Cool Gray City of Love
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The standard book about San Francisco’s early literary scene is San Francisco’s Literary Frontier by Franklin Walker. The city’s riotous journalistic tradition is entertainingly recounted by John Bruce in Gaudy Century, 1848–1948: San Francisco’s 100 Years of Robust Journalism. Mark Twain’s San Francisco journalism is collected in Clemens of the “Call”: Mark Twain in San Francisco, edited by Edgar Branch, and Mark Twain’s San Francisco, edited by Bernard Taper. Oscar Lewis’s Bay Window Bohemia covers the gaslit fin de siècle era. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters provide a fine illustrated look at the literary scene through the 1970s in Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day. The Beats are well covered in Steven Watson’s The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960, and James Campbell’s This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris. Don Herron’s The Literary World of San Francisco and Its Environs is an outstanding guidebook.
On the city’s sinful side, Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld is riotously entertaining, if not entirely reliable. Curt Gentry’s The Madams of San Francisco is a great read.
Philip Choy’s San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide to Its History and Architecture provides a good short history of its subject; his The Architecture of San Francisco Chinatown is fascinating. Erica Y. Z. Pan’s The Impact of the 1906 Earthquake on San Francisco’s Chinatown is also informative. Bonnie Tsui’s American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods is an affectionate reported look at five contemporary Chinatowns. Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown is one of the great photo essays ever taken of a neighborhood.
The standard work on the history of African Americans in San Francisco is Albert Broussard’s admirably nuanced Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954. The rollicking history of the Fillmore in its heyday is told in Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts. On Japantown, a city planning document, San Francisco Japantown: Historic Context Statement, by Donna Graves and Page and Trumbull, Inc. is informative, as is Suzie Kobuchi Okazaki’s Nihonmachi: A Story of San Francisco’s Japantown. Reid Yoshio Yokoyama’s undergraduate honors thesis, Return, Rebuild and Redevelop: Japanese American Resettlement in San Francisco 1945–1958 explores that still-murky subject. Reginald Kearney’s African-American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? is also interesting. An excellent short account of the Western Addition debacle is provided by Jordan Klein in his M.A. thesis, A Community Lost. That tragedy is also the subject of Peter Stein’s fine PBS documentary The Fillmore. James Baldwin’s documentary Take This Hammer remains powerful.
On architecture, Michael Corbett’s excellent Splendid Survivors: San Francisco’s Downtown Architectural Heritage, an important text in the nascent protectionist movement, assigns grades to every significant downtown building in an attempt to save them. Here Today: San Francisco’s Architectural Heritage, by Roger R. Olmsted and T. H. Watkins, is a similarly engaged and informed book. Daniel Burnham’s original Report on a Plan for San Francisco offers a fascinating look at the architect’s utopian plan for the city. Kevin Starr’s Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge is an elegant short history of one of the world’s most beautiful structures. San Francisco Architecture: An Illustrated Guide to Over 1,000 of the Best Buildings, Parks, and Public Artworks in the Bay Area, by Sally Byrne Woodbridge, John Marshall Woodbridge, and Chuck Byrne, is a comprehensive guide to important Bay Area buildings. In a more sociological vein, Paul Groth’s Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States offers the definitive history of SROs in America.
For specific neighborhoods, Arcadia’s photo-rich Images of America series is very useful. San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill by David Myrick and William Kostura’s Russian Hill: The Summit 1853–1906 are fascinating histories of those fabled hills.
Of the many love letters to and sui generis books about San Francisco, some of the more noteworthy include: Harold Gilliam’s The Face of San Francisco, a memorably glowing portrait with superb photographs by Phil Palmer; Herb Caen’s San Francisco: City on Golden Hills, with charming illustrations by Dong Kingman; and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, edited by Rebecca Solnit, a marvelously idiosyncratic look at the city from a wild range of perspectives.
A Note on the Author
Gary Kamiya was born in Oakland, California, in 1953 and grew up in Berkeley. After dropping out of Yale and working at a shipyard at Newport News, Virginia, he drove a taxi for seven years in San Francisco while getting a B.A. and an M.A. in English at the University of California, Berkeley. After cofounding a short-lived city magazine called Frisko, he got his first real job at the age of 37 as an editor of the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine. After five years at the Examiner, where he was a culture critic and book editor, he left to cofound Salon.com, where he was executive editor for 12 years and then a columnist. His first book, Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler, was a critically acclaimed history of Britain’s top-secret Special Operations Executive. He is married to the novelist Kate Moses. They have two children.
By the Same Author
Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler
Copyright © 2013 by Gary Kamiya
Illustration copyright © 2013 by Jon Adams
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Cool Gray City of Love : 49 Views of San Francisco /
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