by Gary Kamiya
Like the greatest creative works, the bridge blends nature and artifice exquisitely. No work by Robert Smithson or Andy Goldsworthy or Christo illuminates its site more profoundly. Like a Janus face, it faces in toward man and out toward the world. As Kevin Starr writes in Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge, “Although the result of engineering and art, the Golden Gate Bridge seems to be a natural, even an inevitable, entity as well, like the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth … The Bridge is a triumphant structure, a testimony to the creativity of mankind. At the same time, it also asserts the limits and brevity of human achievement in a cosmos that is as endless and ancient as time itself.”
Seen in this light, the Golden Gate Bridge is the perfect metaphor for the city to which it provides such a sublime entrance. For San Francisco, too, is a bridge between mankind and the natural world. It, too, is suspended above an elemental power that could destroy it in an instant. And it, too, is a beautiful pennant flaunted exultantly in the face of that power.
As the symbolic western door of America, the Golden Gate Bridge inevitably summons comparisons to its East Coast counterpart, the Statue of Liberty. For countless immigrants, the first sight of the Statue of Liberty was something they never forgot. Standing as it does on the opposite end of the continent, and built after the great early-20th-century wave of immigration into the United States, the Golden Gate Bridge is not, like the Statue of Liberty, the symbolic gateway to the country. But it, too, has inspired overpowering emotions among those sighting it for the first time. Harold Gilliam memorably described standing at Fort Point one afternoon as a troop ship approached the bridge after the end of the Korean War: “The vessel was half a mile away, but the moment it passed under the bridge we were startled to hear a shout that rose from hundreds of throats and echoed across the water from the cliffs beyond. This was the place and the symbol every man aboard had been dreaming of during the months and years of exile, and it resulted in a spontaneous upwelling of sentiment and sound—a soldiers’ chorus of total exuberance.”
To cross the sea safely and return home is inscribed in our DNA. It is the theme of the epic that stands at the beginning of our civilization—the story of another old soldier who returned across the sea, after great trials, safely to his home. That was in another time. But we still read Homer’s ancient tale, and will continue to read it as long as words exist, because in his perseverance, his will to survive, and above all his restless intelligence, Odysseus is the most profoundly human character ever created. He is the archetype of our species. He appears to have been created by someone standing miraculously outside the human race.
Odysseus was not a god. He was a mortal. But using only his wits, that cunning man tricked the Sirens, outwitted Polyphemus, survived the Clashing Rocks, strung the unstringable bow.
And—if we believe that some spark of the essentially human is passed on from generation to generation—built the unbuildable bridge.
There are very few words worthy of the 746-foot towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or of the brains and muscle and courage and skill that were required to build it. But the words spoken 2,000 years ago by a blind poet are.
“Tell me, Muse, of that man of many ways …”
Chapter 20
Californio Dreaming
Former Point Rincon, near First and Harrison Streets
In 1836, the Richardsons got their first neighbor. Some savvy Yanks had realized there was good money to be made acting as resident agents for the hide and tallow trade. Jacob Leese, a trader from Ohio who was partners with two other pioneering businessmen, Nathan Spear and William Hinckley, built a two-story wooden house and store just to the south of the Richardsons’ tent. It was the first building in Yerba Buena. To celebrate, Leese threw the first of what was to become an annual Fourth of July party. It was a legendary bash, talked about for years.
Leese invited everyone who was anyone: the American and British residents, the officers of the Presidio, the people from the mission, and the foreign officers of ships in harbor. Hinckley provided a six-piece orchestra, supplemented by two six-pound cannons borrowed from the Presidio.
It was San Francisco’s first party, and Leese set the bar high. The American flag was raised for the first time, next to the Mexican flag, to great applause. When the sun was at its height, the ships fired a salute, to the cheers of the crowd. That evening, Leese held a grand banquet, followed by music and dancing that lasted until dawn the next day. After a short sleep, everyone headed to the village’s favorite excursion site, Point Rincon. On the high ground that formed the southern end of the cove, near present-day First and Harrison Streets, the guests feasted, caroused, and enjoyed the beautiful view of the bay all day, returning to Leese’s house in the evening to resume dancing. The party continued until the morning of July 6, when, according to William Heath Davis, “the ladies became so exhausted that the festivities ceased.”
Leese had adopted one of the Californios’ favorite pastimes, the merienda, or picnic. Tales of the period are full of mouth-watering descriptions of grand excursions in which dozens of revelers, accompanied by wagons groaning with sides of beef, roast turkeys and chickens, beans, tamales, fruit, dulces, wine, and brandy, would head off to a bucolic site at the edge of a lake or a glade. There the partiers would gorge on carne asada (meat broiled on a spit), race horses, play guitars, and sing all day.
Such grand fiestas were among the crowning glories of the California pastoral. That brief era lives in the state’s mythology as a carefree, gracious time when generous-hearted, open-handed Spanish ranchers practiced the art of dolce far niente. As Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez puts it in the final words of her 1929 book Spanish Arcadia, “these wanderers from old Castile [sought] to make of this world a paradise, singing and dancing their happy lives away on the edge of the Peaceful Sea!”
Some of the myth is true. It really was a carefree, gracious time, and the Californios really were as happy and generous as any people who ever walked the face of the earth. Morever, during the few decades of the California pastoral, a peculiar combination of historical circumstances led many Anglo-Saxons and Hispanics to marry, creating a mixed-race society almost unheard of throughout American history. But beneath the surface of the Spanish arcadia were some all-too-human realities.
The Californios may have been the most loveable nouveau riche in history, but they were still nouveau riche, and their open-handed, generous-to-a-fault, profligate lifestyle was driven by status anxiety. As Douglas Monroy points out in his superb study, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California, the rancheros “were of dubious lineage with regard to status, and to acquire social standing befitting their landed domains became their primary ambition.” Part of their anxiety concerned their ethnicity. For the Spanish arcadia was not Spanish at all: Much as the dons liked to pose as “wanderers from old Castile,” they were really mestizos from Mexico, who embraced their new identity as Californios primarily to distinguish themselves from the more recent immigrants from Mexico (many of them foundlings or convicts), whom they reviled as “cholos.” And their willingness to marry their daughters to Yankee and British traders had at least some of its roots in the same anxiety. Monroy writes, “The arriviste gente de razón naturally gravitated toward respectable Anglos to counter the threat that the Mexican immigrants, whose numbers they correctly perceived as growing, posed to their shallowly rooted status and culture.” The rancheros, to put it in urban slang, were “fronting.”
But the fact that the rancheros suffered from status anxiety is far less troubling than the fact that the grand lifestyle that confirmed their status was built on the backs of Indians. Monroy argues that the Californio culture was, in the feudal sense, seigneurial. The lords of the manor were the patriarchs of a few dozen large extended mestizo families, the lucky beneficiaries of the land grants. In the middle, the “poor whites” were the lower-class Mexicans who worked for them. And at the bottom, the Indians, who d
id almost all the work, were the serfs.
As it had since Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, access to free or virtually free Indian labor made the rancheros’ easy lifestyle possible. Almost to a person, contemporary observers commented on how little work the Californio men (the women were a different story) did. Juan Bandini, himself about to become a ranchero, commented, “Riding on horseback and lounging lazily is the gamut of their days, and the women bear all the responsibility of the house.” Richard Henry Dana called the Californios’ aversion to work “the California fever.”
The trademark of the Californio lifestyle was unparalleled hospitality. Every traveler commented on it. José del Carmen Lugo accurately said, “The traveler could go from one end of California to the other without it costing him anything in money, excepting gifts he might wish to make to the Indian servants at the missions or on the ranchos.” The head of the Hudson Bay Company, George Simpson, wrote, “They literally vie with each other in devoting their time, their homes and their means to the entertainment of a stranger.” Mariano Vallejo noted that a hungry traveler could slaughter any cow belonging to anyone, so long as he left the hide where the owner could find it.
The Californios’ approach to life, characterized by love of pleasure, an aversion to conflict, and a live-and-let-live attitude, was about to be destroyed by hard-charging Yankees. But many of the Americans who had lived among the Californios recognized that there was something rare and delightful about the way they lived, and bitterly regretted its loss. “The native Californians were about the happiest and most contented people I ever saw, as also were the foreigners who settled among them and intermarried them, adopted their habits and customs, and became, as it were, a part of themselves.” So wrote William Heath Davis as an old man in 1889.
Davis knew the Californios intimately: Like Richardson and Leese, he married an hija del país. The wholesale sexual mingling between Californios and foreigners in the San Francisco area, as throughout Mexican California, is one of the most extraordinary anomalies in American history. No less than 15 percent of the marriages in California during the Mexican period were intercultural. Almost all the prominent traders in Yerba Buena married Californio women.
It would be unwise to exaggerate the degree of racial enlightenment possessed by either side. Foreign women almost never married Californio men, reflecting a gender taboo that was still in force more than 100 years later, when my Anglo mother scandalized her mother by marrying my Japanese American father in 1950, just two years after California became the first state to strike down a miscegenation law in the landmark Perez v. Sharp case. (My parents were unusual. Most members of my cohort—third-generation mixed-race Japanese Americans—have a white father, often a G.I., and a Japanese mother.) And as we have seen, the Californios tended to identify themselves as pure-blooded Spanish, a claim the foreigners were happy to take at face value: Marrying a “Castilian” was more acceptable than marrying a mixed-race Mexican.
But if marriages between Californios and Yankees were to a greater or lesser degree transactional, self-interested, and class-bound, they still resulted in a genuine intercultural mingling. And it went both ways: the foreigners embraced the Californio culture as much as the Spanish-speakers embraced the Anglo one. Edward Cleveland Kemble, who edited Yerba Buena’s first newspaper, the California Star, called his town a “half-breed babe—[a] half Mexican and half ‘foreign’ prodigy.” With the exception of Louisiana—and that was a slave state—no other place in the country except California could have been described as a “half-breed babe.” (The first non-Indian child born in San Francisco, the daughter of Jacob Leese and wife Maria Vallejo—Mariano Vallejo’s sister—was mixed-race.)
Not surprisingly, the Californios had complex, deeply ambivalent attitudes toward both the United States and Mexico. Leonard Pitt, in his classic 1966 study The Decline of the Californios, notes that “a vague and contradictory patriotism” led the Californians to stand by the mother country during war with America, and argues that “Californians remained, in their heart of hearts, Mexicans.” On the other hand, many Californios saw Mexico not as their mother country but as a “stepmother,” as Governor Alvarado, a proud hijo del país, put it. Some—Mariano Vallejo was the most prominent—admired the vigor, efficiency, and enlightened ideas of America and hoped it would conquer California. Others, perhaps the majority, wanted some kind of independence under Britain or France, but came to realize that was unrealistic. Most came to recognize that, sooner or later, America was going to swallow them up.
Starting in 1841, the year that the Bartleson-Bidwell party became the first wagon train to cross the Sierra, that future began to loom larger. A different, coarser breed of Americans—mountain men, trappers, overland emigrants—began to appear in the little cove. These Yankees had no interest in the Californios, their customs, or their society. They had come as outsiders and they intended to stay outsiders. Many held virulently anti-Mexican feelings, which became common after the Texas revolt of 1836. (The word “greaser” was originally used to refer to lower-class Californios who carried greasy bags of tallow on their backs to the Boston ships; later, Americans began using it as a derogatory term for all Californios.) They were trouble, and both the Mexican authorities and Californios knew it.
But the trouble came later. Until 1846, when the American flag was raised over Portsmouth Square not to kick off a party but to end a war, Yerba Buena was a place apart, a lost corner in the world where a band of eccentrics, color-line crossers and self-made men, and one remarkable woman, built a ramshackle utopia.
Chapter 21
The Puertozuela
Pacific Avenue and Jones Street
From my office on the western slope of Telegraph Hill, I can see the saddle, the low point where Nob and Russian Hills meet. It’s a thousand yards away, marked by a fortuitously lurid crimson apartment building on Pacific Avenue just below Jones Street. I have lived near that pass through the hills for more than a quarter of a century. The very first day I met my wife’s two-year-old son, I pushed him up Pacific in a stroller. I’ve sweated up that damn hill on my bike thousands of times. An Asian man who lives in a little bungalow set back from the street sits on the sidewalk in his wheelchair on sunny days, smoking a cigarette. He always says, “You’re halfway there!” as I pedal past him.
One of the benefits of riding a bike in San Francisco is that you end up following in the footsteps of everyone who has ever lived here, from the Yelamu to the Spanish to the Mexicans to the 49ers to the Beats. Your leg muscles are an infallible guide to the past. People have been avoiding the hills since time began.
Every low point in San Francisco’s terrain collects history the way a fence in the desert collects tumbleweeds, and the saddle at Pacific and Jones has probably collected the most of all. According to Zoeth Eldredge, a leading historian of early San Francisco, the Spanish called it the puerto suelo, or “low pass”—puertozuela for short. The Yelamu must have traveled it. When Anza took his cryptic first tour of the eastern hills, he probably spurred his charger through the puertozuela. San Francisco’s first street, a muddy path, angled up toward the pass. William Richardson rode over it on his way to the Presidio. Anyone on the northern side of the cove who wanted to get to the other side of Nob or Russian Hills would have taken it. The crowds that came to see San Francisco’s first legal hanging in 1852, somewhere around Vallejo and Leavenworth, would have walked up it.
For decades, a little grocery called the New Russian Hill Market has stood on the puertozuela, on the northeast corner of Pacific and Jones. When I first moved onto Jackson Street in 1984, and for years thereafter, it was run by three elderly Italian brothers, one of whom lived in the apartment above it. The store must have been there, essentially unchanged, since the 1930s or 1940s. The place was like something out of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop. It was absolutely crammed with odds and ends of homey merchandise—great bunches of dried red peppers tied with string hanging above the counter, salamis and chee
ses randomly piled up, bottles of wine lurking in recesses where they had been gathering dust for decades, yellowing posters for Sam Spade whiskeys like Four Roses and Kessler (“Smooth as Silk”) pinned up on the ceiling. The store was so old it had no refrigeration: The brothers kept their produce, milk, and perishable goods in ancient built-in wooden icebox units with heavy metal handles on their doors. Even though we knew they were Italians—from Liguria, I think, like many San Francisco Italians—my cousin and I called the old geezers “the Russians,” after the sign on the store. After a while, we actually started to think of them as Russians.
One day, we found one of the Russians, a skinny guy with a thin mustache and a nervous face, crying. We asked him what had happened. He told us his brother—was his name Sal?—who had fat, spatulate fingers and always wore a wide tie that only went down his shirt about six inches, had passed away. “We worked together 12 hours a day. Hell, I spent more time with him than I did with my wife!” the old man told us, shaking his head as he rang up a loaf of bread. The oldest of the brothers (or maybe he was a cousin)—a smiling 90-year-old fellow who stood in the corner all day and spoke almost no English—died soon after, slipping gently down to the floor at a dance at the Italian-American Athletic Club in North Beach. “That’s the way to go,” said the skinny brother. “Talking to the girls with a glass of red wine in his hand.” A year or two later he sold the business to a Palestinian family, who took out the ancient iceboxes and put in modern refrigerators. In a world-class example of poor marketing, they briefly taped a postcard of a keffiyeh-wearing youth throwing a rock next to the cash register.
