by Gary Kamiya
The list does not include anything I did not experience myself, so the truly monumental, Les Halles–like losses will not be found here. Like the great ferry fleet, or the 1853 Montgomery Block, or the Belt Line Railway at the base of Telegraph Hill, or the sprawling old Produce Market that used to stand where the sterile Golden Gateway Apartments now are. Those icons are not on the list, but the ones included are heartbreaking in their own right. If a common theme connects them—besides the preponderance of bars—it is that they all date to a time when the city was cheap and unpretentious and amiably vulgar and infinitely more eccentric. Read ’em and weep.
1) Playland at the Beach. The old amusement park at the Great Highway and Balboa was the city’s last low-I.Q., high-kicks, comic book link with a sleazy, fun-loving America, the low-democratic country of dames and John Dos Passos sailors and crazy-eyed carnies that spilled gloriously all over the place before liability lawsuits and sanitized corporations vacuumed it up.
2) Portofino Caffe and Frank’s Extra Bar. There are still Italians in North Beach, but these two moribund and lovely little places harkened back to the golden days of Joltin’ Joe. The fact that no one was ever in them made them even more shrinelike.
3) Minnie’s Can-Do Club. This was the last jazz and R&B club on Fillmore, a solitary hip outpost at uptown Pine Street after redevelopment had gutted the street that once jumped all the way down to Hank’s 500 Club. To be in that mixed-race crowd in 1974, with Dave Alexander pounding the 88s and Minnie working the bar, was very heaven.
4) U.S. Restaurant. A venerable North Beach joint with brisk middle-age Italian waitresses in starched blue uniforms, it was the last restaurant in San Francisco to unapologetically serve completely unambitious food.
5) Musée Méchanique. This wonderful little collection of antiquated moving toys lost its nostalgic mojo when it left the Cliff House for Fisherman’s Wharf. At least the sublime and demonic Camera Obscura is still out there.
6) Hamm’s Brewery sign. A huge beer mug that filled and overflowed at 16th and Bryant, it was the zenith of neon advertising’s Godlike period and served the essential function of making San Francisco mysterious from the freeway.
7) Monkey Island at the zoo. Unsanitary, decrepit, and weird, this moated jumble of enormous concrete blocks was an irresistible spider monkey favela that must have inspired thousands of future zoologists.
8) Surf Theatre. It ran every film in the Janus Film Festival. It was a block from the beach, and its perch at the end of the N line and the continent somehow seeped into the atmosphere. Maybe it’s just because that was where I saw Jules and Jim and Black Orpheus and Red Desert for the first time, but no subsequent cinematic experience has ever come close to the ones I had in that little stucco building on Irving and 47th Avenue.
9) Sam Wo. The most recent addition to the list (it closed in 2012), this absurdly narrow, filthy Chinatown noodle house was presided over by Edsel Ford Fong, the rudest waiter in the world. (See no. 11). If an eatery’s greatness is measured by the number of drunken 2 A.M. meals consumed in it, Sam Wo was the greatest restaurant in history.
10) Fun Terminal. The sordid downtown counterpart of Playland, this low-class arcade stood opposite the (also departed) Transbay Terminal. Haunted by sad Last Exit to Brooklyn hustlers and lost souls. Inspired the title of the seminal Mutants album.
11) Persian Aub Zam Zam Room. Actually this little WWII-era bar on Haight is still there, but it isn’t the same without its weird owner/bartender Bruno, who with silken malevolence would summarily kick out patrons who did not order a martini or otherwise behave in accordance with his impossible-to-divine requirements. There is a special restaurant and bar on the 10th level of hell reserved for Edsel Ford Fong and Bruno, where they will never be served.
12) Keystone Korner. Bill Evans, Grant Green, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bobby Hutcherson, Herbie Hancock, Charlie Haden—all the greats played there. Those of us who hung out there didn’t know that, after 1983, there would never be another New York–class jazz club in town.
13) Vacant lot at the end of Reed and Priest Streets. On the very summit of Nob Hill, accessible by two wondrous little dead-end streets, stood a patch of unclaimed dirt covered with foxtails. The ultra-swanky Montaire destroyed this miraculous hidey-hole.
14) VFW bar at the Beach Chalet. Bikers, nomads, and assorted losers drinking long-necked Buds underneath the glorious Lucien Labaudt murals while the ocean crashed across the highway.
15) Gjoa. The great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s ship Gjoa, the first ship to sail through the Northwest Passage, stood at the Great Highway until 1972. The beautiful sloop, facing the Pacific, was the final triumphant link with the centuries-long search for the Strait of Anian that led to the discovery of California.
16) Danny’s Dynasty and the Rickshaw. Two bars that faced each other across Ross Alley in Chinatown. The alley is so narrow that if you were thrown out of one, you would literally land inside the other, saving cab fare if not face.
Chapter 39
Port of Embarkation
Fort Mason, former San Francisco Port of Embarkation
You could put a plaque to memorialize World War II on hundreds of places in San Francisco, because the war touched everyone and everything. You could put one on the old Bethlehem Steel shipyard at 20th and Illinois Streets, where six days after Pearl Harbor the workers came up with the slogan “Keep ’em sliding!”—after the Army’s “Keep ’em flying!” You could put one on the sidewalk on Fillmore Street, where hopeful merchants had erected metal arches after the 1906 quake, when the street briefly became the city’s main drag. Those merchants had sacrificed the proud arches to one of the scrap-metal drives that kept the tanks rolling off assembly lines. You could put a plaque on Saints Peter and Paul Church in North Beach, which lost many of its parishioners in the first months of the war when hundreds of Italian American men enlisted. You could put one on the Chinese Playground, which volunteered the services of Chinese kids who were master kite builders when the military needed model airplanes for training.
But one place stands out above them all: Fort Mason, formerly known as the San Francisco Port of Embarkation. For it was from its piers that 1,647,174 troops shipped west—two-thirds of all the troops sent to the Pacific theater. For many thousands, who would not survive the island hells of Tarawa and Kwajalein and Iwo Jima, it was the last piece of American soil that they would ever touch.
The war changed San Francisco externally. It became an instant citadel, the “American Singapore.” A submarine net stretched under the Golden Gate Bridge. Catalina Flying Boats roared over the bridge, searching for Japanese submarines. Massive gun emplacements and machine gun nests ringed the bay. These defenses protected a vast network of military bases, shipyards, factories, and munition plants that stretched across the entire Bay Area. The huge Naval Shipyard at Hunters Point, the four Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, and others worked around the clock. During the war, the Kaiser Shipyards built more than 747 ships, many of them the indispensable workhorse Liberty ships, a record never matched by any shipyard before or since. One Liberty ship was built in less than five days. By 1943, the Bay Area had become the largest shipbuilding center in the world.
Before the United States entered the war, in a radio broadcast urging America to provide support to Great Britain during the dark year when it stood alone, President Roosevelt had called the United States “the great arsenal of democracy.” That arsenal was to play a decisive role in the ultimate Allied victory. And San Francisco was a vital part of it.
The city was packed as never before or since, not just with military personnel but also with tens of thousands of migrant civilians—blacks from Texas and Arkansas and poor whites from Dust Bowl states who had streamed into California, lured by shipyard jobs. (The “Okies” were subjected to almost as much discrimination as the blacks.) A staggering 94,000 people migrated to San Francisco between 1940 and 1943, most in less than one year. Despite frenzied government housing cons
truction at Hunters Point and elsewhere, there was not nearly enough housing for all these newcomers. Workers packed into tiny rooms, vacant lots, gymnasiums, spare rooms. Servicemen slept in movie theaters. Families doubled up. Some workers slept in the same bed in shifts.
But the war also changed the city in invisible ways, reaching into its citizens’ hearts and souls. San Franciscans had always been highly individualistic, but the common goal of winning the war united them. One of the most remarkable manifestations of this unity was the explosion of wartime neighborhood block clubs. These neighborhood groups, often led by women, took charge of organizing civil defense, first aid, food supplies, firefighting, and other emergency needs. In The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego, Roger Lotchin argues that “it is very likely that [the clubs] contributed further to making San Francisco the collection of neighborhoods it was already famous for being.”
But if the war created a sense of shared experience, a feeling of being a part of something larger than oneself, it also heightened a deeply subjective sense of strangeness, newness, unpredictability. Almost 200 years after Anza had chosen the site for the presidio, San Francisco had finally become a true frontier garrison city. As a result, life there during the war was a whirlwind—exhilarating and sometimes terrifying.
San Franciscans learned the realities of war firsthand on Christmas Day 1941, when hundreds of wounded soldiers, orphaned children, and other survivors of Pearl Harbor, along with the remains of those killed, arrived on a convoy of ships. No official announcement was made, but the city saw the convoy of camouflaged ships moving through the Golden Gate. Thousands of anxious people, not sure if their loved ones were on the ships, drove down to the waterfront, only to be turned away by armed sentries. A fleet of ambulances and taxis drove the wounded—far more of them than had been reported in the newspapers—to hospitals as an emergency call went out for nurses to report to Eddy and Octavia. Hundreds of female volunteers greeted the refugees and soldiers, dispensing hot coffee and cigarettes and making sure every child got a toy. The Chronicle ran a photo of a sad, confused-looking little girl clutching a teddy bear. There was no way to conceal the trucks that drove away with the black coffins. It was not a Christmas any San Franciscan who was there would ever forget.
Death was a constant presence. Fear of a Japanese attack was real: Japanese submarines sunk freighters off the coast and shelled an oil refinery in Santa Barbara. Blackouts were frequent. As the war went on, it hit closer and closer to home. Everyone had a relative or a friend in the service, and everyone knew what it meant when the dread Western Union man knocked on the door. Gold stars denoting mothers who had lost sons were displayed on windows all over town.
In 1943, the city turned out to honor the survivors of the cruiser U.S.S. San Francisco, which had engaged in a heroic point-blank shootout with Japanese warships in the naval battle of Guadalcanal. Its commander, San Francisco–born Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callahan, and 77 men were killed in what was perhaps the last ship-to-ship engagement in military history. The battered cruiser had staggered into Mare Island Navy Yard for repairs, and the 100 surviving members of her crew were sent ashore. Some were in bathrobes, carrying canes and crutches. As the sailors, sitting silently and ill at ease and looking straight ahead, were driven in jeeps down Market Street, 100,000 San Franciscans, standing three deep on the sidewalks and leaning out of office windows, roared and applauded and whistled. Today the twisted, shell-torn bridge of the ship stands at Point Lobos, in the most spectacular place in the city, facing the great circle route from San Francisco to Guadalcanal.
Omnipresent death mingled with ceaseless change. People—workers, family members, friends, lovers—were here one day and gone the next. Uncertainty gripped everything. Thousands of lonely young men were always in town, celebrating their last nights before going off to war. Carpe diem was the city’s motto. Bars and clubs were packed. Authorities winked at prostitution, although many of the soldiers were small-town innocents who were just looking for a nice girl to talk to. Love, deep respect, and dread made a cocktail of unbearable poignancy. An electric charge filled the city, a sense that life mattered, that it was for keeps.
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, an immigrant from Alabama who had only recently moved to San Francisco, captured this feeling eloquently: “The air of collective displacement, the impermanence of life in wartime and the gauche personalities of the more recent arrivals tended to dissipate my own sense of not belonging. In San Francisco, for the first time, I perceived myself as part of something. Not that I identified with the newcomers, nor with the rare Black descendants of native San Franciscans, nor with the whites or even the Asians, but rather with the times and the city … To me, a thirteen-year-old Black girl, stalled by the South and Southern Black life style, the city was a state of beauty and a state of freedom.”
John dos Passos, who had described the raw feeling of Market Street in his great U.S.A. trilogy, wrote an evocative essay about the city’s atmosphere for Harper’s magazine in March 1944. He went up to the top of Coit Tower in a rainstorm, where for a moment he saw, through the shifting mist, a long line of gray freighters at anchor. “Two young men in khaki are standing beside me, squinting to see through the rain-spattered glass. ‘Boy, it won’t be long now,’ says one. ‘You mean before we are stuck down in the hold of one of those things.’ ‘You said it.’ “They notice he is listening and shut up. The city was filled with young men like those.
San Francisco served two crucial functions during the war. It was a vital part of the great arsenal of democracy, and it was a great liberty town. As the last stop, San Francisco got to play her favorite role, the whore with a heart of gold. And for once, she could play it completely straight. She was a whore with a heart of gold, offering the solace of her beauty, her nightclubs, her booze, her tattoos, and her beautiful girls—and they were all beautiful—to a bunch of scared 19-year-old kids who were about to enter hell.
The war changed the city in a million ways, some good, some bad, some too ambiguous or huge to sum up even now. But if you were to ask any San Franciscan who was there, they would tell you that what the war did to them was not important. What was important was what they did for the war. And when it was over, they could say, as Albert Camus said of his fellow Parisians on the August night their city was liberated, “We did what was necessary.”
Chapter 40
The End of the Road
1546 Grant Avenue, formerly the Place
On January 14, 1949, a former Columbia University halfback named Jack Kerouac, his pal Neal Cassady, Cassady’s first wife, LuAnne Henderson, and a man named Al Hinkle piled into Cassady’s 1949 Hudson and barreled out of New York City, heading for San Francisco. Hinkle is unknown to history and is only mentioned here because on the trip east with Neal to meet Kerouac, in an apropos curtain-raiser to what would become the most mythic American road chronicle since Huck Finn headed down the Mississippi with Jim, he had left his newlywed wife stranded in Arizona.
The 26-year-old Kerouac had just finished his first novel, titled The Town and the City. But Scribner’s and Little Brown had both rejected the 1,183-page manuscript. Angry and depressed, Kerouac wrote a despairing letter to his equally unknown and equally ambitious friend, a brooding, sexually frustrated, intellectual poet named Allen Ginsberg: “I am lost. The only thing to do is to give up—I am giving up.”
But Kerouac was revived by Cassady. The young Dionysus from Denver—athlete, sex junkie, car thief, motormouth, semi-sociopath, and wannabe writer—sent Kerouac passionate letters proclaiming they were “blood brothers.” Inspired, Kerouac started a new book, which he described as “an American-scene picaresque … dealing simply with hitch-hiking and the sorrows, hardships, adventures, sweats and labours of that.” The book would be called On the Road.
When they arrived in San Francisco, Cassady yelled, “No more land! We can’t go any further ‘cause there ain’t no more land!” T
hen he abruptly dropped Kerouac and LuAnn at the corner of O’Farrell and Grant and went to rejoin his second wife, Caroline. “You see what a bastard he is?” Lu-Ann said to Kerouac as they stood penniless on the corner. “Dean will leave you out in the cold any time it’s in his interest.”
It was not an auspicious visit. “I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life,” Kerouac wrote. He and LuAnne walked all over town, looking for food money. They were so broke they hit up some drunken seamen in a Mission Street flophouse, who offered them whiskey. But Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, would return to the place Kerouac called “the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills.”
That the Beats would come to San Francisco seems preordained. They were city poets par excellence: Their dark romantic vision needed mysterious streets and evil towers. (Film noir, which came into existence at the same time as the Beats, manifests the same love-hate relationship with the city.) Kerouac loved San Francisco, calling it “really the most excited city in America.” His descriptions of it have an intensity born of the fact that in those days before air travel, getting there still felt like an epic feat. “Whoo, Frisco nights, the end of the continent and the end of doubt, all dull doubt and tomfoolery, goodbye,” Kerouac rhapsodized. And it was in San Francisco that Kerouac and Ginsberg launched the pedal-to-the-metal literary movement that would inspire youth across the country, outrage the Man, and give a name to a generation: the Beats.
One San Francisco neighborhood is indelibly associated with the Beats: North Beach. The connection makes sense. North Beach had been edgy since the Gold Rush days of the Sydney Ducks, the Hounds, Chiletown, and the Barbary Coast. The holy trinity of cheap sex, sketchy bars, and low rents have always attracted writers and artists, and North Beach and environs, in particular its southern edge, became San Francisco’s artistic quarter. The tradition kicked off with the Montgomery Block: Built in 1853, it hosted various impecunious artists’ colonies until the 1940s. Its most famous turn-of-the-century watering hole was Coppa’s, whose walls were covered with a demented collection of murals, mostly by Porter Garnett, depicting various lascivious, off-the-wall, and generally crazed artists and writers. The Black Cat Café, which opened in the 1930s, was another bohemian haunt (and later a gay bar of historic import) just up the street on Montgomery. The nearby Iron Pot was a favorite of artists, including Hassel Smith, Sam Francis, Jean Varda, and Benjamin Bufano.
