Above San Francisco [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Of all the great picture-book cities, San Francisco may be the most tantalizing. Now you see it, now you don't - an ever-changing panorama of shifting patterns and drifting fog, the dizzying interplay of light and shadows among the hills that both exalt and obstruct. It is a peek-a-boo, hide-and-seek city, forever elusive, its endless secrets lurking in nameless alleys, hidden gardens and pathvk-ays that lead through stately corridors of eucalyptus and then vanish somewhere into the misty Pacific. It's an odd quality, this pervasive air of mystery, for on the face of it, San Francisco seems the most accessible of world cities. It is so small - about 49 square miles, seven by seven - that I once wrote, in a not uncommon fit of hyperbole, that I could stand on Twin Peaks "and cup the city in my hands." And so it seems from that dramatic vantage point. On the surface, at least, all of San Francisco is visible, from the down-tovk-n towers to the shrinking sea; from the flat Mission District, with its church towers and palm trees, to the even flatter Marina, fringed with yachts. The world's most dramatic bridges are there, arching their backs as they spring across the bay. The thousands of little houses built by the late Henry Doelger march through the Sunset District to Ocean Beach. Golden Gate Park, another man-made creation (all hail, William Hammond Hall and John McLaren), covers a thousand acres of what was once a Sahara of sand dunes; alongside, the Richmond District turns its old bay windows toward the sun, sometimes a vain gesture, for this is the "fog bell." Market Street slashing through the downtown from its launching pad at the venerable Ferry Building (our most beloved landmark), the park-like Presidio green in the distance, the elegance of Nob Hill and Grace Cathedral - these are only a few of the facets of this gem-like city that are immediately visible. And yet, lo pursue the tantalizing theme, San Francisco remains an enigma, for all its apparent openness. For one thing, the past is forever getting in the way, cluttering up the vision and the visionaries. In few young cities (it was founded in 1850) does a short but turbulant history play such an important role. Nostalgia is as much a part of the atmosphere as the pearly fog, painting halos around streetlamps. There is constant tension between those who want the city to remain what it was - the "Little San Franciscans," lo whom small is beautiful and old is sacred - and what I call the manic-progressives, who scoff at the yesterdays and think only of building higher and faster. And if a treasured landmark stands in the way, call in the bulldozers. It is hard not to think of San Francisco in feminine terms, perhaps, because of her curves and undulations and her Barbary Coast reputation as a "naughty" hoyden. This approach rapidly becomes precious and even cloying, I agree, but the image has a certain validity as the opposing forces battle over her fate, as in an old melodrama. The old-timers see themselves as gallantly fighting to save her honor, while the new San Franciscans feel it's time the bid crone was rehabilitated with some new jewelry and a dozen 60-story gowns. Meanwhile, for all her past excesses and present mistakes, she remains intensely attractive, fulfilling the words of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who said 40 years ago, before the real depredations began, that "only a city as beautiful as this could survive what you people are doing to it." We must thank nature more than man for this incomparable setting in its own little world of crashing waves, strong tides and brisk breezes forever rippling the banners and whistling between the towers of Baghdad-by-the-Bay. San Francisco is a challenge. For all its smallness, where is its heart and soul? When a cable car lurches around a corner of Chinatown on a foggy night, we sometimes feel its essence. The view from Colt Tower at night, with mysterious lights moving slowly across a black velvet bay - this too, is a bit of it. Sometimes the soul seems near at hand in North Beach, where the twin towers of Saints Peter and Paul smile down on Washington Square, with its paisanos talking of their childhood in far-off Lucca. In the Mission, the soul is Spanish and the chicanas dark-eyed and provocative. The heart of San Francisco is easy to find among the skyscrapers of the financial district and the fine stores of the Union Square area, but the soul remains elusive. Poets, authors, and hacks like myself have been struggling for years to capture and set down the secret of San Francisco-generally failing. The poet laureate, George Sterling, a tortured man who was doomed to kill himself in the Bohemian Club one dark 1926 night, wrote equally tortured verse about the city he loved, but he did catch something special with "at the end of your streets are stars." William Saroyan loved San Francisco, too, but in a different way. To him it was a crazy city of wild-talking characters, most of them compulsive gamblers, and whores with hearts of gold. Mark Twain caught the frontier humor, Charles Caldwell Dobie the flavor of little North Beach restaurants, and Frank Morris the drama of everyday life behind the staid Victorian facades. Maybe it's the great photographers who have been and are capturing San Francisco - if not its heart and soul, at least the places where they are lurking. They look at San Francisco with the most practiced and poetic of eyes, seeking the great sweep of the bridges, the incredible steepness of the streets (San Franciscans tend to take these phenomena for granted), the complicated compactness of this world-in-a-city balanced on the tip of a Peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water and always searching restless for its fourth dimension - reality. Certainly no one recorded the death of old San Francisco with more painful felicity than Arnold Genthe, whose earthquake and fire pictures inspire disbelief (and pity) to this day and will forevermore.