Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  The Moonrose Forest had its own peculiar story. When I had Googled “George’s Log Cabin,” I came upon a Web site called Rock Archaeology 101, which chronicles obscure rock venues of the 1960s and 1970s. According to the leading blogger on the site, someone named Corry, the notorious British band the Deviants—who were reportedly the first rock group to call themselves punks—played at the Moonrose Forest (“formerly George’s Log Cabin”) on November 14, 1969. Why, Corry wondered in his post, had this legendary group ended up in an unknown club at the edge of the city?

  An old knotty pine bathroom still had the original graffiti on the walls. I looked for any sign of the infamous Deviants, their American career fizzling out in this obscure roadhouse on the edge of town. Or Dan Hicks, or Sly Stone, who, Sandra said, had played here once. But I couldn’t find any. Someone had scrawled “Nita and Riley from Lodi, November 3, 1963”—19 days before America lost its president and its innocence. “Hootenanny forever 1959–1960.” “The moon lasts 4-ever.” And this sad little complaint, preserved in knotty pine: “Can’t get a man without playing on his marriage problems.”

  We left the melancholy ghosts in that wood-paneled time capsule and walked back into the main room. It was invincibly cheerful, as if decades of good times had somehow collected in its shaggy bark.

  Outside, standing on Bayshore, I took a last look at the building formerly known as George’s Log Cabin, the Moonrose Forest, the Polynesian Hideaway, Roman’s Cantina, Sam’s Lodge. They were all gone now, and so were most of the numberless men and women who had once danced and laughed here, gone across a border no one can find. To the north, on the other side of McLaren Ridge, the big city hummed heedlessly along. To the south, across the city line, the sign of the ancient, formerly sinful 7 Mile House thumbed its nose at the commuters roaring past. And to the west, an invisible line ran through miles of uncelebrated streets, each of them hiding its own universe of stories, until it hit the distant sea, where it vanished for good.

  Chapter 29

  The Torch

  The Palace Hotel, New Montgomery and Market Streets

  Gold Rush San Francisco was no paradise. For many, it was a living hell, and the visitor to Portsmouth Square had only to stumble south through half a mile of sand dunes to find its ninth circle. The majority of 49ers camped out in a 1,000-tent city centered on where the present-day Palace Hotel stands at New Montgomery and Market Streets. The neighborhood was called Happy Valley, but for many of the men who lived there, that name must have felt like a cruel joke. Disease, widespread throughout the instant city, plagued Happy Valley. Poor sanitation and San Francisco’s acute water shortage were to blame. Drinking polluted water from “hundreds of little seep-hole wells two and three feet deep,” almost everyone who stayed there got dysentery. The disease, marked by bloody diarrhea and abdominal pain, is often fatal.

  A 49er named John McCrackan described wandering through Happy Valley for hours, trying to find the tent of a man suffering from severe dysentery. Himself ill, McCrackan reported that “it [was] very unpleasant wading through” what he called a “perfect desert of sand.” He finally found the sick man and had him taken to the hospital, but it was too late; the man died the next day. McCrackan wrote to his family, “It is dreadful to think of his coming out here to suffer so much, and to die at last.”

  Death was as present in San Francisco as in a medieval city. One observer related coming upon a well-dressed young man lying dead on the ground, apparently of exposure, on Washington Street.

  The authors of the 1855 Annals of San Francisco saw the tragic side of the new city clearly. “San Francisco was like the scene of a great battle. There were victorious warriors braving and flaunting on all sides, while hope swelled the breast of every unwounded soldier. But, unheeded amid the crash and confusion of the strife, lay the wounded and dying, who had failed or been suddenly struck down in the melee.”

  There were a lot of wounded and dying. One physician estimated that one in five people died within six months of reaching San Francisco. Others went mad. Others returned home, disappointed and ashamed.

  But people from around the world kept coming to the ragged, jagged, brawling city at the end of the continent. They were initially drawn by the dream of getting rich, but some of them found other rewards.

  What San Francisco offered, for those first few strange years before it came back down to earth, was unprecedented freedom—from family, from work, from church, from one’s own past. For most Americans, whose entire lives might be expected to play out literally within a few square miles and figuratively within an even smaller area, that freedom was a wind more exhilarating than an April breeze blowing in from Ocean Beach. Lawless, self-regulated, radically democratic, licentious, compassionate, lonely, and fearless, the city by the bay was a place apart.

  Above all, San Francisco was alive. The painter John David Borthwick said of it, “People lived more there in a week than they would in a year in most other places.”

  Thoreau, the cold-blooded moralist of Walden Pond, balefully denounced the Gold Rush as a disgraceful race to get rich quick. He was partly right: It was a rush to get rich quick. But Thoreau missed something quick, alive, and unknowable in that wild stampede. Greed brought the 49ers to San Francisco. But something happened to many of them along the way.

  At the end of The Shirley Letters, perhaps the finest literary document to come out of the gold rush, Louise Clappe wrote, “My heart is heavy at the thought of departing forever from this place. I like this wild and barbarous life; I leave it with regret … Here, at least, I have been contented.”

  Clappe was writing about a mining camp on the Feather River, but she could have been speaking for the thousands of others whose lives had been transformed by their time in San Francisco.

  The Gold Rush shaped the 49ers’ lives in too many ways to describe, but two in particular stand out. First, it blurred class distinctions. Bayard Taylor wrote, “A man who would consider his fellow beneath him on account of his appearance or occupation would have had some difficulty living peaceably in California.” San Francisco’s famous tolerance, its embrace of oddballs and outcasts of all stripes, its impatience with East Coast notions of propriety, can be traced back to the radical egalitarianism of its early days.

  The second is harder to describe, but it has something to do with the euphoric self-transformation that Louise Clappe experienced. To an extent unique in American history, many of the participants in the Gold Rush were educated, thoughtful men who were aware of the historic nature of their odyssey even as it took place. And what some of them came to realize was that the quest that had taken them to the far West had been its own reward. In Buddhist terms, theirs was a mindful journey.

  Whether by some nebulous chain of causality or mere serendipity, that peculiar combination of adventurousness, acquisitiveness, reflectiveness, and, above all, independence, has remained deeply inscribed in San Francisco’s character. This has always been a city of thoughtful rogues, greedy do-gooders, irreverent theologians, socialist entrepreneurs, hedonistic environmentalists, sensitive newspapermen, philosophical rockers, and high-minded sensualists. And through the years, these mavericks have carried, like an unruly band of Olympic torchbearers, the rebellious, restless, life-affirming fire that was lit in 1849.

  Chapter 30

  The Park

  Golden Gate Park

  Parks are infallible signs of civilization, and Golden Gate Park is no exception. The great verdant rectangle that runs from the Haight to the sea came into existence because 20 years after its chaotic birth, San Francisco had finally outgrown its wild youth and was ready to settle down.

  It was a tumultuous passage. In the years following the Gold Rush, San Francisco underwent a literal and figurative trial by fire. Between December 1849 and May 1851, it burned six times, the most destructive series of fires ever to befall an American city. At the same time, its citizens had to confront the dark side of the limitless freedom upon which their city w
as founded.

  At the very beginning, the city’s lawless, every-man-for-himself ethos was liberating. But Hobbes soon replaced Rousseau. In 1849 the “Sydney Ducks,” a band of Australian ruffians, and the “Hounds,” a gang of former Mexican War soldiers, began terrorizing the town, the latter specializing in “patriotic” assaults on Chileans. Other criminals ran amok, their misdeeds rarely punished. San Francisco’s merchants and businessmen were willing to overlook corruption and rampant crime as long as their own tills kept jingling. But after a series of egregious crimes, they decided to take the law into their own hands, forming a first Vigilance Committee in 1851 and a second in 1856. The second, with 6,000 members, was the largest vigilante movement in American history. A genuinely revolutionary movement—its real aim was not so much to punish criminals as to destroy the corrupt political machine—it remains the most contested episode in the city’s history.

  While San Francisco battled for its soul, it kept relentlessly growing. In 1850, it had 35,000 people; in 1860, 56,800. By 1870, its population had swelled to 149,000, making it the 10th biggest city in the United States (New York, the largest, had 942,000). The city comprised only about nine square miles; few people lived west of Divisadero or south of 24th Street. San Francisco was not particularly densely populated—New York had five times more people per square mile—but its houses were built right next to one another, and it sorely lacked open spaces or parks. As early as 1855 the authors of the Annals of San Francisco had complained, “There seems to be no provision made by the projectors for a public park—the true ‘lungs’ of a large city … Not only is there no public park or garden, but there is not even a circus, oval, open terrace, broad avenue, or any ornamental line of street or building or verdant space of any kind.” Portsmouth Square, Washington Square in North Beach, and Union Square to the west were the only open spaces in the city.

  Nor was it a particularly attractive city. Two panoramas taken by Edward Muybridge in the early 1870s show a sprawling, dumpy town of boxy buildings and warehouses, with smoke rising up from factory chimneys. Museums, civic buildings, and monuments barely existed. San Francisco’s lack of civilized amenities reflected its obsession with money, a fact observed by the underwhelmed British novelist Anthony Trollope: “I do not know that in all my travels I ever visited a city less interesting to the normal tourist, who, as a rule, does not care to investigate the ways of trade or to employ himself in ascertaining how the people around him earn their bread.” (Trollope’s complaint was echoed during the dot-com years, and is being heard again today, as the city fills up with high-paid techies. It would be a colossal irony if high-spirited, eccentric San Francisco ended up as a boring, money-obsessed burg.)

  One might think that San Francisco’s spectacular setting would have offered its residents some aesthetic solace. But its natural surroundings do not seem to have made a great impression on its inhabitants. There were several reasons for this. First, San Franciscans had less contact with those surroundings than they do now. There were well-known beauty spots, like the city’s favorite promenade, Long Wharf. One of the city’s many long piers—de facto streets, lined with saloons and auction houses and stores—Long Wharf extended 2,000 feet into the bay from the foot of Market Street. Climbing Telegraph Hill and visiting the Cliff House and the crumbling Mission Dolores, out in the country, were also popular pastimes. But these were Sunday excursions, not routines of daily life. Because the upper reaches of the hills were still inaccessible by road, and there were few tall buildings, views were harder to come by. Rhapsodies about the city’s vistas are not common in the literature of the day.

  Equally important, perhaps, was the city’s roughness. The fact that the natural world was still incompletely tamed made it seem more threatening and alien than sublime. Moreover, the very idea of contemplating nature for pleasure and enlightenment, although promoted by visionaries like John Muir and embodied in the 1860s passion for the pasear, camping trips taken by middle-class families to the Coast Range or the Russian River, was still new. And it ran counter to the heedless, nature-ravaging, money-mad ethos that had built the city. The vast natural park that surrounds San Francisco, more beautiful than any man-made one, was not perceived as such.

  Deprived of beauty, and having finally made up their minds to stay in the instant city they had created, San Franciscans were ready to put down roots—literally. They had sown their wild oats; now they wanted to plant trees. They began clamoring for a great city park.

  They were part of a national movement. Before the 1830s, the idea of a city park scarcely existed in America. But as the country became increasingly urban, parks were seen as necessary—to ameliorate crime and other city-related pathologies, to reconnect with nature, and to establish a city’s civilized bona fides. Like every other 19th-century American city, San Francisco had a number of so-called pleasure gardens, privately owned enterprises described by one historian as “a unique artifice—a blend of circus, museum, rural dale, and sometimes saloon.” Russ’s Gardens at Seventh and Harrison, the Willows at Valencia and 19th, and Woodward’s Gardens at 14th and Mission (which featured a lake, a museum, a zoo, an aquarium, and a racetrack for Roman chariot races) were all popular, but they were insufficient for a city whose citizens had always been accustomed to living publicly. Moreover, the lofty self-image of the place that John C. Fremont had implicitly compared to Byzantium demanded a park that would rival Hyde Park or the Bois de Boulogne, not a glorified beer garden adorned with stuffed bears. In 1865, a petition given to the Board of Supervisors stated, “No city in the world needs … recreation grounds more than San Francisco.”

  The city turned to the master planner of urban parks, Frederick Law Olmstead, who in 1857 with Calvert Vaux had submitted the winning design for New York’s great Central Park, still being finished in 1870. Olmstead looked at the endless sand dunes that made up the city west of Divisadero, known as the Outside Lands, and concluded that no park in San Francisco would “ever compare in the most distant degree with those of New York or London. There is not a full-grown tree of beautiful proportions near San Francisco.” Olmstead instead proposed creating a “sea gate” on the site of today’s Aquatic Park, a sunken parkway along Van Ness, and a park in Hayes Valley. But in 1870, San Francisco officials (led by a self-dealing politician who stood to make a pile by leveling the hills) decided to establish a park in the Outside Lands anyway, choosing a three-mile-by-half-mile rectangular area ending at Ocean Beach. At 1,017 acres, the park would be 20 percent larger than 843-acre Central Park.

  The skepticism and derision that greeted this decision can only be understood when one realizes just how windswept and inhospitable the park site, and all of western San Francisco, was. Great sand dunes covered most of it. Roads were almost nonexistent. The incessant breeze blew sand so violently that it was difficult to get a horse to face west. And plants would not take. William Hammond Hall, the park’s first engineer and superintendent, set about the Herculean task of domesticating this wild terrain.

  The most critical problem facing Hall was how to hold the sand in place. A hardy plant with long roots was needed. From camping out in the dunes, Hall knew that the native lupine was a likely candidate. But when he planted soaked lupine seed, the sprouts were covered by the wind-blown sands before they could take hold.

  An accident provided the solution. One day, a saddle horse’s nosebag of soaked barley spilled onto the sand dunes. The horse refused to eat the sandy barley, so it was left on the dunes. When Hall returned to the spot a week later, he discovered that it was covered with barley sprouts. Hall mixed the barley and lupine seeds together and scattered them on the sand. It worked. The barley grew fast enough to protect the lupine. The sand that had been piling up for centuries had been conquered.

  The rest was easy. Guided by Olmstead’s vision of an urban green space that would feel as natural as possible, Hall and his legendary successor, the irascible, hard-drinking Scot John McClaren, created what Harold Gilliam called
“the city’s greatest work of art.” San Franciscans fell in love with the vast emerald rectangle instantly—“The desert has been made to bloom as the rose,” a newspaper exulted—and they have remained in love with it ever since.

  In one crucial respect, Golden Gate Park is inferior to certain other great city parks. New York’s Central Park, London’s St. James’s Park, and Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens all offer a sublime contrast between city and nature. That contrast is an essential part of their magic. The fact that you can look up and see the Dakota Apartments filtered through the branches of elm trees deepens the drama of Central Park. You never entirely escape the city, and that urban presence illuminates the park like a poignant sunset. There is a human sadness, a romance, to Central Park that exists only in the old belle epoque eastern end of Golden Gate Park, around the Music Concourse and the Children’s Playground. In the same way, the fact that the Luxembourg Gardens sit right in the middle of Balzac’s “humming hive” and St. James’s Park is next to Buckingham Palace makes them feel almost otherworldly. In these urban works of art, the frame is as important as the painting.

  Golden Gate Park, on the other hand, has no frame. It gets no help from its surroundings. Situated in a low-rise residential district of undistinguished buildings far from the city’s center, it lacks the dramatic sense of being an urban oasis.

  But Golden Gate Park’s weakness is also its strength. For it possesses a quality none of the above-mentioned parks do, one singularly appropriate to its city: It feels wild. It is shaggy and labyrinthine and confusing. There are places in it so hidden away and hard to find that few people have ever set foot in them. You can get lost in the place. After visiting it frequently for 30 years, I had barely scratched its surface. It wasn’t until I began systematically exploring it that I really got to know it. And it took months.