by Gary Kamiya
The barn stands on one of those unfathomable corners where different urban realities dissolve into an ambiguous haze. The two-block stretch of Mason between Washington and Pacific is a twilight zone. As recently as a few years ago, much of it was positively decrepit, a decaying precinct of Chinatown. There used to be a huge fortune cookie factory on the corner of Jackson. The street has come up a little, with an architect’s office and one or two buildings with new security systems, but it’s still an odd mixed bag. John Street, half a block north, is lined with tenements. Across the street from the barn, on Washington, a sparkling new Chinese Recreation Center has replaced the old Chinese Playground, whose old green wooden sign always struck me as the acme of ethnic political incorrectness. (The “Japanese Playground”? The “Jewish Playground”?) Walk uphill on Mason, and it gets rich fast. Two steep blocks above, clearly visible on the summit of Nob Hill, looms the castlelike Brocklebank, the patrician apartment building where Madeleine lived in Vertigo.
Jackson is similarly elusive. Some barely respectable apartments rub shoulders with one or two swanky newcomers, million-dollar homes never before built this close to Chinatown. Once you get into Chinatown proper, all pretense at respectability disappears.
History is soaked into the ground here. During the city’s wild youth, there was a brief attempt to make this area, which was called Spring Valley because water bubbled out of the earth at Washington and Powell, a fashionable neighborhood. But it was too close to the prostitutes who cruised down Stockton and Grant and the whorehouses and gambling hells on Pacific. One block away, at Pacific and Mason, stood the porch-encircled house of a crusading editor who bore the odd name James King of William. One night in 1856, as King began to walk the six blocks home from his Montgomery Street office, he was shot and mortally wounded by a corrupt supervisor named James Casey. The murder precipitated the formation of the Second Committee of Vigilance, the largest vigilante movement in American history.
The contested geography of this neighborhood played a crucial role in that still-controversial episode. King was a hyperbolic moralist whose shrill editorials, shrewd marketing, and use of sensationalism paved the way for the yellow journalism of the late 19th century, which reached its acme in William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, the paper where I cut my journalistic teeth. (As a result of this, any errors or libels in this book are not my responsibility, but James King’s.) King’s crusade against gamblers and prostitutes earned him the undying loyalty of one powerful constituency: wives.
This is where Nob Hill’s geography comes in. As historian Roger Lotchin notes in his superb San Francisco 1846–1856: From Hamlet to City, by 1856, middle-class San Franciscans had moved west, living on Nob and Russian Hills while working downtown. But in the area between, on Dupont and Stockton—today’s Chinatown—large numbers of prostitutes still openly plied their trade. Because San Francisco was still very much a walking city, a “trip to the dentist, the doctor, the milliner, the husband’s office, and sometimes even the church kept the situation explosive by renewing the contact between housewives and harlots,” Lotchin says. A woman furiously spat, “Is it not wonderful that young men should spend their evenings, like dogs, smelling out all these vile excrescences, peering through the cracks and crevices of doors, windows and blinds in our crowded thoroughfares, in the full face of ladies and gentlemen going and returning from church?”
Racially, too, this area has long been a no-man’s-land. Until the 1950s, the Chinese were not allowed to buy or rent west of Chinatown’s unofficial border at Powell. When the restrictive covenants were removed, Chinese began buying properties on Nob Hill, eventually acquiring most of its lower slopes. Ironically, the whites who formerly kept the Chinese in a ghetto have now begun descending into that ghetto and buying out the Chinese.
So this is a deep San Francisco corner. And its dinginess makes it all the deeper. It is the perfect setting for a small urban coda.
The whole thing takes less than a minute. A little before half past one in the morning, the cable cars go home for the night. The last car runs up Jackson, past the barn’s car entrance. The gripman, weary after a shift working one of the most demanding jobs in the city, brings his car to a stop opposite dingy Auburn Alley. The conductor gets off and walks over to a railroad switch next to the tracks. If there are any autos behind the car, the gripman motions them to stay back. Then the conductor pulls the switch, the gripman releases the brake, and with a final clatter the old wooden car, free of the cable, rolls on gravity back into the barn.
A few minutes later, the sound of the whirring rope abruptly ceases, a sudden loud silence that informs anyone stumbling home that it is 1:30 A.M. And the city has called it a night.
Chapter 24
The Farce
Fort Point, previously the Castillo de San Joaquin
In the small hours of July 1, 1846, Captain John C. Fremont, his scout Kit Carson, and a few men commandeered a longboat at Sausalito, rowed across the Golden Gate, and climbed up to the ancient, abandoned Castillo de San Joaquin. By the dawn’s early light they spiked 10 rusty bronze cannons, including three ancient pieces cast in 1623, 1628, and 1693, which were lying in the dirt, completely useless. The longboat’s owner would later submit an exorbitant bill to the U.S. government for his services, which was rejected out of hand.
This heroic feat of arms was San Francisco’s contribution to one of the most disgraceful episodes in California history: the Bear Flag Revolt.
Fremont was leading a company of army topographers on a mission of scientific exploration. He was also carrying secret instructions, now lost, regarding America’s imminent acquisition of California. His orders were almost certainly to avoid conflict. But Fremont had a fatal Byronic streak, and it led him to encourage a pointless and unprovoked revolt.
The mountain men and adventurers who had begun trickling into the West had no connection to the Californios. They had long resented Mexican rule, and Fremont’s saber-rattling presence gave them a green light. After the grandiloquent captain—whose presence had already aroused Mexican suspicions—ratcheted up tensions by rashly raising the American flag on a mountain near Monterey, a group of settlers seized 200 horses belonging to General Castro, the Mexican commander. Alarmed, Castro began to raise troops. On June 14 a group of 33 settlers, some of them extremely rough customers, stormed into the tiny hamlet of Sonoma and knocked on the door of Don Mariano Vallejo—the town’s leading citizen, a staunch liberal, and, ironically, the most outspoken Californio advocate of an American takeover of California.
When Vallejo opened the door, the mountain men somewhat incoherently informed him that he was a prisoner of war. The courtly Vallejo brought out several bottles of his excellent aguardiente, which his captors avidly consumed. Fueled by brandy, they wrote out a document announcing the birth of what they styled the California Republic. One member of the party, William Todd (the nephew of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln), made a crude flag depicting a bear standing on its hind legs. Vallejo and several others, including Yerba Buena’s second inhabitant, Jacob Leese, were marched away to jail at Sutter’s Fort in present-day Sacramento.
The whole episode was a ridiculous farce. What the august founders of the California Republic did not know was that the United States was already at war with Mexico, and had been since May. American naval forces commanded by Commodore John Sloat captured Monterey on July 7. When the American flag was raised over Sonoma and Yerba Buena on July 9, the California Republic, such as it was—it was never recognized by any entity and passed no laws—came to an end. Its brief and inglorious life is nonetheless immortalized on the California flag, which features the grizzly bear and the words “California Republic.”
Most of the American citizens of Yerba Buena, which in 1846 had a total population of about 200, favored an American takeover of California. John Henry Brown, who ran the old adobe City Hotel on the southeast corner of the Plaza, claimed that most of them also supported the Bear Flag Revolt. But several Ye
rba Buenans, including our thirsty old friend Bob Ridley, opposed the American conquest. When General Castro called upon all Mexican citizens to meet him in Santa Clara, Ridley and leading merchant William Hinckley heeded the call. Ridley was ordered to return to Yerba Buena and stop all boats from landing there. He had been home for only two days when two Bear Flag militiamen arrested him at gunpoint in the billiard room, told him they would kill him if he moved, and packed him off to jail, thoughtfully allowing him to take two bottles of liquor with him. This was the only time guns were drawn in Yerba Buena during the Mexican-American War.
On July 9, the U.S. sloop-of-war Portsmouth anchored off Yerba Buena cove and sent two dozen marines and carbineers ashore to take formal possession of the town. A sailor named Joseph T. Downey, writing under the name of Filings, captured the event in all its awful majesty. Disembarking at Clark’s Point, the troops marched down Montgomery Street to the Plaza, accompanied by a single fife and drum. After a motley crew of 30 to 40 inhabitants were enticed to the Plaza by “threats, promises and entreaties,” the American flag was raised above the old adobe Mexican customs house. After the cheers and the brays of jackasses had subsided, all present “unanimously voted to go where liquor could be had, and drink a health and long life to that flag. The Indians consequently rushed frantically to one pulperee, Captain Leidesdorff and the aristocracy to Bob Ridley’s bar-room, and the second class and the Dutch to Tinker’s [John Finch’s bar].” Soon a cacophony of drunken “vivas” and “hip hip hoorahs” and “Got verdams” echoed from the four corners of the Plaza. At sundown, the authorities informed the revelers that the town was under martial law and that they had to return home. “But few, however were able to do so, and the greater part of them either slept in Tinker’s alley or on the grass in the Plaza, and only woke with the morning’s first beams, to wonder what was the cause of yesterday’s spree.”
In the months after the flag was raised, fears that the Mexicans would launch a surprise attack and retake Yerba Buena led to one of the most hilarious incidents in the city’s history. The commander of the troops from the Portsmouth, one Captain Watson, came ashore late every night to stand watch. Watson tended to get thirsty during the night, so he always had hotelkeeper Brown fill his flask with whiskey before he started his watch. Brown was usually in bed by then, however, so Watson had come up with a cunning plan to alert him. He would rap on Brown’s window twice and say “The Spaniards are in the brush,” whereupon Brown would fill Watson’s flask and he would go happily off to stand guard. One night, however, Brown drank more than usual and slept through Watson’s raps. The displeased Watson, who had been imbibing even more freely than Brown, fired one of his pistols and shouted at the top of his lungs, “THE SPANIARDS ARE IN THE BRUSH!” Hearing the shot and the cry of alarm, the troops at the barracks in the customs house on the Plaza beat the long roll and rushed out to defend themselves. Thinking the Spanish really were in the brush, they opened fire, but succeeded only in hitting some scrub oaks that were waving in the wind. The next day Watson warned Brown that if he ever breathed a word of what had happened, he would be a dead man.
For Yerba Buena, the war was low comedy. But its ludicrous elements cannot disguise the fact that the conquest of California, like the entire Mexican-American War, was a case of naked expansionism. The U.S. government offered some flimsy justifications, but they were fig leaves. A young officer named Ulysses S. Grant, who gained his first combat experience in the war, later wrote, “To this day [I] regard the war … as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
And for one of the village’s leading citizens, the war was not a comedy at all. During the short-lived hostilities, Fremont imprisoned three of the sons of an old Californio man named José Berreyessa in Sonoma. The worried Berreyessa, accompanied by his cousins, two 19-year-old twins, went to see how his sons were doing. As they stepped off a boat in the North Bay, they were accosted by three of Fremont’s men, including the famous frontiersman Kit Carson. When Carson asked Fremont what he should do with them, Fremont reportedly replied, “I have got no room for prisoners.” Kit Carson and the other Americans shot the three unarmed men.
In California: A Study of American Character, published in 1886 and still one of the finest books ever written about California, the philosopher Josiah Royce bitterly attacked Fremont’s conduct during the Bear Flag Revolt. Royce noted that the American consul in Monterey, Thomas O. Larkin, was secretly working to acquire California peacefully and that Fremont’s loose-cannon adventuring undermined his efforts. Royce was outraged that Fremont had squandered an opportunity to deal justly and fairly with the Californios. Instead, the Grass Valley native wrote, Fremont “brought war into a peaceful Department; his operations began an estrangement, insured a memory of blood-shed, excited a furious bitterness of feeling between the two peoples that were henceforth to dwell in California.”
Royce overstated the effect of the Bear Flag Revolt on the relations between the Californios and the Yankees who were about to flood in. Regardless of Fremont’s actions, America was going to swallow California. But that knowledge would have been no consolation to Don Francisco.
De Haro was the first alcalde of Yerba Buena. He was the man who commissioned Jean Vioget to survey the village and one of the leading citizens in the town’s early history. One of the most dramatic streets in San Francisco, rocketing down from the summit of Potrero Hill toward downtown, is named after him. His great gray tombstone adorns the north side of the Mission Dolores graveyard.
The 19-year-old twins who were killed in cold blood by men under the command of John C. Fremont—who also has a San Francisco street named after him—were de Haro’s sons. For the rest of his life, the old man never got over their murder.
Chapter 25
A Streetcar to Subduction
The rope swing halfway up Billy Goat Hill,
near 30th and Castro Streets
I first stumbled upon Billy Goat Hill sometime in the 1980s. It was a steep, grassy, undeveloped hillside, located on a spur of Diamond Heights where it descends into upper Noe Valley. Two tall eucalyptus trees stood on a little saddle halfway up the slope. With its winding dirt trails, golden grasses, and random rocky outcroppings, it reminded me of the Berkeley Hills where I grew up, except that it was in the middle of a big city. I wandered around it for 20 minutes, then left. It was just one of those unassuming miracles that pop up in San Francisco, another breach in the urban wall. There are lots of them. I didn’t go back to Billy Goat Hill for more than 20 years.
This spring, thanks to a man named Clyde Wahrhaftig, I finally made it back there. I’m glad that Wahrhaftig will always be associated in my mind with Billy Goat Hill. For both the man and the place represent everything that is best about San Francisco.
When I started poking around under this city’s hood, one of the first things I wanted to learn about was its geology. San Francisco has some of the most extraordinary terrain of any city in the world, and after 40 years of wandering across it, I was curious about what I was walking on. I was really driven by the same impulse that leads people to look at the night sky: I wanted to blow my mind. The ground we stand on was formed by forces as inconceivably vast as those that created the stars twinkling in the sky. If you think of it that way, geology is just stargazing while looking down.
The circuitous path that led me back to Billy Goat Hill started when I was browsing the San Francisco Public Library’s catalog. I came upon a book titled A Streetcar to Subduction, and Other Plate Tectonic Trips by Public Transport in San Francisco. The title enchanted me. It perfectly captured the juxtaposition of artifice and nature, the quotidian and the inconceivably vast, that epitomizes San Francisco. It made me want to climb aboard the J Church streetcar, ask for a transfer, and ride it to the center of the earth.
Which is pretty much what Clyde Wahrhaftig—the author of the book—did.
A Streetcar to Subduction has become an underground classic (no pun inten
ded) and is hard to find, so I checked it out of the library. The photo on the back of the magazine-size book showed a lean-faced, white-bearded, white-haired man with keen, twinkling eyes looking out at the camera, his hand on a rocky outcropping. The accompanying biographical note said that Clyde Wahrhaftig was a geologist for the U.S. Geological Service and a professor of geology at U.C. Berkeley. He did field research in Alaska for almost 30 years. A committed environmentalist, he was the first chairman of the Geological Society of America’s committee on the environment and public policy and served on the California State Board of Forestry.
Wahrhaftig was obviously a maverick. In his waggish note, he wrote that early in his career he “realized the advantages to health, safety and sanity in not knowing how to drive, and managed to get around on foot and public transportation, or by sponging on my friends.” He was also a bit risqué. Telling readers how to get to Corona Heights, he wrote, “You are now in the heart of San Francisco’s gay community. Don’t get subduced.” This type of witticism is not typical of geologists.
I already liked this guy. But I didn’t yet know his whole story.
In A Streetcar to Subduction, Wahrhaftig takes the reader on a guided tour, via public transportation and foot, to seven geological sites in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Trip 1 is to Billy Goat Hill, via the J Church. Wahrhaftig chose Billy Goat Hill to open his book because the three most important types of rock found in San Francisco are exposed there, “in a deceptively simple and orderly relationship.”
