Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  Langley said he first heard about the Occupy movement from his pal Ben Cohen, of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. “He was scooping ice cream for them in New York. And he told me, ‘These are the real deal.’ So one day I was eating lunch at the Ferry Building, and I walked across the street to the camp and started talking to these young people. And they were the real deal. They’re folks who lost their jobs, or are just out of school and can’t get a job. I could bring my credibility to the movement, so I decided to get involved.”

  Across the city that day, hundreds of protesters snarled traffic, got arrested, held sidewalk teach-ins, and generally served notice that they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. It was Occupy’s last major street action, although hundreds of activists came out on September 17, 2012 to celebrate the movement’s one-year anniversary. Since then, the movement has become more focused, taking aim at specific issues like home foreclosures, health care, and education. Spin-off groups like Occupy Bernal Heights and Occupy SF Housing have held marches and succeeded in saving a number of homes from foreclosure.

  No one knows what the future will hold for the Occupy movement, or for progressive politics in America in general, any more than anyone can predict what will happen to San Francisco in the decades ahead. But on that miserable January day, Eleanor Levine and Sarah Lombardo and Alex Carlson and Warren Langley and the hundreds of other people who came out in the rain served notice that the dissenting city, the visionary city, the compassionate city, the city of the vigilantes and Henry George, of the antiwar fight and the green movement and the gay rights struggle, was still around.

  Chapter 47

  Genius Loci

  The lawn at the base of Coit Tower, Telegraph Hill

  Telegraph Hill is quintessential San Francisco. If you compressed the entire city between two tectonic plates, it is the diamond that would emerge. All the beauty and mystery and romance of this white seaport at the end of the American trail are found here, reduced to their purest form. Telegraph Hill is the city’s genius loci.

  At a modest 284 feet, Telegraph Hill doesn’t even break into the list of the 30 highest hills in town. But what makes it the San Francisco hill par excellence—old-timers simply call it “the Hill”—is its location. In a city of unexpected hills, Telegraph is the most unexpected of all. The historic, storied part of the city is its northeast corner, and Telegraph Hill is squeezed into the northeasternmost part of that corner. Its sheer eastern side rises gratuitously up a few steps away from the bay, as improbably as a sperm whale breaching in a swimming pool. On the vast canvas that is San Francisco, Telegraph Hill is the section drawn by a child, an impossibly steep isosceles triangle with a toy-castle tower atop it, right below a smiling wild-haired sun.

  The same sublimely playful quality hovers over the dense, loving way the hill’s terrain has been worked on. Its slopes, some of which are more like cliffs, are covered with a network of old wooden steps and blind alleys and dead-end streets more intricate than any in town. The Filbert Steps and Greenwich Street Stairs are the most celebrated, but at every turn you find yourself in some cul-de-sac, or facing an unexpected precipice, or stumbling upon a tiny park, or at the corner of two streets so steep you feel like you’re on a Dr. Seuss set.

  Take the intersection of Filbert and Kearny, just below the steps that go up to Coit Tower. It is one of the city’s holy corners. The long view down the steps to the bottom of the hill at Filbert and Grant (memorialized with a plaque as “Poet’s Corner”) is suffused with as much history and melancholy as the Montmartre alleys down which the little boy runs in The Red Balloon, that unforgettable homage to Paris and childhood and magic. Look left down ridiculously steep and narrow Kearny, and the skyscrapers of downtown mark the cove where Esteban Richardson watched quarreling bears, wolves, and coyotes. Yet this place of magnificently condensed urbanism also faces the majestically inhuman Marin Headlands across the windblown Golden Gate. It is the classic San Francisco encounter between civilization and nature, the known and the unknown, the near and the infinitely far. And the vista is exquisitely harmonized by the facing slope of Russian Hill, which forms the far side of a U-shaped valley whose center is marked by the glorious spires of Saints Peter and Paul Church.

  Like a billiard ball dropping into the corner pocket, history has always sought out Telegraph Hill. In A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas immortalized the village of his childhood as the “sea-town corner,” and the lovely phrase fits Telegraph Hill perfectly. During the city’s wild beginnings, when its connection to the outside world was by ship, the Hill’s corner location, overlooking both the Golden Gate and the heart of the city, made it indispensable. In 1850 a semaphore, called the Marine Telegraph, was placed on the hill’s summit to inform the city when ships came through the Golden Gate—hence the name Telegraph Hill. The various positions of the semaphore’s arms denoted different types of vessels and were widely known by San Franciscans—a fact that resulted in one of the best one-liners ever delivered in the city. During a Gold Rush–era performance of a play called The Hunchback, an actor entered with outstretched arms, loudly declaiming, “What does this mean, my lord?” Before the other actor could respond, some wag in the audience shouted out, “Side-wheel steamer!,” bringing down the house.

  As the corner hill, overlooking both Yerba Buena cove and the bay, the Hill witnessed all the decisive events in the city’s early years. It was on Loma Alta, as the Spanish called it, that the indomitable Juana Briones gathered the herb that gave the cove its name. When the Hounds ran riot in 1849, they charged up Telegraph Hill on horseback, firing at the fleeing Chileans. When the vigilantes aimed their cannon at the jail on Broadway and demanded the jailer hand over Casey and Cora, solemn crowds watched from the slopes above. Telegraph Hill has loomed over all the fabled maritime events in the city’s history—the entrance of the U.S.S. Portsmouth at the end of the Mexican-American War, the anxiously-awaited Pacific Mail steamers during the Gold Rush, the arrival of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, the grimly unannounced ships bearing the dead and wounded and orphaned victims of Pearl Harbor, the last ride of the ferry Eureka, the first of the container ships that doomed the brawny waterfront that flourished for so long at the base of the hill.

  Like the bear that went over the mountain, people have always climbed Telegraph Hill just to see what they could see. Even when Yerba Buena was just a handful of drunks and adventurers, it was one of the hamlet’s favored sites for Sunday picnics, pleasure outings, and strolls. Despite its panoramic views, however, it was not considered a desirable place to live. Most of the early inhabitants of the hill were working-class Irish who favored the summit and the east side, which was known as the Twilight Side. Before 1900, large numbers of Italians began settling on the west side of the hill, called the Sunny Side. The two groups sometimes clashed. One Irish gang, aptly named the Rock Rollers, used their lofty position on the hill to hurl boulders down on their opponents. Many Spanish also settled on the hill. Eventually the Italians supplanted the Irish. They have themselves largely been supplanted by the Chinese, but Telegraph Hill will always feel like an Italian quartiere, a slice of Umbria magically transported to the city’s oldest corner.

  Artists and writers have always been drawn to Telegraph Hill. Actors Edwin and Junius Booth lived there, and Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frank Norris frequented it. The gentle bohemian writer Charles Warren Stoddard spent his childhood on the hill, leaving an elegiac description of it in his 1902 memoir In the Footsteps of the Padres. Stoddard described the cottages on the eastern side of the hill as “hanging gardens” approached by “airy bridges” and inhabited by “pleasant people who seemed to have drifted there and were living their lyrical if lonely lives in semi-solitude on islands in the air.”

  In a prescient 1897 piece in the Wave titled “Among the Cliff-Dwellers: A Peculiar Mixture of Races from the Four Corners of the Earth,” Frank Norris led the reader on a tour of the top of Telegrap
h Hill, to a community he depicted as so isolated that it had become a world apart. Its Spanish, Italian, and Native American inhabitants had begun interbreeding, developing what Norris called “a new race.” “Here on this wartlike protuberance above the city’s roof, a great milling is going on, and a fusing of peoples, and in a few more generations the Celt and the Italian, the Mexican and the Chinaman, the Negro and the Portuguese … will be fused into one type. And what a type it will be.”

  The Hill remained a working-class, multi-ethnic neighborhood well into the 20th century. But the opening of Telegraph Hill Boulevard in 1923 doomed the steep-sided bohemia. Visitors poured into the new Julius’s Castle restaurant, car traffic increased, and—the kiss of death—modern apartment buildings began to go up, replacing the drafty old cottages that had bad plumbing and single-burner stoves. In 1936, the New York Times ran a piece with the subtitle “San Francisco’s Historic Bohemian Quarter Succumbs to the Forces of Economics and Modernism.” Telegraph Hill became one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in San Francisco—and it still is. The city’s financial elite may live in Pacific Heights or Seacliff, but the cognoscenti, those who are willing to trade garages and square footage and homogenous wealth for Napier Lane and boho neighbors and the innumerable ghosts of the city’s past, prefer Telegraph Hill.

  As with most of San Francisco, the wealth on Telegraph Hill doesn’t show itself unless you try to buy real estate. In the mornings I regularly walk up from my office-apartment to the sunny lawn in front of Coit Tower, where I sit in a lawn chair, read the paper, drink my coffee, and look out at the finest view of the Bay Bridge in the city. Besides a flock of psychedelic parrots, the regulars are old Chinese men and women doing their morning exercises, who always greet me cheerfully. None of us have any money, and it doesn’t matter. We’re on top of the world.

  Part of my routine is to circle Coit Tower. It takes about one minute. Starting from the southwest side and heading clockwise, in that one minute you see Chinatown, Nob Hill (a superb perspective that makes it look like a vast concave amphitheater, with the great brick chimney of the Cable Car Barn halfway up), Russian Hill, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and Angel Islands, the North Bay, the hills of Napa and Sonoma, Richmond, the Embarcadero, Berkeley, the Bay Bridge and Oakland, Mount Diablo, the South Bay, the Ferry Building, and the entire Financial District, with a piece of Mount San Bruno and Bernal Heights in the distance. It’s the best 60-second walk I know.

  This quintessentially San Francisco hill was created, appropriately, by an earthquake. At the end of the memorable day we spent wandering around the city, geologist Doris Sloan and I drove to the base of Telegraph Hill. Her old favorite exposure at the foot of Lombard had been blocked off, but we looked from the car at its sheer yellowish face, exposed by 19th-century quarrying. Sloan explained the way the hill was created. When the Farallon Plate collided with the North American Plate more than 100 million years ago, sediments from the North American Plate were carried into a huge trench that formed at the edge of the subduction zone by enormous underwater landslides made up of water and sediment. These primordial landslides, known as turbidity currents, were probably triggered by powerful earthquakes. Over millions of years the sediments hardened into a sandstone called graywacke. The massive, nonlayered nature of the graywacke on Telegraph Hill, she said, indicated that it was probably formed by a single enormous landslide.

  The fact that Telegraph Hill was created by one gigantic underwater landslide was mind-boggling enough. But then Sloan said something that I have never forgotten. “It took millions of years to form the rock, but the event that triggered the landslide only lasted for a few minutes.”

  As I stared up at the sheer face, for the first time I felt like someone had shone a spotlight into the dark backward and abysm of geological time. The idea that Telegraph Hill was created not just over millions of years but in a period of time no longer than a song on Meet the Beatles, made geology’s inconceivably vast forces and time frames comprehensible. In The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Frank Kermode distinguished between what he called kairos time, or crisis time, and ordinary tick-tock time. In a universe measured in tedious tick-tock eons, the frozen waterfall that is Telegraph Hill is a permanent shrine to kairos time, a solid-stone reminder of the violent preciousness of every second.

  And kairos time is matched by kairos space on Telegraph Hill. It is one of those compressed, dwarf-star-like places whose inches are as charged as its centuries. The hill’s heavenly details, its steps and dirt trails and secret gardens, offer escape from the tiresome abstraction through which we customarily move. And the hill also offers literal escape. It is up the Filbert Steps that runaway con Humphrey Bogart stumbles in the most memorable of the many films shot on Telegraph Hill, Dark Passage. Last winter, there was a real-life sequel. I was at Varennes Street working when I heard a helicopter hovering over the east side of the hill. I went online and discovered that a burglar, cornered by the police, had climbed over the perpendicular cliff below Julius’s Castle and was clinging to a tree growing out of the face. He clung to the tree all night. When the police finally got tired and left, he climbed down and got away. Even though I knew this meant a criminal was on the loose a few blocks away, I had to raise a figurative toast to the guy. Like Bogie, like everyone who has been lucky enough to live on Telegraph Hill, he had escaped.

  But the greatest escape was pulled off by a retired house painter named George Yeomans. In 1943, Yeomans was wandering around the base of the hill when he discovered a 10-by-15-foot cabin hidden behind some thick underbrush. It was surrounded by landslides and made out of scrap lumber. Yeomans moved in, putting in a woodstove and borrowing water from a nearby warehouse. His house had no address: It was described as “west of Winthrop and 120 feet south of Chestnut.” He lived there until 1956, when the city finally kicked him out and ordered the owner of the lot to dismantle the cabin.

  That heavenly playhouse is sadly gone, but Telegraph Hill still has secret passages into other dimensions. Late one night in the early 1970s, a starry-eyed newcomer to the city, I fell into one of them. I had been roistering in the Grant and Green bar and had stumbled up to Filbert Street to get some fresh air. I walked uphill a few steps, sat down in a little doorway, and leaned back to contemplate the night. Suddenly the door opened and I fell backward into pitch darkness, sliding headfirst down a flight of stairs. I had no idea how long I was going to fall. After seven or eight steps, I crashed into something hard. Rubbing my head, I stood up and looked around. I was in a dingy storage room filled with garbage cans. Standing there in the darkness, I began to laugh. I felt like I had just fallen down a rabbit hole into Wonderland.

  I still feel that way about Telegraph Hill. Maybe it’s because from the midnight stillness of Grant and Edith you can see the lights of Chinatown shimmering to the south, then turn and see distant ships moving silently across the darkened waters to the north. Or because from the top of Coit Tower you can see the Pacific. Or because Kid Rambler, my beloved green straight-six with the bungee cord on the door, appears for a split-second in Phil Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, just before it was towed away forever from Union Street. Or because from Calhoun Terrace you can see the 1930s. Or because I burned so many years of my life, that three-minute underwater earthquake, in the bars on upper Grant. Or because the barking of the sea lions sometimes carries up from the water. I don’t really know why. But Telegraph Hill will always be my lucky spot, my enchanted hill, my secret garden—the heart and soul of my city.

  Chapter 48

  Dancing on the Brink of the World

  The small beach 600 yards southwest of Candlestick Park,

  off Harney Way, site of the vanished Crocker Mound

  During my endless wanderings through San Francisco, I often found myself thinking about the first people who lived here, the Yelamu. They intrigued me for several reasons. For one thing, we were both fascinated with the same little piece of turf.
Like all California Indians, the Yelamu were passionately devoted to their home territory. They knew every inch of it. The 19th-century journalist and adventurer Stephen Powers wrote that mothers of the Mattole tribe of northwestern California taught their children their tribal boundaries by reciting its features “in a kind of singsong,” repeating the names of boulders, trees, canyons, and other landmarks until the children had learned every foot of their domain. Since this was an almost exact description of my own increasingly problematic behavior since I began to work on this book—I actually once forced my daughter to learn an inane sentence whose words were reminders of street names in our neighborhood—it was clear to me that the Yelamu were either kindred spirits or escapees from the same mental hospital. Either way, I wanted to know more about them.

  Then there was my abiding interest in the city’s primordial landscape, the city before the city. The Yelamu had moved naked through a naked world. I thought that by learning more about them, I might be able to imagine that harsh and innocent terrain.

  The native people who lived in San Francisco, the Yelamu, were members of a larger group of Indians called the Ohlone, or, as the Spanish called them, the Costanoans. The Ohlone shared many cultural practices, but they were not a tribe and were not politically or ethnically unified; “Ohlone” refers to a language family consisting of either six or eight languages. Numbering between 10,000 and 17,000 at the time of Spanish contact, the Ohlone occupied the area from the San Francisco Bay south to Big Sur and east toward the Central Valley. They lived in about 50 politically autonomous communities or tribal groups, each with from 50 to 500 people and a number of villages, some permanent, some seasonal.

  In trying to imagine San Francisco during the endless years that the Ohlone lived here, the first thing you have to get your head around is how few of them there were. About 1,500 Ohlone lived on the peninsula, with a proportional number inhabiting the 10 percent of the peninsula occupied by San Francisco. Randall Milliken, an expert on the Yelamu and author of an authoritative study of the destruction of Bay Area Indian culture, A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769–1810, estimates that San Francisco’s population was between 160 and 300 people at European contact—less than the number of people who live in some of the apartment buildings down the street from my house. For thousands of years, you could walk clear across San Francisco and barely see a soul.