by Gary Kamiya
For these very reasons, I’m not sure that Debord would have gotten San Francisco. John Muir he was not: Deriding a surrealist experiment in aimless walking that took place outside a town, he wrote, “Wandering in open country is naturally depressing.” Debord’s love-hate fixation with the city as city, with the artificial and constructed, was driven by his Marxist-tinged ideology. His dérives were an attempt to escape the seamless web of capitalist domination he called “the Spectacle,” but the escape could only take place by turning the Spectacle on itself. Nature was irrelevant; it left him cold.
But even though San Francisco’s nature quotient is much higher than Paris’s, it’s still a city. The fallen world of late capitalism has many mansions. And leaving ideology aside, I like to think that Debord and his pals would have found San Francisco a fascinating challenge. As connoisseurs of terrain confronted with a city whose natural landscape trumps its man-made one, they would have been forced to expand their definition of urban space.
Of all the locations in San Francisco, I would have been most interested to know what these students of the “precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment” would have made of Bernal Heights.
Bernal Heights is the city’s trickiest psychogeographical conundrum. Its atmosphere is unmistakable, ineffable, and quintessentially San Francisco. Yet it is incredibly hard to describe.
More than any city I know, San Francisco is made up of discrete neighborhoods, each with its own unique aura. The main reason for this is its terrain. Its convoluted landscape defines San Francisco’s neighborhoods, endowing each of them with a specific terroir. Many of them—Potrero Hill, West Portal, Cole Valley—almost feel like villages. These different atmospheres are more aesthetic and spatial than sociological: The days when the city’s neighborhoods were ingrown ethnic enclaves are vanishing. Still, there’s no shortage of neighborhood pride, as evidenced by the proliferation of hyperlocal newsletters, Web sites, and volunteer groups. A Sienna-style Palio here, with young bloods from North Beach and Ingleside and Potrero Hill and West Portal and the Sunset swaggering boisterously around town under medieval banners before staging a viciously contested bicycle race around Speedway Meadow, would be an instant success.
In this city of quasi-villages, sprawling Bernal Heights is the most village-like place of all. And it doesn’t feel like just any village—it feels strangely old, like a Gold Rush town that was somehow lifted up and dropped down next to the freeway four miles southeast of downtown. It has the hand-tinted atmosphere of a 19th-century village in a Currier and Ives print. The place was originally an old cow pasture, and the sound of horses’ hooves seems to have just faded in the distance. There are certain streets in Bernal that remind me of Angels Camp, the Mother Lode town where my mother’s side of the family grew up. Angels still has an ancient set of decaying wooden chicken steps running down toward Main Street. If any neighborhood in San Francisco had chicken steps, it would be Bernal. In fact, I saw some chickens pecking in a yard over near the Rutledge Street Steps the other day.
Much of Bernal’s enigmatic, quasi-rural atmosphere comes from the big round hill it occupies. The most isolated and dramatic of all of the city’s 50-plus major hills (the exact number is a matter of theological disputation), its great bare top rises 433 feet above amiably bedraggled Mission Street, visible from all over town. With the possible exception of Twin Peaks, no other hill in San Francisco is so barren. The summit looks like it’s right out of a Western, especially when you approach it from the old, arrow-straight streets that run into it from the south. A stark ridge of reddish chert looms up over those venerable streets, casting a weird, Stagecoach-like spell on the vicinity.
If the hill is the biggest reason Bernal feels like a 19th-century village, the second is its streets. Bernal’s streets, especially on its eastern side, are a labyrinth, winding circuitously across the vast reaches of the hill. Peralta Avenue is the most interrupted and illogical street in the city, following what appears to be the logic of quantum mechanics as it suddenly appears again and again where it has no business being. And the streets on the northwest side of the hill, although straight, are equally eccentric, plotted on an odd off-center grid and approached by a strange diagonal street, Coso.
These irregular streets are old, and their houses are old. They are lined with Victorians of all shapes and sizes. The combination of the looming barren hill, the open ground, the eccentric streets, and the old wooden houses adds up to a disheveled 19th-century sublimity that is found nowhere else in town. Potrero Hill, which also has weirdly eclectic old architecture and fantastic views, comes closest to matching Bernal’s atmosphere. But it is much smaller, it is less riddled by byways, and its streets are linear and wider. It only dissolves into mystery a few times. Bernal is permanently caught in a time warp.
In a wild, dérive-addled manifesto, Chtcheglov famously lamented the loss of a mythical “hacienda.” No such building exists outside of Burning Man, but Bernal Heights—at whose foot an actual adobe hacienda once stood in the Spanish days—comes close.
The aura created by the hill and the streets would have given Chtcheglov and company plenty to jot down on their demented aesthetic spreadsheets. But what really would have overloaded their mental calculators is Bernal’s peculiar motleyness. It’s fitting that Bernal is home to a disproportionate number of writers and artists, for a sense of disorder and creative irregularity clings to it. There is more geographically induced entropy here, especially on the hill’s steep and surreal eastern side, than anywhere else in town. The strangest of Bernal’s many intriguing paths is a long little-known trail on city-owned freeway-fringe land off Mayflower Street and Holladay Avenue. This trail hugs the edge of the cliff 100 feet above the freeway, ending just below a dilapidated Dogpatch-y red house in a bizarre clump of prickly pear.
(It’s an unavoidable fact that the most obscure and unused patches of ground in any city are close to freeways. In the 1980s I went on an expedition with a Situationist-inspired group called the Cacophony Society, in which our leader, John Law—who later played a role in creating Burning Man—set up a rigger’s pulley over the 280 freeway on the east side of Potrero Hill, hoisted the attendees into the air, and swung us into one of those strange little concrete bunker-like spaces that were part of the structural reinforcement of the hill face. We sat there like a bunch of Futurist Tom Sawyers in a place no one had ever been, looking down at the cars roaring past at 65 miles an hour. Debord and Chtcheglov, eat your hearts out.)
The freeway trail is the weirdest, but Bernal Heights is riddled with peculiar byways. There are more staircases in Bernal Heights than anywhere else in San Francisco. There are also a disproportionate number of dirt paths, those humble byways that are more important to San Francisco’s soul than all of its freeways and arterials put together. And there are big stretches of land too steep for anyone to use, and which neither the city nor anyone else has fenced off. Joy Street, one of the city’s great undiscovered streets, faces one of these: a big hillside filled with anise plants and graced by a little bench from which the flaneur or dériver can gaze down at the freeway, the industrial stretches, and Bayview Hill.
These empty patches of ground are found all over San Francisco. In fact, one of my favorite ways to discover the city is to get onto high ground, look for a bare stretch of earth, and then head over there. When I find it, I walk onto it until I come to a sign telling me to stop. There usually aren’t any. The comedy of the commons, not the tragedy, prevails in San Francisco. It’s fitting that perhaps the most lovely common space in the entire city is in Bernal Heights, an obscure spot next to a marvelous community garden above Brewster and Costa. On this large, level lawn sits a round table and seven delightful chairs, free to all, tangible evidence that Hobbes was wrong.
When I moved to Bernal Heights in the early 1970s, one stretch of Brewster was completely unpaved. You’d go out walking past a huge Victorian house and a big eucalyptus tree and come to a dusty country
lane, which petered out past a few ramshackle houses and decaying cars. It was not paved over until the 1990s. Today it is lined with sterile expensive buildings, but for me, that lost dirt lane is as permanent a part of San Francisco’s eternal landscape as the cargo ship my dad once took me to watch being unloaded by crane at one of the piers north of the Ferry Building.
These are some of the things that make Bernal Heights feel the way it does. If Debord fed them into his psychogeographical algorithm, maybe he’d come up with the precise formula. But that formula would never capture all of my feelings about Bernal. For there is a variable that is impossible to control for, something that trumps the laws of location: time. Or, more precisely, felt time. Experience. Life.
I moved to Bernal in 1973. My cousin Jon and I were 20-year-old college dropouts and complete ne’er-do-wells. We took turns working clerical jobs for a temp service called Kelly Girl. The usual routine was for one of us to sign up and start working, while the other one leaned and loafed at his ease, observing a spear of summer grass. After four or five months, the job would end, and whoever was working would be laid off, which entitled him to begin collecting unemployment. At that point, the other one would sign up at Kelly Girl, and the whole cycle would begin again. It was not a pattern of behavior that would have brought joy to the heart of Ronald Reagan, governor of California at the time.
We actually felt quite middle-class. Before we became Kelly Girls, when we were both unemployed, we lived on potatoes and carrots with a few sausages thrown in, washing this serflike repast down with three-dollar-a-gallon Mountain Castle wine. Our Kelly Girl income allowed us to eat chicken and supplement the Mountain Castle with occasional fifths of Johnnie Walker. We had finished a house-sit on Pine Street and were looking for a place to rent. We saw an ad for a house on Prospect Street. It was an unusual deal, a lease-option to buy. We looked it up on the map and went over to Mission and Precita, where I made a call from the payphone at an old Rexall drugstore, which stocked liquor and paperback books. The house was a dilapidated 1886 Italianate Victorian on the steep slope of Prospect Street, on the northwest part of the hill, with a panoramic view of Twin Peaks and downtown and an overgrown backyard.
We decided to take it and drove down to South San Francisco to sign the papers. The terminally uptight middle-age realtor told us that the building was technically condemned but that the city would work with us on it. The rent was $250 a month, and the purchase price, if we decided to exercise the lease option, was $29,200. We moved in.
What is there to say, looking back from the moon of 40 years later, about being 20 years old and living in your first real place, the first place for which you paid rent? Music playing constantly. Johnnie Walker–fueled philosophical debates. Raucous parties. Long-gone girlfriends, long-gone friends. Throwing pork chop bones to the cats in the corner. Playing the guitar. Bowling. Eating at a cheap Mission Street joint called Palace Family Steak House. Looking out the window at the lights of Twin Peaks. Asking our parents for $5,000 to buy the place and being laughed at. Reading P. G. Wodehouse as a daily hangover cure. Wandering around San Francisco. Planning to read Nietzsche again and not doing it. Going to bed at 3 A.M. and waking up at noon for a year. Moving out.
In 2011, Jon and I found ourselves back in Bernal when he had a salsa gig at a bar on Mission Street called El Rio. Neither of us had walked through the old neighborhood in more than 30 years. We wandered around a little bit, marveling at what we remembered and what we had forgotten. Our old house was all fixed up and probably worth a million bucks. We bought a bottle of wine at a Mission Street liquor store and drank it while we ate dinner in the old Rexall drugstore, now a nouveau barbecue joint. Neither of us got drunk enough to start going on about how those had been the happiest days of our lives. But both of us knew that they were gone forever, and so were the two young, foolish, hopeful men we once had been. The hill was the only thing that was left.
At the time, that felt like a consolation. Right now, it doesn’t. For a place can only summon up the past. What you do with those memories is up to you.
Chapter 17
Huck’s Hideaway
The Dick-Young Apartments, 823 Grant Avenue,
former site of William Richardson’s lean-to
My favorite period in San Francisco’s entire history takes place between 1835 and 1846. During those enchanted years, the village of Yerba Buena—the future San Francisco—was so tiny that almost every single person who lived there can be identified, so somnolescent that the slamming of a door was news, and so strangely, blissfully remote that its cast of resourceful oddballs, lucky veterans, and adventurous drunks seems to exist in a decrepit fairy tale, like the paisanos in John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. These were San Francisco’s lost-boy years, when a band of merry souls—“a few romantics and dream-drugged escapists,” in Bernard DeVoto’s words—fleeted the time carelessly in their snug little hideaway west of the West.
Yerba Buena’s first inhabitant, William Richardson, chose his house site above the cove on June 25, 1835. Five months later, halfway across the continent, a baby named Samuel Langhorn Clemens was born in what he later described as the “almost invisible hamlet” of Florida, Missouri. Mark Twain, who was to find his literary calling in San Francisco, created an unrivaled American paradise when he recollected his boyhood on the banks of a great river and the edge of civilization in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At the end of Twain’s masterpiece, Huck famously says, “I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest.” Huck wasn’t talking about Yerba Buena, but he could have been. For the 11 years, seven months, and five days of its charmed existence, Yerba Buena was that territory. It was a place beyond the reach of the Aunt Sallies of the world.
In William Heath Davis’s Sixty Years in California, one of the most delightful books about the city’s earliest years, Davis recalls how in 1840 he spent a week on Goat Island (now Yerba Buena Island), cutting wood, reading, and fishing. It was a San Francisco version of Huck and Jim’s stay on Jackson Island. Like their magical sojourn, Yerba Buena’s first decade was a small miracle of racial harmony, an escape from American gravity. Also like theirs, it was not fated to last.
On August 2, 1822, the bedraggled “Spanish” soldiers at the Presidio, who did not even know that they had been subjects of Mexico for almost a year, fired a salute as the British whaler Orion sailed through the Golden Gate. The Orion, commanded by William Barney, sailed past the Presidio, weathered the northeast tip of the peninsula, and anchored in a cove off a vanished promontory called Clark’s Point, near the present-day intersection of Broadway and Battery in the lee of Telegraph Hill. The ship, one of the first non-Russian vessels to enter San Francisco Bay, badly needed supplies. Her first mate, 27-year-old William Richardson, was sent ashore because he spoke Spanish.
Born in London, Richardson had gone to sea at the age of 12, starting as a cabin boy in the British merchant marine. He had seen the world. In the next 24 hours, he would reinvent his life.
Richardson rowed to the sandy beach, where he was greeted by a squad of soldiers who escorted him to the Presidio, three miles to the west. They rode through the wind-blown dunes, crossing between Nob and Russian Hills at the puerto suelo (low pass) at Pacific and Jones. Then they continued past the little lake at Gough and Greenwich and the old Indian village on the northern shore.
When Richardson arrived at the fort, he was greeted warmly by its comandante, Don Ignacio Martinez, who invited him to a fiesta he was hosting that very evening. Martinez introduced the young Englishman to his guests, a group of fellow officers and their wives, and began pouring aguardiente as the music began. Richardson found himself dancing with the comandante’s eldest daughter, a 19-year-old named Maria Antonia Martinez with long black hair and flashing brown eyes. He himself was tall and slender and elegantly dressed in a braided coat and nankeen trousers.
Richardson did not know it, but Maria Antonia had fallen in love with him at first sight. As he had leape
d off the boat, she had exclaimed to her friends, “Oh, que hombre tan hermosa el estranjero que desembarco del bote; el va hacer mi novio y yo voy hacer su esposa.” (“Oh, what a handsome man that foreigner is who just got off the boat. He will be my bridegroom and I will be his wife.”)
The guests danced the jarabe, the jota, the contradanza, and other Spanish dances. Richardson did an Irish jig, to the delight of the guests. The fiesta did not break up until dawn.
When Richardson returned to the ship, no doubt feeling like he had just visited a different and much superior planet, he found an enraged Captain Barney. Furious that his first mate had left the ship anchored all night in rough waters, envious that he had missed the party, or both, Barney severely reprimanded Richardson. What happened next is unclear, but Richardson apparently jumped ship and came ashore, where he explained his situation to Don Martinez. The comandante offered his hospitality. Smitten with Maria Antonia, Richardson decided to stay in California.
Romulus-and-Remus-like legends about the founding of cities are unreliable at best. But it cannot be a coincidence that one of the world’s great cosmopolitan party towns was founded by a runaway who had just met a mixed-race hottie at an all-nighter.
Martinez advised Richardson to go to Monterey, the territory’s capital, to get permission from the governor to stay. The governor granted Richardson permission, on condition that he teach the Californians navigation and carpentry, two of the many skills they sorely lacked. Richardson returned to live at the Presidio. He was the first foreigner to settle in the Bay Area. (In 1822 there were only eight English-speaking foreign residents in all of California, all of them sailors.)
