A brief tour of God’s beloved city
“If you took all the fruits and nuts out of San Francisco, all you would have left are the flakes.”- Unknown
The jury is out. What is the world’s most beautiful city? Apparently Cape Town in South Africa is lovely, although I haven’t been there myself to verify so please send me an invite with the dates and business class flight times clearly shown on the itinerary. Rio de Janeiro boasts a fantastic landscape, but you run the risk of being robbed at any moment, which isn’t lovely at all. I live in Vancouver, Canada which is a spectacularly beautiful city when the sun shines, although if you are prone to depression the winter months with dense clouds sitting on your head for weeks may cause consternation. Of all the cities I have visited or lived, San Francisco gets my nod as my favourite. For what? While it may be obvious to anyone who has been to the City on the Bay and left their heart there, this may require some explanation. Pay attention; there will be a test later.
San Francisco is a mad city — inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people. — Rudyard Kipling
So we start with the beauty. Few outsiders know anything about the city’s famous fog. As poet Carl Sandburg said in his famous poem; “The fog creeps in on little cat feet.” Actually, in summer it roars in like a wounded lion offended by tourist complaints and hot weather. The Bay itself acts as a giant vacuum cleaner, the heat of the inland desert sucking in moisture from the nearby ocean. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the two coldest months you will spend in San Francisco are July and August. The hotter it gets, the colder it gets, if you follow my drift. To drive across the Golden Gate Bridge in the heat of a California summer you need a ski jacket. Its fifty degrees hotter in Oakland in the East Bay than by Ocean Beach, which is located by the ocean.
OK, so we got the beauty description out of the way. Now let’s work on the crazy part. San Francisco is a city of hills. Some of them are very steep. This didn’t faze the anal retentive city planner who laid out the streets in a square grid pattern as if the city was Des Moines and he was designing a corn field. The San Francisco street grid dates to the 1839 work of Swiss ship captain and surveyor Jean-Jacques Vioget who laid out the city on a simple north/south, east/west grid without regard to its haphazard topography. If there was a hill getting in the way, Vioget’s roads simply went over the top. The city was served by only horse and carriage in the early days, many of which during a good rain simply slid backwards down the hill to the consternation of driver and horse. This nonsense served to create the wonderful feature that gives the city much of its charm, which are the delightful cable cars, long may they run.
The first real frantic craziness in San Francisco was during the Gold Rush in 1849, giving true meaning to the phrase “Wild West.” Saloons, brothels, saloons, jails, saloons, banks and brothels sprang up like mushrooms in the rain. Getting rich quick makes a lot of money for those willing to make it rich slower. I’m not personally sure where they keep all the brothels these days, but the saloons are still doing a roaring business and there are more bank headquarters downtown than there are brothels.
World War Two didn’t do many people many favours, but the shipbuilders and warmongers made a bundle in the City of Brotherly Love West. Post war, many people aspired to buy a ticky-tacky house, sit down and watch bad TV sitcoms about white families with strong noble fathers on black and white TVS while President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the danger of the military industrial complex that would soon lead to Vietnam. At the same time Beat writer Jack Kerouac went against the curve and described San Francisco as a madhouse. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, he said.” As mad as that may be, the Beats in the Fifties begat the hippies, and no city in the world was hipper, wilder or crazier than San Francisco in the Sixties.
The Sixties slid into the Seventies and drugs took over. Peace, love and happiness turned to war, anger and addiction. Marijuana use evolved from “love grass” to harder drugs and LSD went from a spiritual discovery to just another high. Panhandlers, ejected from other major cities across the land, found a home in liberal, open-minded Baghdad by the Bay and today there are hordes, battalions and virtual armies of professional scroungers demanding money from passersby and pissing in the alleys. There may be more beggars than there are tourists, and (aside from pandemics) San Francisco is one of the great tourist towns in the world.
So what’s to love about this crazy city? The fact that its nuts is not my problem. I don’t live there. I am not a citizen. I don’t pay taxes. I am not responsible for the mess and I don’t plan to help clean it up. It’s not my concern. I lived north of the city for seven years and drove into the city twice a week to play hockey at the downtown arena. Since there are 52 weeks in the year, that means I visited San Francisco over 300 times, and I enjoyed every single trip except for those rare times when a street involved person caught me parking my car and kindly requested $20 to keep it safe, in which case I had to move the car, and as everybody who has driven in San Francisco knows there are more cars than parking spaces. You soon learn not to race around looking for an empty parking space; you sit patiently and pounce the moment an opportunity presents itself. Always bring a pocketful of spare change to feed the parking meters and if you give some to the panhandlers as an encouragement I will take you off my Christmas list.
The city is a study in contrasts. The gleaming steel high rise headquarters of the rich in the Financial District are contradicted by the shabby slums and dirty alleyways of the Mission District where, thanks to the money pouring into the city from the nearby Silicon Valley computer labs where the Mission geeks and nerds refuse to live, formerly dirt cheap rents have quintupled to astronomical amounts. Rather than being scarred by graffiti, the lanes in the Mission are covered by dazzling art created by local spray can artists that no street person would dare to deface.
Whenever I travel to San Francisco I try to stay in a hotel with a difference. That isn’t difficult because there is a plethora of attractive hotels “with a difference.” I loved the ship captain’s cabin where I slept on the roof of the San Remo Hotel, with the sounds of the sea lions barking at dawn, but the Kimpton hotel chain offers some weird creature comforts, like the goldfish in a bowl I rented to keep me company on one trip. I think if you asked nicely you could rent a hippopotamus, but there are plenty of those walking around on the streets of most American cities so why bother?
San Francisco has a significant gay population. Should you wish to see strange apparel on hairy men, wander down to the Castro District and have a walk around. To save time and effort, you don’t need to hike down to the Castro because there are gay and weird looking men everywhere. Should you find yourself in Dolores Park, for instance, you may note some odd sights. The Mission District is somewhat park deficient, and Dolores Park has to serve several different demographics. Given that it has a children’s playground, you may assume that children comprise a portion of the demographic mix. However, the hill next to the playground apparently is a popular cruising spot for gay men, so you have the odd juxtaposition of little kids on teeter totters and near naked men lounging around wearing only a sock on their gonads. Only in San Francisco, you say?
My favourite anecdote about San Francisco I found in a book about the city written by locals. I wish I had seen it myself but I trust the story is true. The writer was waiting for a bus at rush hour early in the morning. A hooker dressed completely in black leather and toting a guitar case strolled up to the bench, opened the guitar case and proceeded to change to a nurse’s uniform for her day job at a nearby hospital. I guarantee you won’t see that in Peoria. It’s unknown what she had for breakfast but leaving the fruits out of it for now, no doubt there were some nuts and flakes involved.