comments on Buena Vista Park, someone enthusiastically posted, “I just fucking love this park. It’s like a game preserve of faggotry.”

  The Satyricon-like orgy on the adjoining sands may be over, but Baker Beach will always be associated with crazy revelry and hedonistic ritual. For it was here on the summer solstice in 1986 that a man named Larry Harvey and a friend built a wooden figure and set fire to it in front of 20 people. That fire grew to become Burning Man, the largest and most astonishing countercultural event in the world. It makes sense that it started here.

  For years, I used to walk my dog at Baker Beach after dropping my daughter off at school, and I still come out here all the time, in sun, in clouds, in fog, in rain. No matter how many times you approach it from the road that winds along the edge of the cliffs in the Presidio, the view is breathtaking: a patch of white sand facing the sea, filtered by trees, framed by majestic rock formations, pounded by waves. In the early morning it is sometimes completely deserted. I am always astonished that this half-mile-long stretch of paradise exists in a big city. There are a dozen or so big houses on top of the cliff at the southern end, but other than that, it is completely unspoiled. Wondrous Lobos Creek enters the ocean here. Dolphins routinely cavort offshore. The big ships, still carrying their imperishable cargo of romance, sail past Mile Rock and disappear over the horizon. Others steam in, banged-up metal postcards from Liberia and Panama, getting longer and dirtier and more fascinating as they approach the Golden Gate.

  The few houses aside, the beach looks almost exactly the same as it did on that spring day in 1776 when Anza and Font stood on its sands after riding over the dunes from Mountain Lake. The waves roll in and out as they did on that day, as they will do until this beach no longer exists. The one thing that is different looms up beyond the rocks to the north, a 746-foot-high reminder in International Orange that human beings, who have been here for such a short time, can sometimes create things that are as beautiful as the world itself.

  Chapter 14

  Pluto on the Pacific

  The Quadrangle, Moraga and Graham Streets, the Presidio of San Francisco

  The story of the Presidio’s early years is a story of utter futility. No other time or place in the city’s history is as pointless and woebegone. For half a century, a handful of illiterate soldiers, often lacking weapons or even uniforms, shivering in crude adobes so poorly built they would turn into mud pies with the first storm, stood pathetic guard at the fog-shrouded mouth of the Golden Gate, waiting for invasions that never came. The only time the Presidio fired its guns in anger, if you can call it that, was when its garrison fired a single shot at a mysterious ship that appeared offshore, refused to identify itself, and spent the night at anchor before sailing away. During the last 12 years of Spanish rule, the troops were never paid. When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, the news took more than a year to reach the Presidio. The Spanish outpost was so cut off from the world that it might as well have been called Pluto on the Pacific.

  If possible, things got even worse during the 25 years that the Mexican flag waved over the crude quadrangle facing Angel Island. One year, the garrison was paid in cigarettes. Another year, all the troops seem to have simply disappeared.

  Anza had originally selected a site for the Presidio on the heights above present-day Fort Point. Fort Point is the place where Madeleine jumps into the bay in Vertigo, and if the great captain had known the pathetic fate that awaited his fortress, he might have leaped into the water himself. When Anza’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Moraga, arrived leading the “California Mayflower” party of 16 soldiers, two priests, seven colonists and assorted servants and vaqueros, he realized that the original site, although militarily logical, was too cold, windy, and far from water, so he relocated it to its present location a mile southeast. As was the Spanish custom, the outpost was laid out as a square quadrangle, 92 varas (a little less than a yard) per side. Construction commenced, and thunderous broadsides celebrated the Presidio’s dedication on September 17, 1776—probably the most robust use of shot and shell in the fort’s history.

  The Presidio today is a lovely, shaggy space, run since 1996 by a unique U.S. government corporation called the Presidio Trust. The three-square-mile area was a U.S. Army base for 219 years, and it still has an odd, quaint feeling, halfway between military museum and overgrown park. Its barracks and fancy officers’ houses have been taken over by a variety of nonprofits and commercial enterprises. Star Wars director George Lucas’s company put in a state-of-the-art $300-million complex near the old Letterman Hospital. Some of the most wondrous spots in San Francisco, like El Polin Spring, are in the Presidio. But few tangible traces of the Spanish and Mexican eras remain. You have to pick up their scent in the air.

  A stone monument on the gently sloping lawn that runs down to the bay marks the northwest corner of the old Presidio quadrangle. Almost nothing of it is left, although the present-day Officers’ Club contains some adobe bricks that date to around 1815 (and are possibly as old as 1776). A parking lot covers most of the old enclosure. The desolation of the old Presidio cannot really be felt here. But on the obscure trails that wind through the sand dunes above El Polin Spring and peter out at Lover’s Lane, the ancient footpath from the Presidio to Mission Dolores, it is not hard to imagine the loneliness of life 200 years ago, before there was a city or even a village.

  The purpose of the Presidio was to wave the Spanish flag at the Golden Gate, warning off any foreign interlopers who harbored designs on the Great River and Harbor of San Francisco, and to assist the mission. For the Spanish crown, these were crucial objectives, but it was unable or unwilling to pay for them. It only funded two-thirds of Anza’s initial request for 22,000 pesos, and the purse strings drew even tighter after that. After insurrectionists seized Spanish supply ships in 1810, the bankrupt crown stopped sending money altogether.

  The Presidio had only a token garrison. For its first 20 years, 30 to 40 soldados de cuera (leather soldiers, so named because of their thick, arrow-stopping leather jackets) were officially enrolled, but only 10 to 20 were actually on duty. Two years after they arrived, half of this threadbare detachment still did not have muskets, pistols, swords, or lances. In the ultimate indignity, two-thirds of the leather soldiers did not even possess their trademark jackets.

  These troops were technically Spanish, but as throughout California’s Hispanic history, that term is misleading. Almost all were born in Mexico, and most of them were so-called castas, or people of mixed race. Over the centuries that it colonized the New World, Spain had developed a system of racial classification known as the systema de castas. The systema de castas was instituted in the early 1600s because the criollos, the colonial elite born in the Americas of unmixed or “pure” Spanish blood, wanted to be distinguished from people of mixed race. Since there was so much racial mixing, the crown formulated a bizarrely precise list of racial combinations:

  Spanish and Indian: mestizo

  Mestizo and Spanish woman: castizo

  Castizo woman and Spaniard: Spaniard

  Spanish woman and negro: mulatto

  Spaniard and mulatto: morisco

  Morisco woman and Spaniard: albino

  Spaniard and albino: torna atras

  Indio (Indian) and torno atras: lobo

  Lobo and Indio woman: zambaigo

  Zambaigo and Indio woman: cambujo

  And so on. These classifications were never as rigid as the Anglo-American “one drop rule,” according to which anyone with black ancestry, for example, was (and usually still is) identified as black. But although it allowed more mobility, it was still hierarchical: The Spaniards at the top enjoyed more privileges and status; the blacks and Indians at the bottom less.

  Not surprisingly, Spanish-sp
eaking people in the New World invariably changed their casta status “up.” Negros became mulattos, mulattos became mestizos, and mestizos became Spaniards. By 1773, 49.3 percent of soldiers in Spain’s frontier provinces were listed as español, even though a contemporary missionary said that almost none of them were of pure Spanish blood.

  The soldiers at the Presidio also seized the opportunity to climb the racial ladder. In 1776, 39 percent of the Anza colonists were listed as español. By 1782 that had increased to 44 percent; by 1790 to 57 percent. Concomitantly, those who identified themselves as mulatto and indio decreased sharply. When ordered to identify the caste of soldiers and settlers, missionaries complained that it was impossible because they all claimed to be pure-blooded Spanish. Over time, the colonists dropped all racial classifications, preferring to identify themselves as gente de razón (people of reason—as distinguished from Indians), hijos de pais (sons of the country), or simply as Californios. Race mixing and identity shifting (or, in less politically correct terms, “passing”) were thus inscribed in San Francisco from the start.

  For these underequipped men and their families, the biggest challenge at first was just surviving. Housing was a nightmare: All the buildings they erected in 1778 had collapsed by 1780, with even the walls falling apart. Adobe was not the best choice of building material for a fog-shrouded place like the Presidio, and the adobe was of such poor quality that it started disintegrating with the first rains. In 1792 the comandante, Hermenegildo Sal, complained that his buildings kept falling down because his men lacked logs and construction skill.

  The housing problem was never solved. When British captain Frederick William Beechey, commander of H.M.S. Blossom, visited the Presidio in 1826, he found one side of the quadrangle “broken down, and little better than a heap of rubbish and bones, on which jackals, dogs, and vultures were constantly preying.” From a distance, he summed up the appearance of Spain’s outpost as “a sickly column of smoke rising from some dilapidated walls.”