by Gary Kamiya
The trail runs below the Lincoln Park golf course and then the V.A. Hospital. It is verdant and overgrown and smells of eucalyptus and nameless aromatic bushes. Little springs create muddy pools. It climbs up and down, through gentle sandy patches, then steeper sections where stairs have been cut into the rock. Endless azure vistas appear around each corner. It feels like coastal California, but also like the Mediterranean. You could be on the Via d’Amore in the Cinque Terre or a corniche road in Positano or walking up to the Chora in Folegandros. You could be on any majestic cliff-side trail over any ocean in the world. But you are in San Francisco, a 20-minute drive from downtown.
To the north, the great expanse of Pacific stretches, the reddish Marin Headlands towering on the far side. Up the coast you can see Stinson and Bolinas and, on a clear day, Point Reyes, where Sir Francis Drake and Sebastián Cermeño made their uncanny California appearances during the age of Shakespeare. As you pass Mile Rock Beach, if the tide is low you can see the rusty remains of shipwrecks. Dozens of ships have been lost here, lost in the fog or gone off course, their hulls ripped open by the jagged rocks. Once mighty, they have suffered a sea-change into oxidized shadows. A peculiar white patch on the side of the cliff next to the trail is a link with the days when navigation was a matter of life and death. Ship captains used that mark to align themselves properly in the center of the channel that goes through the Golden Gate strait.
The trail levels out as it approaches the end. Intricate mazes of trees adjoin the ocean side of the trail, offering little tangled bowers from which to observe the currents that drift across the waters. Up above stands the shell-riddled bridge of the U.S.S. San Francisco. The trail turns south and civilization comes into view: The Cliff House, where Mark Twain once went on a frozen early-morning excursion, and the Seal Rock Inn, where a distant disciple of Twain’s named Hunter S. Thompson holed up to write Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Out on the horizon line you can see the Farallones, those dragon’s teeth that kept mariners from discovering San Francisco Bay for hundreds of years.
There is only one significant place in San Francisco where I have never set foot: the rocky shoreline at the base of the cliffs at Lands End. For years, that unknown shoreline has called to me. It was the ultimate San Francisco mystery. What was down there? Would I find a secret beach at low tide? Were there caves? Loot from a forgotten shipwreck? The mysteriously preserved oar from Ayala’s lost cayuco? An ongoing secret rave, accessible via a tunnel bored through the cliffs that emerged in a hole in someone’s backyard at 46th and Clement?
Every time I walked on Lands End, I eyeballed the cliff. It was nasty—300 feet high and steep. But trees and bushes were growing out of its side, and I remembered what one of the Norwegian commandos who climbed up a vertical ravine to blow up Hitler’s heavy water plant had said: “Where trees grow, a man can make his way.”
I wanted to, but for one reason or another—not being a Norwegian commando foremost among them—I never climbed down. I still plan to make it down there someday. But if I don’t, maybe it’s just as well.
I fell in love with San Francisco when I was a kid growing up in the Berkeley Hills and looked across the bay to what I thought was the most miraculous city in the world, a shining Valhalla at the end of a rainbow bridge. The years have gone by, but I still find her as magnificent as ever—a soaring sand castle built where the tide comes in, a thousand white pennants waving from cathedral spires, the last place to have a drink before America stops and the endless ocean begins.
“The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay, / No matter how they change her, I’ll remember her that way.” Oscar Hammerstein wrote those lyrics to the song he wrote with Jerome Kern in 1940, when Paris had fallen to the Germans. The song became a hit because it reflected the universal human desire to preserve the places we love, to keep them sacred, even if only in memory. Paris might be crushed beneath the Nazi boot, but Paris would live on forever. Ernest Hemingway said the same thing when he called Paris “a moveable feast.” It was a place you could take with you.
The place in the world I love most happens to be San Francisco. It could have been somewhere else, but it isn’t. And the San Francisco that I keep in my heart, the San Francisco that I will take with me even if I never see her again, is the city that is a window open to the world. The city that is as inseparable from her magnificent setting as the lyrics of a song are from its music. The city that rises from the sea as gracefully as Botticelli’s Venus. The city composed of an infinite number of accidental perfect arrangements with the earth and the sea and the sky. The city whose beauty, like Cleopatra’s, is endless:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies …
I have spent much of my life exploring San Francisco. But perhaps it is better not to see everything. To let a small mystery stand in for the great one. To know that somewhere far below, down there where the sea crashes endlessly into the land, is a rock that I will never climb.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for their help: Caroline Bins, Peter Brastow, Joan Chase, John Dell’Osso, Greg Gaar, Dylan Hayes, Sarah He, Karen Johnson, James Lockett, Randall Milliken, Carmen Mohr, Paul Scolari, Sandra Silvestri, Kirra Swenerton, Buck Tergis, Yoshio Takakuwa, and Cindy Wu.
Special thanks to Doris Sloan and Peter Field, who were extraordinarily generous with their time, expertise, and passion. Sloan is responsible for what little I know about geology, and Field for virtually everything printable I know about the Tenderloin.
The staff at the San Francisco History Center of the San Francisco Public Library were very helpful in tracking down obscure clippings and documents.
I also wish to thank the Lannan Foundation, which generously awarded me a monthlong residency in Marfa, Texas, while I was doing research for this book.
Thanks also to Jon Adams for his graceful and apt illustrations.
Thanks to my agent and friend Ellen Levine, an old-school agent who cares as much about the words on the page as she does about the zeros in the contract.
And finally, thanks to Kathy Belden and Rachel Mannheimer at Bloomsbury. I couldn’t have asked for better editors.
Select Bibliography
Of the general histories of San Francisco, Oscar Lewis’s San Francisco: Mission to Metropolis, the longtime standard, is still useful. Rand Richards’s well-researched Historic San Francisco: A Concise History and Guide provides a helpful reference to specific historic sites. Of the many oversize illustrated histories of the city, T. H. Watkins and Roger R. Olmsted’s elegantly written Mirror of the Dream: An Illustrated History of San Francisco stands out, as does James Beach Alexander and James Lee Heig’s sumptuous San Francisco: Building the Dream City.
For the Spanish period, Simon Barton’s A History of Spain and William Maltby’s The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire provide solid background. C. H. Haring’s The Spanish Empire in America and Charles Edward Chapman’s A History of California: The Spanish Period remain informative. Harry Kelsey’s Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo is eye-opening, while William Schurz’s The Manila Galleon offers a fascinating look at that legendary trade route. Kirkpatrick Sales’s The Conquest of Paradise is a polemical but powerful analysis of the Spanish colonial enterprise. Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535–1846, is a first-rate anthology of primary sources about early California, as is Peter Browning’s San Francisco/Yerba Buena: From the Beginning to the Gold Rush. For early explorers, see Henry R. Wagner’s Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast of America in the 16th Century, Theodore Treutlin’s San Francisco Bay: Discovery and Colonization, Alan K. Brown’s authoritative edition of Pedro Font’s With Anza to California, 1775–1776, and the venerable volumes on Anza’s explorations by Herbert Bolton (who wins the Shoe Leather Award for retracing every step of Anza’s
10,000-mile explorations).
For the frontier period, Douglas Monroy’s unsparing Fallen Among Strangers: Making of Mexican Culture is superb. Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush, published by the California Historical Society, is a strong collection of essays. Leonard Pitt’s classic The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californias, 1846–1890, is invaluable. Juana Briones of 19th-Century California by Jeanne Farr McDonnell sheds fascinating light on the enigmatic, inspiring “mother of San Francisco.” The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California by Louise Pubols is an excellent analysis of the Californios, especially during the secularizing period. Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast is a literary masterpiece that evokes the hide-and-tallow days. Several works explore the history of the Presidio, including John Langelier and Daniel Rosen’s El Presidio de San Francisco: Spain and Mexico, 1776–1846, and Barbara Voss’s The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco.
The charmed Yerba Buena years inspired a rich literature, including John Henry Brown’s Reminiscences and Incidents of the “Early Days” of San Francisco, William Heath Davis’s Sixty Years in California, and Joseph T. Downey’s Filings from an Old Saw: Reminiscences of San Francisco. Important secondary material includes Captain Richardson: Mariner, Ranchero, and Founder of San Francisco by Robert Ryal Miller, the sentimental but informative Spanish Arcadia by Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, and Zoeth Eldredge’s musty and dusty but important two-volume Beginnings of San Francisco: From the Expedition of Anza, 1774, to the City Charter of April 15, 1850. San Francisco Memoirs: 1835–1851, edited by Malcolm Barker, is an excellent anthology of early writings about Yerba Buena/San Francisco, as is Oscar Lewis’s Sketches of Early California: A Collection of Personal Adventures. Nor should one ignore the delightful little essay by Douglas S. Watson, bearing the wonderful title “An Hour’s Walk Through Yerba Buena: The town That Existed for Eleven Years, Seven Months and Five Days, Then Became San Francisco.”
The event that gave birth to San Francisco, the Gold Rush, also inspired perhaps the best single book ever written about the city, The Annals of San Francisco by Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet. Other important contemporary works include Bayard Taylor’s clear-eyed El Dorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire, Louise Clappe’s classic The Shirley Letters, Frank Marryat’s witty Mountains and Molehills: Or, Recollections of a Burnt Journal, and T. A. Barry and B. A. Patten’s Men and Memories of San Francisco: In the “Spring of ’50.” First-rate modern histories include Rand Richards’s Mud, Blood, and Gold: San Francisco in 1849 and Charles Fracchia’s When the Water Came Up to Montgomery Street. The classic about the Gold Rush itself is J. S. Halliday’s The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience. Ken Burns’s PBS TV series The West, an excellent overall introduction to the saga of the American frontier, is strong on the Gold Rush.
Roger Lotchin’s San Francisco, 1846–1856: From Hamlet to City is a brilliant analysis of the city’s formative decade and one of the best books ever written about the city. San Francisco 1865–1932: Politics, Power and Urban Development by William Issel and Robert W. Cherny is another major study. Doris Muscatine’s Old San Francisco: The Biography of a City from Early Days to the Earthquake is a detailed account of the city before the quake. Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin provides a mordant interpretation of the city’s mining origins. Mary Floyd Williams’s History of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851 is an authoritative and sympathetic account of the first vigilance movement by a pioneering female scholar; later revisionist views include Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism by Richard Maxwell Brown and Robert Senkewicz’s Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco. Philip J. Ethington’s The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco is an important academic study that offers a trenchant defense of the Vigilance Committees as a manifestation of small-r republicanism. B. E. Lloyd’s eccentric Lights and Shades in San Francisco offers a wide-ranging look at the city in the 1870s (its chapters on Chinatown are particularly interesting).
Good books on the Gilded Age include Oscar Lewis and Carroll D. Hall’s Bonanza Inn: American’s First Luxury Hotel, Lewis’s The Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker, and the Building of the Central Pacific, and Robert Rayner’s The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California.
On the 1906 earthquake and fire, several books stand out: Dennis Smith’s riveting San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake, Gladys Hansen’s groundbreaking Denial of Disaster: The Untold Story and Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake, William Bronson’s The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned, and Philip Fradkin’s The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself. Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 is good on the geology. The official Report of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission, by Andrew Lawson, has fascinatingly detailed accounts of damage throughout the city. The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Centennial Field Guides, edited by Carol S. Prentice, provides walking tours of Shipley and other sunken streets.
San Francisco in the 1930s is well described in Nancy Olmsted’s The Ferry Building, as well as in the sparkling San Francisco in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City by the Bay. Kevin Starr’s Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California is a solid history of the state during the Depression era.
The 1940s and 1950s are splendidly evoked by Mr. San Francisco, Herb Caen, in classics like Baghdad by the Bay and Don’t Call It Frisco. The World of Herb Caen: San Francisco, 1938–1997, edited by Barnaby Conrad, offers a good selection of Caen’s eclectic writings. The World War II era is explored in Roger Lotchin’s The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego, as well as a collection he edited, The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second World War.
The hippie phenomenon is intelligently chronicled in Charles Perry’s The Haight Ashbury: A History. Josh Sides’s Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco provides a solid overview of the city’s gay history. The classic book about the AIDS crisis remains Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, while David Weissman’s film We Were Here is an extraordinarily powerful documentary. Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, edited by James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters, is a stimulating collection of essays with a progressive political slant. David Talbot’s Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love, one of the best recent books about San Francisco, offers a vivid, deeply reported history of the city’s turbulent passage through the hippie era, the Jonestown massacre, the Moscone-Milk assassinations, and the AIDS crisis.
On natural San Francisco, E. Breck Parkman’s “The California Serengeti: Two Hypotheses Regarding the Pleistocene Paleoecology of the San Francisco Bay Area” offers a vivid look at the age of megafauna. Harold Gilliam’s The Natural World of San Francisco and The Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region are models of lyrical and informed prose. The transformation of the city’s natural landscape is well described in Greg Gaar and Ryder W. Miller’s San Francisco: A Natural History. Nancy Olmstead’s Vanished Waters is a fine history of Mission Bay. Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region by Doris Sloan and Natural History of San Francisco Bay by Ariel Rubissow Okamoto and Kathleen M. Wong offer first-rate introductions to their subjects. John McPhee’s classic Assembling California is a deeper account of plate tectonics. San Francisco Bay: Portrait of an Estuary by John Hart, with photos by David Sanger, and Bay Area Wild by Galen Rowell with Michael Sewell feature beautiful photographs and stimulating texts. Laura Cunningham’s A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California offers evocative re-creations of vanished landscapes by a talented artist and researcher. The eclectic 1951 Geologic Guidebook of the Bay
Area Counties is dated but irresistible. Clyde Wahrhaftig’s A Streetcar to Subduction will subduct even the most rock-averse reader, as will Peter White’s fascinating The Farallon Islands: Sentinels of the Golden Gate.
On the California Indians, the standard works are the Handbook of North American Indians, volume 8, edited by Robert Heizer, and Handbook of the Indians of California by Alfred Kroeber. The Ohlone: Past and Present Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region, edited by Lowell Bean, is a useful and wide-ranging anthology. Malcolm Margolin’s classic The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco–Monterey Bay Area is a lovely and informed imagining of their culture. The most authoritative study of the Yelamu after European contact is A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769–1810, by Randall Mil-liken. Also very useful is the National Park Service publication Ohlone/ Costanoan Indians of the San Francisco Peninsula and Their Neighbors, Yesterday and Today, by Randall Milliken, Laurence H. Shoup, and Beverly R. Ortiz. The dreadful story of white California’s destruction of the state’s native peoples is well told in James J. Rawls’s Indians of California: The Changing Image. Brian Fagan’s Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at Our Earliest Inhabitants is a lively account of the archaeological record of the state’s first people. Theodora Kroeber and Robert F. Heizer’s Almost Ancestors: The First Californians combines a moving text with superb photographs of native people. Finally, Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds is a book one never forgets.
For the intellectual and cultural history of California until World War I, see Kevin Starr’s magisterial Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915, the first and finest volume in his indispensable multivolume history of the state. Starr’s brief California: A History provides a good introduction to the Golden State. Josiah Royce’s 1886 classic, California: A Study of American Character, offers a penetrating moral analysis of the Gold Rush and the vigilante movement. California Heritage, edited by John and Laree Caughey, is a first-rate anthology of primary sources.
