Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  The duo closely followed the avant-garde tendencies of the day, in particular the aesthetic and decadent movements, with their art-for-art’s-sake credo. They read the London magazine the Yellow Book, kept up with French post-impressionist painters, and were intrigued by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Porter, who had visited the studio of Edward Burne-Jones, was a proponent of art nouveau. The two men were painfully aware that San Francisco was a provincial backwater, whose best writers and artists inevitably decamped for New York. (They would not be the last San Franciscans to grapple with this problem.) Possibly inspired by a Chicago magazine called the Chap-Book, they decided to launch their own. As Burgess later wrote, “we had been watching the literary movements of the time very narrowly, and the impulse to strike for California grew in us. There was a new note of personal expression then becoming dominant, but not in the Revue Blanche, not in the Yellow Book nor yet in the Chicago Chap-Book did we seem to hear the tune ring true. Yes, we must demolish Decadence and its ‘precious’ pretensions.”

  Thus was born the Lark. In place of pessimistic Decadence, Burgess and Porter extolled a Western optimism that drew its strength and inspiration from nature. Instead of preciousness, they celebrated nonsense and childish whimsy. Burgess’s most famous poem appeared in the first issue:

  I never saw a purple cow,

  I never hope to see one;

  But I can tell you anyhow,

  I’d rather see than be one.

  Rubbing shoulders with the nonsense were brief romances, parables, French-influenced poems, and little essays. They surrounded their text with remarkably creative graphics, including hand-drawn drop caps, unusual typefaces, startling borders, and weird creatures drawn by Burgess called “Goops.” The bubbly nuttiness of the contents was evidenced by the back cover of issue no. 10: a spoof ad, with an illustration by Willis Polk, for a new book by Polk called L’arkitecture Moderne. “The edition will be limited to three copies, printed on palimpsest parchment, bound in half-chicken leather, crushed mouse-skin, or Irish bull,” the copy solemnly intoned. This light-as-a-feather magazine cost five cents.

  The public loved it. Reviewers felt that the Lark had somehow captured the spirit of the fin de siècle. The New York Times wrote, “It is a thin, small creature, but incredibly, even impossibly, 1895. And as for contents, it is all written by ‘Les Jeunes,’ those of California, forsooth, and delightfully young men they are.” The Boston Budget agreed: “The Lark is a reaction against the decadent spirit. It is blithe, happy, full of the joy of life and the Greek within us. A herald of the dawn of a new century.” There were dissenting voices—the New York Tribune called it “one more hysterical magazine … from the realm remote from the moorings of intelligence”—but they were decidedly in the minority.

  The Lark’s biggest impact, not surprisingly, was on its hometown. San Francisco, which had seen a blossoming of talent in the 1850s and 1860s with Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ina Coolbrith, Joaquin Miller, and others, had been in a literary doldrums for several decades. The Lark inspired a cultural revival. Les Jeunes, as the magazine’s creators took to calling themselves after the Times review came out, blew fresh air through the town’s Victorian sensibilities, just as they had toppled the self-satisfied statue on Market Street.

  Les Jeunes’ finest achievement, out-Larking the Lark, was a one-issue magazine called the Petit Journal des Refusées. Trapezoidal-shaped, filled with demented graphics based on old wallpaper designs, pursuing the conceit that every piece in it was rejected by made-up journals like the “Polynesian Monitor,” its margins crawling with what Burgess called “Goops, square trees and cubical suns, striped elephants and plaid hippopotami, architectural monstrosities, falling tears, lighting flashes and deformities unmentionable,” it was a miraculous little bit of anachronistic Far West Dada, a simultaneous precursor of Zap Comix, the Onion, the Believer, and Mad Magazine. Looking at its original pages, protected beneath plastic covers in the History Center of the San Francisco Public Library, it is hard to believe that something this crazy was published in 1896.

  The Lark’s flight lasted just two years—which, considering its gossamer nature, was actually a solid run. By the end, the fizz had gone out of the bottle. “Our mood was too spontaneous, or rather too enthusiastic to last, for we had dwelt over-long with gayety; there was the world’s sober work to do,” Burgess recalled. “And, jealous of the Lark’s prestige, which had suffered from no carelessness in our devotion, after two years of the frolic, we brought the essay to a close before it could be said that the fire of our initial enthusiasm had grown cold.”

  Les Jeunes claimed to take their inspiration from the superb natural setting of San Francisco. Burgess wrote, “For here Nature came to our very doorsteps and bade us to be of good cheer. To our doorsteps … in a literal sense, for from my window on Russian Hill, I commanded a whole half circle of ocean, channel, harbor, islands and mountains, and saw the hills change from green to yellow, from yellow to red and from red to brown, as we swung past the vernal equinox. Who would not call such a terrible, awful, beautiful land his home, and, loving it with the passion of youth, endeavor to liberate it from the worship of dead gods and useless rituals!”

  But neither Burgess nor any of his collaborators attempted to capture this “terrible, awful, beautiful” nature. The Lark features some poems and essays that gaily celebrate nature and living for the moment, but they lack depth and darkness. At their worst, they evince a pallid, oversophisticated, effete tone that recalls Watteau’s paintings of shepherds. A deeper response to nature, a truly independent California literature, would have to wait for greater artists, like Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck.

  Burgess was besotted by San Francisco’s beauty, but he was unable to turn his personal immersion in that beauty into lasting art. This is a common-enough theme in San Francisco’s history that it raises the perennial question: Is this city so beautiful that it turns its would-be artists into stupefied Lotus-Eaters? At least some of the time, the answer seems to be yes.

  But one does Burgess and his friends an injustice by weighing them against heavyweights. They were not great artists, but they did not claim to be. They created a madcap, funny, smart, life-affirming little magazine, one that still breathes the spirit of youth and fun. And they knew enough to bring down the curtain before their act got old.

  The true spirit of Les Jeunes, and the best qualities of Burgess the man, comes across in his little book Bayside Bohemia. Looking back on the long-gone days when he and Porter Garnett created the Petit Journal des Refusées, Burgess wrote, “I doubt if there is any place in the broad world, save San Francisco, where such insane, misspent endeavor could be possible; where two men, no longer in their first youth, would toil for a month to produce 16 pages of such fantastic rubbish as we perpetrated in my office on Sutter Street. But my blood had not yet begun to cool, nor has it yet, thank God,—I would link arms with any other such madman as Porter Garnett, in any other such absurd enterprise, today, at the drop of a hat!”

  Fun, like friendship, leaves no tangible traces. It rises into the air and vanishes like a balloon. But from that little lawn on the summit of Russian Hill, when the sun begins to set, you can still sometimes see that balloon floating out toward the ocean, in the shape of—what else?—a purple cow.

  Chapter 34

  The Front Door

  The Ferry Building

  It is best seen at night. It is better still if a white shroud of fog—that ghostly mantilla that Dashiell Hammett called “thin, clammy and penetrant”—obscures the soulless towers behind it. But above all, it must be seen from the water. Only then do its ghosts rattle their anchor chains.

  The Ferry Building has loomed up at the watery end of Market Street since Ulysses S. Grant was president. Its clock famously stopped at 5:16 A.M. on April 18, 1906. Modeled after the Giralda, Seville Cathedral’s minaret turned bell tower, A. Page Brown’s long, elegant gray pile still functions as a ferry terminal, and as the home of a pop
ular (and extremely expensive) farmers’ market. There was universal rejoicing when the wretched Embarcadero Freeway was torn down after the 1989 earthquake, bringing one of San Francisco’s most beloved landmarks back into view. But what was revealed is an enormous tombstone for a city that no longer exists.

  Actually, the Ferry Building commemorates not one but two vanished cities: the workingman’s city and the city of the bay. Those lost cities were not identical, but they overlapped, and they died at about the same time. Soon after the bay ceased to be San Francisco’s heart and soul and became just a pretty backdrop, the laborers and truckers and merchant sailors and all the other working Joes who used to own this town began to vanish from the city’s streets. There is poetic justice in the fact that the vast, unknowable bay evokes an equally vast, unknowable city—and country, for that matter—that no longer exists.

  Until 1936, when the Bay Bridge opened, San Francisco could be reached only by water or from the peninsula. The overwhelming majority of people came across the bay by ferry. Which meant that the Ferry Building was the city’s front door.

  In 1913, 60,000 commuters crossed the bay by water twice each workday. They walked off the boat and up the Y-shaped gangways into the Ferry Building, strolled across its marble mosaic floors, and exited through its massive arches onto the Ferry Plaza. What greeted them was controlled chaos—and a city planner’s dream. Streetcars, horses, cable cars, railroads—there was more transportation running around than in a Richard Scarry book. The streetcars, timed to arrive at the Ferry Plaza when the boats came in, hauled most of the passengers, but the cable cars were workhorses too. They clanked all over town, along the flats and up the hills, rattling along at a civilized six miles an hour, the pace of a slow runner. On the water, 23 ferryboats plied the turbid bay waters from 5:30 A.M. to 11:35 P.M. Fast Key System boats carried passengers to Berkeley and Oakland in 18 minutes, where they were met by electric trains. It was so efficient that San Franciscans routinely commuted to U.C. Berkeley. On weekends, 30,000 people rode the ferries on cheap pleasure outings. The “Moonlight Excursion to Mt. Tamalpais—Up on the Crookedest Railroad in the World” cost $1—10 cents more for a round trip to Sausalito and $1.50 for dinner at the Tavern at the Top.

  The heart of the waterfront was East Street, now the Embarcadero. The scene there in 1913 is captured in a wonderful panoramic photograph included in Nancy Olmsted’s The Ferry Building: Witness to a Century of Change. With its shabby stores and bars and earnest billboards, the picture is a relic of a handmade San Francisco, a pre-corporate San Francisco, a San Francisco still hospitable to people walking the street with very little money in their pockets. Olmsted gives a lovingly detailed description of it:

  At 16 East Street between Mission and Market, Yosemite beer is advertised in stained art glass at five cents a glass. The owner is confident that beer won’t cost more in his lifetime. San Francisco’s waterfront is a workingman’s hangout; he can choose between “Can’t Bust ’Em” or “Boss of the Road” overalls. He can put away a dozen oysters on the half-shell at Herman Dree’s Sidewalk Oyster Bar at 2 East Street, and wash them down with Jackson or Albany (brewed locally) or imported Bohemian Lager. He might drop into the Ensign Saloon (front door on Market, backdoor getaway on East Street) … It’s “Big Doin’s at Calistoga on July 4th!” Coca-Cola is recommended for “relieving fatigue.” Los Angeles is $12 away—round-trip on scenic Southern Pacific; and a hotel room costs as little as 15 cents for a chicken-wire separated stall at the Cosmopolitan.

  East Street belonged to the men who went down to the sea in ships. A 91-year-old sea captain named Fred Klebingat, who first sailed into San Francisco in 1909, stood with Olmsted in front of the Ferry Building in 1980, looked at the old photograph, and recalled the old days on what was called, fittingly, the City Front. “If you walked into the Ensign Saloon and called ‘Captain,” half the men in the place would look up,” Klebingat said. As a broke young sailor, he relied on one of San Francisco’s great saloon traditions, the free lunch. “If it wasn’t for the free lunch, I don’t think we would have survived. There was Feige Hansen in the middle of the block between Mission and Market, known as the ‘Hash House.’ It served ‘cannibal sandwiches’ as free lunch. There were slices of pumpernickel with raw hamburger and a slice of onion on top. Of course, first you had to buy a couple of steams for five cents.” Klebingat recalled talking with a couple of broke pals: “‘How much you got?’ ‘I got a nickel.’ ‘I got a dime. That’s 15 cents. Enough for three of us—let’s go to Sanguinetti’s for lunch.’ Sanguinetti’s would serve you a scoop of steam beer, some spaghetti and Italian bread, and all the fish you could eat for a nickel. Now his place is called Fisherman’s Wharf.”

  Traffic at the Ferry Building, whose first incarnation opened in 1875, increased every year between 1888 and 1933. In 1930, the year that saw the greatest volume of ferry traffic on the bay, 43 boats carried 47 million passengers and more than 6 million vehicles over a dozen routes. Fifty to 60 thousand people crossed the bay between San Francisco and Alameda County every day. At the evening rush hour, the Ferry Plaza was black with people rushing to catch the 5:15 ferries home. This superbly efficient and organized mass transit system handled more people than any transportation hub in the world except London’s Charing Cross Station.

  The piers north and south of the Ferry Building were the city’s muscular heart. The waterfront bustled. In 1933, the nadir of the Depression, 7,000 ships pulled in and out of the port’s 82 docks. In a fascinating book titled San Francisco in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City by the Bay, an anonymous author evokes its atmosphere:

  The smells of copra, of oakum, raw sugar, roasting coffee and rotting piles, and mud and salt water creep up the darkened streets … Even before the eight o’clock wail of the Ferry Building siren, the Embarcadero comes violently to life. From side streets great trucks roll through the yawning doors of the piers. The longshoremen, clustered in groups before the pier gates, swarm up ladders and across gangplanks. The jitneys, small tractor-like conveyances, trailing long lines of flat trucks, wind in and out of traffic; the comical lumber carriers, like monsters with lumber strapped to their undersides, rattle along the street. Careening taxis, rumbling underslung vans and drays, and scurrying pedestrians suddenly transform the water front into a traffic-thronged artery.

  It was the workingman’s heart of what was still, at least in demographic terms, a workingman’s town. Of the city’s 600,000 residents (400,000 of them male), 150,000 were blue-collar males and 150,000 white-collar workers. Even during the Depression, those down on their luck could still get by in San Francisco.

  But if workers made up the bulk of the city’s population, they did not call the shots. Led by a shipping magnate appropriately named Robert Dollar, employers had crushed attempts by the riggers and stevedores to form a union. Throughout the 1920s, big business interests successfully imposed their so-called American Plan—empty patriotism, then as now, being employed to disguise naked greed—which mandated open shops and gave employers control of the crucial hiring halls used to assign daily work on the waterfront. Longshoremen were forced to go through a humiliating and corrupt process called the “shape-up,” in which they were forced to mill around a bribe-taking “straw boss” who decided who would work that day.

  By 1934, the longshoremen, led by a terse, lean Australian named Harry Bridges, had successfully unionized. In May, 35,000 West Coast waterfront workers went on strike, demanding a coast-wide contract, higher wages, shorter hours, and an end to the shape-up. Negotiations brought the two sides fairly close, but an ideological chasm and mutual mistrust prevented a settlement. Tensions mounted and violence flared as employers and police tried to forcibly open the port. On July 5, 1934, the waterfront exploded. Hundreds of police and thousands of strikers clashed at the foot of Rincon Hill. Near Steuart and Mission Streets, a policeman fired into a crowd with a shotgun. Three men fell—one dead, one dying, one seriously wounded. Seventy-five others were
shot, clubbed, or hit by tear gas canisters. It would forever be known as “Bloody Thursday.”

  In the arbitration agreement that followed Bloody Thursday, almost all of the longshoremen’s demands were met. It was one of the great triumphs for organized labor in U.S. history.

  But the 1934 waterfront strike proved to be the high-water mark not just for San Francisco’s organized labor movement but also for its traditional workforce. Vast changes—in industry, in technology, in society, and on the world stage—were afoot that would utterly transform the city.

  The ferries were the first to go. The bridges and the automobile doomed them. By 1939 the number of annual passengers on Southern Pacific ferries had dropped to about 10 million, compared with more than 22 million in 1920. Also in 1939, the worst streetcar jam in the city’s history clogged downtown streets, while the Ferry Plaza stood empty. In 1941, the mighty side-wheeler Eureka, now one of the floating museums on the Hyde Street Pier, made its last trip to Sausalito. By 1950, there were only four ferry routes and 13 boats. In 1958, the last ferryboat sailed. Ferry service would not be resumed until 1964, and then it was only a shadow of what it once was.

  Herb Caen, keeper of so many of the city’s sacred fires, recognized what had been lost: “A bridge is only a bridge, a highway in the sky. Ferryboats were close to the foaming heart of the matter—something to love.”

  Like a heartbroken old spouse, the port began its final decline. Trucks were replacing trains as freight carriers, but they were hard to maneuver on San Francisco’s cramped docks, and hard to drive through its increasingly congested streets. Fewer and fewer ships used the port.