by Gary Kamiya
The ugly 19th Avenue stretch of this magnificent view is worth pondering. For the vast majority of views in San Francisco are far more imperfect than this. They are marred by dreary neighborhoods, or ungainly buildings, or obstructions, or just by being aesthetically flawed. For every panoramic vista of the Golden Gate Bridge, there are a thousand truncated views of a tiny piece of it. For every Hokusai-like view of Mount Tamalpais, there are a hundred views of Mount San Bruno—a magnificent mountain, but one disfigured by radio antennas on its summit and tract houses running high up its flanks.
This imperfection is an essential part of San Francisco. It is its anti-postcard reality. And it holds a lesson.
In the 10 or so places I have lived in San Francisco, I have had all kinds of views, from the sublime to the uninspired. I am not going to say that I prefer the latter. But I have a place in my heart for all of them.
In February 1990, I was looking out the window of my room in San Francisco’s Kaiser Hospital. The day before, I had had surgery for colon cancer. The oncologist had given me a 50-50 chance to live. Across the street was the stucco wall of a dreary little house, in front of which extended the almost-bare branch of a scraggly tree. It was the most beautiful view I have ever seen. It was a view of the world, which I loved and desperately wanted to stay in.
We all spend most of our lives looking at some version of that stucco wall and that scrawny tree. My brief moment of radiant contentment faded, and I do not pretend to possess any knowledge of how to make it stay. But if we are lucky, or wise, we learn to love that little view, the way a condemned prisoner loves the patch of sky he can see through the bars of his cell. All the views in San Francisco are beautiful.
Chapter 28
City Limits
The building formerly known as George’s Log Cabin, 2629 Bayshore
Boulevard, on the San Francisco–San Mateo county line
San Francisco’s extreme south is a lost world. Even when I was a taxi driver, I never really learned it. Most San Franciscans don’t know it at all. It borders Daly City, whose greatest claim to fame is that Malvina Reynolds wrote “Little Boxes” about it, and a little strip of weird, steep-streeted, Christmas-cross bedecked Brisbane, whose once-beautiful lagoon was poisoned during the 30 years that San Francisco dumped its garbage into it. Nondescript, working-class, and devoid of tourist attractions, San Francisco’s southern frontier is a ragged Cinderella scrubbing the pots of the glamorous Painted Lady neighborhoods of the north. In a sign of total cartographic contempt, one popular San Francisco street map simply omits the entire southern border and all the streets around it.
I’ve always been intrigued by borders. They endow their surroundings with a feeling of pointless specialness, a gratuitous drama. And the more banal and obscure they are, the more that feeling is heightened. Borders are like an anal manifestation of the Zen mind: Whatever they touch, no matter how insignificant, becomes important. Discovering a border in a place where the surroundings possess absolutely no charm, where the streets peter out meaninglessly, is like stumbling on a precious trinket dropped by an absentminded deity.
Doing the Knowledge for San Francisco obviously required me to know where it began and ended. So I set off to walk the entire six-mile-long line that separates San Francisco City and County from San Mateo County.
That ruler-straight line turned out to be oddly elusive.
One stormy day in late winter, I drove out to Fort Funston, the old army base on the coast whose enormous guns waited for an enemy fleet that never appeared. (I once saw a 1970s porno movie that utilized one of the deserted coastal batteries as a set—an admirably literal response to the 1960s admonition “Make love, not war.”) Its crumbling cliffs are one of the last remnants of the vast sand dune system that once covered most of the city. I descended the sandy cliff below the hang-gliding platform and started walking south, looking for the border. I had a rough idea where it was from the city limits sign a few hundred yards east on Skyline Boulevard.
A heavy horizontal rain whipped into my face as I walked down the empty beach toward Mussel Rock, the sea stack where the San Andreas Fault, after running 600 miles through California from Mexico, heads out to sea before emerging in Bolinas, that wondrous old-hippie hideaway as sublimely cracked as the earth beneath it. The epicenter of the 1906 earthquake was about two miles offshore from Mussel Rock. I suddenly realized that, embarrassingly, I had never been this far south on Fort Funston Beach before—and it was one of the most spectacular places in San Francisco. Between the geological time bomb looming ominously offshore five miles away, the eroding yellow cliffs (which collapse from time to time during winter storms, sending houses crashing to the beach), the pounding surf, and the Wuthering Heights weather, it was a Götterdämmerung-like setting for the end of San Francisco, but there was no sign of the border. I climbed back up the cliffs looking for it, only to find the way blocked by the off-limits fairways of the patrician Olympic Club.
I went around to the eastern side of the golf club. Near the southern tip of Lake Merced, I found my first city limits sign. A few yards away from it, I stumbled on what had to be the strangest historic site in San Francisco. At the end of a dead-end street used by pickup trucks serving a gated community I had never heard of, past a sad little picnic area and a nondescript gray house, stood a small ravine where, at dawn one day in 1859, David Terry, former chief justice of the California Supreme Court and an extremely hot-tempered and violent man, shot and mortally wounded U.S. Senator David Broderick in the last major duel fought in the United States. Two worn stone obelisks, terrifyingly close to each other, marked where the two men had stood. Ancient rage still hung over the place like mist.
I tried to walk east from the duel site but ran up against the fence of the mega-exclusive San Francisco Golf Club, another place I had never heard of. Why were all these lordly golf courses located on the city border, preventing honest citizens from going about their business? Consumed by such serflike thoughts, I went around it. The border reappeared in the Outer Mission, in a dreary neighborhood so confusingly hidden behind the twirled spaghetti strands of the 280 freeway, Alemany Boulevard, San Jose Avenue, and Mission Street that it might as well be behind a moat. (Which is probably why Patty Hearst took up residence there, a few hundred yards from the city limits at 625 Morse Street, when she was an SLA fugitive hiding from the police. They found her anyway.)
After a brief World-Historical Genius stretch at Goethe and Shakespeare Streets, the border crashed unceremoniously back down to earth at the County Line Cleaners. Its suicidal yellow waistcoat freshly scrubbed, it then intersected a long stretch of strange lunar-suburban streets descending from mighty Mount San Bruno. That big mountain, 1,314 feet high and four miles across, looms over and defines the entire southern part of San Francisco, but 95 percent of it is on the Daly City side of the line, and because they stood on rising ground on the lower part of the mountain, these streets didn’t feel like they belonged to the big city at all.
After crossing gaunt Geneva Avenue near the vast Depression-era bread box called the Cow Palace, the border ran along the industrial edge of one of San Francisco’s least-known neighborhoods, Visitacion Valley, once home to the terrifying Geneva Towers, two Eichler-built high-rises that became housing projects so nightmarish (think snipers and bodies being hurled from windows 20 stories up) that even the police were afraid to enter them. I found myself in a twilight zone of industrial buildings, ringed by ambiguous roads that petered out in the middle of nowhere. I walked around a vast See’s Candy plant, only to find my way blocked by an inexplicable fence. On the old stagecoach and toll road, Bayshore Boulevard, the boundary was clearly marked, then disappeared among the weedy railroad tracks.
I crossed Bayshore and headed east into a weird oasis of small Spanish-style houses called, for reasons that are unclear, Little Hollywood. I had never been here either. This two-block-by-five-block neighborhood, squeezed between Highway 101 and Bayshore and in the lee of the least-
climbed major hill in the city, 500-foot Bayview Heights, was so cryptic it made Visitacion Valley look like Times Square. Past three laughing Latino kids playing in front of their house and an old black man changing the oil in his truck, I came to a little hilly park on the neighborhood’s edge. When I walked up to the top of the park and looked through the fence, I found myself staring with astonishment at a sculpture garden. Then I saw a flock of circling seagulls and heard the sound of bulldozers, and realized that the sculpture garden stood on land owned by the city dump. I’d been to the dump a dozen times and never known that this hidden neighborhood butted up against it.
I walked east down a forlorn street. It dead-ended at Highway 101, but there was an opening in the bushes and some sort of overgrown noman’s-land running along next to the freeway. I stepped over some old tires, pushed through the bushes, and bushwhacked through weeds and anise plants and a couple of gnarled trees. After about 30 yards, the no-man’s-land petered out. Peering out from the bushes next to the guard rail, a few feet away from cars going 65 miles an hour, I saw the Brisbane city limits sign at the side of the freeway, 20 feet away.
This was the ultimate border hidey-hole. If it were Checkpoint Charlie, I would have had a chance to make a dash for West Berlin before the guards swung their machine guns around and opened fire.
That was the last city limits sign. I went through a tunnel that crossed under the freeway, which took me past some sterile modern high-rise apartments beneath Bayview Heights, and wandered along the edge of the bay near Candlestick Park. But that was it. The unmarked border vanished for good into the mucky bay somewhere south of an empty little beach.
I had come to the end, but there was one more border to explore. And this one turned out to be the strangest of all.
Leafing through an Arcadia book about Visitacion Valley, I found a photograph of an old log cabin, occupied by various nightclubs over the years, which sat directly on top of the San Francisco–San Mateo county line. According to the book’s authors, the building’s owners had painted a line down the middle of the floor, right over the county line.
To understand the purpose of this line, it’s necessary to know a little about the peculiar history of San Mateo County. That county is now a staid and ultra-respectable place, dominated by wealthy peninsula communities like Burlingame, Hillsborough, and Atherton, but the matron used to be a trollop. Starting as early as 1856, gambling, dueling, prostitution, and drinking flourished in the northern end of the county, whose laws were much laxer than San Francisco’s. Between 1890 and the early 1900s, an estimated 30 percent of San Mateo County’s businesses were saloons. By 1900, the county also hosted boxing and dog racing, the latter disallowed in San Francisco. One now-defunct municipality located just west of the Cow Palace, Bay-shore City, made its money entirely from dog racing; when the sport was outlawed in 1939, Bayshore City died. An ancient roadhouse just over the city line, the still-going 7 Mile House, was variously a stagecoach stop and a whorehouse, a speakeasy, a biker bar, and a mobbed-up gambling den that was busted twice by the FBI. During Prohibition, San Mateo County was a hotbed of bootlegging: Under cover of fog, shiploads of booze from Canada were dropped in coves off Half Moon Bay, picked up by obliging artichoke farmers, hauled on sleds to the road, and trucked into San Francisco. Female speakeasy owners known as “whisper sisters” poured drinks for police chiefs and mayors, who also enjoyed the company of the county’s numerous women of easy virtue. Small wonder that throughout the 1930s and 1940s, San Mateo County rejoiced in the title “the Most Corrupt County in California.”
San Franciscans in the first half of the 20th century, by some unhappy twist of fate forced to endure life in an uptight, Calvinist burg where the booze stopped flowing at 2 A.M., naturally saw San Mateo County as their southern playpen, a pre-Castro Cuba, a den of iniquity whose merry or paid-off officials turned a blind eye to the bacchanalian vices that should rightfully have belonged to the big city.
Hence the line painted on the floor of the old log cabin. At 2 A.M., all a customer had to do was step over that line, yell “O for a beaker full of the warm South,” and he or she could keep partying all night long with impunity.
I had hit the jackpot. Not only had I located the border with exquisite precision, I had found the bar I had been looking for my entire life.
A little research revealed that the building that had once been the old log cabin was still standing and was now owned by the A. Silvestri Company. Silvestri is a well-known San Francisco family business that manufactures and sells garden statuary. In fact, one of their fountains—of Bacchus, by happy coincidence—stands in my backyard. Sandra Silvestri, who runs the business, agreed to show me the log cabin. So I drove down to the company’s big Visitacion Valley showroom, located just on the San Francisco side of the border, across Bayshore from the log cabin.
Sandra Silvestri was giving directions in Spanish to three Mexican employees who were moving some pieces into the showroom. A successful middle-age businesswoman with a no-nonsense air warmed by Italian earthiness, she told me that the seeds of her family’s business were planted in the early 20th century, when her great-grandfather Arcangelo and grandfather Adorno came to America from Bagni di Lucca, a region home to many of San Francisco’s Italian immigrants. Experienced at working in plaster, the two men got jobs in 1916 creating the decorative molding for Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts. They also started a workshop where they made little figurines of saints, which they peddled door-to-door, mostly to other Italian immigrants. When the Great Depression came, Arcangelo and Adorno returned to Italy, but they emigrated again to San Francisco in the 1950s, joined by Sandra’s father, Alfeo, and other family members. “They started pouring concrete into molds, instead of plaster and alabaster, and making bigger objects like St. Francis statues and pagodas,” Sandra said. “And they started selling wholesale to nurseries.” The business took off in the 1970s. The company that started with poor immigrants peddling tiny statues door-to-door now grosses millions of dollars, has 50 to 70 employees, and is an anchor in a neglected part of the city. “When we walk into a community meeting, the police cheer,” Sandra said.
She took me across the street to the log cabin, which her family purchased in the 1970s. “It had been abandoned for a few years and was filthy. The roof was caving in,” she said as we waited for the light at Bayshore. The company used it as a showroom until 2001, when they bought the place across the street.
The cabin was a conventional frame structure, but the logs were real redwood. A San Francisco city limits sign stood right outside the door. “Look at this,” Sandra said, pointing down. Embedded in the sidewalk was a round, cast-iron disk about eight inches across, which read “Survey monument SF-CAL,” the words circled by eight stars. “It’s an old marker for the city limits,” she said. “One day someone stole it. And you know who it was? An old man with a cane! I had installed a video camera in front of the building for security, and on the film I saw him lean down and pick it up. He could hardly walk!” She laughed, then said, “I don’t know if his conscience started bothering him, but a few months later it appeared again.” Before it was returned, she had asked the city about replacing it. They said they didn’t know anything about it or any marker like it. It is apparently the last one in existence.
Uneasily wondering if my San Francisco mania was pointing me toward the fate of that light-fingered old man, I followed Sandra into the building. We found ourselves standing in a cavernous, high-ceilinged room with a weird split-level roofline and big vertical support beams. To the left was a vast stone fireplace, at least 10 feet wide. Dozens of old fiberglass molds for statues and fountains rested on the floor. The oddest thing was that the entire interior was covered with shaggy redwood bark. It was like a Dean Martin–style cocktail lounge decorated by Daniel Boone. It was one of the stranger buildings I’d ever been in, and it kept getting stranger the farther we went into it.
“The stage area was straight ahead,” she said. “
The bar was to the right. It was a beautiful bar—60 feet long and made out of mahogany. We had to cut it up—there was nowhere for us to put it.”
And the famous line on the floor? “That was right here,” she said, pointing down. “It was painted yellow.” The line ran from around the center of the front door back to the stage area. Since the bar ran parallel to the line, and was on the San Mateo side of the building, anyone standing at the bar did not have to move to keep legally drinking at closing time. I wondered whether the line was just a gimmick, or whether the police ever stormed in to arrest miscreants, only to run into an invisible wall that stopped them in their tracks like Marcel Marceau.
The place was enormous, 6,000 square feet, a warren of weird old rooms. In the attic, a 10-foot-long old grain-storage unit with pull-out bins sat along one wall. Pulling aside a shaggy piece of bark, Sandra said, “If you look through here, you can see where there are little windows looking down on the floor. They used to have gambling in here, and the owners could look down from above to make sure no one was cheating.” She thought there had been a brothel here too.
In the 1930s the log cabin was called Sam’s Lodge, Sandra said. In the 1950s it was known as George’s Log Cabin. Later it became Roman’s Cantina, the Polynesian Hideaway (where the owner’s beautiful wife danced the hula and her kids performed the fire dance), and finally the Moonrose Forest.
