Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  I don’t find myself in South Park that often. But whenever I do, I feel like I’m looking at a stage set of my own life. It’s one of those odd places in the city whose history mirrors my own. It’s been up and it’s been down, and then it’s been up again and down again. It’s hosted Scarlett O’Hara barbecues and hobo-jungle campfires. It’s seen dot-com moguls and dot-com bankrupts. And it’s still there, waiting to turn again, a Great Wheel of Fortune flattened into an oval off Second Street.

  Chapter 45

  The Sand Castle

  Aquatic Park

  Of all the places in San Francisco, Aquatic Park is the one I’ve had the most fun in. The little stretch of sandy beach at the foot of Polk Street enchanted me from the first time I saw it 40 years ago. And since then, it has remained an old friend, like Rat and Mole’s river in The Wind in the Willows—a companion whose conversation never palls, whose countenance never darkens, whose spirit remains forever carefree.

  A big part of the beach’s charm is its tiny size. Only 400 yards long, it’s protected by the gently curving Municipal Pier on one end, and by the old wooden buildings that house the venerable Dolphin and South End Rowing Clubs on the other. Its toylike quality is heightened by the enormous ship model in reinforced concrete that faces it. Architects Mooser and Mooser’s spectacular 1939 streamline moderne building, now the Maritime Museum, looks like a beached 1930s ocean liner, complete with portholes, deck rails, and funnels: You expect P. G. Wodehouse and Cole Porter to appear on the top deck in white flannels, martinis in hand. It was built as an “ultramodern” public bathhouse, and the WPA Guide to San Francisco made the showers sound like they were designed by Jor-el of the planet Krypton: “Each person returning from the water passes through a photo-electrically operated chlorinated shower and foot bath on his way to the dressing rooms and fresh-water showers. He dries himself in currents of warm air and retrieves his street clothes from metal containers that will be sterilized with live steam before they are reissued.” (In later years, some of the clothes stashed there needed all the sterilizing steam they could get: Until it was lamentably closed in 1990, the bathhouse was the only free indoor public shower in San Francisco, and attracted its share of homeless people.)

  Best of all, this postage-stamp beach is shoehorned into the heart of the waterfront, at the foot of swanky Russian Hill. Van Ness Avenue, the city’s main north-south artery, dead-ends at one end of it. Hyde, the fabled ski ramp conjured up by Tony Bennett when he sings “where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars,” ends at the other. The city’s other beaches are destinations. But you stumble upon Aquatic Park on a stroll down Columbus Avenue. It is the ultimate urban amenity: a beach in the middle of town. It’s like the ersatz “beaches” they create every summer along the Seine in Paris, except it’s real.

  Actually, whether Aquatic Park is real or fake is an unanswerable question. It’s a real beach: You can wade into the bay here and swim until you drown, as banker William Ralston did in 1875 when his financial empire collapsed. But it is also artificial—although the “artifice” simply restored the shoreline to something closer to its original state. In keeping with the city’s founding mania for paving over any and all bodies of water it could, the original cove at Aquatic Park, known as Black Point Cove, was filled in with debris from Chinatown after the 1906 quake. When the park was created in the 1930s, workmen clearing the cove found jewelry, watches, pieces of jade, and foreign coins. The beach was created by using tons of sand from the excavations for the underground garage at Union Square. So Aquatic Park is not only a blend of nature and artifice, it is a literal cross-section of the city.

  It is also a testament to the New Deal. During the Depression, the project stalled because the city ran out of money. WPA workers—laborers, engineers, artists—stepped in and finished the job. Like another one of San Francisco’s artistic gems, the superb murals at Coit Tower, Aquatic Park is a testament to enlightened government action. It is fitting that this quasi-socialist cove graces the northern waterfront of the most liberal city in America, a gratifyingly permanent stick in the eye of Fox News.

  Finally, Aquatic Park is a link, through the Dolphin and South End Clubs, with San Francisco’s lost world of joyous athleticism and benign machismo. Even before the Dolphin Club was founded in 1877, small swim houses dotted the cove. Carleton Watkins’s 1867 photograph of four naked boys in the water captures the innocent spirit of a time when the whole city would turn out to watch a race between rival rowing clubs and when “international tug of war” was all the rage.

  Aquatic Park is the private beach for every San Franciscan who lives downtown. It’s mine too. I can bike there from my house in five minutes. Coming down Polk Street on a sunny day, the frozen ship with its flying pennants, the enigmatic sea behind it, always reminds me of a de Chirico painting, with the mystery but without the melancholy. It is the one place in my world that is reserved only for fun.

  So many of the best times of my life have been spent on that little beach that the place and my memories of it have become inseparable, like a perfect Bill Evans chord in which the melodic and the dissonant notes merge. Celebrating Zachary’s pirate-themed birthday with my family. Playing our diving-into-the-water-for-a-football game with Jonathan. Marking each one of Celeste’s summer vacations—there will not be many more—with a father-daughter swim. Riding my bike along the old Belt Line tracks. Listening to the monotonous congeros. Wandering out to the end of the collapsing old pier and looking back at the white city. Buying a Hamm’s from the grumpy old man with bad teeth who ran the long-gone hot dog stand and always opened the beer from the bottom, for reasons that were never explained. Lying in the hot sand. Sitting on the old cracked creosote-smelling boards next to the Dolphin Club, and marveling at how little is required for happiness.

  Chapter 46

  Taking It to the Streets

  Sacramento and Leidesdorff Streets

  The city that existed when I moved here in 1971 is long gone. Many of San Francisco’s working-class people have left, or moved into outlying neighborhoods like the Excelsior, the Outer Mission, or the Bayview. Its black community has been decimated. And the middle class has been battered by a combination of poor public schools, high rents, and stratospheric home prices. Ironically, the people who are most protected are the very poor, who have powerful allies defending them. As historian and open-space activist Greg Gaar told me, “San Francisco is starting to be like Paris before the revolution—only the very rich and the very poor live here.”

  San Francisco’s inexorable move toward becoming a rich man’s city began in the mid-1970s, when real estate values exploded. At least four separate tidal waves of money followed, each tsunami washing away a few more cops, teachers, artists, and plumbers. In the late 1970s and 1980s, there was an influx of young financial-industry types, who clustered in the Marina, tied sweaters around their necks, and drove Porsches. In the late 1990s, the dot-com-ers blasted inanely through, spending half of their companies’ available capital on Super Bowl ads and dropping thousand-buck tips on strippers. In the first decade of the new millennium, there were the investment bankers, stockbrokers, hedge fund managers, and mortgage brokers who made a killing on the housing bubble. And today, there are the second-wave techies, who are flooding in at a rate that exceeds even that of the dotcom era. San Francisco draws more venture capital money than any other American city. A staggering 1,700 tech firms are now based here, employing a total of 44,000 workers—many of them highly paid enough to afford $3,000-a-month one-bedroom apartments or down payments on modest houses that cost $800,000.

  The ramifications of this latest invasion are most obvious in the Mission and South of Market neighborhoods, favored techie turf where real estate prices have gone through the roof. But the whole city has become so expensive that people making an ordinary salary cannot move here. San Francisco is on the verge of becoming a gated community.

  For close to 40 years, San Franciscans have been asking the sa
me questions, and today they’re more urgent than ever. Can the city survive all this money? Will ordinary people be able to live here? Will the city still nurture artists and mavericks and dissenters? Will it still be San Francisco?

  I don’t have the answers any more than anyone else does. It may be that money will finally flatten the city out, homogenize it, kill its spirit, run down its freak flag once and for all. But the city has experienced booms before and survived. And its history suggests that it would be unwise to predict anything—good, bad, or indifferent—about its future.

  The most pressing issue is the increasingly exorbitant cost of housing. But even this will not completely change the nature of the city. San Francisco is becoming a city divided between those who are grandfathered in and those who are rich enough to buy their way in. Those who get shafted are the young and middle-class people who want to move here. This is deplorable, and the lack of churn and fresh blood is inevitably going to lead to cultural stagnation. Oakland, Brooklyn West, where many young artists and creative people have moved to escape San Francisco rents, is coming on fast: Its First Fridays, dazzlingly multiracial street parties, are hipper than anything happening across the bay, or probably in the country. But again, San Francisco has been expensive, albeit not quite so expensive, for decades, and the city has muddled through, still just as left-wing, if not as eccentric, as ever. The de facto urban socialism known as rent control keeps enough oddballs and nonplutocrats here to keep San Francisco from becoming Monaco. It’s a Rube Goldberg–like solution, it’s unfair and inequitable, but it sort of works.

  San Francisco is the “limousine liberal” of cities. It’s too bad it’s not still the deux chevaux liberal of cities, but at least it’s still liberal.

  Still, anyone who isn’t concerned about San Francisco’s future is not paying attention. Some unique combination of class and politics and ethnicity and geography and history and a dozen other ingredients have gone into making it the place that it is. Some of those ingredients have changed, and some of them don’t exist anymore. It’s worth fighting to save what can be saved, to ensure that this city remains ornery and compassionate and out of step with the American mainstream. But nostalgia—which San Franciscans are prone to indulge in far too much—is a fool’s game. And it is ultimately antithetical to the city’s spirit. Born in a frenzy, destroyed in a catastrophe, the destination of renegades and dreamers, San Francisco has constantly reinvented herself. There are many prayers that one could say for her as she approaches the 250th anniversary of her founding, but the one that matters most is that she stay forever young.

  On the dismal, rainy morning of January 20, 2012, I found out that she still was.

  The Occupy San Francisco movement started in the fall of 2011. Inspired by Occupy Wall Street’s protest in New York’s Zuccotti Park, protesters set up a few dozen tents in Justin Herman Plaza, across from the Ferry Building. (If those protesters had known who the plaza was named after, they might have moved.) Like the other Occupy protests in cities across the country, the San Francisco movement was an outburst of pent-up popular anger in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008. The protesters were outraged that predatory, unregulated financial institutions were bailed out, while average Americans lost their life savings or got kicked out of their houses. At a deeper level, the Occupy movement was driven by a sense that the fundamental American social contract—the promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will do all right—had broken down. The movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” resonated with millions of people fed up with the enormous gulf between the richest Americans and the rest of the country, and by a political and economic system that increasingly seemed to be bought and paid for by the 1 percent.

  The protesters who came out to Justin Herman Plaza at the beginning were a mixture of recent college graduates, veteran lefties, homeless people, young anarchists, people down on their luck, and a few employed people. They were a motley crew, but they stayed around. The movement was essentially theatrical, but in a media age, theater is a legitimate political tool, and Occupy offered a counter-narrative to the Tea Party. The more aggressive stance on income inequality President Obama took in 2012 was made possible in part by the political cover the movement gave him.

  So, Occupy San Francisco made its mark. But winter came, the authorities kicked it out of its encampment, and people drifted away. Then, on January 20, organizers were ready to launch Occupy Act II. They had called for a day of protests in San Francisco’s Financial District.

  At 6:20 A.M. that day, I rode my bike through the rain to the 52-story Bank of America building. The schedule on the Occupy Web site said there was supposed to be a 6 A.M. squid fry in front of Goldman Sachs—the squid theme derived from Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s description of Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” But when I arrived, there were only four protesters there. One of them, wearing a bedraggled squid costume, was a 69-year-old retired psychology professor named Eleanor Levine. I asked Levine what brought her out at six in the morning.

  “I’m out here to bring attention to the irresponsible financial practices of Goldman Sachs,” Levine said. “I also want to bring attention to the concept of corporate personhood [which was behind the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United]. Corporations are not people. This company played a role in bringing not just the country but the world to financial ruin. People have to face up to what Goldman Sachs has done. Their CEO made $28 million.” Asked if the dreadful weather had prevented more people from joining the protest, she said calmly, “Yes, the rain put a damper on the turnout, but more will come.” Her pink tentacles waving, she walked cheerfully off.

  I approached a mustachioed man in a yellow poncho inscribed with the words “Money 4 Housing and Education, not 4 Banks and Corporations.” Alex Carlson, 34, was a San Francisco paramedic who said the biggest reason he came out was to protest America’s lack of educational opportunities. “I couldn’t get into school just to get an EMI license. I had to beg a teacher to let me into his class. Nursing was my real goal, but there’s no money for nursing schools. It’s crazy because there’s a nursing shortage and there’s going to be a crisis of care when the baby boomers die off.”

  Carlson said he had come out at the crack of dawn in the rain because he felt he had to. “Like everyone else, I’m just trying to carve out a little life for myself, but my knife is getting shorter and shorter,” he said. “I’m not a crazy activist person. I have a wife and a young son. Camping out isn’t an option for me. But I was able to come out today, so I did. And I’m proud.”

  I walked down a block to a building housing Wells Fargo, where people protesting the bank’s role in the national foreclosure crisis had chained themselves in front of the entrances on all four sides. A crowd was gathered on Leidesdorff Street, where the great self-taught 19th-century radical Henry George, whose passionate insistence that land was the rightful possession of all citizens inspired George Bernard Shaw, once lived. In an entranceway, about eight people were squeezed in, their arms inside big yellow PVC pipes that were connected together. A policeman came up and politely informed them that they were creating a public health risk and would be arrested if they didn’t leave. Dozens of police waited on the corner.

  A fresh-faced young woman with glasses was sitting among the crowd in the entrance, with a sign that said “Give us our homes back.” I asked her why she was there. “My parents had their home in Southern California foreclosed,” she said. She said her name was Sarah Lombardo and she was 28 years old. “They couldn’t make their payments because of medical costs. My mom had breast cancer, and my dad had a stroke. They were told to leave in two weeks, and our house was auctioned off. Now they’re living in an apartment, but their credit was destroyed, so they had to pay three times the normal deposit.”

  Lombardo said her mom was a purchasing agent, and her dad was a factory worker. “I’m the first one in my family to go to college.
” She said she came to the protest because she wanted “to put a face to the statistics.” It was a face that looked like it belonged to the girl next door, or to your daughter.

  She said that now that she had finished college, it made it possible for her to be arrested. “It’s for a good cause.”

  I asked her if she had ever been arrested before. “No.” Was she afraid? “No, I’m not scared.”

  Later, behind a cordon of police, I watched as protesters on the north side of the building were arrested, frisked, and loaded into a police van. I rode off on my bike to cover some more actions. When I came back, Lombardo and the rest of the group of people in the doorway had been arrested.

  I walked up Sacramento. A few blocks down the street once stood Fort Gunnybags, the headquarters of the Second Vigilance Committee, whose members, inspired by a Roman ideal of civic duty, formed themselves into a citizen’s army that ousted their corrupt government.

  Back up at 555 California, beyond the big turd-in-a-plaza artwork jokingly called the “Banker’s Heart,” I came upon an older man in a suit, carrying a sign that said “Give Us Our City Back.” I was intrigued: He was definitely not the usual Occupy protester. But when I asked him who he was, he turned out to be even more unusual than I could have expected. He was Warren Langley, the 69-year-old former head of the Pacific Stock Exchange.

  What brought a man with his background out to protest?

  “I was in the industry. I worked for an option trading firm that was sold to Goldman Sachs. So I played the game on the other side. But I have two grandkids and two daughters, and I became increasingly concerned that their future wouldn’t offer them the same opportunities that I had as a young man. The income inequities in our society are a huge problem.”