I grew up in a small town in Ohio and now live in a small town in North Carolina. In between, I lived in or around San Francisco, a small town with big britches. For 45 years, I watched San Francisco transition from the Summer of Love (which happened just before I moved there in 1969) to a Temple of Technology teetering on a foundation of homelessness, lawlessness and carelessness. It was a slow transition, but one day people turned to each other and said, what happened to San Francisco? Where did our city go and how do we get it back?
Mayor London Breed gave part of an answer to that question recently when she announced a more vigilant and responsive police presence in particularly problematic parts of the city, where crime and open drug use are rampant.
“It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city come to an end,” she declared. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement: more aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.” She has every reason to be angry. Crime has exploded in San Francisco over the past decade.
Of course, crime is up in many parts of America. Don’t go to Chicago without your Kevlar! But the awareness of crime is especially acute in San Francisco because of the city’s identity as the “cool gray city of love,” as author Gary Kamiya called it in his eponymous book. Seeing San Francisco turn into a dark, cold city of chaos made the transition all that more painful. The other aggravating factor is that San Francisco is a small city — 49 square miles — where everything is on public display and in very close quarters. It only takes about a 10-minute walk to transition from the gilded hills of Pacific Heights to the degradation of the Tenderloin.
All of this brings to mind a classic headline from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1963. The legendary editor Scott Newhall was on a mission to lead the Chronicle away from a pack of competitors that included the Examiner and the Call-News. Mostly he did this with his tongue firmly in his cheek, editing the kind of send-ups that are routine in social media today. He sent a reporter to Mexico, for instance, to hunt for the burial site of Pancho Villa’s head. He ran a series on a group called the “Society for Indecency to Naked Animals,” which advocated for covering up the genitalia of domestic pets. And he ran one of the most famous headlines of the era after an “expose” on the state of restaurant coffee in San Francisco: “Great City Forced to Drink Swill.”
Mayor Breed has had her fill of swill. If coffee in San Francisco can evolve from lukewarm dishwater to $6 lattes at Blue Bottle, surely San Francisco can clean up its streets and make it safe to take an evening stroll while the fog horns sing their song.
Besides exposing the state of coffee in San Francisco, Scott Newhall also gave the city another great gift — Herb Caen. He didn’t create Herb’s daily column, but he put a spotlight on it, along with other legendary Chronicle scribes like Stan Delaplane, Art Hoppe and Charles McCabe. All of them gave the city character and made it seem larger than life, but none more so than Caen. He wrote a 1,000-word column every day for decades. He was funny, knowledgeable, humble, and naughty. Most of all he made us all fall in love with San Francisco by making a story out of it. Herb’s city was filled with swells, eccentrics, wise cabbies, conniving pols, gimlets and “Vitamin V,” and cable cars. Even his competitors admired him. The editor of another daily newspaper said the secret to Herb’s enduring success was “his outstanding ability to take a wisp of fog, a chance phrase overheard in an elevator, a happy child on a cable car, a deb in a tizzy over a social reversal, a family in distress and give each circumstance the magic touch that makes a reader an understanding eyewitness of the day's happenings.” A special Pulitzer Prize called him the "voice and conscience" of San Francisco. In a way, he was the mayor San Francisco always wanted.
Here’s what Herb did that no one has done since: he made sense of the city. He gave it characters and a narrative that we all shared. In a city that has now been atomized by identity politics he made us all feel like we were part of the same dashing, suave and slightly crazy city at the edge of the continent. I remember my first visit to New York City as a young man. I was only there for a few days, but when I returned, San Francisco seemed like a quaint little village, a doll house that I could almost hold in my hands. Part of that is because Herb Caen knit the city together. That’s gone now.
Shortly after our family moved to San Francisco in 1969 I headed over to the new Mecca of music, the Fillmore, which was a small room above a car dealership at Market and Van Ness. I saw a double bill of the Grateful Dead and Miles Davis (the Dead’s performance wasn’t their best due to the anxiety of opening for Miles; Davis put on a barn-burning performance in which he previewed a lot of “Bitch’s Brew”). Music continued to be a centerpoint of the San Francisco experience, as it does to this day, somewhat ameliorating the city’s problems. As Pete Townshend once said, “Rock and roll may not solve your problems, but at least it will let you dance all over them.”
The humanity of San Francisco is as rich and varied as the geography. It is a cliché of sorts. When I moved back east and told people where I was from, a few times they’d giggle and say, “Oh, the land of fruits and nuts.” I would ignore it, but like all clichés, there’s a touch of truth to it. San Francisco was, and is, at the forefront of establishing dignity and social freedom for gay people. And, oh, the nuts and eccentrics! There were plenty of them, from Emperor Norton to Carol Doda, Edsel Ford (the Chinese waiter who would yell “fork you!” if you asked for one at his restaurant), the Brown twins (Marian and Vivian, who would dress identically and stroll all over downtown), Lillie Coit (whose fetish for firemen was memorialized by Coit Tower), the Pink Man (dressed in a pink leotard, riding a unicycle and declaring “I pink therefore I am”), among others. More and more, the city is being homogenized by tech money and tech bros. Its diversity used to aggravate me when I lived there; now absence makes the heart grow fonder.
The San Francisco of my memory — the city I fell in love with in the 70s, 80s and 90s — is a city planted on a stunning plot of geography, a grid laid out over 40 hills ranging from sea level to over 1,000 feet in elevation. The elevations in the city can be disorienting, especially if you climb all 264 steps of the Filbert Street Stairs without stopping. It’s a Mediterranean climate that rarely breaks out of a temperature range of 45 to 75 degrees. The cool Pacific air coming through the Golden Gate creates the city’s ubiquitous fog, which people love, hate, or simply endure. I did all three when I lived there. Sometimes I felt like Jack Kerouac did when he wrote, "I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco, long bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness.” At other times, I’d watch the fog roll over the hills like a waterfall, an astonishing display of nature that made me feel powerful and diminutive at the same time. Or I’d lay in bed in my Marina apartment listening to the baritone bleats of the foghorns, like old gray Buddhist monks chanting “ommmmmmm.”
I’ve already exceeded Herb Caen’s word count in this piece and I’m not sure I’ve done what I tried to do. Here it is: San Francisco today is a hard city. It’s crowded, unruly, expensive, dirty, arrogant, indifferent and frustrating. When I was there a few weeks ago, I was shocked at the empty storefronts around Union Square, for many years the diamond in the city’s premier retail district. When I spent a summer there in 2019 I was shocked to discover human feces on the doorstep of my AirBnB in Pacific Heights and saddened at the theft of my golf clubs from the side of a friend’s house above St. Francis Wood.
And yet, I return every year. And every time, I feel myself drawn to the San Francisco of my mind: North Beach, the Marina, Land’s End, Russian Hill, the Mission. I’m drawn to small-scale San Francisco, away from the corporate towers, the gleaming new transit hubs, the Michelin restaurants with $75 corkage. Even so, the “new” San Francisco is here to stay, such is the nature of progress. I remember in the 70s when the Transamerica Pyramid was going up and people were aghast (“The end of San Francisco!” they would titter). The funny pyramid was finally embraced when it was incorporated into Herb Caen’s column head. Maybe the same destiny awaits the stratospheric Salesforce Tower. As someone once said, even prostitutes and ugly buildings become respectable if they last long enough.
All this is to say that I didn’t leave my whole heart in San Francisco, like Tony Bennett, but I did leave a little piece of it. San Francisco is not unlike Hotel California. I checked out six years ago, but in some ways never left. So it saddens me to see what’s become of it today, how paradise has crumbled. I understand London Breed’s anger and frustration. But she, and everyone who lives there, have an opportunity to reinvent what Herb used to call “Baghdad by the Bay.” San Francisco is a city of the mind, as much as Los Angeles or New York, limited only by the imagination, ingenuity and pragmatism of its people. Let’s see what happens.
Paradise Misplaced
You’re wrong. You did exactly what you tried to do. You should make yourself a proper Martini and reread it.
Russ, I was taken by this "Just Exactly Perfect" post. I don't come close to knowing SF as you do, you provided a lot of insight. You and your family all once lived there and I enjoyed the visits we had during that period. I could sense the vibrancy and the beauty of "the city on the bay". I began reading about the decline of SF at least two decades back and I waited for the citizens to say they had enough. It didn't appear to happen. I am pleased that Mayor London Breed has taken the first stance, support the police! Let's hope that the law and order citizens stand behind her and SF in the future will recapture the allures it once had.