Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  On the evening of October 29, Kearney led 3,000 followers up Nob Hill to Charles Crocker’s mansion at California and Taylor. Crocker owned the entire block, with the exception of one lot owned by a German undertaker named Yung. When Yung refused to sell to Crocker, the magnate took revenge by erecting a 30-foot-high fence that surrounded Yung’s cottage on three sides, almost completely blocking the sun. Kearney cited this “spite fence” as an example of the limitless arrogance of the corrupt rich. He warned that if Crocker did not tear down the fence, he and his followers would give Crocker “the worst beating with the sticks a man ever had.” As his torch-carrying supporters roared in approval, Kearney shouted, “If I give an order to hang Crocker, it will be done … The dignity of labor must be maintained, even if we have to kill every wretch that opposes it!” The mob marched down California Street to Stanford’s mansion, but its bark was worse than its bite, and it dispersed.

  Kearney’s moment in the sun was brief. His Workingmen’s Party won more than a third of the seats at the California Constitutional Convention, but the party was wracked by internal dissension and failed to achieve anything. Legislation calling for an eight-hour workday was toothless, and various anti-Chinese campaigns in San Francisco were overturned by the courts. (At a national level, however, the anti-Chinese campaign succeeded, culminating in the draconian Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which essentially froze America’s Chinese population until it was repealed in 1943.) By 1880, the party that had fascinated Karl Marx was defunct. In a fitting conclusion to his hollow, opportunistic career, Kearney himself returned to being a conservative businessman and pillar of the community.

  The confused, contradictory, and volatile reactions the magnates on Nob Hill inspired among San Franciscans mirrored the nation’s complex reaction to what Mark Twain and Charles Dudley dubbed the “Gilded Age.” That money-mad era profoundly confused Americans because it revealed the contradictions in their most cherished beliefs. Just when Jacksonian democracy had established that every man was as good as a king, a new national elite, the plutocracy, emerged. Class, which had barely existed before, appeared at precisely the moment when anti-class ideology had triumphed. As the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, America was becoming a nation of city dwellers, leaving its old small-town and agrarian values and verities behind. Americans desperately strove to reconcile their Horatio Alger–like belief in individual effort and their Calvinist admiration for wealth as the external sign of inward rectitude with their increasing awareness that many of the men who got rich had done so by cheating. Small wonder that San Franciscans were uncertain what to make of the huge mansions on the hill.

  Meanwhile, a breezy new perspective was being heard from. On August 18, 1877, the Daily Union gave prominent play to a “Letter from Kate Heath” about her visit to “‘Nob Hill’ and its Railway.” Writing in a witty, intimate style that feels strangely contemporary, Heath described riding in a cable car up to a Nob Hill mansion next to an elderly moneybags. “I was so near him I could have poked him in the ribs with my guilty forefinger, and he was gray and wrinkled, and when he breathed he wheezed; yes indeed, he actually wheezed, and when he stopped the car, he walked off goutily and gingerly, as though neither his lot in life nor his palace on the hill were worth bragging of, after all. Poor man! I’ve no doubt in the world he’d have liked my lungs, my sound feet, and my hair that I’d just freshly crimped over Hyperion curlers.”

  Heath’s teasing compassion is a breath of fresh air after the lugubrious moralizing of so many of her male colleagues, whether they were Nob Hill haters or Nob Hill defenders.

  But perhaps the last word on the mansions on the hill should go to a failed 49er, a good-natured, good-hearted man from Buckport, Maine, named Franklin Buck. Buck had tried everything—mining, running a store, speculating, selling lumber, raising hogs—and had never made any money. Now, in 1880, at age 55, he and his wife, Jennie, were ready to retire to the Napa Valley. But on the way, he returned to visit San Francisco, the city that had enthralled him when he sailed through the Golden Gate as a 24-year-old.

  The Bucks wandered around town, amazed by the changes, taking in the sights and visiting old friends. “I still think it is the finest city to live in the U.S.,” Franklin wrote in one of the last of the letters that he had been faithfully sending to his sister for almost 40 years. He marveled at the great wooden mansions of Stanford, Flood, Crocker, and the rest of the magnates. “It was a kind of melancholy satisfaction for Jennie and me to stroll around and gaze upon these splendors and try and guess which house our twenty dollar pieces went into … for here is where it all gets to. These magnates own the mines, the state of Nevada and all the people in it.”

  Buck had spent the best years of his life searching for treasure, and never found it. Now, just when he was abandoning his dream, he realized that the riches that had eluded him had ended up in these vast palaces on California Street. But he was content. He had lived his life the way he wanted to. In his final letter to his sister, from Oakville, he wrote, “I have given up the idea of ever finding a rich mine or making a fortune in stocks. I have given it a fair trial and such things are not for me so I am setting out trees and fixing myself comfortably for life right here.”

  There are many ways to look at the Flood Mansion. It is the dream house of the luckiest bartender in history, symbol of an age of ruthless greed, target of a vengeful mob, survivor of a cataclysm. But I like to think of Franklin Buck approaching the big brownstone, looking at it for a moment with a rueful smile, and then walking away to plant his trees.

  Chapter 32

  Happy Trails

  Dirt trail between Clarendon and Belgrave Avenues,

  a few feet west of Tank Hill

  One of the most marvelous things about San Francisco is its dirt trails. I’m not talking about trails in parks—every city has those. No, I mean trails in the city itself—dirt trails running right through the middle of swanky residential districts, and staid middle-class tracts, and run-down slums, and just about everywhere else. As far as I know, this makes San Francisco unique. In all my extensive wanderings through dozens of cities in the developed world, I have rarely come across a single dirt trail. In modern cities concrete covers everything, and what isn’t covered is fenced off. But not in San Francisco. This city fought the earth, and the earth frequently won. As a result, there are whole stretches where between dirt trails, stairways, hillsides, natural areas, back lanes, and just plain unclassifiable open spaces, you can avoid setting foot on the asphalt grid at all. It is San Francisco’s secret circulatory system, a network of divinely dusty capillaries.

  Take, for example, the dirt trail half a block from my office on Telegraph Hill. Filbert Street, the steep street at the north end of my alley, Varennes, is filled night and day with tourists huffing and puffing and smiling their way up to Coit Tower. Very few of them notice a little metal gate through a fence on the hillside above the Garfield School. It bears two little hand-painted signs, one of which says “Please shut gate” and the other “Farewell.” If you swing open that sweetly enigmatic gate, you find yourself on a dirt trail that heads north. It meanders along, past anise plants and random rocks, until it emerges onto Telegraph Hill Boulevard above the dead-end of Greenwich Street. I sometimes end up parking in front of the apartment building there, and that trail is the most direct route to my office. It feels like a divine cross between a mountain trail and the secret tunnel that leads to Toad’s pantry in The Wind in the Willows.

  Or take the nameless little trail that runs just west of Tank Hill, between Clarendon and Belgrave, two of the most beautiful and expensive streets in the city. Like most of the city’s dirt trails, this one is the result of a patch of hillside simply falling between the cracks: The land is presumably owned by the city, but it’s between two houses and it’s too narrow to do anything with. But someone, a kid or a kid at heart, has made a trail there. It is covered with pine needles that have fallen from a big Monterey pine and it looks
out at the Golden Gate Bridge. For 30 seconds, as you walk along it smelling that dusty pine needle smell, you are in the Sierra foothills.

  Or the unmarked trail that runs west of Beacon Street at the top of Billy Goat Hill. I discovered it one afternoon when I saw a bobcat in the foliage next to a monstrous modern house at 275 Beacon. Following the bobcat, I walked up the hillside and found myself on a densely wooded trail that emerged at the Walter Haas Playground on Diamond Heights Boulevard. I had no idea I was going to come out there. The great thing about trails is that you don’t know where they’re going to end up.

  Equally delightful are the city’s unpaved streets and lanes. There are only a few of these left. Since Brewster Street in Bernal Heights has been paved over, Glen Park now holds the James Taylor title as Country Road Capital of San Francisco. Poppy Lane, off Sussex, wanders along for 400 or so blissful yards, probably the longest dirt road in town. But even more of a trapdoor into permanent summer vacation is nearby Ohlone Way. This path lives up to its evocative name, dreaming along in dusty splendor past anises and daturas and blackberries and morning glories and prickly pears.

  Great cities invite you to love them in extreme close-up, to love every inch of them. And the more eccentric, convoluted, broken, and uneven they are, the more there is to love. The tenements on the Lower East Side in New York City, the decaying wooden houses above the waterfront in Istanbul, the fading rose-colored buildings in the magical little grid south of the Spanish Steps in Rome, the bombed-out villas near the Vucciria in Palermo—it is precisely the irregularity of these places that allows your heart to get a grip on them, like a climber finding a tiny hold that will not give way. Shimmering Venice has the most beautiful inches of any city in the world. San Francisco cannot compete, because it does not have streets made of water. But it has the next best thing: It has dirt trails. They make this city a place where mystery is measured in soft footsteps, and magic in clouds of dust.

  Chapter 33

  The Balloon

  Nameless lawn past the balustrade at the dead end of

  Vallejo Street, east of Florence Street

  The most enchanting view of downtown San Francisco is found from a little-known place high on Russian Hill called Ina Donna Cool-brith Park. It is not so much a park as a winding paved path that meanders along the steep eastern face of the hill just off Taylor Street, making two loops before rejoining the Vallejo Steps. A few old green benches line one side of the cracked asphalt path. The hillside is luxuriant with towering Monterey pines and century plants, jade and potato, oleanders and manzanita shrubs and golden grasses.

  This lane offers such an unexpectedly close-up view of the city that it almost feels illicit, as if you’ve stolen into a locked-off castle turret. The skyscrapers of downtown rise up less than a mile away, with the Transamerica Pyramid filtered through the branches of an enormous pine. The banners of Chinatown wave gaily in the foreground, against a background of old brick buildings. By day, Broadway is just a wide street; at night, illuminated by the gaudy signs of the last of the topless bars, it acquires a spurious neon romance. Beyond the city, three of the four towers of the magnificent suspension span of the Bay Bridge are visible, leading the eye to the bridge’s mighty keystone pier, Moran’s Island, the deepest bridge pier in the world, more massive than the Great Pyramid at Giza. The cable cars roll past a block below, on an amiably disheveled block of protean Mason Street that marks the border of the northern reach of Chinatown. To the left, Coit Tower soars like an Italianate exclamation mark.

  Even today, when it is easily accessible, the top of Russian Hill feels like a place apart. But in the 19th century, when only a steep goat trail connected the heights with the town below, it felt like it was floating above the earth. So, at least, a writer named Emma Frances Dawson wrote in an 1896 short story titled “A Gracious Visitation”: “I live in a region of remote sounds. On Russian Hill I look down as from a balloon; all there is of the stir of the city comes in distant bells and whistles, changing their sound, just as the scenery moves, according to the state of the atmosphere. The islands shift as if enchanted, now near and plain, then removed and dim.”

  If you cross Taylor and head uphill on the Vallejo Steps, you come to the summit of Russian Hill. Here, just east of an elegant stone balustrade, is the most delightful patch of grass in San Francisco. This little lawn with the stunning view has no name, but I think of it as Robin Hood Place, because it steals from the rich and gives to the poor. It stands on hallowed, and very expensive, San Francisco ground. Right next to it is one of San Francisco’s great houses, architect Willis Polk’s anti-Victorian shingled duplex at 1013–1019 Vallejo. Like a number of houses atop Russian Hill, this masterpiece escaped the 1906 fire. Polk also designed the balustrade, as well as the larger one at the Jones Street end, and four cottages on Russian Hill Place. A few steps away is little Florence Street, one of the most exquisite and exclusive lanes in the city. The two oldest shingle-style houses in the city, designed by an ethereal Swedenborgian minister named Joseph Worcester, stand at 1034 and 1036 Vallejo. Every square inch on the summit is soaked in history—and money. But that cheerful little lawn at the very top is a commons, open to all. I sometimes walk up there with a gocup, the knowledge that I am a plebian trespasser making the cocktail taste even better.

  Actually, some of the summit’s denizens would have heartily approved of such bibulous trespassing. For they were trespassers themselves—bohemians and free spirits who for a brief time sent a zany jolt through San Francisco and the country with their lighthearted, invincibly youthful approach to life and art. Here on the summit of Russian Hill, at the end of the 19th century, a merry band of young writers and artists and architects came up with a little magazine called the Lark. The Lark was not profound, or even particularly original. But it was playful, witty, sophisticated, and self-mocking. And it did leave a legacy, albeit one written in invisible ink. It was fun.

  Fittingly, the Lark came into existence because of a prank. A teetotaling dentist named Dr. Henry Cogswell had donated a number of fountains to the city, each of them featuring a life-size statue of Cogswell himself proferring a glass of refreshing, nonalcoholic water to the onlooker. One of the statues stood at Market and California, near the Ferry Building. This statue offended a 27-year-old man named Gelett Burgess, a Bostonian who was teaching topographical drawing at U.C. Berkeley. Burgess found it outrageous that visitors to San Francisco, of all the gin-joint-filled burgs in the world, should be confronted by a fatuous cast-iron sermon for abstemiousness the moment they set foot on the city’s main street. So late one January night in 1894, Burgess, his friend Bruce Porter, and two other cronies, threw a rope around Dr. Cogswell’s iron torso and dragged him off his pedestal.

  Demonstrating an admirably lax attitude toward vandalism, the Examiner lauded the mystery miscreants, lambasting the statue as “an eyesore” that “dried up the artistic fountain of the soul.” When Burgess, reveling in the praise, told friends what he had done, U.C. officials got word of his involvement and fired him. Cast out of bourgeois respectability, Burgess embraced a bohemian lifestyle. His first step was to leave his modern apartment at Green and Leavenworth and move to a dilapidated old house at 1031 Vallejo, on the summit of Russian Hill.

  In the late 19th century, San Franciscans wanted modern houses, with indoor plumbing and electricity. New houses were popping up in Pacific Heights, the Western Addition, and the Mission District. The old houses on the summit of Russian Hill, even though they had panoramic views of the Golden Gate, downtown, and the bay, were not in high demand. According to an 1890 article in the Chronicle, Willis Polk discovered his future home when, wandering around at night “in quest of inspiration,” he came upon a deserted old house with all of its windows broken and decided to move into it if he could. The story is probably apocryphal, but the summit was not exactly ritzy. A nearby site at about that time was occupied by a poor old Irish woman’s shack and filled with trash through which goats roamed. Of hi
s one-story-plus-an-attic house, one of 15 modest structures built in the 1860s on that stretch of Vallejo, Burgess wrote, there was “no queerer, quainter, crookeder a house, nor a house in worse array, of more tatterdemalion an aspect and cock-sided disrepute than the chunk of queer cottage at No. 1031 Vallejo Street.”

  Russian Hill had long been an artists’ haunt. In the late 1860s, the poet Ina Coolbrith (after whom the park was named), Bret Harte, and Charles Warren Stoddard met frequently at Coolbrith’s house on the hill, plotting out issues of a magazine called the Overland Monthly. The tradition was continued by a charismatic middle-age woman named Kate Atkinson, a fellow Unitarian with whom Burgess had become close. Atkinson hosted dinner parties at her house at 1032 Broadway (built in 1853, the house still stands), where the guests included Burgess, Willis Polk and his wife, artists and designers Bruce Porter, Florence Lundborg, and Porter Garnett, and printer Charles Murdock. Polk also hosted a group called the Roseleaves for select fellow members of the Bohemian Club, a writers’ and artists’ club. (It later underwent a hideous, Gregor Samsa–style metamorphosis into an exclusive retreat for the likes of Donald Rumsfeld.) During one of his brief stays in town, Robert Louis Stevenson, who was universally beloved by San Francisco’s artistic community, attended a Roseleaf party. Burgess and Porter and their pals also gathered at a cabin in the redwoods they called Camp Ha-Ha. (In a pleasing continuity, the novelist Herb Gold, author of a book on bohemias, lives on the summit of Broadway, across from Atkinson’s old house.)

  Burgess and Porter—whom Burgess regarded as the true artistic genius and free spirit, and with whom he remained friends for more than 60 years—played the part of bohemians to the hilt. The diminutive Burgess, who was known as “the Walking Peanut,” wore a knee-length cape with a huge lapel carnation, Oscar Wilde’s trademark. The much taller Porter favored gloomy bohemian clothes. As they walked on the goat trail that ran down the steep Vallejo slope to the “Lower Town” (North Beach, Chinatown, and Kearny Street), they must have been a peculiar sight.